Download or read book Living Soviet in Ukraine from Stalin to Maidan written by Michael T. Westrate and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What the world is now witnessing in Ukraine is the cumulative effect of history and memory in the lives of the people of the region—and this book directly addresses those subjects. Although the majority of scholarship on the Soviet Union focuses on top-level political and intellectual elites, these groups were only tiny minorities. What was life like for the rest of society? What was it like for the vast population that usually supported the regime, mostly accepted the rules, essentially internalized the ideology, and generally made the same choices as their neighbors and friends? What was it like to live Soviet as the USSR hit its peak as a superpower and then fell apart? What was it like to live Soviet in Ukraine in the decade after independence? This book answers those questions. It is an oral history of a group of military colonels and their wives, children, and contemporaries, covering their lives from childhood to the present. During this period, these military families went from comfortable economic circumstances, professional prestige, and political influence as part of the Soviet upper stratum, to destitution and disgrace in the 1990s. Today, many of them are part of Europe’s largest ethnic minority—Russians in Ukraine. The geographic focus is Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Europe’s second-largest country, a Russian-speaking city in eastern Ukraine. Based on 3,000+ pages of interview transcripts and supplemented with materials gleaned from unprecedented access to personal, family, and institutional archives, the book investigates how families endured shifting social, cultural, and political realities. By analyzing the lives of individuals in context, Westrate provides insights at the grassroots level. He reveals how ideological, professional, gender, ethnic, and national imperatives—as developed and transmitted by elites—were internalized, transformed, or rejected by the rank and file. He reveals how the subjective identities of individuals and small groups developed and changed over time, and how that process relates to the parallel projects pursued by the leaders of their countries. In the process, he shows what those experiences have to offer the study of Soviet, post-Soviet, and transnational history, bridging the boundaries created by the collapse of the USSR and exploring the foundations of both twenty-first-century Ukraine and today’s conflicts.
Download or read book Ukraine s Maidan Russia s War written by Mychailo Wynnyckyj and published by Ibidem Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols. Driven by an urban "bourgeoisie" that rejected the hierarchies of industrial society in favor of a postmodern heterarchy, a previously passive post-Soviet country experienced a profound social revolution that generated new senses: "Dignity" and "fairness" became rallying cries for millions. Europe as the symbolic target of political aspiration gradually faded, but the impact (including on Europe) of Ukraine's revolution remained. When Russia invaded--illegally annexing Crimea and then feeding continuous military conflict in the Donbas--Ukrainians responded with a massive volunteer effort and touching patriotism. In the process, they transformed their country, the region, and indeed the world. This book provides a chronicle of Ukraine's Maidan and Russia's ongoing war, and puts forth an analysis of the Revolution of Dignity from the perspective of a participant observer.
Download or read book Black Square written by Sophie Pinkham and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Lively and engaging' Financial Times 'Empathetic and deeply humanising' Peter Pomerantsev, author of This is Not Propaganda Each time Ukraine has rebuilt itself over the last century, it has been plagued by the same conflicts: corruption, poverty, and most of all Russian aggression. Sophie Pinkham saw all this and more over ten years in Ukraine and Russia, a period that included the Maidan revolution of 2013-14, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the ensuing war in Donbass. With a keen eye for the dark absurdities of post-Soviet society, Pinkham presents a dynamic account of contemporary Ukrainian life. She meet a charismatic doctor helping to smooth the transition to democracy even as he struggles with drug dependence; a band of Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian hippies in a Crimean idyll; and a Jewish clarinetist agitating for Ukrainian liberation. These fascinating personalities deliver an indelible impression of a country on the brink. Black Square is necessary reading for anyone who wishes to learn the roots of the current Russo-Ukrainian war and the personal stories of the people who live it every day. ___ 'Elegant, suggestive, ominous, beautiful, and deceptively simple . . . Perhaps the only thing more impressive than the sheer number and diversity of people Sophie Pinkham has spoken to is how deftly she has woven their stories into a single compulsively readable narrative.' Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
Download or read book In the Labyrinth of the KGB written by Olga Bertelsen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2024 Winner, Kjetil Hatlebrekke Memorial Book Prize, King's College Centre for the Study of Intelligence This book focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their persona friendships, formal and informal interactions, and the ways they dealt with repression and arrests. This study demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s–1970s. Despite their various cultural and social backgrounds, the Kharkiv literati might be identified as a distinct bohemian group possessing shared aesthetic and political values that emerged as the result of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. Archival documents, diaries, and memoirs suggest that the 1960s–1970s was a period of intense KGB operations, “active measures” designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews along ethnic lines domestically and abroad.
