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Ukraine: Readings and Resources

Analysis and Insights

Title Date Author Publication Link
Ukraine Conflict Updates — ISW Press Institute for the Study of War Read Here
Ukraine’s Shock will Last Generations February 23, 2024 Jędrzej Nowicki The Atlantic Read Here
Ending the War in Ukraine: Harder Than It Seems February 22, 2024 Mathew Burrows The Henry L. Stimson Center Read Here

 

Recorded Talks

University of Florida

Title Date Host Link
The Transatlantic Community in the Aftermath of Russia’s Aggression February 27, 2023 UF Jean Monnet Center of Excellence Watch Here
Fueling the War in Ukraine March 1, 2023 UF Center for European Studies Watch Here
Ukraine and Crisis of European Security March 16, 2022
  • UF Center for European Studies
  • Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair
 Watch Here
What the War in Ukraine Means March 1, 2022
  • UF Center for European Studies
  • UF Department of Political Science
 Watch Here
War in Ukraine: Why, How, and What Happens Next March 1, 2022
  • UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • UF Center for European Studies
  • UF Bob Graham Center for Public Service
 Watch Here

 

Other Organizations

The Global Fallout from Russian Aggression in UkraineMarch 17, 2022Carnegie Endowment for International PeaceWatch Here

Title Date Host Link
A Conversation with the EU Ambassador to Ukraine, Matti Maasikas May 21, 2022 European Union Listen Here
Shape of the Union: European Sentiment in Light of War and Pandemic May 12, 2022 European Council on Foreign Relations Watch Here
Quo Vadis Russia? Putin’s Regime after the Invasion of Ukraine May 4, 2022 Center for European Policy Studies Watch Here
Strategies for Teaching about Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine March 15, 2022 American Political Science Association Watch Here
Russia and Ukraine: History Behind the Headlines March 4, 2022 American Historical Association Watch Here
Dean’s Speaker Series: What’s Next for Ukraine, Russia, and the World? March 1, 2022 Johns Hopkins SAIS Watch Here
Rapid Response Panel: Ukraine Under Attack February 28, 2022 Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University Watch Here

Readings**

Introductory Histories
  • Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine (second edition)
    • A travelogue of sorts that accounts for the history of Ukraine from the foundation of Kyivan Rus to the Maidan/Revolution of Dignity of 2014.
    • Each chapter profiles a region of Ukraine – e.g., Kyiv, Odesa, Ivano-Frankivsk – and its place in particular moments of Ukrainian and greater European history.
    • The second half of the second edition places recent events – e.g., the Orange Revolution of 2004 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 – in to larger historical context.
    • Because this is a travelogue written for a popular audience, it may be a particularly good resource for undergraduate teaching.
  • Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015)
    • Quite possibly the most exhaustive and readable history of Ukraine written to date.
    • Plokhy focuses on Ukraine’s position in relation to Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East and thus demonstrates its role in on-going and recent geo-political conflicts
    • Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and also the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI)
  • Myroslav Shkandrij, Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917-2017: History’s Flashpoints and Today’s Memory Wars (2019)
    • This installment of Routledge’s series on Cultural History gives a concise, critical history of twentieth- and twenty-first century Ukraine by attending to four (4) distinct moments – or “flashpoints” – in contemporary Ukrainian history.
    • Shkandrij, Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba, has published many books about Russo-Ukrainian relations, Avant-Garde Ukrainian art and literature, and representations of Jews in Ukrainian literature.
  • Serhy Yekelchyk Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know* Second Edition (2020)
    • A concise history of Ukraine from a contemporary geo-political perspective by a professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria.
  • Igort, The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks (trans. Jamie Richards 2016)
    • Igort is an Italian comics producer of Russo-Ukrainian heritage whose two books, The Ukrainian Notebooks and The Russian Notebooks, offer graphic narratives of (post-) Soviet history.
    • The Ukrainian Notebooks demonstrates how the Stalinist-engineered famine of 1931-1933 (or Holodomor – literally, “murder by hunger”) has profoundly shaped post-Soviet Ukrainian cultural memory.
    • The Russian Notebooks focuses on the reportage of Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkoyskaya, who was assassinated for her exposure of Putin’s war on Chechnya
    • The post-script of the English-translated compilation of these two books calls further attention to the contemporary geo-political implications of Soviet/Russian imperialism
  • Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2018)
    • Applebaum’s history of the Stalinist-engineered famine of 1931-1933 (or Holodomor) ultimately accounts for how this genocide and its cultural memory has influenced the current relationship between Ukraine and Russia.
    • Applebaum is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Gulag: A History (2003), Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956, and Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020)
    • Her essays for The Atlantic have long called attention to the relationship between Russian authoritarianism/imperialist objectives and Western European and American neo-fascism in the age of Trump
      • Follow her on Twitter
  • Timothy Snyder, Yale historian and public intellectual in the Age of Putin and Trump
    • The Road to Unfreedom (2018) essentially foretells last week’s invasion by demonstrating how Putin has been influenced by a veritable cocktail of nineteenth-century Slavophilism, fascist rhetoric, and Stalinism.
    • Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) offers a nuanced history of the Second World War by focusing on the entangled, porous history of Eastern Europe – a geo-political region which, though it has been long neglected by Western European and Anglo-American historiography bore the brunt of civilian and military casualties and was the site of both Nazi and Soviet genocides.
    • Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015) deliberately focuses on Hitler’s preoccupation with the “Black Earth” of Ukraine to give an account of the Nazi concept of Lebensraum and the genocide of Eastern European Jews.
    • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century (2017) is a deliberately concise handbook that offers Snyder’s reflections on the implications of Nazi and Stalinist history with respect to contemporary anti-authoritarian activism and social justice movements.
      • Snyder’s “lessons” include, for example, “Practice Corporeal Politics” “Listen for Dangerous Words,” and “Be Calm When The Unthinkable Arrives”
      • Snyder’s book is now available in a graphic edition illustrated/designed by Nora Krug.
  • Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy (2020), The Future Is History (2017) and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012)
    • as well as other books and New Yorker articles about Russia, the experience of Russian Jews, and the experiences of LGBT+ people in Russia and Eastern Europe.
    • Follow them on Twitter

