Konotop

Konotop or Konotip (Конотоп or Конотіп). Map: II-14. City (2011 pop 93,377) and raion center in Sumy oblast under oblast jurisdiction, situated on the Yezuch River. Konotop was first mentioned in a historical document in 1634. From 1654 to 1781 it was a fortified company town in Nizhyn regiment. In the summer of 1659 during the Ukrainian-Muscovite War, it was besieged for three months by Prince A. Trubetskoi's army and defended by Colonel Hryhorii Hulianytsky. On 8 July 1659 Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, who came to the town's aid, scored his first great victory known as the Battle of Konotop, killing or scattering 30,000 Russians and capturing 5,000. In 1664 Konotop was destroyed by the Poles. From 1782 to the early 1920s it was a county town, from 1802 in Chernihiv gubernia. From 1923 to 1932 it was an okruha center, and from 1932 to 1939 a raion center, in Chernihiv oblast. Its development began only after it became a junction on the Kyiv–Voronezh railway: in 1859 its population was 9,000; in 1897, 18,440; in 1926, 33,600; in 1959, 54,100; and in 1970, 68,400. Its major industries are machine building industry and metalworking industry. The electromechanical plant Chervonyi Metalist (est 1916) produces automated mining equipment. The city also has a repair plant for locomotive and railroad cars, firms servicing railway transport, a food industry, a piston plant, a clothing factory, and a construction-materials industry. Several educational institutions are located there; among them the Avtomatvuhlerudprom design-and-construction institute, a general technical faculty of the Sumy branch of the Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute. Its regional studies museum was founded in 1900.

Volodymyr Kubijovyč

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]