SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY  

 

The standard surveys, covering Ukraine from prehistoric times to independence, are Orest Subtelny’s Ukraine: a History (Toronto 1988), and Paul Magocsi’s equally magisterial A History of Ukraine (Toronto, 1996.)

George Vernadsky’s Kievan Russia, volume two of his multi-volume A History of Russia (New Haven 1948), is a thorough, though now rather dated, account of medieval Rus. James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe (London 1966) gives an original overview of Rus art and culture; Richard Pipes’s Russia under the Old Regime (London 1974) traces the effects of Mongol suzerainty.

For the history of Polish rule in Ukraine, I relied on Norman Davies’s two-volume God’s Playground (Oxford 1981) and Adam Zamoyski’s The Polish Way (London 1987). Roman Szporluk’s After Empire: What? in Daedalus, vol. 123, no.3, stresses Ukraine’s enduring Polish ties. Subtelny’s The Mazepists (Boulder 1981) details the rise and fall of Mazeppa, and Robert Massie’s Peter the Great (London 1981) includes a lively account of the events surrounding the battle of Poltava. Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia: People and Empire (London 1997) throws new light on tsarist imperialism. On Shevchenko’s career, I used Pavlo Zaitsev’s Taras Shevchenko: a Life, written in the 1930s and reprinted by the University of Toronto Press in 1988; translations of Shevchenko’s poetry are taken from Vera Rich’s Song Out of Darkness (London 1961). Hugh Seton-Watson’s Nations and States (London 1977) and John Armstrong’s Ukrainian Nationalism (Colorado 1990) thoughtfully analyse modern Ukrainian nationalism.

Pipes’s Russia under the Bolshevik Regime: 1919–1924 (London 1994) covers the Civil War in Ukraine, as, marvellously, do Isaac Babel’s Collected Stories (London 1994) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard (London 1989). The seminal works on Stalin’s famine and purges are Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow (London 1986) and The Great Terror (London 1990). Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (New York 1946) and Lev Kopelev’s The Education of a True Believer (New York 1980) are outstanding first-hand accounts of the period. Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims (New York 1981) is a blackly comic round-up of Western apologists for communism, Eugene Lyon’s Assignment in Utopia (London 1937) a fascinating memoir of life as a journalist in 1930s Moscow.

The most balanced treatments I found of the Ukrainian war record were David Marples’s Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s (New York 1992) and Philip Friedman’s Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (New York 1980). Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust (London 1986) details Jewish massacres month by month and town by town. Amongst survivors’ memoirs, Leon Weliczker Well’s The Janowska Road (London 1966) and Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar (London 1970) stand out. Conquest’s The Nation Killers (London 1970) covers the deportation of the Crimean Tatars; Vera Tolz’s article in World War 2 and the Soviet People (London 1993) incorporates new research on the subject. The only English-language history of the khanate I know of is Alan Fisher’s The Crimean Tatars (Stanford 1978). The Transcarpathian débâcle of 1939 is hilariously described by Michael Winch in his Republic for a Day: an Eye-Witness Account of the Carpatho-Ukraine Incident (London 1939). Petro Grigorenko’s Memoirs (London 1983) cover, amongst much else, the Tatar liberation movement and the beginnings of Ukrainian dissidence.

Eyewitness accounts of the Chernobyl disaster are taken from Yuri Shcherbak’s Chernobyl: a Documentary Story (London 1989). The best general analyses of the accident are The Chernobyl Disaster, by Viktor Haynes and Marko Bojcun (London 1988), and Marples’s The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster (London 1988). Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence by Taras Kuzio and Andrew Wilson (London 1994) details the tumultuous years 1987–1991; Solomea Pavlychko’s Letters from Kiev (New York 1992) capture the atmosphere of the time. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Premature Partnership, in vol. 73, no.2 of Foreign Affairs, and Szporluk’s Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Question: a Comment in vol.9, no.4 of Post-Soviet Affairs stress Russia’s non-acceptance of the loss of empire, and urge continued Western support for Ukrainian independence.

Ukraine’s post-independence history is authoritatively and comprehensively covered in Andrew Wilson’s Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (London 2005) and his Ukraine Crisis: What it Means for the West (London 2014), which takes events up to the autumn of that year. Askold Krushelnycky’s An Orange Revolution: a Personal Journey through Ukrainian History (London 2006) is good on the Gongadze affair and Anders Aslund’s Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It, due out in April 2015, will be essential reading on the economy. For an understanding of the social and political dysfunction that helped bring about today’s war in the Donbass, watch Jakob Preuss’s superb, light-touch documentary The Other Chelsea (2010). Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan (2014) lacks commentary but provides a sumptuous visual record of the 2013–14 protests. The BBC’s Putin, Russia and the West: Democracy Threatens (2012) covers the international ramifications of the Orange Revolution, and includes interviews with many senior players.

Among travel books, Anne Applebaum’s Between East and West (London 1995) and Neal Ascherson’s Black Sea (London 1995) both movingly cover parts of Ukraine. Lastly, Patricia Herlihy’s Odessa: a History 1794–1914 (Cambridge, Mass. 1986) and Michael Hamm’s Kiev: a Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton 1993) are excellent city histories.