Can the history of a railway station be fascinating and engaging? Andriy Zayarnyuk, a professor at the History Department at the University of Winnipeg, makes a strong argument for this with his latest book. In it, he helps us understand the history of Lviv, its train station, and the region served by this terminal.

In 1772, during the first partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburgs took its southern region, later known as Galicia. It was hardly accessible. Separated from the rest of the empire by the impenetrable Carpathian Mountains, it was like a distant colony. However, this most extensive province of the Austrian part of the empire was of great military importance and potential: its integration with the Habsburg lands was critical. In the late 1830s, Vienna began to connect its provinces with an expanding railway network. In 1856, it reached Cracow and, in 1861, Lviv—then the capital of Galicia and the fifth-largest city of the empire. Zayarnyuk describes these early stages of the Habsburg railroading and introduces the first metropolis on the territory of present-day Ukraine, attached to the empire with regular railway service.

In 1904, Lviv’s magnificent new terminal opened. Zayarnyuk outlines the building's splendid “moderate Secession” architectural form, its employees and passengers, its modus operandi, technological innovations, contribution to the city's economic and spatial development, as well as to the political life of the late Habsburg Empire. The terminal’s neighborhood became the city’s working-class area and a stronghold of the labor movement. The station and the Galician Railroads played an important role during wartime, particularly during World War I. Then, during the Polish–Ukrainian war in 1918–19, it suffered from additional deliberate and unintentional heavy damage. It took several years to reconstruct the terminal. Even though it was considered “the largest and most beautiful” in independent Poland (129) and “became a patriotic memorial and a stage for performing national rituals” (133), it did not return to its Habsburg glory. The old problems reappeared: the tunnels were flooded, the restaurant was uncomfortably damp, parts of the roof and windows disintegrated. There were several labor strikes that ended with tragic consequences, while senior management were caught up in multiple scandals due to corrupt practices.

World War II brought catastrophe: First, the Germans bombed the city and the terminal in September 1939. Then, the Soviets incorporated the Galician railroad system into their network and regauged the tracks. They changed the ethnic composition of the city and the terminal personnel in a brutal and persecutory manner. In June 1941, during an evacuation after the German invasion, the Soviets blew up a part of the terminal installations. The Nazis fixed them temporarily. They were then again destroyed and left in an even worse state in 1944, before the Red Army entered the city. Before that, however, the Germans infamously used the Galician Railroads to send Jews to their deaths at the concentration camps. Therefore, “railway employees, from engine drivers to managers, became a symbol of the wider public's collaboration in the Holocaust” (173).

After the war, it required many years to rebuild the terminal. As in the case of the entire city, the Soviet reconstruction “entailed the complete disregard and destruction of Lviv’s historical heritage” (190). Zayarnyuk explains the new government's mismanagement and inefficiency through the lens of the railroad, stating that “the Soviet reconstruction of the terminal never ended. One cycle of repairs followed another” (205). This recursive process was beleaguered by many factors: fraud, poor discipline, endemic theft, ubiquitous drinking, managerial turbulence, conflicts between the “locals” and the newcomers, the “evacuation” of Poles from the city, political pressure, Soviet social engineering, ruthless exploitation of labor, violent hooliganism, contempt for regulations, and many others. The terminal gained a reputation and attracted both local criminals and homeless citizens seeking shelter. All these setbacks happened despite the fact that the railway played a far more critical role in the Soviet Union than in the West (260). “Soviet Lviv's public space remained grim” (263).

This excellent book is a testament to Zayarnyuk's deep academic and personal expertise with the subject matter. The author grew up in the vicinity of Lviv terminal and became intimately familiar with it. He still remembers “the unmistakable railway smell: a potential mixture of wet iron, machine oil, burnt oil, and rotten sleepers” (266). His grandfather worked for the terminal, further strengthening Zayarnyuk's connection to the train station. His professional trajectory heavily compliments the book as well, a combination of Ukrainian and Western academic training that contributes to his continued academic success. He has authored or coauthored several books and numerous articles, including the important essay “Historians as Enablers? Historiography, Imperialism, and the Legitimization of Russian Aggression” recently published in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies.

The book uses a rich theoretical framework inspired by the concepts of Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and David Harvey. Specifically, by mixing history, geography, architecture, and studies of everyday life. Zayarnyuk, taking a measured and objective position, writes about ethnic differences and conflicts in Lviv but does not picture them as the defining features of the city's past. Most people of the city were wage workers, writes the author, and “this experience was far more fundamental than either ethnicity or language” (10). Yet he does not shy away from precise statements: “many Ukrainian memoirs of Lviv under the Germans avoid the subject of the Holocaust completely. Such silence not only focuses attention on the suffering of their own ethnic group; it also helps to avoid discussion of Ukrainian complicity in the genocide” (183).

The book is based on impressive research in seventeen (!) archives in four countries. The author uses many printed primary and secondary sources, often in several languages. The text offers multiple examples of statistical data, and it does so in a digestible way. Analyses of economic processes and policies are supplemented with silhouettes of architects, managers, and politicians. Numerous reproductions of old postcards, maps, and photographs included in the pages enrich the text. In 2020, Zayarnyuk's contribution to the field of Ukrainian urban history, appreciated by readers and reviewers, was awarded the American Association for Ukrainian Studies book prize—a distinction fully deserved and further proof that something as niche as the historical context of a train station can indeed be gripping and enlightening.