In a Europe remade by the First World War, his talents led him to different roles—intelligence operative, powerful statesman, underground activist, lifelong conspirator. Henryk Józewski directed Polish intelligence in Ukraine, governed the borderland region of Volhynia in the interwar years, worked in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet underground during the Second World War, and conspired against Poland’s Stalinists until his arrest in 1953. His personal story, important in its own right, sheds new light on the foundations of Soviet power and on the ideals of those who resisted it. By following the arc of Józewski’s life, this book demonstrates that his tolerant policies toward Ukrainians in Volhynia were part of Poland’s plans to roll back the communist threat.The book mines archival materials, many available only since the fall of communism, to rescue Józewski, his Polish milieu, and his Ukrainian dream from oblivion. An epilogue connects his legacy to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the democratic revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

    After the 1917 revolution, this view was discredited by many leading scholars, politicians, and cultural figures, but none were more intimately involved in the dismantling of the old imperial identity and its historical narrative than the eminent Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934).Hrushevsky took an active part in the work of Ukrainian scholarly, cultural, and political organizations and became the first head of the independent Ukrainian state in 1918. Serhii Plokhy's "Unmaking Imperial Russia" examines Hrushevsky's construction of a new historical paradigm that brought about the nationalization of the Ukrainian past and established Ukrainian history as a separate field of study. By showing how the 'all-Russian' historical paradigm was challenged by the Ukrainian national project, Plokhy provides the indispensable background for understanding the current state of relations between Ukraine and Russia.

    "Ukrainian folk art's most outstanding feature is its ornamentation - individual motifs applied using various techniques (weaving, embroidering, painting, applique, engraving, carving, embossing) and different media (textiles, leather, wood, clay, eggs, metal, and even dough). Beneath the designs lie deeper meanings suffused with the mystery, sacredness, and ritual in whose power people once profoundly believed. The motifs, which date back to ancient times, were signs, symbols, or codes that had cosmic, religious, ritualistic and magical significance. The book describes in detail each of the three motifs mentioned in the title in three separate essays, and contains full color photographs of 115 objects from the exhibition." - Publisher.

    Contested Tongues explains the complex linguistic and cultural politics in a bilingual country where the two main languages are closely related but their statuses are hotly contested. Laada Bilaniuk finds that the social divisions in Ukraine are historically rooted, ideologically constructed, and inseparable from linguistic practice. She does not take the labeled categories as givens but questions what Ukrainian and Russian mean to different people, and how the boundaries between these categories may be blurred in unstable times.Bilaniuk's analysis of the contemporary situation is based on ethnographic research in Ukraine and grounded in historical research essential to understanding developments since the fall of the Soviet Union. Mixed language practices (surzhyk) in Ukraine have generally been either ignored or reviled, but Bilaniuk traces their history, their social implications, and their accompanying ideologies. Through a focus on mixed language and purism, the author examines the power dynamics of linguistic and cultural correction, through which people seek either to confer or to deny others social legitimacy. The author's examination of the rapid transformation of symbolic values in Ukraine challenges theories of language and social power that have as a rule been based on the experience of relatively stable societies.