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Comment by myth_drannon | Hacker News Reader

But wasn't Poland occupying the city from 1918-1939? It was Austro-Hungarian city beforehand? Also I wouldn't characterize Soviet occupation as bad luck and Polish as a heaven on earth. Yes, he was born in 1921, 3 years after Polish army invaded the city and terrorized it. I don't know enough history about the period until 1939, but just extrapolating 1918 events to the whole period of Polish occupation.

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Lwów was probably most Polish city in the region, and generally what's now Western Ukraine had skewed towards polish in cities and ukrainian in rural areas.

In reality, for as late as 1939 the main differences were language and religion, and considerable chunk of rural population considered themselves "locals" not linking with nation-state idea.

This reflects on Commonwealth being rather multi-ethnic and Austro-Hungarian occupation and repression changing little on the areas they took.

Eastern and Central European history has less stable borders/states than Western/Northern Europeans and Americans often assume. Nationalities existed under various empires without much state-aspirational nationalism until the 19th century. People practicing various religions, speaking various languages lived under changing lords or free in the wild fields, then fled en masse in times of conflict and lived somewhere else. Forced mass-conversions and massacres changed demographics a number of times over the last thousand years. Bureaucracies remained largely intact through their posession by empires, soviets, then nation(ish)-states.

Modern states in the region are real, but contingent, and shouldn't falsely be projected backwards through history.

That's why I mentioned the idea of "locals" - apparently during census in interwar Poland, some rural regions especially in modern West Ukraine had as much as over 20% declaring their nationality as just "locals".

> I don't know enough history

Clearly.

Weird to see you accuse someone of intellectual dishonesty, and then turn around and take a quote out of context to throw a dig at somebody else, purely because you don't agree. Very shameful behavior, honestly.

I'm sorry if the response was blunt, nevertheless people really have to take a responsibility for their education and not make inflammatory comments about history of the parts of the world they don't understand or are unwilling to understand.

There is plenty of information regarding history of Lviv and this region in general. It's long and sad, tragic and sometimes beautiful but never simple.

Besides, I found that most people who feign ignorance know history very well and use it for their own agenda. If you know what to search in someone post history it becomes more or less obvious.

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