The city in eastern Ukraine, now known as Lviv, has had many different names during its history. At the end of the mediaeval era it formed part of the kingdom of Poland, when it was known as Lwow.
It was the centre of the territory then known as Galicia: a flat region dominated by the vast feudal estates of Polish landlords, worked by Ukrainian-speaking serfs, and with a large population of Jews, living in their isolated shtetls.
When at the 18th century, the kingdom of Poland was carved up between the surrounding powers of the kingdom of Prussia and the empires of Russia and Austria, the city was taken by the Austrians, and was renamed Lemberg. It was a thriving intellecual centre, but Galicia was a povertystriken region. Many thousands of Jews left, either emigrating to America, or to seek work in Vienna, where they aroused the alarm and hatred of the young Adolf Hitler. Austrian rule was on the whole benign when compared with the serfdom and anti-Jewish pogroms suffered by Galicia's neighbours over the border in Russia.
After the region was fought over in the First World War and suffered enormous damage, the ancient state of Poland was resurrected at the Treaty of Versailles: Galicia became part of it, and Lemberg reverted to its Polish name of Lwow. Although Poland was nominally a democratic republic, there was in fact gross discrimination against Ukrainians and Jews. But, once again, the people of the region could consider themselves fortunate when compared with those living in the Soviet Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands died of starvation in Stalin's collectivisation campaign and the entire leadership of the Ukrainiann Communist Party was shot in the great purge of 1937-8.
In September 1939 Hitler launched his attack on Poland, and shortly afterwards Stalin took advantage of this to occupy Galicia. Lwow now became Lvov. Elections were held in which only candidates approved by the Kremlin were permitted to stand. Farms were collectivised and businesses taken over by the state. The NKVD, under Beria, arrested anyone likely to cause trouble, shooting or deporting to Siberia tens of thousands, amounting to between 10% or 20% of the entire population of the region.
But the nightmare was only beginning, because in June 1941 Hitler launched his war on Russia. Lviv fell to the Germans just eight days into the campaign. Behind the fornt-line troops came the Einsatzgruppen, who were instructed to comb through the conquered territories and shoot all Jews and Communist agents. By September the slaughter had been extended from killing Jewish men to killing the women and children too. At first, many Ukrainians welcomed the invaders, and Alfred Rosenberg, who was placed in charge of the occupied territories, wanted to build up a collaborationist movement, but Hitler was only interested in turning Ukraine into a vast plantation worked by slave labour. It cannot be denied that some Ukrainians, along with Russians,Lithuanians and others, asssited in the Holocaust: they were known as "Hiwis"; helpers. Many of the most brutal guards at the death camps were not Germans, but recruited from the various nationalities in the Soviet Union.
What was left of Lviv was reoccupied by the Red Army late in the war, and in the redrawing of frontiers after the war it was incorporated into the Soviet Union: the first time in the city's history that it had been ruled from Moscow. Armed resistance to the Russians continued in some regions until the early 1950s, as Ukraine was subjected to the ruthless administration of two of Stalin's leading hitmen: Khrushchev and Kaganovich. Ironically enough, both were born in Ukraine, though Khrushchev was an ethnic Russian from the Donbass and Kaganovich was Jewish. One oddity of the postwar settlement was that both Ukraine and Belarus were given their own votes at the United Nations. There was no instance of either voting against the Soviet line.
As with the rest of the Soviet Union, Ukraine drifted into slow decline during the Brezhnev years. Throughout this tedious era, many of the levers of power remained in the hands of the survivors of the old Khrushchev/ Kaganovich Ukraine group: they were known as the "Dnieper Mafia".
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was no accident that the drive for an independent Ukraine came from Lviv rather that Kyiv.
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