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Lviv and the Collapse of the Soviet Union: Establishment Writers and Literary Politics on the Soviet Western Borderlands
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Lviv and the Collapse of the Soviet Union: Establishment Writers and Literary Politics on the Soviet Western Borderlands William Jay Risch The Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 led to a plethora of studies on the Soviet state's role in promoting an empire of nations, ones that employed the rhetoric and practices of the state to call for its dissolution. This article considers the Soviet western borderlands' contribution to its demise. Turning to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, it suggests that late Soviet politics of empire integrated Western Ukrainians into one Soviet polity. In the late phases of Khrushchev's "Thaw," the literary journal of Lviv's Writers' Union, Zhovten (October), from 1964 to 1966 became a forum that accommodated local and national interests while adhering to an all-Soviet imperial canon. The dismissal of its editor, poet Rostyslav Bratun', did not completely end the journal's approach to literary expression. Writers like Bratun' remained very active in the public sphere. Drawing on studies of the Soviet Union and other empires, this article rejects binary oppositions between state and society and between imperial centers and colonial peripheries. It sees the power of imperial imaginations affecting regional and national identities1 It suggests instead that unresolved debates over issues like literature, language, and historical memory made these borderlands' integration very problematic. They provided the impetus for establishment intellectuals like Bratun' to mobilize support for national sovereignty movements in the late 1980s that contributed to the Soviet Union's breakup. Borderland Identities and Lvivans' Habitus As Peter Sahlins indicated in his pioneering study of the early modern Pyrenees , border regions have become crucial in shaping national identities. In the case of France and Spain, they affected early modern imperial policies2 A number of scholars have highlighted the Russian Empire's western border1 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, Histon) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 2 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). The Making of Russian History: Society, Culture, and the Politics of Modern Russia. Essays in Honor of Allan K. Wildman. John W. Steinberg and Rex A. Wade, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2009, 181-209. 182 WILLIAM JAY RISCH lands' impact on late tsarist and early Soviet nationalities policies3 The western borderlands acquired by the Soviet Union during World War II similarly transformed Soviet politics of empire. The Baltic republics, for instance, became for Russians a model of compromise between the capitalist West and Soviet socialism. At the end of the 1980s, national movements there had a direct impact on politics in Russia, encouraging Russia's separation from the Soviet Union.4 While this article will not assess the impact of Lviv on Soviet policies in Moscow, it sees that literary politics here had significant implications for relations between Lviv, the Soviet Ukrainian capital Kyiv, and Moscow. As with the Baltic republics, policy makers in Kyiv and Moscow had to deal with a region affected by Western "bourgeois" practices of nation-building. In the case of Lviv, this meant national movements that had emerged under Habsburg and then Polish rule. In the 19th century, the Habsburg province of Galicia, whose capital was Lviv, became the site of three major national projects, Polish , Ukrainian, and Zionist. Galicia's Ukrainian national movement was highly contested, as noted by Andriy Zayarnyuk in his study of Galician peasant reading clubss However, competition with Polish nation-building projects over time led to a sense of belonging to a Ukrainian national community in opposition to a Polish other, what Liah Greenfeld sees as a central aspect of modern nationalism6 This sense of belonging to a community united by a common history, territory, language, and etlmicity did not make violent confrontation between Polish and Ukrainian nationalisms inevitable, as Timothy Snyder has perceptively observed. However, Soviet and Nazi occupation 3 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russificntion 011 the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb: Northern minois University Press, 1996). 4 Nils R. Muiznieks, "The Influence of the Baltic Popular Movements on the Process of Soviet Disintegration," Europe-Asia Studies 47: 1 (1995): 3-25; Dmitrii Smirnov, "Sovietization , Terror and Repression in the Baltic States in the 19405 and 19505: The Perspective of...