Krutikov’s circus, or the Hippo-Palace: Kyiv’s first Art Nouveau building
Kyiv, Mykolaivska Street · 1903–1941
Krutikov’s circus, the Hippo-Palace, stood on Mykolaivska Street in Kyiv, just off Khreshchatyk, from 1903 to 1941. Petro Krutikov, a horse trainer, built it with his own money. The city architect Eduard Bradtman gave it a front of great arched windows, and the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine calls it the first Art Nouveau building in Kyiv. It had two thousand seats, a glass dome over the ring and stables for fifty horses. A hetman was proclaimed in its hall, the Soviet authorities made it a state circus, and in September 1941 it was blown up.
A permanent circus is built round its ring. The usual ring is 13 metres across, the measure Philip Astley used in London from 1768 for riding standing on a cantering horse. Tiers of seats rise round it, and the stables are under the same roof. Horses were the heart of the programme. In a liberty act they work without riders, directed from the middle of the ring by the trainer’s voice and body and by a long whip, the chambrière. Krutikov’s ring measured 6 sazhens, about 12.8 metres, “as in all circuses”.
Petro Sylvestrovych Krutikov was born in Kyiv, graduated in law from St Volodymyr University and served in the governor-general’s chancery, then in the Kyiv judicial chamber. From 1890 horses were his profession. That year he built a covered manege in Kyiv, with stables and a hall for 200, after the Cirque Molier in Paris, and showed his horses there once or twice a year. They rolled barrels, walked on wooden bottles and on an elastic beam, spelt out words from letters and handed programmes to the audience; there was a liberty act, and a troika that did the same moves in step. In 1897 he took them on tour, to Paris and Odesa among other cities, and he sold trained animals to circuses at home and abroad.
Kyiv had wanted a stone circus for years. The great circus families of the day, Salamonsky, Ciniselli and Truzzi, offered to build one, and so did the Nikitin brothers; the city did not accept their bids, and in 1899 a city commission under the architect Heorhii Shleifer took up the question. In the end a Kyivan built it. To pay for it, Krutikov not only spent a sizeable inheritance but sold his estate: he paid a private commercial bank more than 100,000 roubles for the plot on Mykolaivska Street, and the building cost 325,000. There were two inheritances, by the account of the clown D. Alperov, who worked there. The provincial board issued the building permit on 24 March 1903. The design was by Eduard Bradtman, Kyiv’s city architect from 1898.
The permit asked for low-pressure steam heating, electric light throughout and fire hydrants. Five entrances from the street led into a vestibule with the cloakrooms, and two wide staircases went up to the foyer and the hall. The hall, about 34 metres across, held 2,000 people in three tiers and had twelve exits, seven of them straight onto the street. Everything but the parquet and the seats was iron and concrete. A glass dome on thin iron supports let daylight onto the ring, and the acoustics were excellent: the ring could be turned into a concert hall. At the front of the building, next to the Hotel Continental, there were shops, and behind them, upstairs, stables for fifty horses.
Alperov called it the only two-storey circus in the empire: the cloakrooms and the box office downstairs, a marble staircase, and upstairs the arena, the hall and a huge foyer. He did not like the hall. It was built “not as an amphitheatre but as a well”, three storeys of seats and boxes, so a performer felt he was working only for the front rows and had to crane his neck to see the rest of the audience.
On 23 November (6 December) 1903, at one in the afternoon, the building was consecrated, and the circus opened the same day. Krutikov called it “Hippo-Palace”, the horse palace.
By Alperov’s account, Krutikov was the first in the empire to show horses trained without a whip. “He came into the ring in a black velvet jacket and a jockey cap, without a whip or a chambrière,” Alperov wrote. “He led out sixteen golden horses, and they went through complicated evolutions for him without the usual crack of the chambrière. All the horses were in harness, and the harness had numbers on it. Krutikov drove them into a bunch in the middle of the ring and then ordered: ‘First, to your place… Second, to your place…’ And all the horses stood in the order of their numbers.” He loved horses more than people, Alperov added, and they had a better life with him than the performers did. A wrestler’s memoir quoted by the circus historian M. Rybakov tells it differently: the golden horses worked well, but Krutikov beat them without mercy, and at a rehearsal in Kyiv he killed one with an axe.
An advertisement in the Kyiv newspaper Kievlyanin in 1906 printed a seat plan and the prices. A box for four in the stalls cost 7 roubles 80 kopecks, a box in the dress circle 5.80, an armchair in the front row of the stalls 2.50, a seat behind the boxes 1.50, and an extra chair in a box 2 roubles. The cloakroom has a column of its own in the price list, 10 kopecks a seat and 40 a box: a cloakroom was still a novelty.
Krutikov himself appeared in his ring four times in 1904 and after that once or twice a season; others filled the programme. For the 1904/05 season he engaged the ballet master Tomasz Nijinsky, father of Vaslav Nijinsky, with the prima ballerina Rumyantseva and a troupe of 24. Alperov names his ballets “La Gioconda”, “White Ballet” and “Ballet with a Scarf”; for his pantomime-ballet “On the Seashore” the ring was covered with a carpet, half of it yellow like sand. The Kyiv press of those years also names the pantomimes “Pan Twardowski”, “Don Quixote”, “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Puss in Boots”. The acoustics brought singers: Mattia Battistini, Adam Didur, Titta Ruffo, Maria Lytvynenko-Volgemut, Feodor Chaliapin. Ukrainian companies played there in 1906 and 1913, with Maria Zankovetska and Panas Saksahanskyi, and films were shown after the evening programme.
In 1910 the circus staged a pantomime called “Circus under Water”. As Kievlyanin described it, the ring was covered with a special tarpaulin and filled with water, with artificial waterfalls; a searchlight made the lighting effects, and moving pictures served as scenery. Water shows were the fashion of the time. In Paris the Nouveau Cirque had opened in 1886 with a ring whose wooden floor sank on a hydraulic column below the water in about six minutes, and that December it showed the first water pantomime, La Grenouillère. From 1900 the London Hippodrome had a tank worked by hydraulic rams. In Kyiv a tarpaulin did the job.
The First World War changed the bill. In the autumn of 1914 the hall became a theatre of miniatures: a sketch, a one-act operetta and solo turns by a dancer, a baritone and a singer of romances, at 20 kopecks to a rouble a seat. In November the Odesa miniatures company played a topical revue, “The Kaiser’s Dream”. At the end of December Strepetov’s “first-class Siberian circus” gave two shows a day, the matinee at reduced prices and free for children. In 1916 Krutikov let the circus to Alexander Kisso, a clown who had worked in his programme. In January 1917 Kisso offered children free rides on little horses, and in March he opened an international championship of French wrestling.
The building also had its place in the political life of Kyiv and Ukraine. On the morning of 29 April 1918 the Central Rada adopted the Constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and at eleven the All-Ukrainian Congress of Grain-growers opened in Krutikov’s circus, called by the Union of Landowners and the Ukrainian democratic grain-growers. About 8,000 delegates came, most of them peasants, 6,432 of them with mandates: to a hall with 2,000 seats. A vote for hetman was begun between three candidates. In the break, at about three, Pavlo Skoropadskyi arrived and went into a side box; before the count was announced, his circle shouted “Long live the Hetman!”, the hall took it up, and Skoropadskyi was proclaimed Hetman of Ukraine. In the newspaper Nova Rada the writer Serhii Yefremov mocked the scene “in a circus box”.
The Soviet authorities decreed the nationalisation of circuses in 1919, but took them over step by step. From 1920 the building was called the State House of Popular Spectacles, yet the authorities, short of money, let it to private impresarios. In 1924 Kyiv’s became the first circus in Ukraine with state status, ahead of Odesa (1925) and Kharkiv (1927). Photographs of the 1920s and 1930s show “Derzh Tsyrk”, State Circus, over the great arch, and a banner for a “water pantomime”. The last season before the war closed on 3 May 1941.
German troops entered Kyiv on 19 September 1941. In the summer the Kyiv defence staff
had had the city centre mined: by the report of the head of its engineering service, the work was done by a platoon of an army engineer battalion “in close contact with the city party committee”. Other accounts name the NKVD. From 24 September the charges went off one after another - the post office, the Grand Hotel, the exchange and Krutikov’s circus among them - and the centre burned until 29 September. Photographs of 1942 show the curved wall of the hall, with its row of arched windows, standing over the rubble. The ruins were cleared after the war, and the circus was not rebuilt on its site.
In 1964 the cinema Ukraina opened on the site, now 5 Arkhitektora Horodetskoho Street: Kyiv’s first wide-screen cinema, with two halls. On 4 September 1965, at the premiere of Serhii Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Ivan Dziuba from the stage and Vasyl Stus and Viacheslav Chornovil from the hall called on the audience to stand in protest against the arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. In 2008 the city council allowed a shopping and entertainment complex on the plot; the cinema closed on 1 October 2018, and in January 2026 its future was still undecided. The National Circus of Ukraine is on Halytska Square, in a building of 1958–1960; its ring is equipped for water pantomimes.
A circus of the same year still works on the English coast. The Hippodrome in Great Yarmouth was built in 1903 for the circus owner George Gilbert, to a design by R. S. Cockrill, with Art Nouveau foliage on its front, and is listed Grade II*. Its ring sinks into a pool, as the Nouveau Cirque’s did, and water shows are still on its bill.
Kyiv kept the site and a few photographs. Alperov’s memoir kept the horses: sixteen of them, each going to its place by number.
Sources: D. Alperov, На арене старого цирка, 1936; V. Kovalynskyi, "Цирк Петра Крутикова"; M. Rybakov, Киевский цирк, 2006; Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine; Звід пам'яток історії та культури України: Київ, 1999; P. Hai-Nyzhnyk, Ukrainian Historical Journal, 2011; I. Kostenko, Istorychna Pravda, 2013; Kievlyanin, 1906, 1910, 1917; Kievskaya mysl, 1914; Circopedia; V&A; Historic England; Wikipedia. Images: Wikimedia Commons, Fortepan, Telegraf.
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