Lviv 1918–2025: A Century-Long Laboratory of Self-Determination

The western Ukrainian city of Lviv has been many things to many peoples: a Habsburg garrison town, a Polish cultural capital, a Soviet provincial centre, and a Ukrainian nationalist redoubt. Since the collapse of empires in the wake of the First World War, Lviv has lived under at least five political regimes and changed official language, flag, and ideological orientation more times than most cities in Europe. Yet through each transformation, the city has served as a centre for political ideas, cultural experiments and democratic aspirations that shaped not only local identity but also Ukraine’s evolving quest for statehood. From 1918 to 2025, Lviv has functioned as a century-long laboratory of self-determination.

1918–1923: The West Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Polish Takeover

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 offered an opening for Ukrainian national ambitions. On 1 November 1918, Ukrainian officers of the former imperial army seized control of Lviv and proclaimed the West Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR). This short-lived republic was an early experiment in self-rule, with a civilian government, a functioning parliament, and military resistance against both Polish and Bolshevik forces. Lviv became the de facto capital of a nascent Ukrainian polity.

But this dream was swiftly crushed. The Polish Army reconquered the city in July 1919 after bitter urban fighting. The Entente powers, wary of Bolshevism and inclined towards an anti-Russian Poland, legitimised Polish control of Eastern Galicia in the League of Nations’ decisions of 1923. Lviv was absorbed into the Second Polish Republic, renamed Lwów, and began a new chapter as a Polish provincial centre.

1923–1939: A Polish Metropolis with an Underground Ukrainian Heart

Under Polish rule, Lwów remained a vibrant university city and cultural hub, but the Ukrainian population—excluded from many positions of power—fostered a subterranean world of activism. The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church maintained its religious and national identity in the face of Polonisation. Educational societies like Prosvita (a society to promote Ukrainian language and culture) and underground institutions like the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO), a paramilitary Ukrainian nationalist movement, laid the groundwork for more radical nationalist sentiments.

The city was home to multiple competing visions: liberal Ukrainians who sought autonomy through negotiation; integral nationalists who favoured revolutionary struggle; and Polish officials attempting assimilation. In many ways, Lviv mirrored the tensions of Central Europe in the interwar period: vibrant, multilingual, and on the verge of ideological eruption.

1939–1944: Occupation and Catastrophe

Lviv’s oscillation between competing powers reached a nightmarish apex during the Second World War. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact brought Soviet occupation in 1939. The Soviet NKVD (Stalin's secret police) targeted the city’s intellectual and nationalist elites for arrest, execution, and deportation. Churches were closed, Ukrainian schools were dismantled, and Polish academics from Lwów University were liquidated.

When Nazi Germany seized the city in 1941, the pendulum swung again—but only deeper into horror. The city’s large Jewish population, numbering over 100,000 before the war, was annihilated in the Holocaust. The Nazis tolerated some Ukrainian nationalist activity briefly, but later crushed it. Both Soviet and German occupations were genocidal, targeting different communities with comparable ruthlessness.

Yet even in these dire years, Lviv witnessed the continued operation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in its rural hinterlands and the formation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR) in 1944. Lviv’s legacy as a centre for independence did not die with the regimes that occupied it.

1944–1991: Soviet Rule and the Preservation of Dissent

The Soviet Red Army retook Lviv in 1944. In its immediate aftermath, thousands of locals were deported to Siberia or executed for suspected nationalist sympathies. The Soviet Union sought to reframe Lviv as a Soviet city: Russian was promoted; churches were closed or absorbed into the Orthodox Patriarchate; and the memory of Polish and Jewish Lviv was erased from public areas.

And yet, under the surface, resistance simmered. Lviv became a hub of samizdat publishing and underground theological study. The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, although illegal, continued to function clandestinely, preserving not just religious faith but national identity. By the 1980s, Lviv emerged as one of the key centres of dissident activism in the Soviet Union.

The first mass rally in support of Ukrainian independence in 1988 took place in Lviv. By 1989, it was the leading city of the Rukh movement, a late Soviet Ukrainian nationalist political organisation, that challenged the Communist monopoly on power. As the Soviet Union disintegrated Lviv’s civil society, forged in the fire of underground resistance, helped engineer Ukraine’s peaceful break from Moscow.

1991–2013: Ukrainian Independence and Western Orientation

After Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Lviv quickly distinguished itself from many other cities in the country. It embraced a Western orientation: market liberalisation, European integration, and national cultural revival. While other regions experienced nostalgia for the Soviet past or economic disillusionment, Lviv became a centre for political pluralism, media freedom and historical reckoning.

Lviv’s universities and NGOs trained a generation of civic activists who would later play key roles in national politics. The city promoted the memory of the ZUNR, the UPA, and the Greek-Catholic Church—consciously rehabilitating the suppressed strands of Ukrainian history.

At the same time, tensions persisted. The city was sometimes accused of nationalism or parochialism by politicians in Kyiv or eastern Ukraine. But its insistence on self-definition, rather than adherence to post-Soviet narratives, kept it politically vibrant and intellectually independent.

2014–2025: Revolution, War, and Resilience

The Euromaidan revolution of 2014 intensified Lviv’s national role. Protesters in Lviv’s central square declared a temporary local government to replace the collapsing Yanukovych regime. The city sent hundreds of volunteers to the Donbas and later to the full-scale war after the Russian invasion in 2022.

Lviv also became the de facto humanitarian capital of Ukraine, sheltering millions of internally displaced persons. As Russian missiles battered Ukraine’s east and south, Lviv absorbed cultural institutions, government ministries and international NGOs. Despite several strikes on infrastructure, the city preserved its relative safety, allowing it to serve as a diplomatic and logistical base.

In these years, Lviv again demonstrated its aptitude for political adaptation. It hosted peace forums, war crimes documentation centres, refugee schools, and defence industry exhibitions. If Kyiv became the wartime capital, Lviv became the soul of wartime civil society.

A Civic Republic in a Borderland State

From 1918 to 2025, Lviv has not merely reflected the political currents of the country—it has often shaped them. Through empires, republics, occupations, and resurrections, the city has remained remarkably consistent in one thing: its desire to decide its own destiny.

The idea of self-determination, tested and refined in Lviv over a century, has outlasted foreign rule and ideological suppression. It has proven that identity is not fixed by flags or decrees but is built in classrooms, newspapers, churches and city squares. In this sense, Lviv is more than a city. It is an experiment still unfolding—one whose conclusions may yet write a significant part of the future for the Ukrainian nation.