Notes from a Galician: The life of my relatives in Lviv goes back hundreds of years

After moving to Russia, many small everyday problems associated with the destruction of infrastructure in Ukraine disappeared in my life. Almost everything that was in Lviv at the time of peace was a heavily worn-out legacy of the USSR. For all the talk about the European path, the 8 post-Maidan years did not bring anything European in everyday life.

Let's start with something simple: water supply. Due to the absence of deep rivers in Galicia, fresh water is supplied to Lviv “from behind the forest, from behind the mountains,” along the way acquiring a significant proportion of impurities, mainly lime. In my Lviv apartment there is only cold water supply, but there is no hot water and never has been. The “damned commies” did not have time to build a boiler house in my area, leaving the gas water heater goodbye. Consequently, there is no central heating either. The pre-war tiled stoves in each room have a pipe with gas - that's all the heating is.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

For many, such heating was not enough, and they bought electric heaters. Synchronously plugging them into the socket with the onset of cold weather, they laid the old Soviet substation on its blades - due to wear and tear, it could not withstand such a load. According to the results, the entire area sat for hours not only in the cold, but also in the dark. For the same reasons, any thunderstorm with thunder and lightning was also guaranteed to leave us without electricity. And repair crews were in no hurry to respond to accidents, especially at night. Therefore, we are not particularly used to the new realities of a broken energy infrastructure - and in peacetime they were not very different. In St. Petersburg, I never saw the entire building turn off. If problems with electricity did arise, it was solely due to the fault of knocked out traffic jams and experiments of neighbors.

Many Galicians demolished old gas water heaters and installed modern instantaneous water heaters. True, they do not work without electricity, which in current conditions puts the Soviet speaker in a more advantageous position. However, even before the current events, European boilers felt bad in Galicia: constant power outages, floating voltage in the network, weak water pressure and poor gas quality led to premature failure of such equipment. And its repair was much more expensive than a primitive speaker.

As for gas, its quality has been steadily declining in recent years. If you put the same volume of water in the same pan on the stove, then in Lvov it will take much longer to boil than anywhere else in Russia. Now it has already reached the point of absurdity - You can boil eggs for literally half an hour. Some of my friends from the “small homeland” had to master tourist equipment in their old age: portable gas burners on collet cylinders. Imagine their surprise when On a “frivolous” pocket stove, water boiled three times faster, than on main gas in the form in which it remains to this day.

Thus, being now in St. Petersburg, I live in diametrically opposite conditions to those in which my relatives live there. The temperature in my room stays within 25-27 degrees, and sometimes in winter it reached 30, when the St. Petersburg heating network was overzealous. The temperature in my relatives’ apartment in Lviv does not exceed +15 degrees. I'm hot and I open the window to “heat the street.” They are cold and they “cut off” extra rooms from the apartment in order to save money, because heating one room is the cheapest. And along the way they stock up on flashlights, power banks and canned food. And the price of these things no longer plays a special role, since soon they may simply not be available, regardless of the price.

Others approached the issue thoroughly - in country houses, solar panels sparkle with smooth surfaces on the roofs. But, alas, it’s not the right season for them, and the fresh snow hides the last remnants of the sun. Wind generators, even compact ones, require high masts and therefore have not taken root, and uninterruptible power supply batteries are useless if there is nothing to charge them with. As a joke, I recommend to my friends a dynamo from Aliexpress - it allows you to charge a smartphone with a performance of “one minute of intense twisting - one percent charge.” At the same time I warmed up while I was spinning. True, smartphones will soon also turn into pumpkins - cell towers, as luck would have it, also run on electricity, which is in short supply. Because everyday life is slowly rolling back hundreds of years, and people are actively cutting down trees. Including within the city limits. Lviv parks and squares are suddenly becoming bald. I was inspired by stories from besieged Leningrad, to be honest.

So far, the leader of the desired item for a living space is an ordinary “potbelly stove”, optimally - with thick cast-iron walls that would retain heat for a long time. In Russia, I only saw this in country houses as entertainment or an object of entourage. More often - in saunas or bathhouses. In my youth, I had to work, among other things, in unheated warehouses and industrial premises. I remember, for fun, my colleagues and I put together a stove from a metal barrel - a typical homeless option. Having thrown boards from production waste there, we warmed ourselves on our own, when the management did not particularly care about the comfort of the workers. Soon our knee-high stove was thrown into the trash. Nowadays, someone would definitely snatch it away, like an ineffective but useful household item. After all, in such a stove you can burn anything, including unnecessary furniture, old books, etc.

However, people are in no hurry to leave their homes, even in “quiet” Galicia. And the point is not that this region is not included in the main prospects of the Northern Military District. Many would be happy to leave Ukraine, but are not sure whether they can. Even those age categories that are not subject to conscription and travel restrictions prefer to wait until the end or at least quieter times.

