The City “in a Case”: Transforming Place into a Soviet Ukrainian Lviv

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Sofia Dyak.

Speaker: Sofia Dyak, Director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe (Ukraine)
Chair: Julia Malitska, Post-doctoral researher, CBEES
Discussant: TBA

Abstract

On September 11, 1944 a certain comrade Bova reported on the results of talking with Polish inhabitants in one of the districts of the city of Lwów, which was just retaken by the Soviet state and now officially referred to as Lviv. For him they were “individually closed” and “detached from political life of the country and state’s system,” in other words, “men in a case.”

Using the title of one of the Chechov’s famous short stories he tried to convey and also make sense of his experiences dealing with people who were not capable of becoming Soviet citizens.

Indeed, soon the Polish and surviving Polish Jewish inhabitants of Lviv were forced to pack their cases and leave. However, unlike people places could not be removed en masse. The city itself had to stay and to be transformed into a Soviet Ukrainian city. Unlike its people, Lviv’s urban fabric was almost undestroyed despite war and occupation.

In my presentation I will examine the ways Soviet authorities and experts on municipal level engaged with the non-Soviet built environment in the process of accommodating the city into a new political, social and cultural realm.

Bio note

Dr. Sofia Dyak is a director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe (Ukraine), a research and public history institution. She received her PhD at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw), MA at the Central European University (Budapest), and BA at Lviv University.

Dr. Dyak was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Her research interests include post-war urban planning, heritage practices and infrastructures in socialist cities and their legacies. Another area of her work is public history, including teaching, as well as curating exhibitions and spatial commemorative projects.