Urban commemoration and literature in post-Soviet L’viv: a comparative analysis with the Polish experience

Abstract

This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L'viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city's “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L'viv's memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L'viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L'viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L'viv's Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city's memory culture.

Keywords:

• L'viv
• Holocaust
• memory studies
• Ukrainian literature
• Polish literature
• urban commemoration

Notes

1. According to the 2001 census, Ukrainians made up 88.1% of L'viv's population, with Russians at 8.9%; Poles and Jews made up 0.9% and 0.3%, respectively. Russians represented a higher percentage throughout the Soviet period. Although it lost its pre-war ethnic mix, L'viv's postwar society, made up of Ukrainians from very different parts of Ukraine and Russians, was nevertheless diverse.

2. New monuments included one to Taras Shevchenko, a figure accepted by the Soviets but also important for anti-Soviet Ukrainians, and to whom no monument had been built in L'viv due to local authorities’ worries over nationalist feelings (Risch 49). Others included historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi (1994), founder of the city Danylo Halyts'kyi (2001), dissident and politician Viacheslav Chornovil (2002), and nationalist leader Stepan Bandera (2007). Also prominent have been memorials to victims of the communist regime, such as those on Stepan Bandera Street (1997) and at the former Zamarstyniv prison (1999).

3. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists became the dominant nationalist movement in western Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s, and fought for Ukrainian self-determination. Stepan Bandera was the leader of its more radical and dominant faction after it split in 1940. His faction controlled its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The OUN directed its main efforts against the Soviets and Poles, but was also anti-Semitic. The UPA carried out ethnic cleansing operations against Poles in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943, and the OUN has been implicated in collaboration in the Holocaust (Himka 2011).

4. In western Ukrainian dialect, but also in Polish (sztuka), the name means art.

5. See www.shtuka.net.ua/history/.

6. See www.fest.lviv.ua.

7. An article by Tom Gross published in the Guardian on 2 September 2011 painted a bleak picture of Jewish heritage in L'viv. The historian Vasyl’ Rasevych, writing on the website Zaxid.net on 3 September 2011, pointed out that many of the details in the article, relating both to the city's wartime history and its contemporary memory culture, were inaccurate. Yaroslav Hrytsak has pointed out many inaccuracies and gaps in Bartov's work on the memory of Jews and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Hrytsak 2009). In 2009, the journal Ukraina Moderna published a number of responses to Bartov's Erased in a special section (“Ievreis'ka spadshchyna v Ukraini” 2009). Bartov's study was written before some of the developments mentioned in this paper, such as the proposed Jewish memorials.

8. A monument to the emperor was erected in 2009 in Chernivtsi on the initiative of politician Arsenii Yatseniuk. Another project for monument to the Emperor was launched by a group of artists in 2012: http://idem.org.ua/fy/eng.html.

9. Andrukhovych's use of the image of the manuscript echoes another famous Ukrainian novel on L'viv, Roman Ivanychuk's Rukopys z vulytsi rus'koi (The Manuscript from Rus'ka Street, 1983); this novel also focuses on the city's Ukrainian past. All translations are my own.

10. The four protagonists, a Jew, a Pole, a Ukrainian and a German, whose fathers had all fought for the Ukrainian National Republic in 1920, all end up fighting for the UPA; while a small number of non-Ukrainians did join the UPA, it is also infamous for targeting Poles and Jews.

11. The places mentioned are all sites of Second World War mass violence.

12. This memorial was built in 2001, and is used for regular commemorations of the pogrom. It is unpopular with some local residents, and has been vandalized with anti-Semitic slogans.

13. A Memorial of Common Memory was opened in Wrocław in 2008, while a monument to Gdansk's destroyed (non-Polish) cemeteries was built in 2002. Some monuments have been erected in Ukraine, on Polish initiative, to the Polish victims of the Volyn’ massacres, though these have met with resistance from local and national authorities and nationalist groups.

14. There is, nevertheless, a significant section of the Polish public who perceive Russia as a major threat to their state, as exemplified in the anti-Russian conspiracy theories that arose around the death of Lech Kaczyński in 2010.