Kyiv Metro
Based on Wikipedia: Kyiv Metro
One hundred and five meters below the streets of Kyiv sits Arsenalna station, so deep underground that it takes nearly five minutes just to ride the escalator down. For decades, this was the deepest metro station in the world. Today it holds second place, behind a station in Chongqing, China. But depth records aside, what makes Arsenalna remarkable is that it was never supposed to be this deep at all.
The engineers who designed it in the 1950s chose such an extreme depth specifically to avoid underground water. They failed spectacularly. The station flooded constantly during construction anyway, its workers fighting against water that seemed to seep through solid rock. The Kyiv Metro's story is full of moments like this—grand ambitions meeting stubborn reality, plans derailed by politics or war or simply the difficult geology beneath one of Europe's oldest cities.
The City on the Hills
Kyiv sprawls across steep hills and deep ravines carved by the Dnieper River. This geography shaped everything about the city's development, and it's why people started dreaming of an underground railway remarkably early.
The first serious proposal came in 1884, just twenty-one years after London opened the world's first underground railway. A railway director named Dmytro Andrievskiy brought a plan to the city council: dig tunnels from the main railway station, starting near Poshtova Square and ending at Bessarabka. The council discussed it. Then discussed it some more. Eventually they said no.
Kyiv was actually a pioneer in urban transit. It operated the first electric tram system in the Russian Empire, ahead of Moscow and St. Petersburg. But underground? That was apparently a step too far.
In 1916, businessmen from a Russo-American trading company tried again. Their pitch was eloquent and prescient:
The development has been lately going at a fast pace, not only when talking about population growth, but as well while talking about the development of trade and industry businesses. The specifics of Kyiv, namely: the distance between the residential districts from the central business district, the insane price of the apartments in the centre and its neighbourhoods, the elongation and hilly position of the city—all those factors make the question of cheap, fast and safe transportation arise.
They argued that trams simply couldn't keep up with a fast-growing city. Adding more tram cars would clog the streets. Increasing speeds would endanger pedestrians. The only solution was to move underground.
The city council said no. Again.
Revolution After Revolution
What followed was a period of such political chaos that metro planning became absurd. In 1918, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky—who briefly ruled Ukraine with German backing—grew interested in building a metro near Zvirynets, where he planned to construct a new government center. One of his cabinet members waxed poetic about the possibilities:
Kyiv is situated on the hills and ravines created by nature itself, so the underground, appearing from the hill into the ravine, then again passing through the mountain, will transfer everyone and everything from Bessarabka to Demiivka, from Zvirynets to Lukianivka.
Beautiful vision. It lasted about six months. The Hetmanate collapsed in autumn 1918. The Directorate took over. Then came the Russian Civil War, with Kyiv changing hands multiple times between 1919 and 1920. The metro plans were, as one might expect, shelved.
After the Bolsheviks won, Kyiv became something of a backwater. The capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was Kharkiv, not Kyiv. Nobody was proposing major infrastructure for a city that had lost its political importance.
Stalin's Capital, Stalin's Metro
Everything changed in 1934 when the capital moved back to Kyiv. Suddenly the city mattered again.
In July 1936, a young Armenian engineer named Papazov presented his diploma project to the Kyiv City Council. The minutes describe it in bureaucratic terms: "The author successfully resolved one of the problems of reconstruction of the city of Kyiv and establishment of intra-city transportation." Papazov received a bonus of one thousand Soviet rubles. Whether anyone actually used his plans remains unknown.
Around the same time, engineers from the Academy of Sciences proposed a three-line system roughly fifty kilometers long. Rumors spread that construction would begin soon. The city council denied these rumors, even as letters poured in from drilling and mining specialists offering their services.
Then, in 1938, officials quietly began preparatory work.
Then June 1941 arrived.
War and Reconstruction
The Great Patriotic War—what Western nations call the Eastern Front of World War Two—devastated Kyiv. The city was occupied for over two years. By liberation, much of it lay in ruins.
But Kyiv remained the third-largest city in the Soviet Union. Reconstruction was mandatory. And this time, the metro was part of the plan.
On August 5, 1944, just months after the city's liberation, the Soviet government issued a resolution ordering metro construction to proceed. The USSR's finance ministry allocated one million rubles from reserve funds. A second resolution in February 1945 made it official: Kyiv would have its underground railway.
Experts analyzed passenger flows throughout the city. Three potential routes emerged: Sviatoshyn to Brovary running east-west, Kurenivka to Demiivka running roughly north-south, and Syrets to Pechersk. They chose the first two for initial construction, planning thirty kilometers of track to be completed by 1950.
It took until 1949 just to establish the construction enterprise. The 1950 deadline came and went.
Building Underground, Underground
Construction planning for the first line began in August 1949. The initial design called for seven stations, and in 1952 a competition was announced to design them. The commission wanted Stalinist style: richly decorated, adorned with Communist symbols, incorporating Ukrainian national motifs.
This was the era of palatial Soviet metros. Moscow's system, opened in 1935, featured stations with chandeliers, mosaics, and marble columns. They were sometimes called "palaces for the people"—underground cathedrals celebrating workers' achievements.
But Kyiv's competition was cancelled. Two of the seven stations were cut from the plans. More significantly, Joseph Stalin died in 1953, and the period known as the Khrushchev Thaw began. Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality and, among many other changes, declared that extravagant architecture was wasteful. The ornate style became politically inappropriate almost overnight.
Meanwhile, the actual digging revealed why Kyiv's geology had always intimidated engineers. Tunnelers encountered unexpected rock formations and underground water sources. The schedule fell apart. The first connection between separate tunnel sections—between Dnipro and Arsenalna stations—was made in December 1951. The last connection, between Vokzalna and Universytet stations, wasn't completed until May 1959. Eight years to connect the segments of a single five-station line.
