Przemyśl, Poland: A Multiethnic City during and after a Fortress, 1867–1939

The city of Przemyśl, now near the Polish border with Ukraine, is perhaps best known as the site of a massive Austro-Hungarian fortress and horrific siege during World War I. John Fahey's thoroughly researched book explores the city's relationship with that fortress from the period of the Ausgleich and proclamation of Galician self-government in 1867 to the beginning of World War II. During this period, Przemyśl was transformed “from a small town to an imperial bulwark, to an international battlefield, to a national battlefield, to a national bulwark in turn” (p. 4). Fahey argues that, unlike other Habsburg garrison towns such as Kraków, where local government could function effectively, Przemyśl was a place where “the army overwhelmed the city rather than simply adding to the local dynamic” (p. 3). As such, it can serve as a corrective to the common argument that “the army served as a bulwark of the Habsburg Empire” (p. 3). In Przemyśl, despite strong local support for social democracy, which was antimilitaristic and largely supportive of Jews and Ruthenians, the presence of the fortress exacerbated multiethnic conflict and played an outsized role in shaping the city—before, during, and after the war.Fahey's opening chapter places the creation of Fortress Przemyśl in its larger context, noting the importance of fortresses in late nineteenth-century military doctrine, despite emphasis on the offensive. The second chapter notes how the process of extensive building from 1870–1902 brought rural Ruthenians, working-class Jews, and expert masons into the city, fueling one of the highest growth rates in Galicia. The population grew from 15,000 in 1870 to 54,000 by 1910, eighteen percent of which (8,514) were soldiers (pp. 9–10). As in Kraków, the ratio of women far outstripped civilian men in 1890, 1900, and 1910, but Fahey fails to comment on this. A discussion of women in service industries, including sex work, would have been helpful. Otherwise, Fahey capably shows how the construction of the fortress changed not only the physical contours of the city but also its culture due to the influx of soldiers and personnel.Socialist pushback against the army is the fascinating subject of the third chapter. In the mid-1890s, once most of the major work on the fortifications had concluded and good-paying jobs diminished, the socialist movement expanded (p. 50). The social democratic newspaper, Głos Przemyski, which frequently criticized the army and its leadership, had to be printed in Lviv because the commander of the fortress, General Anton Galgótzy, would not allow it to be printed locally. Army officers harassed its editor, Witold Reger, and the leader of the socialists, Herman Lieberman, even challenging them to duels and destroying their property when they did not accept (pp. 54–56). Lieberman's election to parliament in 1907 was the occasion for a major conflict between the socialists and the army, who, along with the police, violently suppressed a celebratory gathering of workers, leading to the injury of 200 workers and the death of a woman, crushed by the crowd. In the following years, the socialists showed their strength by constructing a massive House of Workers “on the northern bank of the San River, across from Franz Joseph Quai” (p. 55). Fahey goes so far as to refer to the building, and socialist success generally, as Przemyśl's other “fortress,” asserting that “by 1914 Przemyśl was a socialist fortress, with regular Social Democratic marches and demonstrations, a command center at the House of Workers, and well-respected delegates. This was accomplished by the same laborers who dug trenches and built walls at Salis-Soglio and Optyń” (p. 67).Yet as the war showed, civilians were still not able to check the disproportionate power of the army in the city. The ill omen of the 1898 pogrom and anti-Ruthenian policies in the city, especially after the assassination of governor Potocki in 1908, turned to full-blown ethnic cleansing and violence. The army's fears that Ruthenians would sympathize with the Russians fueled evacuation orders, the burning of surrounding villages, fields, and forests, and the imprisonment of 20,000 Ruthenians in concentration camps in the interior (p. 78). As Russian troops drew near, Przemyśl's wealthy and poor citizens departed, the latter under compulsion, because they could not prove possession of a three months’ supply of food. “This left middle-class citizens and bureaucrats, overwhelmingly made up of the Jewish and Polish segments of the populations” to ride out the five-month siege (p. 78). “Faced with extreme danger outside and blatant inequality inside, soldiers and civilians in Przemyśl during the second siege lived in a disintegrating social order, rapidly worsening material conditions, incompetence, and starvation. In many ways, by early 1915,” Fahey observes, “Przemyśl encapsulated what most of the Habsburg Empire would be reduced to later in the war” (p. 83).After the war, the fortress continued to affect the city during the chaotic period of violence and instability that persisted until the early 1920s. Bandits and ethnonationalist soldiers supplied themselves with weapons from it; political prisoners, including Greek Orthodox priests, were imprisoned in its chambers. Despite Jewish efforts to remain neutral, rampant antisemitism effectively pushed Jews into cooperation with the Ukrainian minority as Poles and Ukrainians fought for control of the region. Yet Jews also faced pogroms and abuse from Ukrainians, as well. Habsburg toponyms were quickly replaced with Polish ones, including the renaming of Franz Josef Quai for Jόzef Piłsudski, whose 1926 coup was largely popular with the city's socialist majority, but whose support waned as his Sanacja regime became increasingly antisemitic and wary of other political parties. Lieberman was arrested by the regime in 1930, imprisoned for a year, and then forced into exile in France (p. 123). The population in 1931 remained smaller than prewar levels; Poles still constituted about fifty percent, while the ratio of Jews had grown, and Ukrainians were on the decline. Two decades later, after World War II and the Holocaust, Przemyśl was a much smaller, and exclusively Polish city. No longer a multiethnic space, the former fortress city had become a national border.The greatest contribution of the book, as I see it, is the author's decision to explore the relationship between the city and the fortress from its beginnings to well beyond its formal end, while considering the problem from the perspective of both soldiers and civilians. Consulting newspapers, diaries, and civil and military records in Polish and German, Fahey tells this story in a rich 211 pages. He cites and defers to scholarship by Alexander Watson and Graydon Tunstall about the siege itself; what the reader gains most by reading this book is the persistent role of social democracy in trying to address the disproportionate power of the army in the city, while addressing its multiethnic character, both before and after the Great War. Ultimately, Fahey argues, “Fortress Przemyśl matters for the society it created as well as what it can tell us about garrisons” (p. 128). Like other garrisons, Przemyśl was a place where defense policy became real and intersected with civilian life. In its rapid late-nineteenth-century urbanization Przemyśl was like other East Central European cities, and this book can be profitably read alongside studies of them. This study shows that in Przemyśl the scale of imperial influence was disproportionate. Locals at times benefitted, while also bravely pushing back against that imperial influence, ultimately suffering disproportionately when the fortress, like the empire, was put to the test and failed.