Russians take Lviv

On 3 September 1914 Russian troops entered Lviv, the capital of Austrian Galicia. The city was not defended. The day before, the last Austro-Hungarian units had left it, retreating west after the lost Battle of the Złota Lipa. For the Poles it was a shock: one of the two most important centres of Polish national life under the partitions, alongside Kraków, had come under Russian rule. The occupation lasted almost ten months.

A city without defences

Before the war Lviv was not a fortress, and the Austro-Hungarian command did not intend to fight street battles for it. When on 30 August the Russian armies broke the defence on the Gniła Lipa, the chief of the General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, resigned himself to the loss of the city. The authorities of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria began evacuating offices, archives and treasuries. Tens of thousands of inhabitants left the city, and the stations were crowded and chaotic. The mayor, Józef Neumann (PL), also left. The administration of Lviv was taken over by the deputy mayor, Tadeusz Rutowski (PL), who was to play an important role during the occupation.

On 2 September the last Austro-Hungarian units left the city. The municipal authorities, wishing to avoid shelling and fighting, hung a white flag on the tower of the town hall and called on the inhabitants to remain calm.

The Russians march in

On the morning of 3 September the first Cossack patrols appeared in the streets of Lviv, followed soon afterwards by the leading cavalry units of the Russian 3rd Army of General Nikolai Ruzsky. Delegations of the city council, Rutowski among them, went out to the city gates to agree the terms of the occupation with the Russian command. The Russians demanded hostages to guarantee order. They were chosen from representatives of all the main groups of inhabitants: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians.

Colonel Sergei Sheremetev became commandant of the city. In a proclamation of 4 September he announced severe penalties for looting and assaults, banned the sale of alcohol and fixed a compulsory exchange rate of the Austrian crown against the rouble. Lviv received the occupiers in silence. In Russia the capture of the city was celebrated as a great victory, and Ruzsky became one of the best-known Russian commanders.

Bobrinsky and the “Russian land”

The occupied lands of Galicia and Bukovina were placed under a governorate-general. At its head was Count Georgy Bobrinsky, a general and aristocrat. He arrived in Lviv in mid-September (sources give different dates for his appointment and arrival). In September, receiving a delegation from the city, he declared that Eastern Galicia was “an integral part of the one, great Rus’”, and that the new authorities would rest on the Russian language, law and system of government.

Deeds followed these words. The Russian authorities decided that the Ukrainian national movement was an Austrian invention and had to be eliminated. Ukrainian newspapers, societies, reading rooms and bookshops were closed. Books were removed from libraries. Schools were closed for several months, and when they did reopen, the language of instruction was to be Russian. The Galician Russophiles, supporters of union with Russia, were on the other hand backed and recruited as officials.

A blow against the Greek Catholic Church

The main target of Russian policy was the Greek Catholic Church, regarded in St Petersburg as a tool for detaching the Ruthenians from Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Archbishop Evlogy came to Galicia and conducted a campaign to convert Uniate parishes to Orthodoxy. Parishes abandoned by Greek Catholic priests were filled with Orthodox clergy. Many Uniate priests were arrested and deported deep into Russia.

In mid-September (sources give dates from 15 to 19 September) the Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Lviv, Andrey Sheptytsky, the most important figure of Ukrainian religious and national life in Galicia, was arrested. Sheptytsky, a Polish aristocrat by origin and the brother of a later general of the Polish Army, was accused by the Russians of spreading the Union among the Orthodox. He was taken to Kiev and then in turn to Nizhny Novgorod, Kursk, a monastery in Suzdal and Yaroslavl on the Volga. He was freed only by the Provisional Government after the February Revolution, in March 1917. He returned to Lviv in September 1917.

The arrests also covered thousands of Ukrainian activists, teachers and clergy. According to some estimates, more than 12,000 deportees from Galicia passed through Kiev alone. It is worth remembering that earlier, in the first weeks of the war, it was the Austrian authorities who arrested thousands of Ruthenians suspected of pro-Russian sympathies and held them in internment camps.

Jews under Russian rule

The fate of the Jewish population was particularly hard. The Russian administration treated Jews as a disloyal element and suspected them of spying for Austria. They were taken as hostages, and their trade and freedom of movement were restricted. On 27 September 1914 Russian soldiers carried out a pogrom of the Jewish population in Lviv, in which, according to various sources, between 38 and 49 people were killed.

Poles in occupied Lviv

Poles formed the majority of Lviv’s inhabitants, and it was they who ran the city. The Russian authorities treated them more cautiously. In his proclamation of 14 August Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich had promised the Poles the unification of their lands under the Tsar’s sceptre, and Russia wanted to win over Polish opinion. Bobrinsky claimed that the western, Polish part of Galicia might in future go to such a united Poland, but Eastern Galicia, with Lviv, was to become part of Russia for ever.

The city council under Rutowski, Polish in composition, tried above all to protect the inhabitants. It organised municipal kitchens that served tens of thousands of meals a day, aid for refugees and care for the wounded, and in disputes with the occupier it defended the city’s self-government. Some Polish politicians associated with National Democracy counted on cooperation with Russia against Germany, but most inhabitants watched the Russification with unease. The Russian authorities also arrested and deported Poles considered dangerous.

In April 1915 Tsar Nicholas II visited Lviv. His visit was meant to show that Galicia had become a permanent part of the empire.

The city retaken

Russian rule proved short. In May 1915 German and Austro-Hungarian forces broke through the Russian front at Gorlice and advanced east. As they withdrew, the Russians deported several dozen hostages deep into Russia, including Tadeusz Rutowski. Thousands of local Russophiles left with them. On 22 June 1915 troops of the Austro-Hungarian 2nd Army of General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli entered Lviv. The Russian occupation had lasted 293 days.

Significance

The capture of Lviv was Russia’s greatest success in the first weeks of the war and a heavy blow to the prestige of Austria-Hungary. A few days later the Austro-Hungarian forces had to withdraw behind the San, leaving the besieged fortress of Przemyśl behind them.

For the inhabitants of Eastern Galicia the Russian occupation was their first encounter with a policy that denied Ukrainians the right to their own identity and the Uniate Church the right to exist. The experience strengthened the Ukrainian national movement and made Metropolitan Sheptytsky a symbol of resistance. For the Poles the occupation of Lviv in 1914–1915 was a test which showed that St Petersburg’s promises did not cover lands that Russia regarded as “Russian”. The dispute over the future of Lviv and Eastern Galicia broke out with new force in November 1918.