The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists

368 Pages·2015·3.52 MB·English

by  Tarik Cyril Amar

The Paradox
of Ukrainian Lviv

The Paradox
of Ukrainian Lviv
A Borderland City between
Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists
Tarik Cyril Amar
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
Cover illustration: Soviet map of Lviv, 1947 (detail). Collection of the Center for Urban
History of East Central Europe, courtesy of Oleg Sergeiev.
Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof,
must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2015 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amar, Tarik Cyril, 1969– author.
The paradox of Ukrainian Lviv : a borderland city between Stalinists, Nazis, and
nationalists / Tarik Cyril Amar.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-5391-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. L´viv (Ukraine)—History—20th century. 2. Ukraine—History—German
occupation, 1941–1944. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Ukraine—L´viv. I. Title.
DK508.95.L86A46 2015
947.7'9—dc23 2015010558
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Note on Terminology viii
Archival Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Chapter One
Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg before 1939 22
Chapter Two
The First Soviet Lviv, 1939–1941 44
Chapter Three
The Lemberg of Nazism: German Occupation, 1941–1944 88
Chapter Four
After Lemberg: The End of the End of Lwów and the Making of Lviv 143
Chapter Five
The Founding of Industrial Lviv: Factories and Identities 185
Chapter Six
Local Minds 221
Chapter Seven
Lviv’s Last Synagogue, 1944–1962 261
Chapter Eight
A Soviet Borderland of Time 282
Conclusion: A Sonderweg through Soviet Modernity 318
Bibliography 323
Index 349
Acknowledgments
I
t is, unfortunately, unlikely that I will remember and properly acknowledge all
the many individuals and institutions that have helped me write this book, and
I offer my apologies to those I inadvertently omit. Special thanks are due to my
adviser, Stephen Kotkin, and to Jan T. Gross, Harold James, and Amir Weiner,
who oversaw the early stages of this project. None of this work would have been
possible without the Department of History at Princeton University. Before
I came to Princeton, I benefited from the support and insights of my teachers at
the London School of Economics and Political Science and at Balliol College,
Oxford University, especially my tutor Martin Conway.
In Ukraine, especially Lviv and Kyiv, as well as in Poland, Russia, Germany,
and the United States, I have been fortunate to encounter many committed and
helpful archivists and librarians, sometimes working under difficult conditions.
Over the years, many historians and scholars from other humanities and
social-science disciplines have also helped, supported, and challenged me, includ-
ing Felix Ackermann, Omer Bartov, Jan Behrends, Volker Berghahn, Michael
David-Fox, Gloria and István Deák, Sofia Dyak, David Engel, Laura Engelstein,
Gennady Estraikh, Franziska Exeler, Mayhill Fowler, Yoram Gorlizki, Victoria de
Grazia, Ruth Ellen Gruber, Mark von Hagen, John-Paul Himka, Jochen Hellbeck,
Susan Heuman, Peter Holquist, Cynthia Hooper, Liudmyla and Vladyslav
Hrynevych (who also housed me during the Orange Revolution), the late Yaroslav
Isaievych, Yanni Kotsonis, Maike Lehmann, Ola Linkiewicz, Eric Lohr, Mark
Mazower, Ekaterina Melnikova, Stefan Plaggenborg, Susan Pedersen, Olena Pet-
renko, Ekaterina Pravilova, Vasyl Rasevych, Andreas Renner, Malte Rolf, Per An-
ders Rudling, Seth Schwartz, Max Schweer, Helene Sinnreich, Timothy Snyder,
Michael Stanislawski, Keely Stauter-Halsted, Theodore Weeks, Richard Wortman,
Serhy Yekelchyk, and Rakefet Zalashik.
I have had the opportunity to present my research and ideas at various ven-
ues, including the Russian and Soviet History Kruzhok at Columbia University,
Acknowledgments vii
the history department at Bochum University, the German Historical Institute
in Warsaw, the Russian History Seminar of the Department of History at George-
town University, the Ab imperio Annual Seminar (then in Kazan), the
Kandersteig Seminar of the Remarque Institute at New York University, the “Bor-
derlands of Empire: Imperialism, Colonialism, Environment, and Culture”
workshop organized by Omer Bartov, Wendy Lower, and Eric Weitz in Vilnius,
the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, the Skirball De-
partment of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, the Council of
European Studies and history department at Yale University, and the workshop
“Sovietizing the Periphery, a Comparative Approach,” organized by the Graduate
School for East and South East European Studies at Ludwig Maximilians Univer-
sity, Munich.
In Kyiv, Lviv, Moscow, Warsaw, and Berlin I have been fortunate to receive
much hospitality and help from Teofil Dyak, Kornelia Holiyat, Ola Linkiewicz,
Ira and Mykhailo Tsimmerman, and Rakefet Zalashik.
I gratefully acknowledge that work on this book has been facilitated by a
number of grants and fellowships received from Princeton and Columbia Univer-
sities, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Harvard Ukrainian
Research Institute, and the Ukrainian Studies Program and the Harriman Insti-
tute at Columbia University. Last but not least, special thanks are due to my edi-
