The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv by William Jay Risch (review)

Anyone who has visited both Lviv, the unofficial capital of the western part of Ukraine, and Kyiv, the country's official capital, will have noticed something essentially "un-Soviet" or even "anti-Soviet" about the city that over time has been called Lemberg, Lwów, Lviv, and Lvov. This is the underlying theme of William Jay Risch's book, which looks at the Lion City and its people after World War II through the prism of its Central European historical legacy—specifically, its integral ties to Vienna and Warsaw and how those ties affected Lviv's confrontation with and accommodation to the "Soviet way of life" (sovetskii obraz zhizni).

With the exception of a brief period of occupation by Tsarist armies during the First World War, Lviv was never part of anything Russian before September 1939, and this basic fact was central to the role that Lviv and indeed the whole of western Ukraine played in the development of Soviet Ukraine and the Soviet Union overall after World War II.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, titled "Lviv and the Soviet West," begins with a brief general introduction that places Lviv in the context of wider political developments in the Soviet Union after the war—from Stalinism to Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw to Mikhail Gorbachev to collapse. Two important realities came to the fore not long after Lviv became Soviet. First, the city had lost almost all of its Polish and Jewish inhabitants—the former through population exchanges with Poland and Soviet deportations and the second because of the Holocaust. At the same time, Lviv witnessed an influx of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians from the outside. Second, the keepers of ideological orthodoxy in Kyiv and Moscow quickly realized that even though the partisans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) had been defeated by the early 1950s, Lviv and western Ukraine as a whole stubbornly refused to shed their "backwardness"; which is to say that they refused to discard the Western beliefs and values they had inherited from their historical experience under Habsburg and Polish rule in exchange for the supposed "progressive" essence of the "Soviet way of life."

One of the most interesting sections in this part of the narrative is Risch's analysis of Lviv's new demographic reality and the relationships among its major components: the newcomers from outside western Ukraine, the western Ukrainian villagers moving into the city, and the depleted strata of original Lviv residents, especially the indigenous intelligentsia, who had survived the war and German and Soviet occupation and repressions. Elsewhere in this part of the book Risch skillfully examines Lviv's role as a "Soviet abroad" that, because of its "exposure" to Poland and Czechoslovakia (including access to media from these "fraternal socialist countries") underpinned its continued "backwardness."

The second part of the book, titled "Lviv and the Ukrainian Nation," is a must read for any student or academic of Soviet and post-Soviet studies who fancies himself or herself an expert in the field. Risch discusses the politics of language and literature and the politics of history and historiography and how they played out in Lviv in the 1950s-1970s. These issues were relevant not only in Lviv but also in Kyiv, inMoscow, in Leningrad, and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. But the difference, of course, was Lviv's "backwardness"—that is, its Western and European connection, which added an entirely different dimension to the ideological struggle that was ultimately a struggle over national identity.

Risch also displays his skills as a cultural historian and historian of pop culture. He looks at how young people, primarily university students, dealt with the realities of the new "Soviet way of life" in the 1950s and 1960s given the fact that they were only one step removed from the "backwardness" of their parents and grandparents. Another chapter deals with the Soviet...