Luhansk is a city located in the very east of Ukraine. The number of residents of Lugansk at the time of the assessment statistics in the winter of 2015 was 418,995 people, in terms of the size of the occupied area and the number of residents, Lugansk is confidently among the ten largest cities in Ukraine. Lugansk is located at the confluence of the Olkhovka River, which is currently critically polluted, into the Lugan River. The city was renamed Voroshilovgrad and back several times before finally becoming Lugansk.
Luhansk 200 years ago
In the 18th century, on the territory of modern Luhansk, there were settlements and temporary farmsteads of some Little Russian, Cossack, Croatian, Bulgarian and Moldovan communities, the first settlement they founded was called Kamenny Brod and was part of the Zaporizhzhya Sich under the rule of Hetman Razumovsky. At the end of the century, an engineer from Scotland, Carl Gascoigne, on the orders of the Russian authorities, conducted exploration for mineral deposits and discovered rich ore mines and untouched seams of high quality coal, after which Empress Catherine II signed a decree establishing a cast iron plant, which later became a city-forming plant.
In 1797, the village formed not far from the plant received the official name Lugansk plant, which was inhabited, for the most part by Lipetsk and Yaroslavl workers, foremen, apprentices and masons, administrative personnel and management staff, wholly or for the most part, consisted of invited Englishmen. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Lugansk plant was the largest supplier of cast-iron cannons and shells for them during the protracted war against Napoleon.
In 1823, a mining school appeared here, the first in the district, and in 1896 a wealthy German industrialist Gustav Hartmann began the construction of the future largest diesel locomotive plant, the equipment for which was specially delivered from Germany.
XX-XXI centuries
Already at the beginning of the 20th century, Lugansk turned into the largest industrial city, about 18 factories and about fifty small craft artels and enterprises worked here, 5 cinemas were opened, Orthodox churches, a church and a synagogue were being erected.
The civil war of 1917 intervened in the measured life of industrial Lugansk, in the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks finally recaptured the city from the Austrian armed forces and assigned Lugansk the status of the capital of the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Republic, and since the summer of 1938 the city is officially considered a regional center for the first time.
During the Second World War, Luhansk was occupied by the Nazi army, but in the winter of 1943 it was successfully liberated from the invaders by Soviet troops. In 1972, the city has its own football club called "Zarya", which once managed to take the championship in the USSR Cup in football. 1996 was a significant year for Lugansk, as the city's population was the first to overstep the mark of 500,000 inhabitants.
Luhansk has its own flag, which is a blue canvas with a coat of arms depicted in the center with the personal seal of Empress Catherine II.
