Europa: Ukrainian City Wants to Reclaim Its Past

LVIV, Ukraine -- Beautiful but poor is a common shorthand description of this city of 800,000 people in western Ukraine, and it takes only a few hours here to sense the accuracy of the phrase. Lviv, which was once as European as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and wishes to be part of Europe again, is not in Europe, at least not as defined by the border of the European Union, though it is a mere 70 kilometers from here.

The Lviv Opera House
This is the periphery. Here is where Europe officially ends, even if the end has an arbitrary, technical quality to it.

The plain fact is that there seems no particular coherence to the reality that the Polish city of Chelm, just on the other side of the Bug River from here, is part of Europe, while Lviv is not. Both, after all, were cities in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, Lviv bigger and vastly more important than Chelm. Both were part of Poland for something on the order of 500 years, including at least a few decades of the 20th century, before the Nazis invaded and then Stalin moved the territory of Ukraine to the West, and Lviv became just another battered and tragic city in the Soviet Union.

But Lviv also reflects how borders become, as they say in the Middle East, "facts," and facts are reality, and Lviv's European aspiration takes place in defiance of some of the most important elements of that reality. It is a city in a different time zone from the EU, literally and figuratively, one hour later than Chelm, Krakow and, for that matter Madrid, a quarter-century or so behind in other measures.

In this sense, there isn't much news to report from Lviv, news in the conventional meaning of events, changes, upheavals, investments. To visit here, at least for me, was more to be reminded of the weight of recent history. Lviv belongs in Europe, and, as the acting mayor of the town, Zinovyj Siryk, confidently predicted of Ukraine in general, "After Poland, we are next."

But at the same time, there is so much heavy residue of the basic fact of Lviv's recent past: that it was ripped in an untimelyway from the European womb, and many things about it - from the Stalinist Greek temple airport with its columns and cupola to the generalized dilapidation - are emblems of that rupture.

"It's a real border, not just a line," Andrij Yurash, a scholar of religion at the university here said, referring to the nearby border with Poland. "There's a real difference economically," he continued, and he provided a striking statistic. According to Yurash, Lviv's city budget is about one-tenth that of Krakow, the other big formerly Galician city about 300 kilometers, nearly 200 miles, to the west of here in Poland.

"It's the heritage of the Soviet period," he said, "because the whole network of economic relations was destroyed here."

To walk the streets of Lviv, a year after Ukraine's Orange Revolution gave national expression to the country's preference for the European zone of civilization over the Russian, produces something akin to a time-capsule sensation. The airport, with its eerily near empty tarmac, reminded me a bit of China in the early 1980s, when that country was just emerging from its Stalinist-Maoist isolation.

The hotel I stayed in, the George, built around the turn of the 20th century to be the epitome of elegance and modernity, is spacious and grand. You could almost hear the Belle Époque music and the clinking of glasses when the Galician capital of Lviv was a major boom town of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now the place, like Lviv itself, is clean and adequate, but threadbare, melancholy, eerily empty like the tarmac, practically calling out for an investor.

"We also think that Lviv was ripped away from Europe," Halyna Tershchuk, a reporter for Radio Liberty, the U. S.-sponsored radio network, said. "We would like Kiev to understand that the headquarters of European institutions have to be in Lviv. It must be a bridge between Europe and Ukraine. We need branches of banks here, diplomatic missions, trade organizations, hotel investments."

She said that in places like Poland, foreign investment in newspapers and broadcasting stations helped create independence in the news media, while in Ukraine in general, most of the press is too attached to particular political parties to be seen as genuinely independent.

A local historian, Vasyl Rasevych, gave a demographic dimension to the rupture with the past.

"You have to remember that after World War II, 90 percent of the population of Lviv changed," he said. "The Jews were eliminated. The Poles went to Poland. And before World War II, 50 percent of the population was Polish, 30 percent was Jewish."

When Stalin grabbed Western Ukraine for the Soviet empire, Red Army officers helped themselves to the homes and apartments of the city's better-off people. Factories were moved here with their personnel from farther east to replenish the depleted population.

"Up until the 1960s," Rasevych said, "Lviv was a Russian-speaking city."

Well, Lviv speaks Ukrainian now, which is an element of revival. I found it very moving in this city where some 200,000 Jews were annihilated to visit the kindergarten at Hesed Arje, the recently created Jewish community center, simply to see Jewish children playing, blissfully ignorant of course of the inconceivable starkness of the past.

Here and there in Lviv are other signs of renewal: the restoration of one of the city's many exquisite Italianate buildings, a new coffee shop, reminiscent of Vienna, even the McDonald's around the corner from the George Hotel. Still, there is nothing like the wholesale sandblasting and renewal that took place in, say, Prague after the communist dictators were thrown out there.

Lviv hasn't had a Soviet dictator for 15 years and, like the rest of Ukraine, it got rid of its pro-Russian autocrat, Leonid Kuchma, last year. Its many churches, including several world- class gems, are emblems of its European spirit, as is the big statue of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz right in the middle of the old city.

If the heavy hand of the Soviet dictatorship hadn't left such a powerful imprint on Lviv, where Joseph Roth went to university and where Sholom Aleichem, the originator of "Fiddler on the Roof," wrote some of his stories, this city would almost automatically belong to the European club. Maybe, as Acting Mayor Siryk predicted, Ukraine will be next. If that is the case, for Lviv, history will have been set right.

Source: International Herald Tribune