What do I mean by our other capital? Is it Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Chyhyryn (1648-1669), or Ivan Mazepa’s and Kyrylo Rozumovsky’s Baturyn (1687-1708 and 1750-1764, respectively)? Or do I refer to Kharkiv, capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1917-1934? No, what I have in mind is the capital for western Ukrainians – though not a Ukrainian capital – between 1772 and 1918, namely, Vienna.
To be sure, there was much to deplore about Habsburg rule, especially its inability to remedy endemic rural poverty and its policy of allowing favored nationalities like the Poles and Hungarians to lord it over lower-ranking ones like the Ruthenians (most of whom eventually chose to identify themselves with the resurgent Ukrainians of the Russian Empire to the east). But today, many Galicians look with nostalgia to a time when Germans, Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, as well as Greeks and Armenians, could live side by side in a city like Lemberg (today’s Lviv) without killing each other – something for which they would exhibit an alarming propensity in the decades after the Austro-Hungarian collapse in October 1918.