History

During the Russian Revolution, Donetsk became a major town of the short-lived Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, which was later to be incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. In 1924, under the Soviet rule, the city's name was changed to Stalino. In July 1933, the city became the administrative centre of the Donetsk Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR.

In the beginning of World War II, the population of Stalino consisted of 507,000, and after the war - only 175,000. The Nazi invasion during World War II almost completely destroyed the city, which was mostly rebuilt on a large scale at the war's end.

The territory of Donetsk in the Great Patriotic War consisted mainly of a Jewish ghetto, in which 3,000 Jews died, and a concentration camp in which 92,000 people were killed. During the war, a collective responsibility system was enforced. For every killed German soldier, 100 inhabitants were killed, and one for every killed policeman.

During Nikita Khrushchev's second wave of destalinization in November 1961, all Soviet cities named after Joseph Stalin were renamed, even though Stalino was named after its steel industry rather than Stalin himself, the name was changed to Donetsk, after the Seversky Donets river, a tributary of the Don.

In 1965, the Donetsk Academy of Sciences was established as part of the Academy of Science of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1970, Donetsk was recognized by UNESCO as the cleanest industrial town of the world. Donesk was granted the Order of Lenin in 1979.

Residents of the city tend to be pro-Russian in their political beliefs. This has been massively exploited during 2004 presidential election, in which the city mostly voted for candidate Viktor Yanukovych, which had been announced as the winner of the election by the Central Election Commission. The vote was later proven to have been falsified, with many of the falsified votes coming from the surrounding region. This led to an election re-run, thus making Yanukovych lose the election. During the 2006 Ukrainian parliamentary elections, the Yanukovych-led Party of Regions also won most of the votes from the region.