I thank the contributors to this forum for their close reading and detailed responses. I am grateful for their work and attention. On the whole, I agree with much in the contributions by Mayhill Fowler, John-Paul Himka, and Serhy Yekelchyk, but not—I should state this clearly—with many of Bohdan Shumylovych’s comments. In my response, rather than reiterate points of agreement, I focus on issues that may benefit from further discussion, clarification, or clear disagreement.

First, however, I should note that I do not think that these points include all questions that my work could also have addressed if I had had a lifetime to write and triple the word count now usually allotted for first books. Thus, like Shumylovych, I, too, would have liked to write more “about the role of urban space in making Soviet subjects in the city of Lviv; how social or class identities intermingled with national imaginations (but not on the level of elites); how prewar cultural practices remained and helped locals to hybridize newcomers; how media and popular culture from the West and East brought new sounds and fashions in the 1950s; and how pre-1939 local family and gender patterns undermined socialist fantasies of communist colonizers.”

These are good topics for further research (and I do say some things about some of them). Yet there is only so much a single author can do. I leave further work to my colleagues, especially those in Lviv and Ukraine. Many years ago, when I told the Lviv historian Yaroslav Hrytsak that I planned to work with the local archive of the Communist party, he advised me that such documents were almost useless as they were shot through with too much ideology. I am glad if my work has helped put such non-sequiturs to rest and hope that it helps encourage Ukrainian historians to work more with the rich holdings, especially of the former Communist party archive. In a larger context, I can only join John-Paul Himka in hoping that my work helps pierce the wall that seems to protect some studies of Ukrainian history written in a traditional and conveniently “uncontroversial” vein from contact with the critical approach that has long been called for. The opening of archives after the Soviet collapse (now a generation ago) should have undermined this wall. Resurgent attempts at aggressive nationalist manipulation of narratives, policies, and memories—Ukraine—make its removal, at long last, ever more urgent.

Generally, I have to strongly disagree with much of Shumylovych’s reading of my book. For example, Shumylovych writes that I “borrowed” the concept of a paradox in Lviv’s twentieth-century development from Martin Åberg, but he also acknowledges that my use of this term (not, therefore, concept) is fundamentally different from Åberg’s, as I also make explicit in my book. Rather than “borrow,” I explicitly contest and revise.

This is, however, a point of minor significance. I have greater concern about Shumylovych’s implication that I am not consistent about the key factors or forces changing Lviv. He writes, “according to Amar, Lviv’s recent and paradoxical history and character was molded into a modern and national Ukrainian center by two highly authoritarian and immensely ferocious regimes—Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union … . However [my emphasis] in other sections of the book, Amar asserts that Lviv and the region was transformed by Sovietization and Ukrainization, as well as rapid Soviet industrialization and modernization, which interacted with both of these.”

While on the whole that is an adequate summary, his “however” is not accurate: I explain how these various forces interacted. In fact, regarding Sovietization, I have been explicit that I follow Jan Gross’s original lead by factoring in the violence of World War Two and both Nazi and Stalinist occupations. Although I do not enumerate the full array of factors in every single sentence addressing this fact, there is no inconsistency between different parts of the book.

Shumylovych asserts that even after reading my work “we still do not know why” Lviv was special—that is, different from other Ukrainian cities. But, in reality, I offer a long, complex, and new explanation of why and how Lviv has been special, including its Polish history; the peculiar interaction of Nazis, Soviets, and Ukrainian ethno-nationalists; and the special policies adopted during the first and second period of Soviet rule. Last but not least, as John-Paul Himka underscores, my work highlights the formative and complicated interaction of Ukrainians from pre-1939 Ukraine with those who were only made to join the Soviet Union (and a Soviet Ukraine inside it) in 1939 and then again in 1944. Moreover, I also point out some limits of Lviv’s peculiarity.

If by “knowing” Shumylovych means that I should advance a faintly hubristic claim to a conclusive end-of-debate interpretation, as is perhaps fashionable among some public intellectuals writing about history, then yes, in that sense, of course we “still do not know”—and I am happy not to have staked a claim to such “we-now-know” knowing. I am, at any rate, confident that my book offers my readers the opportunity to know significantly more—based on more research, at a higher conceptual level, and in a less nationally naïve manner—than before.

Shumylovych states that in my work “modernity” and “modernization” seem the same and that my writing about a “Soviet way of life” implies that it was the same throughout the whole Soviet period. Both points are misleading. As to the latter, I make no such claim, and my work, in its local context, actually explicitly shows the opposite—namely, how things changed after Stalinism. As to the former, I admit that in this book I privileged many years of exhaustive work in sometimes virtually unexplored archives and the careful analysis of what I found there over long theoretical disquisitions on the differences and links between “modernity” and “modernization.” However, to argue that the two appear the same in my book is simply wrong: they simply both appear—each where appropriate.

Shumylovych also thinks that in my book “‘Soviet socialist modernity’ is almost the same as ‘mature Stalinist regime.’” I have two comments on this observation. First, yes, insofar as much of the book is explicitly about the period of Stalinism, the Soviet modernity that I address the most is the Stalinist type. That is just the way this history unfolded. Secondly, no, I neither argue nor imply that that was the only possible type or the only type that ever existed. (I would argue that its importance was central to Soviet history and to the reshaping of Lviv as well, but that is another issue.)

Shumylovych faults me for not “going into a profound explanation of what [Ukrainization] meant … or did.” This is a curious reproach: I cover violence, ideologies, education, factories, migration, intellectuals, and history and memory politics—all in explicit, thoroughly explicated relation to how Lviv was made Ukrainian. If that is not a form of Ukrainization—although one, oddly, too long overlooked, including by historians in Ukraine and especially in Lviv—I am not sure what qualifies. But that Shumylovych seems to have missed this forest for a tree, that I find hard to imagine. My sense here is that most readers will find that much of this book is a clear explication of what the Ukrainization of Lviv (the city that this book is about) “did” (and how).

What Shumylovych may mean is that I should have added a chapter (this is what would have been required, at least) to discuss in detail the historiographical literature on Ukrainization and how my work makes a new and therefore perhaps surprising contribution to it and may very well require adjusting the concept to a long-missed piece of historical reality. This is a task for others and I hope that they will find my work not some sort of “paradigm-disturbing” irritant but rather a useful stimulus for accomplishing necessary conceptual changes.

Likewise, I have not offered an extensive and explicit discussion of the general literature on nationalism. Instead I have drawn on some of its concepts and insights as far as needed to explain my case and explicate my arguments. In sum, my work is informed by theory and historiography while not parading them for their own sake. I feel that that is an efficient approach for a monograph in history, as opposed to an encyclopedia article or an exercise in theory.

It is unclear what Shumylovych means when stating that my book “is full of aesthetic fatigue, since every page is crammed full of ‘life’ beyond the capacity of a single reader to absorb … one must notice everything at the moment when [one] reads [it].” Actually, it is quite possible to read passages in my book repeatedly if need be, although I feel it is written rather clearly. I admit that it may be a challenging read, but that is due to a subject matter that is both complex and often much less than edifying. I would feel disturbed if my work on a period of violence, lies, and hubris felt anything less than disturbing.

If “life” is a reference to my care to capture not only broad outlines and make explicit arguments but also to attend to important details and the experience of individuals, I take that as a compliment.

“Aesthetic fatigue”? That must be in the eye of the beholder; I admit to having no idea what it has to do with my work.

Where Shumylovych, however, entirely misses a central point of my work and ends up badly misrepresenting it is in the strikingly misplaced comparison with his sense of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. My book does not show “an inevitable and inescapable repetition of history” or “protagonists … controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time.” Instead, readers will find that the book emphasizes that, within all that past and complexity, choices and agency keep existing and emerging. It is, I am sure, one of the reasons why some very nationally minded Ukrainian readers have found my book antagonizing: it is clear about just how much agency Ukrainians and especially Ukrainian nationalists exerted in Lviv.

This brings me to a point raised by Serhy Yekelchyk that needs clarification. It is true that my approach to the history of Lviv shares certain general approaches popularized by Timothy Snyder’s writings on what he calls the “Bloodlands,” namely careful attention to, in Yekelchyk’s words, “the intertwining of Hitler’s and Stalin’s policies in Eastern Europe.” Apart from Amir Weiner, whose work I admire and whom Yekelchyk also mentions, the pioneering early studies of Jan Gross on Soviet and Nazi occupations should be mentioned here as well, especially as they, not Snyder’s work, were among the important inspirations for my work on Lviv.

However, readers will find—and this difference is more important than any similarity—that my interpretation of what happened in and to Lviv puts more weight on local agency than does Snyder’s “Bloodlands” thesis, as recently analyzed well by Filip Erdeljac.Footnote ¹ This is not, it bears emphasis, merely a question of degree but of a substantial difference: my book, in fact, shows that the analysis of the effects of the Nazism-Stalinism interaction works only when the full panoply of complex interactions with local actors and populations (who cannot be reduced to an undifferentiated mass of mere victims of totalitarianism) is considered carefully and thoroughly as well.

Serhy Yekelchyk underlines that “many Jews” applied for return to the German-occupied zone of Poland. I made a point of cautioning readers—admittedly only in a footnote—not to exaggerate the meaning of this often-quoted phenomenon, which has become something of a cliché, sometimes (certainly not in Yekelchyk’s case) cited to advance the assumption of a neat “totalitarian symmetry” between the Nazi and Stalinist conquerors, in the spirit perhaps of what is now fashionable in parts of Eastern Europe as the “double genocide” theory, with all its very dubious political baggage. That is why I made sure to draw the reader’s attention to Soviet cadre Ivan Serov’s contemporary observation that the “attitude of the local population, especially of Jews, toward the Germans”—here meaning specifically the resettlement commission members—“was sharply negative” (57 footnote 93).

