TARIK CYRIL AMAR. the Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: a Bor- Derland City Between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists.Ith- Aca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015
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Featured Reviews 1627 narrative of the New Deal, which in the end affirms this ability of the United States to reform and reinvent itself” moment as essentially an anti–global history tale. Yet he (4). Patel has raised important questions for historians to makes an intriguing argument that even as the U.S. re- consider as they continue to grapple with this period of treated from the global stage, its actions were determined American history and as they, more generally, attempt to by and influential on global events. As he puts it, the New argue when and how the global matters. Deal was “an undertaking central to saving the interna- MEG JACOBS tional prestige of democracy in that it demonstrated the Princeton University TARIK CYRIL AMAR. The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Bor- derland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists.Ith- aca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. x, 356. $35.00. The city of Lviv has had eleven different names in a num- extensive archival research in Germany, Poland, Russia, Downloaded from ber of different languages. This linguistic variety reflects Ukraine, and the U.S. He mastered all of the local lan- the multiethnic character of the city throughout history. guages and spent many years in the city of Lviv itself. As a major medieval merchant town and administrative Amar also actively engages in discussions about the poli- center near the current Polish-Ukrainian border, it at- tics of historical memory in Ukraine. In short, one could tracted a diverse population that included, among others, not imagine anyone better prepared for this kind of Armenians, Germans, and Jews. Some historians have study. http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ maintained that in early modern times no other city in Theresultismorethanimpressivebut—alas—less East Central Europe could match Lviv in terms of diver- than persuasive. Most notable is the richness of Amar’s sity. Under Habsburg (1772–1918) and then Polish narrative, which reflects the depth of his archival findings. (1919–1939) rule, the demographic composition of Lviv He masterfully combines micro-stories with macro-analy- evolved into a rather stable tripartite structure with a Pol- sis. Some of the book’s chapters, such as the one on the ish majority (50–55 percent) and two major minorities German occupation, 1941–1944 (88–142), or the one on consisting of Jews (30–35 percent) and Ruthenians Lviv’s last synagogue, 1944–1962 (261–281), may be read (Ukrainians, 15–20 percent). Then World War II de- as micro-monographs on their own. The usual share of stroyed that multiethnic fabric—the Nazis killed the city’s minor mistakes, bizarre spellings, and some repetitious at Fudan University on January 22, 2017 Jews and the Soviets expelled its Poles—thereby trans- segments hardly diminish the book’s value. Surely, The forming Lviv into a predominantly Eastern Slavic city of Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv will become a standard text for Ukrainians and Russians. those who wish to study Soviet modernization. The postwar Soviet industrialization and mass worker It is, however, the book’s conclusion that does not per- migration from the surrounding countryside led to a suade. In the final portion of his book, Amar recites and steady increase in the Ukrainians’ share of the city’s pop- rejects three standard explanations for why Lviv was so ulation, from 44 percent in 1955 to 79 percent in 1989. unusual. The first relies on the long shadow of the Habs- The Ukrainianization of the cities was a process that took burg legacy; the second focuses on the legacy of Ukrai- place throughout all of the Soviet Ukraine from the 1920s nian nationalism, which in this part of Ukraine, with its to the 1980s. Still, the case of Lviv stands out. Unlike in key city of Lviv, was stronger than anywhere else; and the other Soviet Ukrainian cities, local (western Ukrainian) third contends that in the interwar period Lviv was spared peasant immigrants refused to accept the dominant Rus- Stalin’s industrialization, with its excessive amount of sian/Soviet culture, thereby turning Lviv into a Ukrai- transformative violence. Amar finds these three explana- nian-speaking—actually, the largest Ukrainian-speak- tions incomplete and flawed and offers his own. He does ing—city. During the last Soviet decades, it became the this by ascribing much more weight to the Soviet party- least Russian and Soviet city of Ukraine—which was re- state’s role in “creating the new urban working class of flected by, among other things, Lviv’s being the home to a Lviv from already nationalized western Ukrainian peas- disproportionate share of the dissident opposition to ants” (322). Soviet rule. Harvard historian Roman Szporluk referred There are two major reasons why this conclusion raises