Lviv in the First World War

Lviv, the capital of Austrian Galicia, was one of the most important prizes of the war on the Eastern Front. In September 1914 the Russians took it without a fight and ruled it for 293 days, until in June 1915 the troops of the Central Powers retook it. For the following years the city lay behind the front, which Russian offensives tried to break through towards it. When the Habsburg monarchy was falling apart in the autumn of 1918, Poles and Ukrainians fought over Lviv.

The capital of Galicia

From 1772 Lviv was the capital of Austrian Galicia, and in the era of autonomy the centre of Polish administration, scholarship and culture. According to the 1910 census it had over 200,000 inhabitants. Roughly half were Roman Catholics, mostly Poles, over a quarter Jews, and just under a fifth Greek Catholics, mostly Ukrainians. The city was also the main centre of the Ukrainian national movement. At the start of the war it was, along with Kraków and Przemyśl, one of the largest garrisons of the army of Austria-Hungary in the east.

The Russian occupation (1914–1915)

At the end of August 1914 the Russians defeated the Austro-Hungarian Third Army east of the city in the Battle of the Złota Lipa. Lviv was not a fortress, and the command did not want to fight for it in the streets. On 2 September the last Austro-Hungarian units left it, and on 3 September the Russians entered, led by the cavalry of General Nikolai Ruzsky’s Third Army. The attempt to retake the city at Gródek and Rawa Ruska collapsed on 11 September, and Conrad’s armies fell back behind the San. The capture of Lviv was Russia’s greatest success in the first weeks of the war.

The Russians placed the occupied lands under a governor-general, Count Georgy Bobrinsky. He declared Eastern Galicia “an original part of the one, great Rus’”. Ukrainian newspapers, societies and reading rooms were closed, and schools were to teach in Russian. The Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky was arrested in September and deported deep into Russia, from where he was freed only by the Provisional Government in March 1917. On 27 September Russian soldiers carried out a pogrom against the Jews in which, according to various sources, between 38 and 49 people were killed. The inhabitants suffered from deportations, lack of food and poor medical care.

The city was still run by a Polish municipal council. Deputy Mayor Tadeusz Rutowski organised municipal kitchens, aid for refugees and care for the wounded. Russia wanted to win over the Poles, but Bobrinsky declared that Eastern Galicia, together with Lviv, would remain Russian forever. In April 1915 Tsar Nicholas II came to the city to show that the country had become a permanent part of the empire.

Retaken, and the years behind the front (1915–1918)

After the breakthrough at Gorlice the armies of August von Mackensen retook Przemyśl in June and moved east. From 17 June they broke through the last Russian line on the Wereszyca. On 19 June the Russians took 37 hostages away from the city, among them Rutowski. On 22 June, after storming the redoubts around Lviv, the Central Powers regained the city. In the afternoon troops of General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli’s Austro-Hungarian 2nd Army entered it, and the inhabitants greeted them with joy. Mackensen was made a field marshal.

The return of the Austrians brought a new wave of arrests. Field courts punished people accused of collaborating with the Russians, above all Ruthenian Russophiles, but also Ukrainians and Polish National Democrats. Food, medicine and fuel were short, and Poles, Ukrainians and Jews increasingly accused one another of collaboration with the occupier.

In the summer of 1915 the front moved east, to the Złota Lipa, and in the autumn it settled on the Strypa. Lviv nevertheless remained the Russians’ goal. In June 1916, in the Brusilov offensive, the chief of staff of the Stavka, General Mikhail Alekseyev, wanted the main forces of the front to advance on Lviv from Volhynia. In July 1917, in the Kerensky Offensive, the Russian 11th Army was to break through the front at Zborów and advance on Lviv through Złoczów. None of these attacks reached the city, and the counter-offensive in Eastern Galicia threw the Russians back all the way to the Zbruch.

From 1917 supplies grew even worse, and the city saw demonstrations, riots and strikes. When in February 1918 Austria-Hungary, in a secret protocol to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine, promised the Ukrainians a separate crown land made of the Ukrainian part of Galicia, Lviv answered with mass demonstrations and a general strike. In the autumn Spanish flu swept through the city, and the sick sometimes waited a dozen hours or more for help.

November 1918

As the monarchy fell apart, Poles and Ukrainians laid claim to Lviv at the same time. In the night before 1 November 1918 Ukrainian soldiers of the garrison seized the city and proclaimed it the capital of a Ukrainian state, soon named the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. That same day the Polish inhabitants took up arms, many of them schoolboys, students and scouts, later called the Lwów Eaglets. For three weeks they fought over schools, barracks and single buildings.

On 20 November a Polish relief force from Przemyśl, organised by General Bolesław Roja, broke through to the city. After a Polish attack on 21 November the Ukrainians withdrew east during the night, and on the morning of 22 November the Poles took the city, which ended the Defence of Lviv. On the day of victory a pogrom began in the Jewish quarter, in which by 24 November between several dozen and 150 Jews were killed.

The war for the city went on. The Ukrainians surrounded Lviv on three sides, and on 19 March 1919 Polish units retook the railway to Przemyśl and broke their ring. The front moved away from the city only after the Polish offensive of May 1919. For the Poles the defence of Lviv became one of the founding myths of the reborn state, and in 1920 the city received the Cross of the Virtuti Militari. For the Ukrainians November 1918 was the birth of their state in Galicia.