Yekelchyk points out that I identify the Soviet-German transfer of ethnic Germans from Lviv as “explicitly introduc[ing] ethnicity as a key criterion” and reminds readers that “by then the Soviet Union had its own experience of ethnic deportations” antedating the war. I have, of course, not implied that it did not; my statement about the effect of the Soviet-German transfer is part of my discussion of what happened in Lviv—and there this was, especially in its explicitness, new.

I describe the pogrom of early July 1941 as perpetrated by German invaders as well as locals (if usually in different roles). Yet I cannot agree with Yekelchyk’s summary of my position as depicting the pogrom as “scripted by the Germans but implemented by the locals.” First, I mention that Germans, too, were active beyond scripting during the pogrom, tormenting and killing. Secondly, Yekelchyk’s summary misses a third force that I consider important and duly stress in my book: organized Ukrainian nationalists. (One of my chapter subheadings is “Pogrom and Ukrainian Nationalism.”) I am explicit about the fact that they had a hand in co-scripting the pogrom and in implementing it. I agree with Timothy Snyder’s observation, quoted by Yekelchyk, that some locals used violence against Jews to distract from prior collaboration with the Soviets. But it does not need to be “add[ed]” to my work: I already mention examples of this phenomenon.

Yekelchyk states that I compare the Soviet late-war and postwar de facto expulsions of Poles to the ethnic cleansing undertaken by Ukrainian nationalists. If by “compare” he suggests that I see sameness, that is a point I should address. I explain that the Soviet expulsions “completed the ethnic cleansing of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists” (144). That is, in retrospect, a phrasing that I myself find too ambiguous. I did not mean to imply that the Ukrainian nationalist operations that involved deliberate, systematic mass murder—and are the object of currently state-supported denialism by parts of the Ukrainian “diaspora” and in Ukraine—were no worse than this Soviet expulsion, which was, as I point out, brutal but did not involve mass murder. My point, which I could have put more clearly, was that the two—different—forms of compulsorily removing Poles interacted and that they ended up converging in their effect.

Yekelchyk maintains that the Soviet Ukrainization of Lviv did not complete “any [my emphasis] nationalist project.” I have to disagree principally: it did, namely in the fundamental aim of making Lviv and its region Ukrainian, including completing (see above) the violent removal of almost all Poles. Since these were Ukrainian ethno-nationalists, with a record of massacre and ethnic cleansing (see above), those were indeed key projects for them.

Himka points out that the “mainstream” paradigm of much historiography of modern Ukraine is still what he aptly calls “loosely nationalist.” He rightly situates my work with a “critical” historiography that challenges this paradigm. My recognition of the bitter irony that it was Stalin’s policy—backed up by classical Soviet violence—that ultimately secured a key prize of Ukrainian nationalism, whether the latter’s followers liked it or not, is one aspect of that challenge. If Yekelchyk’s point is that the Soviets did this under a regime the nationalists hated and in ways they found abhorrent, I would agree. Yet the fact remains: while Soviet rule did not give the nationalists the Lviv they would have wanted, it did give them its core—a preponderantly Ukrainian city purged of the most powerful “national competitor.” A paradox? Exactly.

Yekelchyk’s mistaken insistence that the Soviet Union did not realize any nationalist project contrasts with Mayhill Fowler’s summary of my argument: “Lviv is actually a result of the Soviet phenomenon.” In general, I agree: that is a key part of what I explain in my work. Yet, to avoid misunderstanding, I should add something to Fowler’s concise statement, which will be less elegant but more explicit: my argument here is that a Ukrainian Lviv, as we know it now, is inexplicable without the Soviet contribution to its shaping and that that contribution cannot be reduced to things the Soviets failed to notice (i.e. already “nationally aware” western Ukrainians taking over the city—the moderate-national/ist myth to this day) or were unable to do (namely overcome, again as per the moderate-national/ist myth, the inherent national stalwartness and—in an all-Ukrainian context—even national-awareness superiority of the locals).

What I do not argue, of course, is that only the Soviets made contemporary Lviv or that any kind of Ukrainian Lviv could have occurred only through a Soviet intervention. Yet the Ukrainian Lviv that actually exists now and still often somewhat defensively (and absurdly) prides itself on “never having really been Soviet” is, equally self-evidently, simply unthinkable without the Soviet input. It might not have been the Ukrainian city’s childhood some nationalists would have wanted, but being in denial about it will not make anyone smarter.

A final point. Fowler notes that my work highlights agency, not only in the context of the large forces of history but also of the central state, even in such monstrous renditions as the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: she points out that Hitler and Stalin do not feature much in my work (which is focused on one city). This is entirely correct. I should, however, stress that I do not adhere to any misguidedly rigid dichotomy between the center and the periphery or, perhaps even worse, above and below. What my research—carried out in both local and central archives across several countries—has shown to me is that what matters the most—among ordinarily resourceful and fallible human beings—are the interactions. Therefore, I pay attention to both grand ideologies and the manner in which the small (but often anything but beautiful) and the big (and truly horrifying) usually did not oppose each other—as some may wish they had—but, on the contrary, interlocked.