to this phenomenon back in 1992 as “the strange politics doubts. The first has to do with Amar’s categorization of of Lviv” without offering any definitive explanation for it historical factors as though they constituted clear-cut leg- (“The Strange Politics of Lviv: An Essay in Search of an acies (e.g., the Habsburg, Ukrainian, and Soviet legacies). Explanation,” in Zvi Gitelman, ed., The Politics of Nation- When it comes to Ukrainian identity building, one may ality and the Erosion of the USSR, 215–231.) talk about interplay and superimposition of those factors. In The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City be- Amar at least seems to admit this implicitly when he dis- tween Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists, Tarik Cyril Amar cusses a new urban working class originating from an al- has taken on the challenge of trying to explain this phe- ready nationalized peasantry (i.e., nationalized before nomenon. He offers a very sophisticated study based on Soviet rule). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2016 1628 Featured Reviews One may discuss when and how this nationalizing oc- sian. So it was not surprising that the rector of Lviv Uni- curred: during “the Ukrainian conquest” of Galicia under versity, Yevhen Lazarenko (himself a migrant from east- the late Habsburg period, or during interwar Polish rule, ern Ukraine), characterized local Soviet politics as a type when, according to memoirs, local peasants finally shifted of “colonizing.” in their self-identification from Ruthenians to Ukrai- All in all, at the point in time of Stalin’s death it was nians. One way or another, it was this experience of a rel- still too early to tell about the Ukrainian character of atively continuous nationalization that made Galicia very Lviv. Suffice it to say that at the beginning of the 1960s, distinctive from the other regions of Ukraine. a majority of city dwellers among the second generation Secondly—and continuing this line of argumenta- ofimmigrantsconsistedofeitherRussiansorRussian tion—Soviet politics were themselves hardly homogenous speakers. Ukrainianization en masse only started after and consistent. The mass demographic Ukrainianization the end of the 1950s or the beginning of the 1960s. The of the city started in the last Soviet decades, i.e., in the main triggering point was a gradual abolition in the 1960s 1960s–1980s. Suffice it to say that—as Roman Szporluk to early 1970s of the discriminatory passport system that was first to notice—in the period of 1959–1989 in Lviv the forbade peasants from leaving their kolkhozy (kolhospy in rate of the population growth of Ukrainians was more Ukrainian). Till then it was hard to leave a village—after than ten times higher than that of Russians. But until that there were practically no barriers to migration to then, the rates of growth had been exactly the opposite: Lviv. Downloaded from thus in 1939/1941–1955, the share of the city’s Russian It was this mass peasant migration that turned the tide population increased by a hundred times, from 0.3 per- against Soviet assimilation. In addition to statistics, evi- cent to 35.6 percent, whereas that of the Ukrainians dence may be found in the ability of the local Ukrainian merely tripled. Thus by the middle of the 1950s, the share culture to assimilate some of the second-generation local of Russians in the city’s population was only 10 percent Russians and Russian speakers. Although the examples less than that of Ukrainians. In terms of language use, are not numerous, they are telling. A notable case in- http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ this Russian-Ukrainian difference was even smaller: since volves a local rock group, Braty Hadiukiny. The group many eastern Ukrainians spoke Russian, the share of emerged in the 1980s from a milieu of Russian-speaking Russian speakers constituted practically half (47 percent) youth (mostly of Russian and Jewish ethnic origins) that of the city’s population. Analyzing these statistics in its songs chose to use Ukrainian rather than Russian. prompts one to conclude that, whatever had been the Ironically, it was Braty Hadiukiny that created the image Soviet regime’s intentions, by the end of Stalin’s rule the of Lviv as a Banderstadt, i.e., as the capital of militant Ukrainian character of the city was very far from having Ukrainian nationalism. been established. To be sure, Ukrainianization was a contested process. The forced postwar Sovietization and industrialization Soviet authorities tended to minimize its political over- at Fudan University on January 22, 2017 simultaneously Ukrainianized and Russified Lviv. While tones, and in that sense Soviet Lviv was probably the most Amar focuses on the former, he rather neglects the latter. extreme example of this approach. Suffice it to say that, Tellingly, the number of Russians living in the Lviv region despite reiterated appeals of the local Ukrainian intelli- was higher than was to be found in the eastern Ukrainian gentsia to Kyiv and Moscow, a monument to Taras Shev- regions neighboring the Russian federation.