How a 1932 Dam Drowned the Rapids and Turned the Dnipro into a Staircase

Trace the Dnipro River on a map, from north of Kyiv to just short of the Black Sea, and you find one stretch after another where the river suddenly widens. These are not natural lakes. They are hydroelectric dams built in the Soviet era, and the reservoirs that formed upstream of them. From Kyiv to Kakhovka there are six dams, turning the river into something like a six-step staircase.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta, calls this the “Dnipro Cascade.” This article looks at the six dams and reservoirs using the encyclopedia and materials from Ukrhydroenergo (Укргідроенерго), the state hydropower company that operates the plants. The river system as a whole is covered in our article on how Ukraine’s rivers flow to three seas.

The six dams, from upstream

Listed in order from upstream, they are as follows. The construction years are the period during which the power plant was built, and may differ from the year the reservoir itself was completed.

The largest is the Kremenchuk Reservoir, which IEU says is the biggest on the Dnipro, spanning Poltava, Cherkasy, and Kirovohrad oblasts. The plant is named Kremenchuk, but Ukrhydroenergo’s list places its location in Svitlovodsk, Kirovohrad Oblast. IEU describes this plant as “the first in the USSR built without a machine hall.” The fourth plant, the Middle Dnipro Hydroelectric Station, was called the “Dniprodzerzhynsk Hydroelectric Station” until 2016, and its reservoir the “Dniprodzerzhynsk Reservoir” until 2017 — renamed to match the town’s own change of name (see our article on the two naming laws that renamed 987 towns and villages).

The rapids the first dam submerged

The first of the six to be built was the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station at Zaporizhzhia, second from the bottom of the cascade. According to IEU, the first plan for the plant dates back to 1905, and construction began in 1927 under the Soviet electrification plan. By 1932, five of its nine generators were operating. American engineers took part in the construction, and all the construction machinery and initial electrical equipment were imported from the United States. Ukrhydroenergo’s own history likewise records construction starting in 1927 and the first generator going into operation in 1932.

The concrete dam, 760 meters long and 60 meters high, raised the river’s water level by 37.8 meters. As a result, the “Dnipro Rapids” were submerged. According to IEU’s entry “Dnipro Rapids,” there were nine rapids crossing the river over the roughly 70 kilometers between Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, a stretch over which the riverbed dropped by 35.5 meters. There were 30 rocky reefs partly blocking the river, including six between Kremenchuk and Dnipro further upstream.

The rapids appear repeatedly in old records. The same entry notes that a Greek writer had already mentioned them in the 1st century, and that the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII gave a precise written account of them in the mid-10th century in De Administrando Imperio. Merchants of Kyivan Rus had to portage their boats overland here, and the Pechenegs of the steppe lay in wait for them. Prince Sviatoslav of Kyiv was killed fighting the Pechenegs near Khortytsia Island in 972. It was on this island in the 16th century that the Zaporizhzhia Sich — meaning “beyond the rapids” — was founded (see our article on the 220 years from the founding of the Sich to its destruction).

The 1932 dam submerged the rapids over a stretch of 90 kilometers, making year-round river navigation possible between Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia.

A dam destroyed twice

The Dnipro Hydroelectric Station’s dam was destroyed twice during the Second World War. According to IEU, the retreating Soviet army blew up the dam in 1941 and removed or destroyed the generators and equipment. The occupying German army repaired part of it, but destroyed it again when retreating in 1943. Three generators were rebuilt in 1944–47, and the rest repaired in the 1950s. In 1969, construction began on a second plant next door, the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station-2.

The five dams that followed after the war

After the war, dams were added both downstream and upstream: Kakhovka in 1950–56, Kremenchuk in 1954–60, Kyiv in 1960–68, Middle Dnipro in 1963–65, and Kaniv in 1963–75. According to IEU’s “Dnipro Cascade” entry, the reservoirs are used to regulate the river’s water level, irrigate the dry regions of the south, and supply water to industrial areas along the Dnipro and in the Donbas, and they created a deep-water shipping channel from the Black Sea to the mouth of the Pripyat River.

IEU’s entry “Kyiv Hydroelectric Station” (updated 2019) states that the Kyiv plant has a history of workers resisting Soviet economic and nationalities policy. In the early 1960s, 70–75% of the workers on the construction site were Ukrainian, but senior positions such as construction supervisors and engineers were held almost entirely by Russians; of the 127 Russian managers at the main facilities, almost all came from Russia and only 11 were Ukrainian-born. In 1968, a former worker was arrested by the Committee for State Security (KGB) for distributing leaflets calling for resistance to Russification, and a major strike took place in May 1969. The same entry also records that Viacheslav Chornovil, the dissident who later became well known, served as secretary of the Komsomol committee and as a journalist at this construction site.

How the river changed

IEU’s “Dnipro River” entry (first published in the 1984 print encyclopedia) sets out both the benefits and the losses of the reservoirs. Water levels became more stable and rose during the summer and winter low-water periods, but many river fish disappeared, replaced by lake-dwelling species. It also states that about 9,000 square kilometers of usable land — 2% of Ukraine’s territory at the time — was submerged. The entry on the Kyiv Reservoir notes that the slower flow reduced dissolved oxygen in the water, harming the balance of aquatic life.

These encyclopedia figures date from the 1980s, and the number of villages submerged by the dams, or of people who were relocated, does not appear in the sources used for this article.

Damage since 2022

Of the six dams, the furthest downstream, Kakhovka, was occupied by Russian forces on February 24, 2022 and destroyed on June 6, 2023. Ukrhydroenergo’s own history states that Russian forces blew it up from the inside. The reservoir lost its water in this destruction. What happened is covered in detail in our article on what happened at Kakhovka the day the Russian-controlled dam broke.

The other plants have also been repeatedly attacked by missiles and drones since the full-scale invasion. According to Ukrhydroenergo, missile strikes and the destruction of Kakhovka cost the company 2,500 megawatts of generating capacity, of which it had recovered about 1,500 megawatts by December 2023. For 2024, it states that it lost more than 40% of its hydropower capacity, and that attacks on its plants since the start of the full-scale invasion had reached 150 (the company’s own history, accessed September 2026). Changes in the country’s overall generating capacity are covered in our article on generating electricity in smaller, distributed units in a country whose plants keep being targeted.

Ukrhydroenergo is a company wholly owned by the state, and operates ten large hydroelectric and pumped-storage plants on the Dnipro and Dniester rivers. The company still operates five of the six steps of the cascade today.