STORIES
Freedom
DONATE

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Putting conflict in context: A reading list for Ukraine

by Steve Donoghue, CSM Contributor from United States

148308A reading list for UkraineCSM Staff
April 12, 2022

When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, even avid news watchers throughout the West were stunned. Despite the well publicized military buildup of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border for many months, it seemed on some level unbelievable that Russia would launch a land war on a European nation while, thanks to social media and the 24-hour news cycle, the whole world could watch – and unite in sympathy with the valiant Ukrainians.

One natural response on the part of all these shocked onlookers was to look for books to help them make sense of what they were seeing in their news feeds. 

They’ve looked, for instance, for accounts of precedents to Vladimir Putin’s attempt at a land-grab in Ukraine – the largest and most noticeable of which was his 2014 attack on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. That’s the opening emphasis of 2016’s “Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire” by Agnia Grigas, an experienced political analyst who examines what can be studied of Putin’s mind frame in attempting to reconstitute a 21st-century version of the vanished Soviet Union.

148308CSM Staff"Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire," by Agnia Grigas, Yale University Press, 352 pp.

 

That annexation of Crimea wasn’t acceptable to Ukraine, of course, and the result was war, which journalist Tim Judah covers in granular detail in his gritty and intensely moving book “In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine.” The fighting Judah covers can’t help but read as a prelude to the larger-scale violence filling the news today, but the stories Judah relates are more detailed and focus on the war’s effects on ordinary Ukrainians. (I reviewed “In Wartime” for the Monitor back in 2016.)

148308CSM Staff"In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine," by Tim Judah, Tim Duggan Books, 288 pp.

 

Readers anxiously studying the headlines have likewise looked for books about the attacked country itself. The best of these is Serhii Plokhy’s “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine,” which came out in 2015 and takes a scrupulous, panoramic look at over a thousand years of Ukraine’s history – including its long and convoluted relationship with Russia. Plokhy is a tremendously engaging writer, and “The Gates of Europe” is an absorbing reading experience that well deserves its newfound bestseller status, however tragic the reason.

148308CSM Staff"The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine," by Serhii Plokhy, Basic Books, 448 pp.

 

One of the most devastating chapters in Ukraine’s history gets its own excellent book in Anne Applebaum’s “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine” from 2017, which details Stalin’s policy of “Sovietization” in Ukraine, which resulted in a consciously planned and mercilessly executed widespread famine that killed many thousands among Ukraine’s peasantry and left deep scars on the fabric connecting the two countries. In the course of her study, Applebaum examines the hot-button topic of Ukraine’s nationalist aspirations, the dreams of its people – and the long-standing Russian urge to quash them.

148308CSM Staff"Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine," by Anne Applebaum, Anchor, 608 pp.

 

The dreams of ordinary Ukrainian people are at the center of Anna Reid’s 2015 book “Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine,” in which she travels the country and talks to people from all walks of life. Her book is evocatively written, and she matches the personal portraits she relates with a sweeping history of the country on a broader canvas. In unsure hands, this combination of wide and narrow focus can go wrong, ending up seeming to trivialize both. But Reid invests both concentrations with extensive research and rich empathy.

148308CSM Staff"Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine," by Anna Reid, Basic Books, 368 pp.

Reid’s book moves readers right up to relatively present-day events, and those events touch the wider international world mainly because of one overwhelming tension that’s on the minds of even the most disinterested observers: What are the chances that this conflict in eastern Ukraine could spill out in the larger arena of first Europe and then the rest of the world?

Page created on 5/25/2022 6:46:08 PM

Last edited 5/25/2022 7:19:39 PM

The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.