Post-war Soviet Period
After the war, despite Polish efforts, the city remained as part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Most of the remaining Polish population was expelled to the Polish territories gained from Germany (especially to present day Wrocław) whose German population was respectively expelled or fled in fear of Soviet retribution.
Migrants from Ukrainian-speaking rural areas around the city, as well as from other parts of the Soviet Union arrived attracted by the city's rapidly growing industry requirements. This population transfer altered the traditional ethnic composition of the city, which was already drastically changed as Polish, Jewish and German population was displaced or murdered.
With Russification being a general Soviet policy in post-war Ukraine, in Lviv it was combined with the disestablishment of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (see History of Christianity in Ukraine) at the state-sponsored Synod of Lviv, which agreed to transfer all parishes to the recently recreated Ukrainian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, after the death of Joseph Stalin, Soviet cultural policies were relaxed, allowing Lviv, the major centre of Western Ukraine to become a major hub of Ukrainian culture.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the city significantly expanded both in population and size. A number of prominent plants and factories were established or moved from eastern parts of the USSR. This resulted in partial Russification of the city and some loss of its western flavour. Among the most notable plants were the bus factory (Lvivsky Avtomobilny Zavod), which produced most of the buses in the Soviet Union and employed upwards of 30,000, TV factory "Zavod Elektron" which made one of the most popular brand of television sets in the country, the front-end loader factory (Zavod Avto-Pogruzchik), the shoe factory (Obuvnaya Fabrika Progress), confectionery Svitoch, and many more. Each of these employed tens of thousands of workers and were among the largest employers in the region. Most of them survive to this day, although economic difficulties put a drain on their production figures.
In the period of Soviet liberalization of the mid-to-end 1980s until the early 1990s (see Glasnost and Perestroika) the city became the centre of Rukh (People's Movement of Ukraine), a political movement advocating Ukrainian independence from the USSR.
Read more about this topic: History Of Lviv
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