Khreshchatyk: a street rebuilt three times

Khreshchatyk runs about one and a quarter kilometres along the bottom of a valley between two hills, which is why it is unusually wide and why the buildings on either side sit at different levels. It is the main street of Kyiv in the full sense: commercial, ceremonial and political.

What was there before

Until 1941 the street was a nineteenth-century commercial avenue of the ordinary European kind — banks, department stores, hotels, apartment buildings with shops beneath, built in a mix of eclectic and Art Nouveau styles.

In September 1941, after German forces occupied the city, a series of explosions destroyed much of the street. The buildings had been mined by Soviet forces before the withdrawal, with delayed-action devices. The fires that followed burned for days and consumed most of what the explosions had not.

By the end of the war the street was rubble along almost its entire length.

The reconstruction

What was built in its place, through the late 1940s and 1950s, is a single coherent architectural composition — the only one of its kind in Ukraine and one of the more complete examples of Stalinist urban design anywhere.

The buildings are faced in ochre and cream ceramic tile, with heavy cornices, arcades at street level and decorative elements drawn from Ukrainian folk ornament. The street was widened substantially and the buildings set back, which is why it feels more like a boulevard than the commercial street it replaced.

Opinions about the result vary and always have. It is undeniably monumental, undeniably ideological, and undeniably a coherent piece of urban design in a way that very few post-war reconstructions managed.

What the street became

Maidan Nezalezhnosti sits at the midpoint of Khreshchatyk, and the combination — a wide central avenue opening onto a large square — turned out to be politically consequential.

The square has been the site of the student protests of 1990, the demonstrations of 2000 to 2001, the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the protests of 2013 to 2014. In each case the physical form mattered: a space large enough to hold a hundred thousand people, in the centre of the capital, surrounded by buildings from which it can be observed, with a main avenue leading to it that can be closed off and occupied.

Cities where the central square is smaller, or peripheral, or overlooked by nothing, produce different politics. This is not a complete explanation of anything, but it is not nothing either.

The street now

Khreshchatyk is pedestrianised at weekends and on holidays, which is when it is at its best. The commercial mix has shifted from department stores to international retail and food, as everywhere.

For a visitor, the walk from Bessarabsky market at the upper end down to European Square takes twenty minutes and passes the central post office, the main department store, the conservatory, Maidan and the city administration. It is the most efficient possible orientation to the city centre.

The buildings are worth looking at properly. The detailing — the ceramic work, the ornament, the way the arcades handle the change in level — is better than the reputation of the style would suggest, and it was executed by craftsmen whose skills were, within a decade, no longer being taught.

Related in this archive

• From Mendeleev to the first Soviet computer: Kyiv's technical inheritance
• Organised retail: the shift from bazaar to mall, and what it revealed
• Chernivtsi and the Habsburg west: why the map still shows
• Ukraine Annual Review 2013: the year the model ran out

I am not the person to pronounce on this avenue's architecture. What I can say is that in twenty-one years I have seen it in three different states: an ordinary shopping street, a square and a place of remembrance. That a street's function changes this often says more about the density of this country's history than the architecture does.