Lviv’s Uncertain Destination examines the city’s tumultuous twentieth-century history through the lens of its main railway terminal. Whereas most existing studies of eastern European cities centre their stories on discrete ethnic groups, milestone political events, and economic changes, this book’s narrative is woven around an important site within the city’s complex spatial matrix. Combining architectural, economic, social, and everyday life history, Andriy Zayarnyuk shows how different political regimes created dissimilar social spaces even on the same streets and in the same buildings. His narrative leads us to rethink how the late imperial Habsburg and Romanov, Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet, interwar Polish, and Nazi German regimes produced, structured, and controlled urban space. Focusing on railway workers, the book also draws attention to the history of Lviv’s wage earners, who constituted the majority of the city’s adult population.

Andriy Zayarnyuk is Academic Director of the Institute for Urban History of East-Central Europe, Harald Binder's Foundation, Lviv.

Andriy Zayarnyuk's profile page

• Winner, The Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies awarded by Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
• Winner, 2018-2019 AAUS Book Prize for the best scholarly monograph-length work in Ukrainian studies American Association for Ukrainian Studies

"Even to readers not specializing in the history of Lviv or Ukraine, the book offers interesting insights and observations regarding the construction of the rhetoric of belonging by the changing design of Lviv’s railway terminal, as well as the history of railway workers. Zayarnyuk offers a new approach to reconstructing Ukrainian national history by reevaluating collective identities and problematizing the meaning and role of the national factor in this history."

<em>Ab Imperio</em>

"This is a book that gives as much attention to those ‘little purposes’ of everyday life as it does to the grand visions of political regimes. It subjects conventional understandings of grand historical narratives to the messy, contingent, personal and entangled projects that animate experiences of public space, social order and identity in everyday life. In so doing, it challenges and reimagines the terms in which a city’s histories and geographies can be told."

Eurasian Geography and Economics