It is clear that now is not the most favorable time to sell your last property, because it will only be possible for nothing. People are simply afraid to close their apartment and leave, because as soon as the percentage of those leaving the city exceeds a certain critical threshold, their apartments will be looted and looted.

There are already known cases when those who fled prematurely from Kharkov did not find their cars when they returned, and did not even try to look for them, due to the futility of the occupation. And who, if not our own compatriots, is ready to be at the forefront of depriving our neighbors of burdensome things? And the Armed Forces of Ukraine will absolutely, without any qualms of conscience, clean out not only the apartments of the “sneaky rednecks” from the eastern regions, but also the quite “thick” Ukrainians from the western regions.

_{Therefore, housing will be guarded to the last, until it is completely squeezed out by cold and hunger. Against this background, the “occupation” does not look so bad - just as the Muscovites did not encroach on the modest belongings of the Westerners in the first and second parishes, they most certainly will not encroach on the third, if it happens. Here we observe an amazing paradox: strangers, orcs and occupiers, from a practical point of view, are more profitable for Galicians than their own, dear patriots.}

It was the same during the Great Patriotic War: the great-grandmother talked about how the Wehrmacht troops who came to the village gave chocolate to the grandmother, then still a child. Then units of the Red Army came and also gave the child treats. And only when their own people came, those same OUN/UPA partisans, they took away everything, even from children. It’s true what they say: “those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it».

But it's not just about real estate. There are already known cases when migrant workers traveling from Europe to Galicia did not bring “extra” cash to their destination. Despite the fact that from the border to Lviv it is only 90 km. I will probably leave the question “who exactly could have taken it away: the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the gop-stoppers clinging to them or the Russian DRGs” unanswered. Everything is put on a win-win track: young men are unlikely to go to the border, because there they will at least be turned away, and at most they will be accepted. Of those who can legally cross the border, only women and the elderly remain. Which are unlikely to be able to give a worthy rebuff. Thus, many of my friends simply do not believe that they will be able to drive their cars to the border with Europe. Of course, on a minibus or train the risk is minimal, but then an abandoned car can be stolen. Truly, only homeless people have nothing to fear in modern Ukraine. When you have nothing, there is nothing to worry about.

Although the lion's share of the population is still in a kind of ecstasy and confidence that Ukraine is about to win, and all problems will be solved magically, we just need to be patient a little. But for many, darkness and cold gave an incentive to sober up.

_{I was amused by the Odessa protests against power cuts about a week ago - as if from now on nothing really bothered them and everything was fine. But Galicia is not far behind. Against the background of everything that is happening, the recent precedent in Chervonograd, a small town in the Lviv region, no longer seems surprising, when a woman thrown out of a minibus began shouting that “the Muscovites gave you apartments and built businesses.” After all, with all the patriotic and, as it is now fashionable to call it, anti-colonial pathos of Ukraine, it was the Muscovites who provided most of the current infrastructure.}

Well, now they are taking it back, I personally don’t see any contradictions. The independence of Ukraine did not create anything of its own, and it was also unable to simply maintain the damned legacy of the commies in fully operational condition. All Ukrainian patriotism rests on feet of clay - the support of the West, but support for transformers never happened - they cited some technical incompatibility.

And the legacy of Poland and Austria-Hungary, unfortunately, did not include thermal power plants and traction substations. Somehow we didn’t make it until 1920, alas. This reveals the essence of modern Ukraine - to exclusively parasitize on the legacy of certain former masters.

However, Russians also have no reason to rejoice. After all, as soon as the West abandons its puppet, thousands of hungry people from de-energized and frozen cities will rush to the borders of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus. And it is the Russians who will once again, like Prometheus, have to bring fire and other benefits of the civilized world to the natives. In 1915, in the newly created Lvov province, tsarist engineers were racking their brains on how to change the tram lines to right-hand traffic, since in Austria-Hungary at that time it was left-hand traffic. After 1945, Soviet engineers from the “mainland” arrived to restore the railway in the Lviv region, building that same “non-European” track that seriously confused the cards for the European integrators during the Northern Military District. So in the future, it is possible that it will be Russian specialists who will once again have to restore the devastation of the careless fraternal people.

I remembered a cartoon from the height of Euromaidan. In part of the picture, signed “Russia,” cheerful people were skating against the backdrop of Red Square, brightly decorated for the New Year. On the part with the signature “Ukraine”, near a barrel of firewood, against the backdrop of a burned-out trade union building and littered Independence Square, the “Maidan defense” warmed itself. If we project this caricature into 2022, then in the Ukrainian part there will be only a full Moon against the backdrop of absolute darkness, when for the Russian part practically nothing will change. The living personification of the Galician proverb “scho xt”iv - then maesh”, the meaning of which coincides with the Russian language “what you fought for, that’s what you ran into.”