But this time, in the centre of the main park, old women stood beneath the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag, discussing the fate of Stepan Bandera — the guerilla leader who fought for Ukrainian independence in the 1930s and 1940s — and selling metal pins shaped like a trident, Ukraine's national symbol. Young men, with rough skin and long hair, laughed and joked and hawked smudged newspapers with titles like «Free Ukraine» and «Democratic Ukraine.» In front of the opera house, a group of men were furiously chipping away at the base of a statue of Lenin. When I returned the following day, Lenin was gone. The dull Soviet landscape which I had once watched through a train window had been altered forever.

In the West, what was happening in L'viv was already being called part of the «nationalist wave» which was then said to be «sweeping» Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. A clutch of columnists were already editorialising about the dangers of national revival in places like Ukraine and Lithuania, whose last semi-independent leaders had been puppets of Nazi Germany and whose borders would be disputed. Politicians were already claiming that independence for the non-Russian Soviet republics would lead to a destabilising collapse of the Soviet Union, and the creation of an angry, revanchist Russia. George Bush, visiting Kiev in the summer of 1991, sang the praises of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and told the Ukrainians to abandon these dangerous nationalist tendencies: «Long live the Soviet Union,» he said. Still, against his wishes, and against the wishes of the American state department, the British foreign office, and almost everyone else in western Europe, Ukraine became independent anyway a few weeks later, along with the Baltic republics, Belarus, the Caucausian republics and Central Asia.

Post-Soviet nationalism certainly would prove to be dangerous, destabilizing, and uncomfortable for diplomats.