 

Scholarly Texts
  • Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007)
    • Chernetsky draws significantly on postmodern and post-colonial theory (and especially the work of Frederic Jameson) in order to conjecture Ukraine’s role in a post-Soviet  imaginary.
  • Tamara Hundurova (trans. Sergiy Yakovenko) The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s 
    •  A study of postmodern/postcolonial homelessness, trauma, and apocalypse that investigates radical shifts in temporal and spatial geo-political thinking
  • Serhii Plokhy, The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present (2021)
    • A companion piece to Plokhy’s scholarly works that present a public intellectual’s thinking about Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and Western Europe.
  • Vic Satzewich, The Ukrainian Diaspora (2014)
    • An exhaustive history of the Ukrainian diaspora throughout the world that calls attention to the ways that diasporic communities have (re-)imagined Ukraine
  • See also the HURI website (https://huri.harvard.edu/) which includes a list of recent scholarly texts on Ukrainian culture and literature https://www.hup.harvard.edu/results-list.php?collection=1061

 

Literary Texts/Resources
  • Instructors of World/ contemporary literature should be aware of the following authors:
    • Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) – or, as he’s known in Ukraine, Mykola Hohol – whose early 19th century Russian-language short stories, novellas, and plays drew on his experiences as a Ukrainian colonial subject at the height of the Russian Empire.
    • Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) – Ukraine’s national poet, an emancipated serf whose epic poem, “Testimony/Zapovit” (1845) galvanized nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalism
    • Ivan Franko (1856-1916)– a western Ukrainian intellectual, translator, poet, and writer who drew on Carpathian dialects to compose texts like Lys Mykyta  (Mykyta the Clever Fox)– later adapted by British children’s author Roald Dahl and American filmmaker Wes Anderson
    • Lesia Ukrainika – née Larysa Patrivna Kosach  (1871-1913)– an early twentieth-century poly-lingual proto-feminist whose poems, stories, and plays demonstrated her commitment to a free Ukraine.
  • Instructors of World/contemporary literature should also be aware of the following Ukrainian authors (and their translators)
    • Oksana Zabuzhko is a Ukrainian public intellectual who has not only published exquisitely written novels in Ukrainian (e.g. Field Work in Ukrainian Sex and The Museum of Secrets) and poems (some translated into English by UF MFA alums) but who has also called attention to the roles of women in Ukrainian liberation.
      •  (Honestly, my bet is on her for next year’s Nobel Prize in Literature – it’s been a long time coming)
    • Serhiy Zhadan is a Ukrainian poet, author, and translator who has famously produced works in Surzhyk – a combination of Ukrainian and Russian dialects.
      • Translations of his poems have appeared in Tin House and Virginia Quarterly Review 
      • His recently translated and critically acclaimed  novel, The Orphanage (2021) depicts the everyday lives of civilians living in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine
  • To that end, colleagues in both the PhD and MFA programs should be aware of New Words for War: Poems From Ukraine (eds. Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky) which introduces English translations of poetry produced by the newest generation of Ukrainian writers.
  • Some recent works of children’s literature:
    • How War Changed Rondo (Romana Romanshyn and Andrij Lesiv)  and translated by Oksana Luchevska
      • a nuanced reflection on the impact of war on children throughout the world, which only tangentially addresses the on-going crisis in Ukraine.
    • Novels and picture books by Marsha Forchuk-Skrypuch, a Canadian-Ukrainian author
      • E.g. Enough, illustrated by Michael Martchenko (the illustrator of Paper Bag Princess)
      • The War Below and Making Bombs for Hitler
    • Amanda McCrina’s recent YA novel Traitor, which depicts Polish and Ukrainian allegiances in Lwów/L’viv during the Second World War.
Other Reading Resources

UF Faculty with Related Expertise

Faculty Department
Seth Bernstein History Website
Aida Hozic (Balkan/SE Europe Perspective) Political Science Website
Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox Sociology Website
Amie Kreppel (EU Perspective) European Studies Website
Bryon Moraski Political Science Website
Zachary Selden Political Science Website
Anastasia Ulanowicz English Website

** Thank you to Dr. Anastasia Ulanowicz for her contributions to the list of readings.