The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv

A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists

Tarik Cyril Amar

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781501735806
• eBook ISBN: 9781501700835
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv reveals the local and transnational forces behind the twentieth-century transformation of Lviv into a Soviet and Ukrainian urban center. Lviv's twentieth-century history was marked by violence, population changes, and fundamental transformation ethnically, linguistically, and in terms of its residents' self-perception. Against this background, Tarik Cyril Amar explains a striking paradox: Soviet rule, which came to Lviv in ruthless Stalinist shape and lasted for half a century, left behind the most Ukrainian version of the city in history. In reconstructing this dramatically profound change, Amar illuminates the historical background in present-day identities and tensions within Ukraine.

CHAPTER ONE

Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg before 1939

Today, Lviv is a city of about 750,000 inhabitants and 65 square miles in the West of an independent Ukrainian nation-state.¹ It is the center of one of Ukraine’s twenty-seven main administrative units, Lviv oblast, and the urban center of Western Ukraine (a generally, if unofficially, recognized region), with about nine-and-a-half million inhabitants, roughly the equivalent of Hungary’s and a fifth of Ukraine’s total populations.²

This contemporary Lviv is a historically recent creation, decisively shaped by the Second World War and the postwar period; it is not the outcome of inexorable national fate. Yet these twentieth-century processes, while anything but preordained, cannot be understood in isolation from either earlier developments or the latter’s echo in twentieth-century memory, ambitions, and conditions. This chapter puts Lviv’s history, as it unfolded after the beginning of the Second World War, in its broader context.

Origins at Stake

There is general consensus that Lviv was founded as a fortress in the thirteenth century and named after its founder’s son, Lev, the Lion. Medieval Lviv quickly became the capital of the Halyts-Volyn principality. Its rulers descended from but also defied the rulers of the ancient Rus' state centered on Kyiv.³ Modern national narratives claim the latter as the origin of Russia or Ukraine. In reality, it was neither Ukrainian in any modern sense nor “one of the most reliable outposts in the West of the old Russian lands.”⁴ Its history does not fit myths of nationalism, imperialism, or hegemony.

By the mid-thirteenth century, the Halyts-Volyn ruler had received papal recognition as Rex Russiae. In the fourteenth century, the principality was divided, with its Halyts part and Lviv going to the Roman Catholic kings of medieval Poland. One of them declared a crusade against Orthodox schismatics.⁵ Later, conflicting interpretations contested the memory of this Halyts-Volyn state. By the end of the nineteenth century, modern Ukrainian historiography in then Habsburg Galicia rejected Polish rule as a dark hiatus and claimed Lviv as originally and authentically eastern Slavonic, Orthodox, and (proto-)Ukrainian—not western Slavonic, Catholic, or (proto-)Polish.⁶

Moreover, the Kyiv and the Lviv myths were linked. Early dynastic affiliations with Kyiv were deployed to assert the national claim that the Halyts-Volyn state had continued an ancient Rus' tradition, preserving legitimacy for a Ukrainian nation. Assigning the Kyiv Rus' origins anywhere else than to the Grand Duchy of Moscow/Russian Empire, however, challenged Russian claims of having alone preserved the Rus' tradition. As a symbol, Lviv could turn, in Andreas Kappeler’s succinct phrase, a “Ukrainian question” into a “key problem of the nation-building and national identity of the Russians.”⁷ By the end of the twentieth century, Lviv’s definitive—and last—Soviet history, published in Kyiv, lauded early Lviv as an eastern Slavonic bulwark against Western Catholics.⁸

The Making of a Multiethnic Borderland City

After Lviv became part of medieval Poland—subsequently the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—the old settlement became a suburb to a new walled city and the ethno-religious structure of the population changed, with Catholic Polish and German immigrants added to Orthodox inhabitants.⁹ By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Roman Catholics made up the majority of the city’s population and dominated its institutions.¹⁰

While Jewish settlement in the area began earlier, the first evidence of two Jewish communities in Lviv dates to the middle of the fourteenth century, when Ashkenazi Jews arrived and shaped the city’s Jewish life.¹¹ For Lviv’s Jews the period of Polish rule brought advances followed by a decline. Pogroms and “blood libel” persecutions grew more frequent starting in the seventeenth century.¹²

At the end of the eighteenth century, as a result of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Lviv and its region came under Habsburg rule as the eastern half of a new Crown Land province called, in a short version, “Galizien-Lodomerien” or simply “Galizien.” Poles initially resisted the new name, but soon it was generally used.¹³ What Larry Wolff has described as the invention of Galicia had begun.¹⁴