Download or read book The Ukrainian Russian Borderland written by Volodymyr V. Kravchenko and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-08-26 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eastern edge of Europe has long been in flux. The nature of the Ukrainian-Russian relationship is both complex and ambiguous. Prompted by the countries’ historical and geographical entanglement, Volodymyr Kravchenko asks what the words Ukraine and Russia really mean. The Ukrainian-Russian Borderland abandons linear historical interpretation and addresses questions of identity and meaning through imperial and geographic contexts. Dominated by imperial powers, Eastern Europe and its boundaries were in a constant state of flux and re-identification during the Russian imperial period. Here, the Little Russian early modern identity discourse both connects and separates modern Russian and Ukrainian identities and gives rise to issues of historical terminology. Mirroring the historical ambiguity is the geographical fluidity of the borders between Ukraine and Russia; Kravchenko situates this issue in the city of Kharkiv and Kharkiv University as both real and imagined markers of the borderland. Putting the centuries-long Ukrainian-Russian relationship into imperial and regional contexts, Kravchenko adds a new perspective to the ongoing discourse about relations between the two nations.
Download or read book Kharkov Kharkiv written by Volodymyr Kravchenko and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city and its former capital. Situated within 40 km of the Ukrainian-Russian border it is one of those East-Central European “liminal” cities which became a center of modernization and pluralization in the borderland area, playing a prominent role in the process of nation building. Volodymyr Kravchenko’s expanded edition of Kharkov/Kharkiv, now in the English-language and including a new chapter on the reconfiguration of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland during and after the watershed Euromaidan event, uniquely uncovers the city’s long history, from the 17th century to today. Addressing issues of regional and national identities, Ukrainian-Russian relations, mental mapping, historical narratives and the ensuing de/reconstruction of national mythologies, this book, fills a unique gap in the literature on Kharkiv.
Download or read book The Gates of Europe written by Serhii Plokhy and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller, this definitive history of Ukraine is “an exemplary account of Europe’s least-known large country” (Wall Street Journal). As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today’s crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine’s sovereignty. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine has been shaped by empires that exploited the nation as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In The Gates of Europe, Plokhy examines Ukraine’s search for its identity through the lives of major Ukrainian historical figures, from its heroes to its conquerors. This revised edition includes new material that brings this definitive history up to the present. As Ukraine once again finds itself at the center of global attention, Plokhy brings its history to vivid life as he connects the nation’s past with its present and future.
Download or read book Regionalism without Regions written by Ulrich Schmid and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collective volume shows how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered against the background of the nation. The overarching objective of the book is to challenge the dominance of the nation-state paradigm in the analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change. The authors—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and the USA—explicitly go beyond the perspective of an entity defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes. The research project that led to the composition of the book combined quantitative (statistical surveys conducted across Ukraine) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus-group discussion) methods. The authors came to the conclusion that regionalism as a defining phenomenon of Ukraine is more prominent than the regions themselves. This approach regards Ukraine as a construct in flux where different discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge through the lenses of various disciplines and methodologies.
Download or read book Borderland written by Anna Reid and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A beautifully written evocation of Ukraine's brutal past and its shaky efforts to construct a better future.”—Financial Times Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centuries, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars. Again and again, borderland turned into battlefield: during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, Russia's wars with Sweden in the eighteenth, the Civil War of 1918-1920, and under Nazi occupation. Ukraine finally won independence in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bigger than France and a populous as Britain, it has the potential to become one of the most powerful states in Europe. In this finely written and penetrating book, Anna Reid combines research and her own experiences to chart Ukraine's tragic past. Talking to peasants and politicians, rabbis and racketeers, dissidents and paramilitaries, survivors of Stalin's famine and of Nazi labor camps, she reveals the layers of myth and propaganda that wrap this divided land. From the Polish churches of Lviv to the coal mines of the Russian-speaking Donbass, from the Galician shtetlech to the Tatar shantytowns of Crimea, the book explores Ukraine's struggle to build itself a national identity, and identity that faces up to a bloody past, and embraces all the peoples within its borders.
Download or read book The Ukrainian Night written by Marci Shore and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. In this lyrical and intimate book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true stories of activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.
