Efforts to gain access to the site of catastrophic radiation damage were denied, and the residents of Chernobyl were given no answers as their lives hung in the balance. Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed. Her findings make clear the irreversible impact of man-made radioactivity on every living thing; and hauntingly, they force us to confront the untold legacy of decades of weapons-testing and other catastrophic nuclear incidents.

    At first she is enamored with the Ukrainians’ idealism, which reminds her of her own patriotic family. But when the romantic revolution melts into a war with Russia, she becomes disillusioned, prompting a return home to the US and the diaspora community that raised her. As the daughter of a man who studies Ukrainian dissidents for a living, the granddaughter of war refugees, and the great-granddaughter of a gulag victim, Bilocerkowycz has inherited a legacy of political oppression. But what does it mean when she discovers a missing page from her family’s survival story—one that raises questions about her own guilt?In these linked essays, Bilocerkowycz invites readers to meet a swirling cast of post-Soviet characters, including a Russian intelligence officer who finds Osama bin Laden a few weeks after 9/11; a Ukrainian poet whose nose gets broken by Russian separatists; and a long-lost relative who drives a bus into the heart of Chernobyl. On Our Way Home from the Revolution muddles our easy distinctions between innocence and complicity, agency and fate.

    In this family saga and Great War story, love and loss are bound together by a country always at war. A heartbreakingly intimate novel about one courageous woman. In 1915, Lukia Mazurets, a Ukrainian farmwife, delivers her eighth child while her husband is serving in the Tsar’s army. Soon after, she and her children are forced to flee the invading Germans. Over the next fourteen years, Lukia must rely on her wits and faith to survive life in a refugee camp, the ravages of a typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik revolution, unimaginable losses, and one daughter’s forbidden love.Based on the true stories of her grandmother’s ordeals, author Diana Stevan captures the voices of those who had little say in a country that is still being fought over. Readers who've enjoyed Kristin Hannah's novel The Nightingale have bought this book.Available as a paperback, e-book and audiobook.

    From the time of the Tsars to the waning days of Communist regime, Russian leaders tried to control the flow of ideas by controlling its citizens' movements. They believed strict limits on travel combined with censorship was the best way to escape the influence of subversive Western ideologies. Yet Russians continued to emigrate westward, both to seek new opportunities and to flee political crises at home.Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Russians' presence in Western countries - particularly the United States - has been for the Kremlin both the biggest threat and the biggest opportunity. It sought for years to use the Russian emigre community to achieve Russia's goals - espionage to be sure, but also to influence policies and public opinion. Russia's exiles are a potent mix of the very rich and the very driven, some deeply hostile to their homeland and others deeply patriotic. Russia, a vast, insular nation, depends on its emigres - but it cannot always count on them.Celebrated Moscow-based journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan masterfully look at the complex, ever-shifting role of Russian émigrés from the October Revolution to present day. From comely secret agents to tragically doomed dissidents, the story of Russian émigrés is at times thrilling, at times touching, and always full of intrigue. But their influence and importance is an invaluable angle through which to understand Russia in the modern world.The Compatriots provides an intriguing and thought provoking gripping history of Russian score settling around the globe.©2019 Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (P)2019 Hachette Audio

    

    Proceeding chronologically, this book shows how Ukraine's separation from Russia in 1991, at the time called a 'civilized divorce', led to what many are now calling 'a new Cold War'. He argues that the conflict has worsened because of three underlying factors - the security dilemma, the impact of democratization on geopolitics, and the incompatible goals of a post-Cold War Europe. Rather than a peaceful situation that was squandered, D'Anieri argues that these were deep-seated pre-existing disagreements that could not be bridged, with concerning implications for the resolution of the Ukraine conflict. The book also shows how this war fits into broader patterns of contemporary international conflict and should therefore appeal to researchers working on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russia's relations with the West, and conflict and geopolitics more generally.

    Something terrible has already happened.Snegurochka opens in Kiev in 1992, one year after Ukraine's declaration of independence. Rachel, a troubled young English mother, joins her journalist husband on his first foreign posting in the city. Terrified of their apartment's balcony with its view of the Motherland statue she develops obsessive rituals to keep her three-month old baby safe. Her difficulties expose her to a disturbing endgame between Elena Vasilyevna, the old caretaker, and Mykola Sirko, a shady businessman who sends Rachel a gift. Rachel is the interloper, ignorant, isolated, yet also culpable with her secrets and her estrangements. As consequences bear down she seeks out Zoya, her husband s caustic-tongued fixer, and Stepan, the boy from upstairs who watches them all.Betrayal is everywhere and home is uncertain, but in the end there are many ways to be a mother.

    Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols.Driven by an urban "bourgeoisie" that rejected the hierarchies of industrial society in favor of a postmodern heterarchy, a previously passive post-Soviet country experienced a profound social revolution that generated new senses: "Dignity" and "fairness" became rallying cries for millions. Europe as the symbolic target of political aspiration gradually faded, but the impact (including on Europe) of Ukraine's revolution remained. When Russia invaded--illegally annexing Crimea and then feeding continuous military conflict in the Donbas--Ukrainians responded with a massive volunteer effort and touching patriotism. In the process, they transformed their country, the region, and indeed the world.This book provides a chronicle of Ukraine's Maidan and Russia's ongoing war, and puts forth an analysis of the Revolution of Dignity from the perspective of a participant observer.

    Based on large-scale research, the book offers a rethinking of postwar Soviet architecture, with Alex Bykov’s photographs documenting buildings in their current state and Ievgeniia Gubkina’s criticism and analysis giving an unexpected spin on the multifaceted modernist architectural movement, putting it in its correct global, historical and political context.

    One survivor is a seven-year-old girl. Lyuba is forced from her home into a Nazi ghetto, then spirited away, into hiding, for nearly two years -- on a farm, in haystacks.Under the hay Lyuba discovers the will to persevere, to survive. Even as her eyes open to the moral failings of her Ukrainian neighbors, she takes heart in the kindness of the Ukrainian farmer who is hiding her at great risk to himself and his family. She's encouraged, too, by thoughts of reunion with her older sister, Hanna, who is in hiding in town. But it's her uncommon bond with the farmer's dog, Brisko, that helps Lyuba through her greatest moments of peril, and despair.For Lyuba the dog becomes not just a guardian, but a guardian angel.The real Lyuba -- now living under a different name in the United States -- tells her own story in "The Girl in the Haystack," weaving a vivid, suspenseful narrative that addresses simply the complex matters of culture and ethnicity, trust and distrust, courage and cowardice. It is a story that has waited more than seventy years to be told.

    He only wrote one novel, Dead Souls, and destroyed much of his later work, so his stories constitute his major output.In this collection, beautifully and skilfully translated by Oliver Ready, Gogol’s three greatest St Petersburg stories – ‘The Nose’, ‘The Overcoat’ and ‘The Diary of a Madman’ – are presented alongside three masterworks set in the Ukrainian and Russian provinces, demonstrating the breadth of Gogol’s work.Gogol’s extraordinary work is characterised by his idiosyncratic, and often very funny sensibility, and these stories offer us his unique, original and marvellously skewed perspective on the world.

    The Normandy Invasion was already in the works; what American officials were suggesting until then was a second air front: the US Air Force would establish bases in Soviet-controlled territory, in order to "shuttle-bomb" the Germans from the Eastern front. For all that he had been pushing for the United States and Great Britain to do more to help the war effort--the Soviets were bearing by far the heaviest burden in terms of casualties--Stalin, recalling the presence of foreign troops during the Russian Revolution, balked at the suggestion of foreign soldiers on Soviet soil. His concern was that they would inflame regional and ideological differences. Eventually in early 1944, Stalin was persuaded to give in, and Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated. B-17 Superfortresses were flown from bases in Italy to the Poltova region (in what is today Ukraine).As Plokhy's book shows, what happened on these airbases mirrors the nature of the Grand Alliance itself. While both sides were fighting for the same goal, Germany's unconditional surrender, differences arose that no common purpose could overcome. Soviet secret policeman watched over the operations, shadowing every move, and eventually trying to prevent fraternization between American servicemen and local women. A catastrophic air raid by the Germans revealed the limitations of Soviet air defenses. Relations soured and the operations went south. Indeed, the story of the American bases foreshadowed the eventual collapse of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War. Using previously inaccessible archives, Allies and Adversaries offers a bottom-up history of the Grand Alliance, showing how it first began to fray on the airfields of World War II.

    Nobody.” When Mikhail Bulgakov composed this dark and prophetic phrase in Kiev amid the turmoil of the Russian civil war, the political troubles of his native Ukraine were well underway, but far from over. In Black Earth: A Journey through the Ukraine, journalist and celebrated travel writer Jens Mühling takes readers across the country during its most recent political crises: the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian annexation of Crimea. In the midst of this turmoil, Mühling delves deep into daily life in Ukraine, narrating his encounters with Ukrainian nationalists and old communists, Crimean Tatars and Cossacks, smugglers and soldiers, all of whose views could hardly be more different. Black Earth connects all these stories to convey an unconventional and unfiltered view of Ukraine, a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and the center of countless conflicts of opinion—and of arms.

    The collection combines reflections on Ukraine’s history (or histories, in plural), and analysis of the present, conceptual ideas and life stories. The book presents a multi-faceted image of Ukrainian memory and reality: from the Holodomor to Maidan, from Russian aggression to cultural diversity, from the depth of the past to the complexity of the present.The PDF of the English-language version: ukraineworld.org/storage/app/media/Uk...The PDF of the Ukrainian-language version: ukraineworld.org/storage/app/media/uk...