The Habsburgs called Galicia’s chief city “Lemberg.” During their rule, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, its population increased sevenfold, surpassing 200,000 in 1910.¹⁵ But no fundamental changes in its ethnic composition occurred. What was really new about Habsburg rule was its ethos. This was the first time in Lviv’s history that its rulers embraced an enlightenment-driven ideology of superior and imperial modernity imposed on a periphery categorized as backward. As Larry Wolff has stressed, Galicia’s status as an “invented entity” made it a “perfect target for systematic enlightened transformation.”¹⁶ Lviv and Galizien were now objects of a civilizing mission. While geographically on—imagined—margins, they now also constituted an important laboratory of the central project of Enlightenment Europe: modernity.

The dynastic Habsburg Empire promoted this modernity with a national accent. The Habsburgs replaced Lemberg’s medieval privileges with a centralizing bureaucracy initially staffed by German and Germanophone officials and aimed at the cultural Germanization of elites.¹⁷ But, hobbled by limited resources and coordination, Habsburg Germanization was not nationalist but remained imperial, oscillating with reactionary responses to revolutionary crises.¹⁸

Habsburg rule brought Lemberg economic growth and changed its look, with substantial urban renewal. Lemberg’s architects, many of them imported from Vienna, introduced a neoclassicist style meant to imprint a new, rational order on the cityscape, and travelers duly praised Lemberg for looking not like itself but like a little “Vienna of the East.”¹⁹ Within less than a century, however, Habsburg Lemberg became a shell for Lwów, a city belonging to Vienna but shaped by Polish elites, a Polish majority, and Polish cultural predominance.²⁰ Gradualist Habsburg fantasies failed—or, perhaps, succeeded, if in unforeseen ways. Although the idea had been “not to make Poles into Germans all at once” but to construct a “genuine” if new Galician identity as a halfway house for the Polish elite, the provisional became permanent and Germanization withered away.²¹ In Lviv, the Habsburgs would not be the last ones to experience the insidious solidification of the transitory.

Habsburg Lemberg never presided over a prosperous province. Galicia remained poor and mostly agricultural, but it was not stagnant, profiting from an early oil industry.²² Around the turn of the century, Lemberg/Lwów boomed, and its architects—now increasingly from the city’s new Polytechnic Institute—turned it into a jewel of Secesja or Jugendstil building.²³

Fin-de-siècle Lemberg was a provincial hub of Europe’s urban modernity. In 1894, it was the empire’s first city and Europe’s fourth to introduce electric streetcars, which by 1938 would employ a staff of thirteen hundred.²⁴ By the early twentieth century, it had one of the empire’s largest electric power stations.²⁵ In 1896, almost all the children in the city attended school, and among the young, illiteracy had been nearly eradicated. Lemberg witnessed an “explosive development” of print media, and the first commercial cinema precursors started working before the turn of the century. By the end of the First World War, over twenty-four cinemas had opened, and local intellectuals had contributed to early Polish film criticism. Lwów’s coffee houses and the unveiling of the city’s monument to the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz were both shown on film to socially mixed audiences, witnessing Lemberg’s own version of the “utterly untraditional artistic modernism,” in Eric Hobsbawm’s apt phrase, that cinema represented.²⁶

Jewish Lemberg

The city’s Jewish population suffered discrimination for most of the nineteenth century, but achieved legal emancipation and formal equality in 1868. Between 1772 and 1848, Habsburg rule combined traditional discrimination against Jews with modernizing policies seeking to turn Jews into draftable citizen-subjects. Galicia was the first province where Jews faced both emancipation and military conscription, putting a region new, poor, and peripheral at the center of a monarchy-wide “discourse on Jewish equality and the price of citizenship.”²⁷

After the establishment of legal equality, the “first purely political organization of Jews not only in Galicia but in Austria as a whole” was the assimilationist Shomer Yisrael, founded in Lwów in 1868.²⁸ On its own terms, assimilation or acculturation produced some results. In the 1890s, out of one hundred city councilors, five or six were ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terminology
• Archival Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg before 1939
• Chapter Two The First Soviet Lviv, 1939–1941
• Chapter Three The Lemberg of Nazism
• Chapter Four After Lemberg
• Chapter Five The Founding of Industrial Lviv
• Chapter Six Local Minds
• Chapter Seven Lviv’s Last Synagogue, 1944–1962
• Chapter Eight A Soviet Borderland of Time
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index