Dneiper Bank-Kamenskoye-Kiyev-Ltava-Vassia

A collection of provinces in central Ukraine along the Dneiper... which created some problems.  I went looking for some record of the original course of the river, since during early Soviet Russia there were several dams built that flooded the valley, displacing thousands of people and drowning villages.  Unfortunately, I could not find such a map.  Apparently, no surveys were done that exist online; even 19th century atlases tend to ignore Russia, apparently as a place where geographers do not go.  Seriously, no map plate at all appears in these.  It goes to show what kind of unearthly place was the czarate before all when sour... and adds to the lesson on what happens when you continually treat a whole people awfully for century after century.

So, made do as best I could, laying the river out as rationally as I could and filling in the basin with slough-lands as I described before.  Some of the cities on the bank of the largest Dneiper reservoir (the 5th largest by area in the world) were moved inward, to fit up against the river.  The effect creates a messy, but somewhat unique landscape.  Unique is always good.

A brief word about Kamenskoye, in the bottom right.  This is the modern Dnepropetrovsk region, or oblast.  Dnipro, formerly Dnepropetrovsk, is a huge city, but it didn't exist until 1776, when it was founded by Catherine the Great as Yekaterinoslav.  None of the settlements in this region are founded prior to 1550... so my population calculations make it a large, uninhabited steppeland, dangerously exposed and thus occupied only by Cossacks.  The settlements are therefore encampments, with few permanent buildings, while little other infrastructure exists at all.  I'll be mapping more of the area soon, but expect it to be largely empty steppe, as the small corner on the map above shows.