New Books in Ukrainian Studies

John Connelly’s new book – From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) – is an encyclopedic but lively narrative that captivates both those familiar with old stories about the region and novices who are seeking introduction to this vast laboratory of European modernity. Passionate, erudite, and insightful, the book pursues answers to the central questi...

The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s―covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, th...

Marco Puleri’s Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics (Peter Lang, 2020) examines a complex process of identity formation in the context of exposure to a diversity of linguistic and cultural influences. Puleri zeroes in on contemporary Ukraine to explore the specificities of cultural overlapping and the power it exercises on the...

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They brought plants, in particular grain and fodder crops, trees and shrubs, as well as weeds. Following their example, and drawing on the expertise of émigré Russian-Jewish scientists, the US Department of Agriculture introduced more plants, agricultural scien...

Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Stanford University Press, 2020) tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the H...

It’s been a difficult year in America. From plague, to protests, to politics, there have never been so many lives at stake, nor so many questions about the future of our country. Since his election in 2016, questions have been raised about president Trump’s too-close-for-comfort ties to Russian leadership and intelligence. Lately, his antagonism toward infectious disease science and CDC guidelines...

Laura A. Dean (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Millikin University and director of the Human Trafficking Research Lab) has spent many years investigating the urgent human rights issue of human trafficking in Eurasia. In her 2020 monograph Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia (Policy Press, 2020), Dr. Dean analyzes the development and effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies...

Paul D’Anieri’s Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) documents in a nuanced way the development of the current military conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The book includes a meticulous account of numerous developments which, according to D’Anieri, led to the war that still remains officially undeclared. The roots of the conflict can be fou...

Stanislav Kulchytsky’s The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor (CIUS Press, 2018) presents a meticulous research that unveils the mechanism of the Holodomor as a man-made famine, which was launched in Ukraine by the Soviets as a punitive and controlling measure undertaken to discipline and suppress those, peasants in the first place, who might have rebelled against the Sovi...

In Epic Journey: Life and Times of Wasyl Kushnir (Academic Studies Press, 2020), Andrei Kushnir documents the story of his father, Wasyl Kushnir, who was born in the western part of Ukraine in 1923. The book is based on Wasyl Kushnir’s memoirs and it includes a number of photos that help reconstruct his personal story. Narrating his family story, Wasyl Kushnir goes back to the second half of the 1...

Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map making which is written through and by individual geographers/cartographers/map men. The book focuses primarily on four countries: Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. When guiding his reader through th...

Katya Cengel’s From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) is an engaging memoir of a Western newspaper reporter’s youthful experiences in Latvia and Ukraine, in the turbulent years from the late 1990’s through the early 2000’s. Interspersed with lively anecdotes, the author brings a unique perspective on the struggles of the post-Sov...

Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development (ADEF-Ukraine LTD, 2018) offers a program that includes complex strategies for the economic development of Ukraine. This program was developed on the basis of data that were collected and analyzed by leading economists and researchers of Ukraine. When designing strategies that will help improve the current economic situation in the country, the...

What happened when Americans and Soviets fought alongside one another against Hitler? How did relations at Poltava airbase reveal cracks in the Grand Alliance? Serhii Plokhy tells the story of personal relationships and high geopolitics in his new book Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2...

Dissecting and digesting the history of the Soviet "experiment" can be a frustrating exercise for academics and a Sisyphean task for laymen; the endeavor demands scrutiny of the facts — and they are legion — but we must also grapple with the dystopian atmosphere and cruel indifference to human life, which characterizes the period. These challenges make the triumph of Professor Michael Khodarkovsky...

Tamara Hundorova’s The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (Academic Studies Press, 2019) is a compelling study of the literary changes that mark Ukrainian literature at the end of the 20th century. As the title of the book prompts, a starting point—or rather a triggering moment for further metamorphoses—is the Chornobyl catastrophe. However, this trajectory is further com...

As revealed by the title of Talia Carner’s latest novel, The Third Daughter (William Morrow, 2019), her heroine, Batya, has two older sisters. Both ran off with men their parents could not tolerate, placing a heavy burden on Batya to compensate for her sisters’ failings by making her parents happy. When her family is forced to flee its home in a Ukrainian village to escape a pogrom, losing most of...

In their introduction to Seasoned Socialism: Gender & Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life (Indiana University Press, 2019), Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko invite the reader to “imagine a society where food is managed by officialdom like a controlled substance and everyone is addicted to it.” Food plays a pivotal role throughout Russian history, but perhaps no more so...

Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform to State-mandated topics and themes, or consign oneself to obscurity, writing only for “the desk drawer” or “without permission.” Vasily Grossman challenged that binary choice, creating some of the most compelling and uncompromising fiction and journal...

Sergei Zhuk’s Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (Tauris, 2018) offers an insightful investigation of the development of American studies in the Soviet Union, with a specific emphasis on Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine. In spite of ideological differences, the US and the USSR established mutual interests to history and culture studies. One may suggest tha...

It’s quite common these days to hear young people being urged to collect and record the stories of their grandparents or parents in order to learn and preserve their family’s history. For a few fortunate folks, like Robbin Légère Henderson, such a record already exists. Henderson’s maternal grandmother, Matilda Rabinowitz, penned her own memoir before her passing in 1963 so that her grandchildren...

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia...

Daniel Unowsky's book isn't about a genocide or other incident of mass violence. Instead, The Plunder examines a series of riots against Jews in Habsburg Galicia in the year 1898. Unowsky tries to understand how, in an Empire built around the idea of the rule of law, anti-Jewish violence could erupt so quickly and then fade away almost as rapidly. Unowsky examines the riots in detail, exploring th...

Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2019), investigates the mobilization of female fighters, women’s roles in combat, and what happens to women when conflicts end. The book focuses on three case studies of asymmetric conflicts. Jessica Trisko Darden contributes research looking at Ukraine, Alexis Henshaw discusses the civil war in Columbia, and Ora Szekle...

What happened inside NKVD interrogation rooms during the Great Terror? How did the perpetrators feel when the Soviet state turned on them in 1938 during “the purge of the purgers?” In her newest book, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2017),... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices