By staying clear of simple truths, William Jay Risch has written a highly insightful sociology of Soviet Lviv. Annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II and repopulated after the murder of its large Jewish community during the Holocaust and the expulsion of its Polish inhabitants after the war, the Polish metropolis of Lwów, former capital of the Austrian province of Galicia, was transformed into a largely Ukrainian city. Contrary to the city's post-Socialist self-image as stronghold of anti-Communist rebellion and Ukrainian patriotism, Risch describes an urban society with far more ambiguous and flexible ethnic, cultural, and political identifications. Soviet Lvivians were as much shaped by the homogenizing effects of an imposed Soviet culture with strong Russian overtones as by their awareness of living far away from Moscow in a city with a “European,” “Western” tradition. With the declining prestige of the Soviet project, the latter was perceived as a privilege, as it provided Lvivians with alternative points of cultural orientation.

The book is divided into two sections, each of which is devoted to one of the major political and intellectual trends that shaped postwar Lviv. The first section describes the Sovietization of the former Polish city; the second one examines the changing position of Ukrainianness in the Lvivians’ perception. Risch's most valuable primary sources are the interviews he conducted with Lvivians between 1998 and 2009, complemented by documents largely from the regional archives in Lviv. The book focuses on the changing cultural and intellectual trends within Lviv's society, not on the city as a built environment. His book is not an urban history interested in the use of space and development of the urban landscape, but rather a sociology of an urban community on the periphery of the Soviet Empire.

The advent of Soviet power in Lviv began with massive population movements. Ethnic Poles, who, together with Jews, constituted the overwhelming majority of the city's prewar population, were expelled to postwar Poland, while the Soviet administration simultaneously cracked down on Lviv's and east Galicia's Ukrainian nationalists by either deporting or executing them. The city's Sovietization was accompanied by a massive influx of ethnic Russians—most of them army and NKVD personnel—and their families. The majority of the postwar settlers, however, were Ukrainians, mostly peasants from the surrounding Galician countryside. Although ethnic Russians initially dominated many of the high-level positions in the city's administration and occupied some of the more prestigious neighborhoods, Risch does not see any systematic attempt at Russification. On the contrary, with the change of nationality politics during the Khrushchev era, the Soviet administration encouraged a policy of Ukrainization in places like Lviv—as long as the promotion of Ukrainian language and culture was void of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian overtones.

Yet, the lines between the officially accepted Ukrainian culture and what was pejoratively labeled as “bourgeois nationalism,” usually referring to western Ukraine's anti-Soviet tradition, were often blurred. The recollection of Lviv's and Galicia's prewar Ukrainian culture, in particular, created a mental space beyond Soviet and Russian influence. With the decreasing prestige of the Communist project in the 1970s and 1980s, this space became, for a growing number of Lvivians, an inspiration for political resistance, anti-Soviet activity, and Ukrainian national independence. Yet, Risch is careful to point out that Lviv's pre-Soviet past was not the only inspiration for anti-Soviet dissent. Dissidents in Lviv found their role models also in Kyiv and Moscow. At the same time, Lvivians enjoyed privileged access to “Western ideas” spread by travelers from Poland, a Socialist country far less sealed off from the Western world than the Soviet Union.

Risch illustrates the amalgamation of these various influences most convincingly in the two chapters on the youth movements in Lviv and on the relationship between mass culture and anti-Soviet counterculture. He shows here that Lvivians did not live under a rock during Soviet times. Trends of the wider world, from rock ‘n’ roll to the hippie movement, always found their way to the west Ukrainian city and generated regional variants there. Also, the city's remoteness from the centers of Soviet rule, in combination with its residents’ increasing identification with west Ukraine's pre-Communist past, made Lviv a Soviet laboratory of intellectual and artistic countertrends. A backwater town in some ways, Lviv was at the same time an avant-garde city comparable, if not necessarily equal, to cities in the Soviet Union's Baltic republics, such as Tallinn or Tartu, whose residents always prided themselves on being less Soviet, more Western. It is no surprise that in the late 1980s, the inhabitants of these cities were among the first Soviet citizens to call for national independence.

Does this answer Risch's question as to why Lviv became “an island of freedom” in the early 1990s? It does, and it is the great accomplishment of this study to describe the particular spirit of this city without producing a tale of an uncompromising fight for freedom and national independence, starting in the early days of the region's Sovietization and continuing throughout the decades of Soviet rule. Instead, Risch paints a highly nuanced picture by demonstrating that Lviv's post-Socialist identity is very much a Soviet product, shaped by the city's geographical location on the western fringes of the Soviet Union, as well as by the mélange of Lviv's postwar inhabitants: the remnants of East Galicia's prewar Ukrainian bourgeoisie, the masses of Ukrainian-speaking peasants from the surrounding countryside, and the thousands of mostly Russian-speaking soldiers and civil servants repopulating Lviv after the war. They all had their part in creating a particular Lvivian spirit during Soviet times. Students of the Soviet borderlands, and of identity building processes in the shatter zones of empires and in places shaped by Central Europe's forced population movements during the 1940s, might want to read this thoroughly researched and well-argued book.