Pervomaisk, Mykolaiv Oblast

Pervomaisk (Первомайськ, ; Первомайск) is a city in Mykolaiv Oblast, Ukraine. It serves as the administrative center of Pervomaisk Raion within the oblast. It is located on the Southern Bug River which bisects the city. Pervomaisk also hosts the administration of Pervomaisk urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. Population: 70,170 (2001).

The city is known for being a center (headquarters) of the 46th Rocket Division of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces during the Soviet period.

Until 18 July 2020, Pervomaisk was incorporated as a city of oblast significance. It also served as the administrative center of Pervomaisk Raion even though it did not belong to the raion. In July 2020, as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Mykolaiv Oblast to four, the city of Pervomaisk was merged into Pervomaisk Raion.

Etymology
The name derives from the Russian pervomay (первомай) meaning "the first of May," (May Day). The city was formed in 1919 after the Bolshevik victory in the Ukrainian-Soviet war, as a result of the merger of three historic towns in the area.

The name for one of the merged towns, Bohopil (or Bohopol), was derived from the name of a local river Southern Bug which in Polish and Ukrainian is named Boh.

History
The city was formed in 1919, when three neighbouring settlements: the village of Holta (Голта), the town of Bohopil (Богопіль), and county city of Olviopol (Ольвіополь) were merged.

In 1420, Lithuanian Duke Vytautas built a bridge for merchants in the vicinity. In the late 17th and 18th centuries the tripoint of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Russia was located there.

The history Olviopol dates back to 1676, when the Orlyk (Орлик) fortress was founded by the Cossacks in protection against Crimean Tatar raids. In 1781 it was granted town rights and renamed Olviopol after the ancient Greek city of Olbia. It was part of the Zaporizhian Sich and Russian Empire, and is located in the historic region of Zaporizhzhia.

Bohopol, as it was known in Polish, arose after the Poles built a border fortress at the site. It was a private town of the Potocki family, administratively located in Bracław County in the Bracław Voivodeship in the Lesser Poland Province of the Kingdom of Poland. It was annexed by Russia in the Second Partition of Poland in 1793. It is located in the historic region of Podolia.

Holta was a village founded in 1762. It was located in the Ottoman Empire until its annexation by Russia in 1791. In the late 19th century, despire its village status, it had two breweries and an iron factory, and its population exceded 4,000. It is located in the historic region of Yedisan.

In World War II, Pervomaisk was occupied by the Axis Powers in 1941 and was divided between German occupation authorities on the east bank (Bohopol and Olviopol) and the Romanian-occupied region of Transnistria to the west (Holta). Holta served as the center of the Golta judeţ (district) of Transnistria. Pervomaisk had been more than 1/3 Jewish before the war but most were murdered during the occupation.

Elements of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces arrived in Pervomaisk for the first time as early as June 1960, and were present throughout the Cold War. The U.S.-funded Cooperative Threat Reduction Program began funding dismantlement of the missile infrastructure in the 1990s.

In 2023, the working group of the National Commission on State Language Standards included Pervomaisk in the list of settlements in Ukraine that contain words with the root "Pervomaisk" ("1 May", the International Workers' Day of the Soviet Union) and can be renamed as part of decommunization and derussification campaigns in Ukraine. Late June 2023 the Pervomaisk City Council initiated a public voting on renaming the city.

Demographics
At the time of the only Ukrainian census conducted after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city counted a population of 70,746 inhabitants, which made it the second-largest city in the region after Mykolaiv, which counted 509,102 inhabitants at the time. The city is mostly Ukrainian, yet a sizeable Russian minority resides in within the settlement's boundaries. The exact ethnic and linguistic composition was as follows:

Notable people

 * Selig Brodetsky (1888–1954), British mathematician, President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
 * Edgar de Wahl (1867–1948), Baltic German teacher, mathematician and linguist, creator of Interlingue

Remarkable buildings and structures
In Pervomaisk, there is at 48°4'0"N 30°51'29"E a 196 metres tall guyed TV mast, equipped with 6 crossbars running from the mast body to the guys.

Pervomaisk was the former location of the 46th Rocket Division of the 43rd Rocket Army of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, formed during the Cold War. The RT-23UTTKh intercontinental ballistic missile silos based at Pervomaisk were destroyed, partially with Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction programme funding, during the 1990s.