Tarik Cyril Amar’s The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv is well written and researched, published by a premier university press, and conveys to readers the real complexity of Ukrainian history. As such, one may hope it stands a chance to pierce the sound-proof wall that now stands between the critical and mainstream historiography of modern Ukraine.

It belongs to the relatively young, critical trend within Ukrainian historiography, joining several other recent monographs that work outside the mainstream, loosely nationalist paradigm, notably Kai Struve’s Deutsche Herrschaft, ukrainischer Nationalismus, antijüdische Gewalt: Der Sommer 1941 in der Westukraine (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015) and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist; Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2014), as well as numerous articles by a wider circle of authors.

So far, the results of the new research have not made a dent in mainstream Ukrainian studies. For example, Serhii Plokhy’s survey The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015), in discussing the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during World War II, fails to mention that the organization’s militias were complicit in the wave of anti-Jewish violence that engulfed Western Ukraine in the summer of 1941, even though this has been well documented. (Amar discusses the Lviv pogrom and OUN involvement in it on pp. 93–101.) And Plokhy’s claim that the Bandera faction of the OUN “went overnight from the Germans’ loyal ally to their enemy” (The Gates of Europe, 267) ignores research that shows both that the abandonment of the German alliance was far from instant and that the alliance was pragmatically restored as the Red Army closed in.

Amar’s monograph confronts the rather more complicated reality. He shows, on the basis of the transformation of Lviv in the late 1930s and 1940s, that the Nazis, Soviets, and OUN all pursued policies of “ethnic unmixing” (145). And this implies something about the city that is his subject. Lviv, as the informal capital of Western Ukraine, is considered by many to be the most nationally conscious city in the country, the most pro-Western, as well as the most democratically oriented. Yet, as Amar rightly notes in his conclusions, “If Lviv and what it stands for in Ukraine is special, as often claimed, it is rash to assume that it is especially liberal. If it is a window on the West, that West cannot be reduced to civil society, democracy, pluralism, and individualism. In fact, historically, its darker side from fascism and ethnic nationalism to the perversions of Enlightenment rationality that fed into Stalinism, has been at least as important” (319).

There is one feature of Amar’s book that particularly deserves highlighting: his sensitive exploration of the meeting of Western and Eastern Ukrainians in 1939–41 and 1944 and after. Emphasis on regional divisions is decidedly out of favor in mainstream analysis of Ukraine, which tends to present the Ukrainian idea, and—I think recklessly—the Ukrainians themselves, as a unity, a coherent whole, sometimes even a monolith. This protestation of unity has become more emphatic since the Euromaidan, Russian invasion of Crimea, and war with Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas. Yet strong regional divisions have been a hallmark of the Ukrainians’ history.

I have experienced the bite of regionalism throughout my career as a historian. One of the first topics I researched, starting in the late 1960s when I had not yet turned 20, was the pioneering work of Father Ivan Voliansky, the first Ukrainian priest to minister to immigrants working in the Pennsylvania coal mines. It turned out that one of the most difficult issues that he had to deal with was the conflict between immigrants from Galicia and immigrants from Subcarpathian Rus’. They met each other in person for the first time in the USA, and they did not get along. That was my introduction to regional division. When a bit later I embarked on my studies of Austrian Galicia in the late 19th century, I again ran into regional tensions in the relationship between Mykhailo Drahomanov, a Ukrainophile from the Russian empire, and the Galician Ukrainian intelligentsia. Drahomanov thought the Galicians were narrow-minded and provincial, as evidenced in their obsession with religion and the church, their neglect of the peasantry, and their outmoded ideas on the place of women. And they thought of him in turn as a dangerous radical and atheist. When I attempted to leave the intellectual terrain of Galicia and work on some all-Ukrainian topic, namely, the place of the Last Judgment in early modern Ukrainian culture, I was, unsurprisingly, foiled by the regional devil. It turned out that icons of the Last Judgment were almost exclusively produced in Western Ukraine, particularly in the eparchies of Przemyśl and Mukachevo. So much for my all-Ukrainian aspirations. And my more recent work on the role of the OUN in the Holocaust perforce concentrates on Galicia, Volhynia, and Bukovina rather than on the large Ukrainian territories to the east and south.

