Lviv

Lviv , Rus. Lvov, Pol. Lwów, Ger. Lemberg, city (1989 pop. 791,000), capital of Lviv region, W Ukraine, at the watershed of the Western Bug and Dniester rivers and in the northern foothills of the Carpathian Mts. The chief city of W Ukraine, Lviv is a major rail and highway junction and an industrial and commercial center. Machine building, food processing, and the manufacture of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, motor vehicles, and textiles are the leading industries. Lviv is also an educational and cultural center, with a famous university (est. 1661) and several institutes of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Landmarks include a 16th-century palace and two 14th-century cathedrals.

Founded c.1256 by Prince Daniel of Halych, the city was named for his son Lev and developed as a great commercial center on the trade route from Vienna to Kiev. It also served as an outpost against Tatar invasions. Lviv was captured by the Poles in the 1340s, the Turks in 1672, and the Swedes in 1704. During the first partition of Poland (1772) it passed to Austria, and became the capital of Galicia . Lviv was the chief center of the Ukrainian national movement in Galicia after 1848. The capital of the short-lived West Ukrainian Democratic Republic after World War I, the city was taken by Poland in 1919 and confirmed as Polish by the Soviet-Polish Treaty of Riga (1921). Lviv was annexed to Ukraine by the USSR in 1939. German forces held the city during much of World War II and exterminated the Jewish population; by the early 1990s the city's Jewish residents numbered about 17,000. In 1945, Poland formally ceded Lviv to the USSR, from which Ukraine declared its independence in 1991.

Lwów was in September 1939 the principal city of south-east Poland, the centre of a region which has been variously known as East Galicia, Eastern Matopolska, or Western Ukraine. Although the city itself possessed a clear majority of Poles, and a large Jewish minority, it was surrounded by districts where Ukrainians predominated; and it inevitably became the target for competing territorial claims. It lay immediately to the east of the demarcation line envisaged by the Nazi–Soviet Pact; and in September 1939, having been encircled by German forces, it was ceded to the Soviet Union. In the period, 1939–41, when it was annexed to the Ukrainian SSR, it was the scene of brutal repressions, forcible sovietization and the deportation of some 80,000 people, especially former Polish officials and Ukrainian nationalists. In June 1941, when the Wehrmacht was advancing with great rapidity (see BARBAROSSA), the NKVD shot all 5,000 inmates of the city jail before retreating. On the same day, a group of Ukrainian activists proclaimed an independent Republic of Ukraine, which was immediately suppressed by the advancing Germans. Lwów was then allocated to the General government of Poland as Lemberg, capital of the Distrikt Galizien (see Poland, 2(b)). In the period of Nazi occupation (1941–4), it saw the construction of a major ghetto, and of the infamous Janowska Street concentration camp. The killing of the city's 150,000 Jews was completed by November 1943.

The future of Lwów became a bone of contention between the Allied governments from the time of the Teheran conference (see Eureka). The western powers were torn between the conflicting claims of the Soviet Union and of the Polish government-in-exile. According to the original version of the Curzon Line drawn up at the Spa conference in July 1920, Lwów lay on the Polish side of the line (see Polish-Soviet frontier). But according to the amended version sent to Moscow, and duly produced by Molotov at Teheran in November 1943, it lay on the Soviet side; and the Soviet version was allowed to prevail. After the reoccupation of the city by the Soviet Army on 27 July 1944, a new reign of terror commenced. Units of the Polish underground Home Army, which had assisted in the city's capture, were arrested and in part deported. Brutal purges of Polish and Ukrainian activists took place; and in 1946 the bulk of the remaining Polish population were transported en masse to the new Poland. Most of them were sent to repopulate the ex-German city of Breslau, now Wrocław, in Silesia. Lwów, renamed L'viv (Ukrainian) and Lvov (Russian), escaped serious physical destruction: but its tremendous human losses had to be replaced, largely by migrant Russians. Its fate, trapped between Hitler and Stalin, left no room for the wishes of its citizens; and was mirrored in the parallel experiences of other ex-Polish cities such as Wilno or Brzesc nad Bugiem (see Brest-Litovsk).

Norman Davies