Only in Kharkiv, ever-changing city of industry and ideas and shifting identities, could the words REINFORCED CONCRETE become a rallying cry for fortitude, resilience and wild hope.
Of course, Ukrainian makes the phrase sound uniquely beautiful, condensed into one word: zalizobeton. Five lyrical syllables. It just doesn’t translate well—the English words bring to mind drab grey boxes, decaying postwar estates. Zalizobeton, though, is the beating soul of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city, which has the misfortune to be located less than 20 miles from Russia. Under near-constant bombardment since the start of the full-scale invasion, Kharkivites found a building to rally around—the improbable, staggering Derzhprom.
You’d know all about this constructivist masterpiece—the House of State Industry, the first skyscraper complex in Europe—if it was in a great world capital. But Kharkiv didn’t get a lot of western tourists even before the full-scale invasion of 2022 made it a terrifying and sometimes deadly place to visit. It got me, though, in 2018, wide-eyed and absurdly excited to finally be in the city I’d read so much about. I made straight for the vast Freedom Square and, at its far end, the bright, stark geometry of the Derzhprom building.
There’s a photo from that day: I’m a tiny, elated figure, arms outstretched, under a walkway in the sky that links one tower to another. I couldn’t believe this city, its layers of history, the almost crazed mixture of architectural styles around every corner. But Derzhprom crowned everything, soaring 63m tall, with a TV tower on top; the three H-shaped sections curving gracefully and joining together at various levels. It was hard to take it all in, the impression being of something both pleasingly symmetrical and totally perplexing, in a way that made me think of the printmaker MC Escher.
The person who took that photo was an actor; we had spent the afternoon walking through cobbled streets and gardens in the November snow, then played table football in a pub and talked into the wee hours. The city felt very free, to me; a place of constant movement and change.
Now, that actor is serving on the frontlines, and his city has been torn apart by nearly three years of bombing, three years of grief. Hundreds of thousands fled, but many I knew stayed to fight—whether that meant baking bread to distribute in the shelters and hospitals, or staging underground concerts to raise money for the cash-strapped army units that were holding off the Russian advance. Or picking up a gun.
Kharkiv was nearly encircled in the beginning, in March 2022, and the courage it takes to stay put in that situation is hard to fathom. Symbolism matters at a time like that: having something to believe in, a uniting idea. And a young graphic designer named Patrick Cassanelli found it. Using the futuristic outline of Derzhprom, he created a stark, heroic image, the building like a computer-game fortress, a Ukrainian flag flying above, and the words KHARKIV ZALIZOBETON in big, stylised letters.
It was a chevron at first, a patch for soldiers’ uniforms. Then quickly the design appeared on T-shirts, caps, hoodies, stickers—with the proceeds going to army units. Kharkiv band Papa Carlo used the word as a song title, and shot the music video on the roof of Derzhprom. The building had always loomed large in the city’s iconography, but in 2022 it gained an almost spiritual significance, an emotional anchor for a million and more people trying daily to defy fear.
The very method of its construction, the reinforced concrete, imbues Derzhprom with a kind of supernatural invincibility. It is the first thing anyone will tell you if you ask about it: the Nazis couldn’t blow it up (they mined it on leaving, causing some damage), and neither could the Russians—because of its zalizobeton structure.
Photographs from the early 1940s, when Kharkiv fell under Nazi occupation, are utterly jarring, because when you stand on Freedom Square and gaze up, Derzhprom looks like a creation from the 1960s, perhaps even later. But there they are, grim-faced German soldiers marching across the square, belt buckles gleaming, greatcoats flapping. The older pictures are even more disorientating. A horse and cart on the square. Women with besom brooms. Sepia figures from another century, surely. But no, there are the very same towers of Derzhprom in the background, messing up the timeline. It doesn’t make sense, because the building’s design—dreamt up by young architects Sergei Serafimov, Samuel Kravets and Mark Felger—was decades ahead of its time. It has survived all that turmoil, people say, all that war. It will survive this.
The myth of Derzhprom’s invincibility is reminiscent of St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz
Or it might. Maria Avdeeva, a passionate Kharkivite and security analyst, recalls the day in early January 2024 when it seemed Derzhprom might finally have run out of luck. A missile strike—the first known use of a North Korean missile in the city—hit nearby, damaging the popular Pakufuda café. “In the first moments you only see smoke, or hear some rumours that the hit is near Derzhprom,” Avdeeva says. “Everyone was terrified, discussing in [online] groups if the building was damaged.”
