Conclusions

This writer does not consider himself competent to evaluate the processes of urbanization in postwar Ukraine from the point of view of demography, geography, economics, or urban studies. As a political historian he is interested to discover that after 1945 the Ukrainians appeared in the cities of Ukraine in numbers large enough to make it possible to modify that old distinction between “Ukrainian/village/West” and “Russian/urban/East.” The East has clearly remained Russian, but the West, including the “Central West,” has become more urban and more Ukrainian in its urban component. This outcome has to be connected with the territorial unification of the Ukrainian nation during the Second World War. Secondly, a historian notes the rise of Kyiv to a position of primacy (even if precise definitions of what constitutes primacy may be lacking) and he connects this with the westward shift of the Ukrainian SSR. He observes with interest the reemergence of the Lviv-Kyiv axis in Ukrainian life—after a 300-year break. Finally, the example of Kyiv and Lviv suggests that it may be possible even under the political conditions now prevailing in the USSR to emancipate the Ukrainians from the status of “younger brother” to the Russians: Certain parts of Ukraine are both urbanized and remain loyal to the Ukrainian language. It might be argued that the contemporary phenomenon of dissent in Ukraine is a result of this faa. Our discussion suggests that behind the individual figures representing that phenomenon there may welt exist a sizable constituency of socially mobilized (urbanized) but linguistically nonassimi-lated people.