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The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

This book is dense. Starting from the 5th century B.C., Plokhy aims to capture the essence of Ukrainian identity as it has developed over 2,000 years. Considered a historical crossroad between east and west, we see how the territory that is now Ukraine has repeatedly fallen under control of successive empires; the Vikings, Byzantium, the Mongols, Poland-Lithuania and the Soviet Union have all claimed control over Ukrainian land. The book covers everything up to about 2015 after “little green men” invaded eastern Ukraine and Crimea. If you don’t know who the little green men are, I guess you’ll just have to read the book!

While this book is fantastic, it is (as I said) dense. If you don’t want to read the whole book but still want to get an understanding of Russian-Ukrainian historical relations, I would start at Part III of the book and read until the end.

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Understanding Russia: A Cultural History

Professor / Publisher: Lynn Anne Hartnett, Ph.D / The Great Courses

If you prefer to watch or listen, these lectures from The Great Courses provide an excellent foundation for Russian history. Dr. Hartnett and The Great Courses provide detailed visual materials throughout the program to illustrate changes in territory. If you don’t want to watch all 24 lectures, I recommend lectures three, eight, 13, and 21.

Did you know we have access to thousands of movies and documentaries through Kanopy? All it takes is a Pinnacle library card and an email address to sign up and get 10 credits each month!

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In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas by Stanislav Aseyev (translated by Lidia Wolanskyj)

This book provides a harrowing account of the years after Russia first invaded the Donbas. Aseyev was “disappeared” for his journalism denouncing the pro-Russia government that was installed in Donetsk. He was held without trial from 2017 to 2019, when he was charged with espionage. Although freed a few months after sentencing (he was part of a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and the separatist governments in eastern Ukraine), he suffered physical and psychological torture throughout his two year imprisonment.

If I could describe this book in a word, it would be local. Instead of commenting on the conflict as a whole, Aseyev often uses local examples in Donetsk and Makiivka to illustrate larger trends within the occupied region. Bringing the frame down to a local level allows the consequences of the invasion and the variety of opinion among Donbas residents to be seen clearly.

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Ukraine and the Art of Strategy by Lawrence Freedman

Written by one of the giants in the field of security studies, Ukraine and the Art of Strategy largely (though not completely) siphons out the historical context given in most literature about Russia and Ukraine. Instead it focuses largely on theory and decision-making. This one is light on politics and history but heavy on war strategy, negotiation and game theory. If you’re more curious about the conflict itself rather than the roots, this is the book for you.

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Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk

One of this most interesting ways to learn about history is to read literature or poetry from the time period you’re studying. You might not learn the cold, hard facts, but you can get quite an intimate understanding of a time period or an event by reading the interpretation of a well-researched author (for more on that, check out Roxanne’s Stacks to the Future blog series). In this book, you won’t learn about casualties, weapons or troop deployments; Lyuba Yakimchuk’s Apricots of Donbas is a title where you’ll come to understand a civilian’s view of war.

This work of poetry, written by a refugee from the Donbas, gives a very personal experience of the invasion and subsequent conflict that began in 2014. Yakimchuk’s poems really stress a sudden loss of control of her life after Russia first invaded. She’ll describe her dissonance in writing “high-minded gilded poems” while her friends lie trapped under rubble, or in being called a “displaced person.”  Other times, she sounds playful, optimistic and even child-like. The instruments of war will momentarily be revered in the same way children might imitate soldiers. Really, I cannot recommend this book enough, if only to humanize the consequences of the war. It’s too easy to forget the people on the ground when we’re looking at territorial changes on a map.

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Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

If all the nonfiction I’ve listed just isn’t your style, Yevgenia Belorusets has the novel for you. Several stories follow multiple women while they navigate a post-2014 eastern Ukraine, one which feels unreal. The stories themselves are short and surreal with the book standing at just over 100 pages. Again, you won’t learn cold, hard facts about the conflict. Lucky Breaks does not revolve around soldiers or generals, geography or referendums. In an NPR interview, one of the translators of Lucky Breaks, Eugene Ostashevksy, put it best: “It’s a book that makes invisible people visible.”

Despite being a work of surreal fiction, this novel offers an excellent view of a very real psychology that exists among the people of eastern Ukraine. Remember how you had to read excerpts from A Farewell to Arms in high school social studies when you learned about World War I? Or when you read The Things They Carried to learn about the Vietnam War and the 70s? I fully expect Lucky Breaks to appear on some school curriculums.

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