tors at Cornell University Press, John G. Ackerman and Roger Malcolm Haydon,
to Kirsten Painter and Carolyn Pouncy, who have made this book much more
readable than I could have done on my own, as well as to the anonymous review-
ers of my manuscript.
Note on Terminology
T
he city at the center of this study has had a long history, most of it multiethnic.
Variations of Lviv’s name have included Lwów, Lemberik, Lwi Gród, Lemburg,
Lemberg, Loewensburg, Leopolis, Civitas Leona, Leontopolis, and Lvov. This
book strives to simplify usage by mostly using the modern Ukrainian “Lviv” for
the post-1944 period and as a default when no other name clearly applies. How-
ever, to avoid an anachronism that could be misread as endorsing one national
narrative over others and to realistically signal Lviv’s historical diversity to the
reader, when the historic context is not Ukrainian, this text will also use Lwów,
Lvov, and Lemberg, all names for the city in local—though not continuous or
uncontentious—use during the twentieth century.
This book also addresses regions whose belonging or character has been
contested. As a result, their names can express claims and the reifying simpli-
fications they require. Thus, the terms Eastern Galicia, Western Ukraine, and
Eastern Ukraine differ from eastern Galicia, western Ukraine, and eastern
Ukraine. This fact poses a special challenge to the historian: the claims and
reifications need to be rendered but not reproduced uncritically. I have ad-
opted the rule that capitalization is used only in quotes or to indicate the
perspective of historical actors. As with Lviv’s multiple names, this approach
makes for less surface consistency but more historical accuracy. I have also
occasionally referred to (eastern) Galicia after the end of the Habsburg
Empire, which is, strictly speaking, an anachronism but sometimes useful as
a shorthand to refer to (largely) the territory of what used to be (eastern)
Galicia.
The Soviet Union was ruled through a parallel structure of state and party, in
which, on the whole and with few, if important, exceptions, the party was domi-
nant. At the same time, members of the Soviet state elite usually were also party
members. Formally, the Soviet Union was not a unitary state but a federation of
republics, which were defined by ethno-territorial or national criteria. Among
Note on Terminology ix
these republics, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was by
far the most important and powerful. The second most important republic was
Soviet Ukraine, with its capital (since 1934) in the city of Kyiv (in Ukrainian) or
Kiev (in Russian). In reality, the Soviet Union was highly centralized, which is
why a book about a major city in Soviet Ukraine has to address rule from both
Moscow and Kyiv.
For this study, a limited number of institutions and offices are especially im-
portant and occur frequently in the text. Their full official names have been re-
placed by short forms: the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, TsK VKP(b) and after 1952 TsK KPSS(b), is referred to as the Mos-
cow Central Committee. At its top was the Politburo, called the Presidium be-
tween 1952 and 1966. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of
Ukraine, TsK KP(b)U and after 1952 TsK KPU, is referred to as the Kyiv Central
Committee or as the Central Committee of Ukraine; it also had a politburo at the
top. Both central committees had their own bureaucracies, which paralleled and
overshadowed the state administration.
In Lviv, generally the most powerful institution, effectively ruling the city and
its region (the oblast), was the oblast party committee; the most powerful man in
the oblast and the city was its first secretary or head. The oblast party committee
was almost always referred to by its abbreviated name, the obkom, which is the
term also used in this book. The Lviv obkom had its own equivalent of a politburo,
the obkom buro and a bureaucracy or apparat, structured, in essence, along the
same lines as the central committees, which has left rich (and unlike in some other
oblasts) nearly undamaged archival holdings for the postwar period. Lviv also had
a city party committee, which was subordinate to the obkom but still important.
It was referred to by two abbreviated names: one Ukrainian, miskom; and one
Russian, gorkom. The lowest level of the party’s spatially structured hierarchy (ex-
cluding party structures based on individual institutions, such as factories, aca-
demic institutions, and collective farms) were the raion committees or raikoms.
The Soviet secret police played a major role and underwent several reorgani-
zations and official names. It was of special significance in Lviv and Western
Ukraine because it was fighting Ukrainian nationalism, generally associated with
this area. To make this text more readable, it is usually referred to simply as the
secret police.
During the Second World War, the German administration of the General-
gouvernement (in essence, those parts of Poland not annexed to Nazi Germany in
addition to, from 1941, parts of western Ukraine) licensed one institution to rep-
resent some Ukrainian interests. This body was called the Hauptausschuss (the
Main Commission) in German and the Ukrainskyi tsentralnyi komitet (literally,
the Ukrainian Central Committee) in Ukrainian. To avoid confusion with the