Slavoj Žižek once commented that he prized Alexei Yurchak’s book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More for bringing philosophical eternity into history.Footnote ¹ In The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists, Tarik Cyril Amar borrows Lviv’s “paradox” not from philosophy but from the work of the Swedish historian Martin Åberg, who stressed that Soviet Lviv is paradoxical as a result of an unintended consequence of Soviet modernization, which brought “the laying of the socio-cultural and demographic foundation for Lviv to become the ‘secret capital’ of Ukraine and a major center of ethno-nationalist politics during the first years after independence” (Åberg Reference Åberg2000, 296). The changes brought about by the economic plans, while providing a basis for new forms of ethno-linguistic differentiation in civil society, were so modest that they allowed for established social structures and cultural forms to continue to exist below the surface (Åberg Reference Åberg2000, 296). A few years after Åberg’s observations and following Roman Szporluk’s identification of this situation as “strange” (Szporluk Reference Szporluk and Gitelman1992, 104), the Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak was still wondering whether the twenty interwar years in Lviv’s history “were so crucial in shaping attitudes that proved to be so persistent some sixty to eighty years later . . . or, are we dealing with some longue durée history of nationalism” (Hrytsak Reference Hrytsak2003, 103). Hrytsak took urban point Footnote ² while claiming that Lwow/Lemberg/Lviv was special due to its metropolitan character, since it was “the largest metropolis in that region,” playing the role of nationalizing city, instead of nationalizing empire or state (Hrytsak Reference Hrytsak2003, 103).

Amar’s book contradicts these accounts, and he does not agree that the Ukrainization of Lviv under Soviet rule happened unintentionally or due to the special character of the city and its long history. Amar believes that Soviet rule left behind the most Ukrainian version of the city in its history. Thus, unlike scholars who look at pre-Soviet history in order to explain Lviv’s paradox, Amar argues that Lviv’s national character was established mainly by the Soviets (321). To prove this argument, he produced an extensive, well-written work rich in resources that highlights contradictions among Ukrainian historians. Amar employs a critical voice, which has been noted by several reviewers. He is criticizing and ironizing nationalists, communists, or Nazis, and this attitude, in my opinion, does not lead, as some historians claim, to biased and wrong conclusions. Amar points out that the city is placed on the border, making it not only marginal but also importantly subject to external forces.

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 (1–2). However, 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. Although George Liber considers Soviet modernization and urbanization as the major reason for Ukrainian reemergence, Amar refuses the nonintentional character of the Soviet policies. In Amar’s view, the new urban working class in Lviv—mostly nationally sensible Ukrainians—was made consciously by the Soviets. He argues that even though Soviet authorities premeditated to transform the locals into Soviets, they also tended to promote regional identity, particularly since the late 1950s. The identities of Lviv and its residents, which historically shifted multiple times, “was neither a coincidence nor due merely to the persistence of pre-Soviet difference but was the result of Soviet policies after 1939” (321).

I do not think that this argument, even though it sounds feasible, is sufficiently disputed and defended, especially when Amar discusses Ukrainization without going into a deep explanation of what it meant and what it did. Amar positions his own research in the field of Sovietization studies—not nationalism studies—and avoids a wider discussion of Ukrainization, whose characteristics seem to him to be self-evident. Comparable practices of urbanization, Sovietization, and Ukrainization through the construct of local industries and institutions that promoted and fought local identities happened in other regions of Ukraine, but Lviv remained special, and we still do not know why.

The book unfolds over eight chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 give a general overview of Lviv before 1939 and outline the first Soviet occupation that made Lviv socialist and Ukrainian. Chapter 3 includes a description of the horrors and the nature of the Nazi occupation of Lviv from 1941 to 1944, which brought the total annihilation of local Jews and changed the balance between two other ethnic groups: Ukrainians and Poles. In chapter 4, Amar outlines the general character of the “population exchange” between Poland and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1947. The last four chapters focus mostly on Lviv’s socialist history: industrialization and urbanization, the integration of the local Ukrainian intelligentsia into the Soviet project, the politicization of Jewish heritage in the city, and the problems of incorporating interwar local communist history within the all-Union historiographical canon of communism.

According to Amar, since 1939, former regions of the Habsburg empire and Poland became “a laboratory of competitive borderland modernization where Soviet socialism would prove its superiority” trying to overcome both feudalism (premodern backwardness) and capitalism (backward modernity) (8). Amar uses the term “modernity” and claims that it “is no less elusive and productive a concept than ideology,” and that in the context of Lviv’s case, it helps to understand Soviet history (9). But again, Amar loses the focus in the narratives, so modernity and modernization seem the same to the reader. I agree with his argument that no matter how antagonistic or competitive modernity was, it was important for the Soviets and Nazis to change society by force and persuasion. This persuasion was practiced on locals by newcomers and had an obvious colonializing “taste.” However, Amar does not take for granted the imperial expansionism of Soviet rule as an explanatory tool of Lviv’s history and differentiates the Soviet motivations and outcomes as not necessarily connected, though he refuses to call such a paradox an unintended consequence.

