A Ukrainian Resource Center

Our suggestions for teachers, students and the general public.

GENERAL HISTORY OF UKRAINE

A BBC timeline of Ukrainian history

An excellent starting point.

The CIA’s Ukraine Factbook

Not many people know that the CIA (which is, after all, an information-gathering organization), publishes excellent profiles on various countries. Here is what they published on Ukraine. (Viewed best while wearing a trench coat.)

Smithsonian Magazine history of 20th century in Ukraine

Journalist Katja Cengel has done an excellent job in this article in bringing together 20th century Ukrainian history, Vladimir Putin’s insistence Ukraine is not a country, and how this war began.

HOLODOMOR

The Holodomor, or the Great Famine, was initiated by the Kremlin in Moscow, and well over 3.5 million Ukrainians—of every religion—starved to death in 1932-1933. Some historians put the numbers far higher.

The Holocaust and Genocide Studies Department of the University of Minnesota

An important and thoroughly researched historical overview of the Great Famine. Although the author is not sited, you’ll find facts, details and links to further readings and video presentations.

USA Today

Orlando Mayorquin has put together an excellent summary of the Holodomor. Probably the best site for teachers and students on this subject.

The Atlantic

Historian Anne Applebaum on the Holodomor.

UKRAINE AND ITS JEWS

YIVO’s history of Jews in Ukraine

YIVO: an indispensible resource

Founded in Vilna (today’s Vilnius) in 1925, YIVO (The Yiddish Scientific Institute) launched a series of historical research programs on Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. As the Second World War approached, YIVO and most (but not all) of its employees and researchers fled to New York, where it has become part of the Center for Jewish History. We strongly recommend getting to know YIVO and here is a link to their home page.

YIVO on Ukraine

In the 1990s, YIVO launched a decades-long program called the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, which is available in hardback or online (and for free). Here is their historical summary of Jews in Ukraine.

PODCASTS

New podcasts appear every week on Ukraine. American interviewers such as Terry Gross and Ezra Klein interview experts from time to time, and The Economist and The Guardian offer insightful podcast episodes every week. The following programs are specifically and exclusively about Ukraine.

Ukrainecast

Ukrainecast, by BBC. Updated regularly. Interviews with political analysts, military experts and on-the-ground BBC reporters.

State of Ukraine

State of Ukraine, by NPR. Updated twice each day. Excellent reports from inside Ukraine and elsewhere.

Explaining Ukraine

Explaining Ukraine is hosted by Volodymyr Yermolenko. These are daily, on-the-ground reports from Ukraine, created by Ukrainians.

Ukraine: The Latest

An excellent podcast series from The Telegraph. Always worth listening to Defense Editor Dominic Nicholls


RECOMMENDED READINGS

HISTORY

The Gates of Europe, by Serhii Plokhy

Plokhy has written several books on Ukraine’s history, from the horrors of Chernobyl to the poisoning of former Soviet diplomats. This is his well reached history of Ukraine. It tops our list.

Borderland, by Anna Reid

First published in 1997 and updated in 2015, a highly readable account of a complex country. Reid worked as a journalist for over a decade in Russia and Ukraine and also published a fine history of the siege of Leningrad.

Red Harvest, by Anne Applebaum

A deeply researched and well-written history of Stain’s enforced famine on Ukraine. Perhaps the book to read on the subject and historian Sheila Fitzpatrick discusses the book in this review in The Guardian.

HOLOCAUST

Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder

Not without its detractors, this searing account of the lands torn apart and savaged by both Hitler and Stalin is considered by many a masterwork.

The Ravine, by Wendy Lower

Two Slovak journalists presented Lower with a chilling photograph taken outside a small Ukrainian town during the Second World War. Germans and Ukrainians were shooting a mother and her children. Who were the Germans? Who were the Ukrainians? Who were the victims? Who took the picture—and why? While parts of the book are extremely difficult read, this is a gripping study of the Holocaust.

FICTION

Red Cavalry, by Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel was surely one of the great writers to come out of Ukraine, specifically from Odesa. His fictionalized account of riding with the Red Army in western Ukraine in 1920 is a masterwork of story telling. Recently (and ably) translated by Boris Dryluk, Red Cavalry is a must read.

The White Guard, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Another classic. Set around the same time as Babel’s book, the scene is Kyiv in 1918, the first year of the civil war. James Meek of The Guardian retraces Bulgakov’s novel in a recent trip to Kyiv.

Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman

Born in the Ukrainian city of Berdichev, Grossman was a reporter for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) during the Second World War. He filed dispatches from the battle of Stalingrad and was with the Red Army when they came upon the destroyed death camp of Treblinka. The reports he wrote at Treblinka were used in the Nuremberg trials. Grossman lost his own mother to German bullets. His novel, Life and Fate, was submitted to censors in 1960. Since it did not consider all Soviet soldiers heroic nor all Germans evil, the manuscript was confiscated by the KGB. Grossman died in 1964. In 1974, friends smuggled the novel out of the Soviet Union—on microfilm. Life and Fate is now considered one of the great works of fiction of the 20th century. Linda Grant wrote this review of it for The Guardian.

CONTEMPORARY UKRAINE AND RUSSIA

Two on-the-ground accounts of the revolution in Kyiv in 2014:


Marci Shore is a Yale-based historian of Central and Eastern Europe and was on the ground during the 2013/2014 Maidan revolution. She published her account in The Ukrainian Night.The Ukrainian Night

Andrey Kurkov (see below) is a Ukrainian novelist who published his take on events of the Maidan revolution of 2014 in Ukraine Diaries.Ukraine Diaries

While books such as these can become quickly outdated, each author continues to write on the Russian invasion of 2022.

A different take can be found in Tim Judah’s In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. Here’s an important review from the CS Monitor.Click here

Judah has been covering wars and conflicts since the early 1990s, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Bosnia and Kosovo. He files for The Economist from Ukraine and throughout the Balkans. When Russia attacked and occupied eastern Ukraine in 2014, Judah went deep into the territory, and this book, filled with poignancy and horror, is well worth your time.

While there are several excellent books on Vladimir Putin and his regime, we recommend Putin’s People by Catherine Belton. Aside from strong reviews like this (Link below), Belton and her publisher have been sued by a half dozen Russian oligarchs, doing everything they could to quash the book both before it was published and after.to the review