The myth of Derzhprom’s invincibility is reminiscent of St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz, I suggest. “I absolutely agree with you, this is a symbol,” she says. “If there was a direct hit, nothing would survive—no kind of material can withstand a direct hit. You always just hope nothing will happen to it.”
The building, which is under provisional enhanced Unesco protection, but still not on the official World Heritage list, did have a near miss in the first week of the full-scale invasion. On 2nd March, the imposing headquarters of the regional authority, located just the other end of Freedom Square, was hit by missiles. I watched a video of its grand façade being swallowed up by a fireball, looking at it over and over on a stranger’s phone screen in Vienna airport, frozen to the spot. When I finally got back to the city weeks later and again made a beeline for Freedom Square, the sight of Derzhprom, windows boarded up but otherwise intact, moved me in a way that took me by surprise. In the gardens around it were neat rainbow rows of tulips, the flower beds carefully tended by municipal workers in overalls. Maybe, I thought wildly, Derzhprom really couldn’t be destroyed.
Other fantastical myths surrounding it include the idea that, from above, the cluster of buildings looks like musical notation, specifically, the opening notes of the Soviet anthem “The Internationale”. Another is that it fills with bats in the summer—true, apparently—and that macaque monkeys from the zoo took refuge in the upper floors during the Nazi occupation.
Nataliya Zubar leads the human rights NGO Maidan Monitoring, and throughout the war has documented the destruction wreaked on Kharkiv’s unique architecture. She knows every street and building inside out.
The zalizobeton idea extends, she explains, to the city’s metro system, which opened in the 1970s—“obviously, lots of very thick concrete”—and has been the safest refuge during the frequent attacks. In 2022 its platforms were covered in blankets and mattresses, and the stationary trains were full of clothes hanging up to dry, and toys, and pets, and kids. In the past year schools have moved underground too, a grim admission that the war isn’t ending soon. All this, Zubar says, “is zalizobeton too. It’s not just Derzhprom right now but all these thick bomb-resistant or even nuclear-resistant structures—that’s how people are trying to perceive the city.”
Zalizobeton is the city as fortress, as an impenetrable bunker; the grey interlocking walls of Derzhprom in Cassanelli’s design like a mediaeval keep. This is a comforting thought when the enemy is at the gates. Though Russia’s forces were pushed back across the border in 2022, away from Kharkiv, they made another attempt in the spring of 2024, retaking land to the north of the city. Many I spoke to in Kharkiv at that time were resolute—the Russians couldn’t take the city, there was no need to fear.
Others, scrolling through rumours on Telegram channels, feared the worst. Some left. Then the Russian advance ground to a halt, and back they came. The endless game of cat and mouse, lives put on hold indefinitely.
Derzhprom may have been well built, but when construction began in 1925, it was practically done by hand. The most cutting-edge design of its time was created with barrows and carts, ropes, shovels, and three shifts of workers and volunteers toiling all hours. By the end of the three-year construction period, more advanced techniques had been brought in, but still, the feat is almost unimaginable.
And it wasn’t just one building. Kharkiv, a city of trade and then of universities, was being transformed at a pace that must have been dizzying. Massive industrialisation was underway. The entire area surrounding Derzhprom was newly planned, and visionary: a vast public square, then named after the founder of the Soviet secret police Felix Dzerzhinsky, was the second-largest in Europe when it was built, with Derzhprom’s zig-zag towers arranged around the circular end.
Behind it a neighbourhood sprung up in concentric circles: apartment blocks in the “new style” of living, the radical, utopian ideas of the 1920s in which family life would gradually be replaced by the communal. The flats were good, spacious and airy, but had only shared bathrooms and kitchens. This kind of experimental social housing and massive, monumental architecture was appearing all over the Soviet Union, but Kharkiv, as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1919 onwards, was one of the great centres of development. The population almost tripled in a decade.
Kharkiv’s architects and designers were famous and the city also attracted the best writers, playwrights and poets. Briefly, Ukrainian-language publications flourished, under Lenin’s korenisatisiya policy of the 1920s. The Tsarist empire had banned the Ukrainian language many times, but now the Moscow rulers, in their Soviet guise, were trying to win over the restive minorities by encouraging national expression in the form of literature and culture. The leniency didn’t last long, but this brief, heady time in Kharkiv—and especially the writers it produced—loom very large both in the city’s mythology, and that of Ukraine. Derzhprom most clearly represents that time, giving zalizobeton such power now.