Download or read book Return to the Motherland written by Seth Bernstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Return to the Motherland follows those who were displaced to the Third Reich back to the Soviet Union after the victory over Germany. At the end of World War II, millions of people from Soviet lands were living as refugees outside the borders of the USSR. Most had been forced laborers and prisoners of war, deported to the Third Reich to work as racial inferiors in a crushing environment. Seth Bernstein reveals the secret history of repatriation, the details of the journey, and the new identities, prospects, and dangers for migrants that were created by the tumult of war. He uses official and personal sources from declassified holdings in post-Soviet archives, more than one hundred oral history interviews, and transnational archival material. Most notably, he makes extensive use of secret police files declassified only after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014. The stories described in Return to the Motherland reveal not only how the USSR grappled with the aftermath of war but also the universality of Stalinism's refugee crisis. While arrest was not guaranteed, persecution was ubiquitous. Within Soviet society, returnees met with a cold reception that demanded hard labor as payment for perceived disloyalty, soldiers perpetrated rape against returning Soviet women, and ordinary people avoided contact with repatriates, fearing arrest as traitors and spies. As Bernstein describes, Soviet displacement presented a challenge to social order and the opportunity to rebuild the country as a great power after a devastating war.
Download or read book In Wartime written by Tim Judah and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the finest journalists of our time comes a definitive, boots-on-the-ground dispatch from the front lines of the conflict in Ukraine. “Essential for anyone who wants to understand events in Ukraine and what they portend for the West.”—The Wall Street Journal Ever since Ukraine’s violent 2014 revolution, followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the country has been at war. Misinformation reigns, more than two million people have been displaced, and Ukrainians fight one another on a second front—the crucial war against corruption. With In Wartime, Tim Judah lays bare the events that have turned neighbors against one another and mired Europe’s second-largest country in a conflict seemingly without end. In Lviv, Ukraine’s western cultural capital, mothers tend the graves of sons killed on the other side of the country. On the Maidan, the square where the protests that deposed President Yanukovych began, pamphleteers, recruiters, buskers, and mascots compete for attention. In Donetsk, civilians who cheered Russia’s President Vladimir Putin find their hopes crushed as they realize they have been trapped in the twilight zone of a frozen conflict. Judah talks to everyone from politicians to poets, pensioners, and historians. Listening to their clashing explanations, he interweaves their stories to create a sweeping, tragic portrait of a country fighting a war of independence from Russia—twenty-five years after the collapse of the USSR.
Download or read book Red Famine written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.
Download or read book Lost Kingdom written by Serhii Plokhy and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a preeminent scholar of Eastern Europe and the prizewinning author of Chernobyl, the essential history of Russian imperialism. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimea and attempted to seize a portion of Ukraine -- only the latest iteration of a centuries-long effort to expand Russian boundaries and create a pan-Russian nation. In Lost Kingdom, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the nation's history. Spanning over 500 years, from the end of the Mongol rule to the present day, Plokhy shows how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin exploited existing forms of identity, warfare, and territorial expansion to achieve imperial supremacy. An authoritative and masterful account of Russian nationalism, Lost Kingdom chronicles the story behind Russia's belligerent empire-building quest.
Download or read book My Ukraine written by Chrystia Freeland and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Soviet republic Ukraine has struggled against its “giant neighbor to the north”—Russia— to maintain its sovereignty. In early 2014 tensions turned to conflict as Vladimir Putin, determined to keep Ukraine from forging stronger ties with the West, seized Crimea and fomented conflict in eastern Ukraine. In the latest Brookings essay, Chrystia Freeland, a former Ukrainian-based reporter with strong family ties to the country, offers a personal reflection on the conflict and the sentiment of the Ukrainian people. She highlights the fact that despite historic, cultural, and linguistic ties between the two countries, Ukrainians stand defiant in their desire for independence.
Download or read book Heroes and Villains written by David R. Marples and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Certain to engender debate in the media, especially in Ukraine itself, as well as the academic community. Using a wide selection of newspapers, journals, monographs, and school textbooks from different regions of the country, the book examines the sensitive issue of the changing perspectives ? often shifting 180 degrees ? on several events discussed in the new narratives of the Stalin years published in the Ukraine since the late Gorbachev period until 2005. These events were pivotal to Ukrainian history in the 20th century, including the Famine of 1932?33 and Ukrainian insurgency during the war years. This latter period is particularly disputed, and analyzed with regard to the roles of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) during and after the war. Were these organizations "freedom fighters" or "collaborators"? To what extent are they the architects of the modern independent state? "This excellent book fills a longstanding void in literature on the politics of memory in Eastern Europe. Professor Marples has produced an innovative and courageous study of how postcommunist Ukraine is rewriting its Stalinist and wartime past by gradually but inconsistently substituting Soviet models with nationalist interpretations. Grounded in an attentive reading of Ukrainian scholarship and journalism from the last two decades, this book offers a balanced take on such sensitive issues as the Great Famine of 1932-33 and the role of the Ukrainian nationalist insurgents during World War II. Instead of taking sides in the passionate debates on these subjects, Marples analyzes the debates themselves as discursive sites where a new national history is being forged. Clearly written and well argued, this study will make a major impact both within and beyond academia." - Serhy Yekelchyk, University of Victoria
Download or read book Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.
