When the German Army finally broke through in central Ukraine in September 1941, pasting up ordinances around Kyiv to announce a new occupying authority, they had only a few days’ calm.
Less than a week after the occupation began, an explosion went off in a children’s toy store on Khreshchatyk Street — the capital’s grandest shopping boulevard, Kyiv’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue or the Champs-Élysées.
Soon the city hall and the Communist Party headquarters crumbled.
Walk through central Kyiv today, down the Khreshchatyk, past the grand Independence Square and the ritzy Tsum department store, and you can read the history of postwar and post-independence Ukraine in the subsequent architecture.
When the city is a battleground, architecture becomes an act of defense and defiance.
Organizations:
German Army, Communist Party, New York Times
Locations:
Ukraine, Kyiv, Russia