Few stories are ever that straightforward, though. Derzhprom was built to house the vast machinery of Soviet power in Ukraine. Countless bureaucrats, all those grey men of the nomenklatura, signed orders at their desks behind the huge windows. Just as the last remnants of anything truly free and radical disappeared from the USSR, as the Holodomor—Stalin’s man-made famine—swept through the countryside, and as the writers began to be arrested, this building was the centre of that repressive power in Kharkiv. Then the capital was moved to Kyiv in 1934, and the bureaucrats were evacuated ahead of the Second World War; Derzhprom was later filled with a whole assortment of organisations, and remains so today. And its association with Soviet power, explains historian Volodymyr Chistilin, simply dissipated.
“It transformed, and lost the status of being somewhere that terrible decisions were made, somewhere that officials probably signed orders for the Holodomor,” he says. Instead, the association is with the groundbreaking spirit of those times. “Derzhprom became a symbol not only of the independence and steadfastness of the city, but of belief in the totally new, the modern, in transformation.”
Chistilin, who is also a civic activist, believes that Kharkiv was defining the course of Ukrainian history long before Soviet power took hold. “People don’t really understand the spirit of the city,” he reflects. From around the 1700s, “people arrived who wanted freedom, escaping the Polish landowners. They founded sloboda settlements [places exempt from feudal duties], and from this you get the name of the region: Slobozhanshchyna.
“These were absolutely free people! It’s very reminiscent of America’s founding. And that spirit of the 1700s appeared in various guises, in different epochs, in Kharkiv.”
The romantic 19th-century nationalism of Mykola Kostomarov and Taras Shevchenko, Chistilin says, is rooted in Kharkiv and its universities, its German influences. In the 20th century, the city grew into a powerful intellectual centre to rival Moscow and Leningrad. “It wasn’t Kyiv, it wasn’t Odesa—it was Kharkiv,” he goes on. “This is where they first split the atom [in the Soviet Union], where the biggest factories were built for the military-industrial complex... the first T-34 tank.
“So in different eras, it changed—it was intellectual, it was industrial, it was commercial. But there was always this spirit of these free people.”
In this war, the past is a player; much can hinge on how events of 100 years ago are interpreted. The fight against Russian colonialism takes place not just on the frontline but in the culture too. In Kharkiv this task feels vital, urgent. It looks like renaming streets: “Moscow Prospect” no more; “Pushkin Street” no more. And it looks like painful personal journeys: discovering your grandparents spoke Ukrainian but never talked about it; confronting childhood nostalgia for Russian books, or the versions of history you were taught in school. And, perhaps, questioning the stories about the buildings that define your city.
The idea that Derzhprom represents something specifically communist, and could therefore be a difficult symbol to integrate into the anti-Soviet Ukrainian mood today, is a misunderstanding, according to Zubar. “Constructivism is not exclusively communist—the French had it, Americans had it, it was just ‘trendy’ architecture. The fact that it [Derzhprom] was built by communists at the time means nothing.”
The same is true of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture, she says, recalling the years of debate over whether it should be demolished. While Derzhprom is monumental but not imperialist, the Warsaw wedding-cake giant is most certainly both, built in the style of Moscow’s “Seven Sisters”, those overbearing and rather prissy towers commissioned by Stalin as a symbol of the Soviet Union’s postwar resilience. His name was stripped from the Palace of Culture long ago, but for some the building is still too blunt a reminder of Soviet dominion. Pull it down and move on, they say. But, Zubar argues, it’s not only Soviet. “I have a friend, a dual citizen of Poland and the USA, and he says, ‘Look, that’s American influence.’ That’s exactly what the Soviets borrowed from the USA!”
Derzhprom, in that sense, is an expression of something much bigger than the Bolsheviks, something truly international, bound up with, but not defined by, the Soviet rule under which it was created. “Maybe you can’t find anything in the USA like this because they destroyed it all,” Zubar adds with a grin, “but it lives on here. A building of the epoch!”
This peeling back of the layers of Russian colonialism and centuries of imperial cultural and linguistic imposition is particularly noticeable in Kharkiv. The city was predominantly Russian-speaking, and though many have switched to Ukrainian, particularly the younger generations, it’s still normal to hear Russian on the streets. And why not? The language doesn’t belong to Russia. But this is just one of the many thorny questions that face Ukrainians these days. Which bits of history to draw from, and which to leave alone, which buildings (or statues) to condemn, and which to celebrate. Kharkiv is well equipped to grapple with these questions. Every time I’ve been there, some cultural event was taking place, hundreds of people packed into a basement club or arts space to talk about history, identity, language.
At the forefront of this activity is the Literary Museum, which runs a programme of writer’s residencies, exhibitions and events that would put any comparable organisation in a safe city to shame. Tetyana Pilipchuk is the director. She speaks quietly and precisely; we talk about the continuing influence of the 1920s on Kharkiv’s present generation of writers and activists.
