New Books in Ukrainian Studies

“Irrationality rules” in war, Michael Mann writes in his magisterial 2023 book, On Wars (Yale UP, 2023), a history that begins with the Roman Republic and ancient China and works its way through the world wars of the 20th century and up to present times. Mann is a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His irrationality thesis, which posits that many wars are...

In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis UP, 2023), Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and...

An astonishing deep dive into the war in Ukraine - from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis since the Second World War - and yet at the heart of the conflict is a mystery. Vladimir Putin lurched from a calculating, subtle master of opportunity to a reckless gambler, putting his regime - and Russia itself - at ris...

In two new books, Fabian Baumann and Lauren Stokes examine the past through the lens of family structures and relations. In Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023), Baumann investigates the origins of Russian and Ukrainian nationalisms through the story of the Shul’gin family (in Ukrainian, Shul’hyn). Baumann argues that bec...

How did the Soviet Union control the behaviour of its people? How did the people themselves engage with the official rules and the threat of violence in their lives? In Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish's book Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State (U Toronto Press, 2023), the contributors examine how social control developed under Stalin and Khrushchev....

Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (U Toronto Press, 2022) offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region, one of Europe’s most volatile flashpoints, by chronicling the aftermath of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in four different literary traditions. In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim...

Prismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. "This chronicle/ Took shape the day the war began, which was/ My 65th birthday," writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist and poet Christopher Merrill. At once deeply personal yet rooted in history so recent you can almost see the smoke billowing from th...

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh's book Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Academic Studies Press, 2018) discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-d...

Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Isaac Mckean Scarborough tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for re...

Nineteen months since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the books are coming thick and fast. Fortunately, each tells a different and compelling story. Like other recent books, Gwendolyn Sasse’s Russia's War Against Ukraine (Polity, 2023) analyses three decades of diverging Russian and Ukrainian politics and society, burgeoning Russian neo-imperialism, and Western temerity. Unique to this...

"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia’s return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According t...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already changed the world. Why did it happen? Who is winning? How will it end? Christopher Miller is the author of The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Hear him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign corr...

Antony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-building. From the 1930's through the Great Patriotic War, architectural monuments such as subway stations were designed to emphasize the perpetual endurance of the nation, regardless of the many crises of the period. The contemporary popularity of Stali...

Ainsley Morse's book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature (Northwestern UP, 2021) traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books, a relationship that persisted over the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s existence. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its qua...

Western analysts and media often assess the prospect that Moscow might use nuclear weapons as the war in Ukraine grinds on, possibly to a flailing Russia’s disadvantage. George Beebe, though, injects a less-familiar element into this grim dynamic: What are the chances that Washington might resort to nukes, should the direction in the war turn sharply against U.S.-backed Ukraine? Or enter the confl...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho...

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans.  In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker...

Eight years after annexing Crimea, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022. For Vladimir Putin, this was a legacy-defining mission--to restore Russia's sphere of influence and undo Ukraine's surprisingly resilient democratic experiment. Yet Putin's aspirations were swiftly eviscerated, as the conflict degenerated into a bloody war of attrition and the Russi...

Focusing on gender relations, family formation, and marriage patterns in areas peripheral to the England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Christian Raffensperger and Joanna Drell argue for a more inclusive understanding of medieval Europe. Their conversation dwells on Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but also the present state of medieval history and the impo...

"That Russia and Ukraine have diverged politically so radically since 1991 is partially due to their position vis-à-vis the imploded empire they emerged from," writes Mark Edele in Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023). As its subtitle suggests, this short work - "a book by an outsider written for outsiders" - has big ambitions to explain the immedia...

Russia's large-scale invasion on the 24th of February 2022 once again made Ukraine the focus of world media. Behind those headlines remain the complex developments in Ukraine's history, national identity, culture and society. Addressing readers from diverse backgrounds, Olena Palko and Manuel Férez Gil's Ukraine's Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited (Transcript Publishing, 2023) approa...

Eastern Europe, the moniker, has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone now, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics, or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe and Croatia is in the Eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identit...

Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice (Cornell UP, 2023) is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling indust...

Andrii Portnov's Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is the first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (until 2016 Dnipropetrovsk, until 1926 Katerynoslav) locates the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context and explores the interaction between global processes and everyday routines of urban life. The history of a pl...

By placing the party grassroots at the centre of its focus, Yiannis Kokosalakis' book Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921–1941 (Cambridge UP, 2023) presents an original account of the formative first two decades of the Soviet system. Assembled in a large network of primary party organisations (PPO), the Bolshevik rank-and-file was an army of activists...