Alchevsk was founded in 1895 with the establishment of an iron works as the railroad station Yuryivka. However, soon in 1903 it was renamed into Alchevsk in honor of the local Russian oligarch of Ukrainian descent Aleksey Alchevsky who died just prior to that. He was famous for the financial and industrial development of the eastern part of Ukraine and particularly the Donbas region. Later his children as well as his wife have made enormous contribution in the development of the Ukrainian culture through poetry and music. After the establishment of the Soviet regime sometime around the time of Holodomor (there is no concrete evidence) the town was renamed into Voroshylovsk. Between 1957 and 1961 the town's name was changing between Alchevsk and Voroshylovsk several times as the Volroshylov's personality cult was diminishing. Finally, it was decided to name the town as Kommunarsk in honor of the Paris Commune. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the city resumed its former name of Alchevsk in 1991.
Winter disaster of 2006
On January 22, 2006, the district heating system of the city almost entirely collapsed after an underground heat pipe line cracked in unusually cold weather (nearly -40 C). As a result, heating equipment in the majority of Alchevsk's buildings was frozen and ruptured, leaving about 60,000 residents with only the protection of individual electric heaters. A few days later the sewage system also froze due to a lack of warm tap water.
An investigation revealed the massive, long-time negligence of the city authorities. The whole heating system was designed in a hyper-centralized way, depending on only two boilers and few main pipelines. Moreover, the housing company failed to react to the pipe incident properly: the water from the system wasn't immediately dumped to prevent further freezing.
The Ukrainian government took massive emergency actions to protect Alchevsk residents from freezing. Engineering teams sent by