“It’s a complicated period for us,” she says. “All our Ukrainian national writers had left ideas—specifically the idea of a communistic Ukraine. They thought about a new type of collaboration, in which Ukraine was a subject, not as part of a new empire... They dreamed about this paradise, in which all members of the society could be happy.”
It sounds so naive now, the dream of that avant-garde generation. These people would later be known as the “Executed Renaissance”, and they are deeply bound up with Kharkiv and Derzhprom. Many writers were given flats in Budynok Slovo (“Word House”), near the communal social housing blocks built behind Derzhprom and in the same style. It had a rooftop solarium, telephones, a kindergarten. Except that once the arrests began, it became a sort of prison. The NKVD, the Soviet Union’s secret police, came knocking on the doors of writers deemed ideologically suspect. Many ended up at Sandarmokh, northern Russia, where they were executed along with thousands of other political prisoners.
Though they largely held left-wing positions, Pilipchuk goes on, their dream was certainly not to be obedient subjects of Moscow. “They understood these mechanisms of Russification, and wanted to build a border between Russian and Ukrainian culture, and build up Ukrainian culture as an independent part of this common Soviet cultural space.”
In this context, Derzhprom was built “as a metaphor of communism”, but also to demonstrate “the new centre of a new capital—a new Ukrainian Soviet capital”. It was an important period for Ukrainian independence, “so of course Derzhprom is now the symbol of our independence, and our resistance,” Pilipchuk adds. The wildly ambitious design of those three young architects reflects the nature of Kharkiv itself, she says. “It’s a city that can propose a lot of experiments. It’s not afraid to do something new. Derzhprom is the real symbol of Kharkiv.”
The real symbol, she means, as opposed to the Mirror Stream, a small gazebo-like structure on a fountain, lit up in pretty colours at night. It’s seen as romantic and uncontroversial, though its history is arguably deeply Soviet, and it always struck me as a somewhat boring, very un-Kharkiv, very conventional. But it was chosen as the emblem of the city during the Euro 2012 football championship, as Chistilin reminds me. “Maybe for peaceful times, it was more suitable,” he concedes. War requires something a little stronger. As strong as steel and concrete.
The problem is, Kharkiv is a place of flux and ideas and experiments; a fortress cannot be these things. In the literary museum, Tetyana Pilipchuk acknowledges this grim transformation. “Our city can.... disappear,” she shrugs, sadly. “We want to think about the new role of Kharkiv in Ukraine, and maybe in the world—it was a transit between Russia and Ukraine, between east and west. And now it’s a fortress, zalizobeton. A small, military city.”
Maria Avdeeva mentions this too—the feeling that the city and its residents are becoming Ukraine’s “outpost”, a “fortress right on the border with, well, Mordor”. (A popular image shared early in the war showed eastern Europe mapped onto Middle Earth; Russia was Sauron’s kingdom.)
But though Derzhprom has become a symbol of Kharkiv as a stronghold, for Avdeeva the building still holds all of the city’s more nuanced values: “it’s very big, very square, but at the same time has so much soul in it, something very emotional.”
Journalist Roman Danilenkov tells me that this spirit lives especially in the local jokes and myths, the absurd legends—including, of course, those about Derzhprom. The musical notation, seen from above. The bats. The macaques. His first reporting job was in one of Derzhprom’s towers, and though the beautiful interiors have been marred by poor renovation and a lack of regulation, he still finds it full of this same spirit. Patrick Cassanelli’s zalizobeton imagery, he says, makes total sense— “it’s like a motto, in one word”.
Like many who belong to Kharkiv, Danilenkov has to watch from afar as the streets he knows so well are transformed by Russian aerial attacks. He took his young family to a safer part of Ukraine, but visits often. And the visits are hard. “Everything you see that day in Kharkiv could be destroyed, at every moment,” he says. “Derzhprom, every building, my parents’ apartment, every monument, everything could be destroyed.”
This is what makes symbols so potent in wartime. The psychological safety of an abstract idea, the myth of an indestructible, sacred landmark. Nataliya Zubar puts this very simply: “People are hungry for symbolism, because symbols allow them to get attached to something. A house can be destroyed, but symbols cannot.”
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Postscript: On the evening of 28th October, shortly after this article was written, a 500kg guided bomb hit Derzhprom, destroying several floors and some of the interior. Nine people were injured in the attack; a missile strike a few hours later killed four others as they slept in their beds. On 7th November, it was hit for a second time, blowing out the windows.
Nothing is safe in Ukraine.