The outsiders who arrived to Lviv in 1939 were, according to Amar, illiberal and Stalinist, though he does not seem to explain why he uses terms like “Stalinist” and “Soviet” interchangeably. So, we often have equivalent phrases: “Soviet socialist modernity” is almost the same as a “mature Stalinist regime,” and a “Stalinist way of life” implies certain coherence and stability of this “way of life” for the whole Soviet history. In any case, when the Soviet Union moved west, it labeled all those who did not participate in making revolutionary historical events in the 1920s and 1930s as westerners, opposing them to proper Soviets. Consequently, Amar focuses on individual and social impacts of encounters between those who were Sovietized and Sovietizers. Thus, his story is about encounters between the so-called Soviet civilization and neighbors occupied by its forces. This conceptual framework is plausible and he tries to avoid limited analysis of the state practices and policies of expansion but to zoom out the outcomes of Soviet policies emphasizing that intentions and results of Sovietization often did not pair.

Amar focuses on the Western Ukrainian local—who, as he believes, was overlooked in literature—needing “to be saved, elevated, and developed” by Soviet modernizers (14). This “local”—who now had certain features of missing Poles—“was seen as backward, often exasperatingly unwilling to be improved but—given enough compulsion, selection, and conditional rewards—redeemable” (15). Amar’s understanding of Soviet Ukrainization of locals appears similar to Habsburg’s invented Galicia, which was supposed to create new and passing identities that served as a temporary stage on the way to become proper Germanized imperial citizens. For the Soviets, making suitable Ukrainians helped to create important differentiation from former Polish citizens. This Ukrainization of locals seemed to be a temporary endeavor as a way for them to become proper Soviet people (sovetskii narod) culturally adherent to Russian civilization. Interestingly, in both cases (Habsburg and the Soviet), the provisional stage was never completed, and transitory identity (like Galician or Ukrainian) remained strong. Although we might agree that postwar Ukrainization of Lviv’s population was intentional, there was, at the same time, an intentional effort to denationalize Ukrainians, which included the intentional resettlement of Russian speaking workers and specialists to Lviv. Overall, the concept of “local” is one of most important aspects of Amar’s research.

The Soviets seemed to believe that their civilization was humanity’s most advanced modern civilization that proposed the fulfillment of the prophecy (in Yuri Slezkine’s terms) of the end of history. It had to eliminate the never-ending historical exploitation and inequality among people and it was supposed to master better human beings, who could be “saved, elevated and developed.” This attitude of Soviets to save and change local people resembled the work of sots-realist art, which like romantic Bildungsroman, focused on the psychological and moral growth of a protagonist who had to shift from spontaneous action to conscious deed. Amar claims that those who were supposed to fulfill the work of transformation of locals usually came from the East and had to be “advanced, avoid assimilating to the locals, and often be strict and demanding with them but also—in theory and self-image at least—self-sacrificing” (18–19). Encounters with locals changed not only them, but also the newcomers (predominantly “other” Ukrainians), especially in their understanding of what it means to be Soviet. In their view, locals responded to civilizing missions in complex ways: “They were silent and sullen; practiced foot-dragging, deception, and careerism; or sought ways to preserve dignity and autonomy in the face of humiliation, compulsion, and opportunity” (19). It is not surprising if one takes into account the repressions and violence through which Soviets tried to “save” and “elevate” locals from the burdens of the wrong modernity. In the end, Amar argues, the Sovietization of Lviv’s residents intentionally produced a new hybrid identity, and if locals were changed, newcomers had to adapt to this new identity. Actually, during this interaction both sides (easterners and locals) were changed intentionally however outcomes did not necessarily matched the need to make “universal” Soviet people.

Amar’s history of Soviet Lviv is based on multiple original sources and can be conceived as a linear archive. He shows a space (a city) where facts become forms of beliefs and metaphors, and where more ordinary actualities become uncertain. His story contains several ideas concerning time: it mixes time inside the narrative (it combines premodern history with late 1980s in the story of the postwar situation), and it also reflects the Soviet ethos of time and history (the present was explained from the perspective of the future advancement). But at the same time, it is full of aesthetic fatigue, since every page is crammed full of “life” beyond the capacity of a single reader to absorb this information: one must notice everything at the moment when reads. In addition, Amar’s work appreciates metaphors or poetic wording, such as “The KPZU would speak again and, mostly, in its own, unmistakably local, disturbingly hybrid voice” (313) or “A story meant to recover a suppressed past never recovered the suppression itself” (314). My favorite is a metaphor about the Communist officials silencing dissolution of KPZU in 1938: “A fuzzy blur with a warmer glow had replaced an icy blank spot” (314).

Because of this language, Amar’s book sometimes reminds me of the leading theme in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history dominates reality. The historical protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time, and throughout the story they are haunted by symbols (ghosts) of the past. Lviv continuously was a ghost to some extent, alienated and estranged from its own history. Not only was it a victim of the severe reality of mass murder, dependence, and underdevelopment, but also of ideological illusions (like communism and nationalism) that haunt and reinforce such social conditions. Unfortunately, this historical dependence locks the interpretation of Lviv’s history into certain patterns (conquest, conflict, and resentment) that deny alternative possibilities.

From Amar’s history, I would love to learn 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. In conclusion, I do believe that this book will stand on the shelf of any scholar who works on Sovietization and socialism in Eastern Europe since it possesses valuable information combined with well-defined methodology and provocative claims. I am using it in my classes as important reading and students appreciate its arguments and criticism. But at the same time, I think it will take time for Ukrainian historians to appreciate the main arguments of the book as national historiography, especially Lviv’s case, since they are still subjects to the whims of often-incompatible political projects.