And of course, the salience of regional divisions and identities comes to the foreground in other crucial turning points in modern Ukrainian history, such as in the encounter between Galicia and Velyka Ukraina during the revolutionary events of 1918–19; in the divisive elections in independent Ukraine, especially since 2004; and in the geography of Maidan and anti-Maidan. These regional issues are not simple, and their difficulty is partially captured in the question: Are there two Ukraines or 22 Ukraines?

And this brings us back to Amar’s study. It concentrates on the politically most meaningful division, that between Galicia and pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine. This is, in fact, the primary division of modern Ukrainian political culture. Although the actual geography has been shifting (Crimea was not part of Soviet Ukraine until 1954, and Kyiv is now politically closer to Lviv), the modes of thought produced in the original division still weigh heavily on Ukrainian political and intellectual life. And the original geographic division is hardly ready to be buried. For example, a Razumkov Center poll released on December 16, 2016, asked Ukrainians if they thought that the history of Ukraine was (1) a continuous process that began with the first settlements on Ukrainian territory and continued through periods of foreign rule into independent statehood, or rather (2) an inextricable part of a larger East Slavic historical process that included the Russians and Belarusians. In the West of the country, 86.8% opted for variant 1 and only 6.6% for variant 2 (the remainder were undecided); in the East 30.2% were for variant 1 and 63.6% for variant 2. Such examples from recent public opinion polls are legion.

From The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, we learn that in the late 1930s Galician intellectuals had a low opinion of their conationals to the east. Feminist and democrat Milena Rudnytska was worried that the effects of Soviet education on Eastern Ukrainians were irreversible, and the conservative journalist Osyp Nazaruk dismissed them as “Creoles” (a term reappropriated in independent Ukraine, but for the same pejorative purpose, by the pundit Mykola Riabchuk) (76–77). Both opinions were expressed even before the Soviet invasion of September 1939, when Western and Eastern Ukrainians came into intimate contact. The Soviets held Lviv until June 1941, and then the Germans seized it. Under the Nazi occupation, the head of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Volodymyr Kubijovyč, argued that Eastern Ukrainian POWs needed to be placed in camps and ideologically trained, but nationally conscious Western Ukrainian POWs should just be released (129).

The Red Army retook Lviv in July 1944. The Germans had killed the vast majority of Lviv’s Jews, and the Soviets expelled most of the Poles (Ukrainian nationalists abetted both processes). The “struggle over hegemony between eastern and western Ukrainian elites” (145) entered a new phase once the Poles and Jews were gone. There was a massive migration into Lviv of Eastern Ukrainians, who were given special privileges. With the flight of the Germans and of much of the Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsia, and with the disappearance of the Poles and Jews, the reinstalled Soviet regime had apartments and villas to dole out. Powerful Eastern Ukrainian migrants had first pick. They also had special dining privileges and did not have to work night shifts. They dominated the occupations that the “locals” considered oppressive and therefore perceived negatively: party functionaries, NKVD officers, policemen, and teachers. The Soviet authorities’ rhetoric clearly distinguished between “Communists” (aka “our Soviet people”) and the “locals” (who did not include the few remaining Jews and Poles). The division grew deeper because of Soviet policies and attitudes.

Amar introduces some nuances, however. Western Ukrainians also met Eastern Ukrainian refugees who were hungry and for whom they felt compassion; they also met Easterners who were a bit like them, who had also survived the Nazi occupation and had been drawn into collaboration or who had been attracted by Ukrainian nationalism. Amar notes too that the regional differences “need not be antagonistic or persist further, can change, and may not be monolithic” (320n8).

Clearly, we need a history of Ukrainian-Ukrainian relations, the story of the ongoing and anything but straightforward process of the integration of a Ukrainian nation. The author of such a history can find inspiration and extraordinarily rich material in this pioneering book.