Arsenalna, with its record-breaking depth, was supposed to be deep enough to avoid groundwater problems. Instead, workers battled constant flooding. The station that exists today is an engineering compromise, a testament to stubbornness more than foresight.
In 1954, funding was diverted to agricultural development—specifically, Khrushchev's campaign to cultivate virgin lands in Kazakhstan. The metro project ground to a halt.
Finally, a Metro
Work eventually resumed. In early 1958, a new design competition was announced. The judging commission included an unusual mix: Communist Party activists, engineering experts from both Ukraine and Moscow, sculptors, artists, writers, and officials from the construction agencies. Eighty designs were exhibited that July. The five winners became the first five stations of the Kyiv Metro.
The numbers from construction are staggering: 660,400 cubic meters of concrete poured, 7,300 square meters of granite and marble used for decoration. Despite Khrushchev's austerity campaign, the stations were still handsome, if not quite as ornate as Moscow's.
On October 22, 1960, a test run took place. The motorman was Alexey Semagin from the Moscow Metro; his assistant was Ivan Vynogradov, a railway operator from Kyiv's main train station. Semagin drove because Ukraine had no institution that trained metro operators. Almost all the early motormen came from Moscow.
On November 6, 1960—the anniversary of the October Revolution—the Kyiv Metro officially opened. Five stations. 5.24 kilometers. The first metro system in Ukraine, the third in the entire Soviet Union after Moscow and Leningrad.
But the public couldn't actually ride it that day. For the first week, special passes were required. Regular service began on November 13. There were no turnstiles yet; passengers showed paper tickets to inspectors.
The Problem of Getting Trains Underground
Opening the metro created an immediate logistical crisis: where do you keep the trains?
Building an above-ground depot was impractical because all the stations were deep underground. Building an underground depot was prohibitively expensive. The solution was a temporary depot next to Dnipro station, where the construction company had its headquarters. There was just one problem.
The temporary depot wasn't connected to the metro tracks.
To move trains in and out, workers used an overhead crane. Trains would be lifted up, swung over, and set down on depot tracks. This was exactly as impractical as it sounds. Most trains simply stayed in the tunnels overnight, only visiting the depot for maintenance.
Getting new trains to Kyiv in the first place was even more absurd. The metro used Type D trains manufactured by Metrowagonmash. To deliver them, each train car was loaded onto a special carriage at Darnytsia railway station on the east bank of the Dnieper. Then—and this is remarkable—the carriage was towed by trams along a now-defunct tram line running beside the river. Once at the depot, cranes lifted the cars onto a railway turntable.
This continued until 1965, when the metro crossed the Dnieper on two new bridges and reached the Livoberezhna (Left Bank) neighborhood. A permanent depot was built there with direct access to both the metro and the regular railway. New trains could finally arrive by normal means.
Growing in Fits and Starts
The metro expanded sporadically over the following decades. In 1963, two more stations opened to the west. In 1965, the line crossed the river, adding three above-ground stations on the east bank. In 1968, another station. In 1971, three more to the west, finally connecting the Sviatoshyn neighborhood.
Along the way came smaller improvements. Khreshchatyk station, which opened with only one exit, got a second in 1965 and a third in 1970. The station was lengthened by forty meters during modernization. Train cars were added: first a fourth car, then a fifth in 1972, where the number has remained ever since.
On August 23, 1972, a worker from the Arsenal factory became the metro's billionth passenger. He entered at Arsenalna station—fitting, given the station's name comes from the same factory. He received a year's free metro pass.
The rolling stock evolved too. The original Type D trains gave way to Type E trains in 1964. Then came an unexpected swap: when Leningrad discovered that its Type E trains didn't work with the platform screen doors being installed at new stations, those trains were shipped to Kyiv. Kyiv's older Type D trains, which had no compatibility problems, went to Leningrad.
Three Lines, Fifty-Two Stations
Today the Kyiv Metro has three lines and fifty-two stations spread across all ten of Kyiv's districts. The total route length is just under seventy kilometers, with most of that—67.6 kilometers—used for regular passenger service and about two kilometers for non-revenue operations like moving trains between depots.
The system carries enormous numbers of people. In 2016, annual ridership was nearly 485 million passengers, averaging about 1.32 million per day. As of 2014, the metro accounted for almost half of all public transit usage in Kyiv—46.7 percent of the city's transportation load.
The metro isn't Kyiv's only rail transit. There's also the Kyiv Light Rail, a rapid tram system, and the Kyiv Urban Electric Train, a commuter rail network. But these are separate systems run by different agencies. The metro stands alone as the backbone of the city's transport.
Shelter from the Sky
Those deep stations—including Arsenalna's 105 meters of depth—serve another purpose in the twenty-first century. When Russian missiles and drones strike Kyiv, residents shelter in metro stations. The same depth that caused so many construction headaches now provides protection that shallow stations never could.
The system that took seventy-six years to go from first proposal to first train, that survived imperial collapse and civil war and world war and funding diversions, that required cranes to move trains and trams to deliver rolling stock, has become a refuge. The engineers of 1884 and 1916 and 1936 imagined moving passengers from one neighborhood to another. They didn't imagine their tunnels would one day shelter those same neighborhoods' residents from bombs.
But here we are. The metro that was rejected again and again, that seemed perpetually delayed, that flooded when it was supposed to stay dry, keeps running. Nearly five hundred million riders a year descend those long escalators into stations that were almost never built, traveling routes that were planned and replanned and abandoned and revived across more than a century of Kyiv's turbulent history.