Voices from Ukraine and Russia

 

FICTION

THE TURNCOAT BY SIEGFRIED LENZ
Previously unpublished, this German postwar classic is one of the best books of this major writer, who died in 2014. The last summer before the end of World War II, Walter Proska is posted to a small unit tasked with ensuring the safety of a railway line deep in the forest on the border with Ukraine and Belarus. In this swampy region, a handful of men - stunned by the heat, attacked by mosquitoes, and abandoned by their own troops in the face of the Resistance - must also submit to the increasingly absurd and inhuman orders of their superior. 

I WILL DIE IN A FOREIGN LAND BY KALANI PICKHART
In 1913 Paris, a Russian ballet incited a riot. A century later, protestors gather in Kyiv to protest the president’s decision to forge a closer alliance with Putin’s Russia instead of signing a referendum with the EU, only to face bloodshed when military police shoot live ammunition into the crowd, killing more than a hundred peaceful protestors. Blending voices of the past and present while following the lives of four very different people over the course of one volatile Ukrainian winter, I Will Die in a Foreign Land paints a picture of a turbulent Slavic history and how it has led to events today.

SOMETHING UNBELIEVABLE BY MARIA KUZNETSOVA
Struggling to balance her life as a new mother, Natasha looks to her beloved grandmother Larissa, asking her to share the story of their family’s wartime escape from Nazis in Kiev. Larissa tells the story of their three years hiding out in the Ural Mountains, shocking both herself and Natasha with the parallels to present.

DEAF REPUBLIC BY ILYA KAMINSKY
In his introduction, the poetry editor Kevin Young observes that Kaminsky, whose family fled Ukraine in 1993, writes about deafness and war in ways that arouse the conscience: “Kaminsky, who is hard of hearing himself, has the citizens of this republic speak with hand gestures and signs—some of which punctuate and animate the poems—as they resist a world of misunderstanding and military violence.”

GOOD CITIZENS NEED NOT FEAR BY MARIA REVA
From moments of intense paranoia to surprising tenderness and back again, Reva’s novel explores what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history. Inspired by her and her family's own experiences in Ukraine, Reva brings the black absurdism of early Shteyngart and the sly interconnectedness of Anthony Marra's Tsar of Love and Techno to a "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews) collection that is "fearless and thrilling" (Bret Anthony Johnston), and as clever as it is heartfelt.

LIKE A RIVER FROM ITS COURSE BY KELLI STUART
An epic novel exposing the ugliness of war and the beauty of hope. The city of Kiev was bombed in Hitler's blitzkrieg across the Soviet Union, but the constant siege was only the beginning for her citizens. In this sweeping historical saga, Kelli Stuart takes the listener on a captivating journey into the little-known history of Ukraine's tragedies through the eyes of four compelling characters who experience the same story from different perspectives.

NONFICTION

If you’ve got a little time and want to delve deep into the history leading up to the conflict, UKRAINE IN HISTORIES AND STORIES: ESSAYS BY UKRANIAN INTELLECTUALS, edited by Volodymyr Yermolenko, makes an excellent starting point due to its accessibility — you can download it for free — and its breadth of topics. It collects essays on a variety of historical and contemporary topics written by leading Ukrainian writers and scholars. Their combination of local knowledge and subject matter expertise makes for powerful reading.

CRIMEA:THE GREAT CRIMEAN WAR, 1854–1856 BY TREVOR ROYLE
The Crimean Peninsula is one of several regions at the center of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict: Russia annexed it in 2014, and its citizens voted to rejoin Russia in an election that same year. But this is not the first-time nations have gone to war over the region. This book gives an in-depth review of the Crimean War, in which Russia lost considerable land and military influence, and explains part of the reason why Russia feels the land is rightfully theirs.

RED FAMINE: STALIN’S WAR ON UKRAINE BY ANNE APPLEBAUM
A major and exceptionally tragic flare-up in the tension between Russia and Ukraine occurred in the early 1930s, when Josef Stalin’s agricultural policies created a famine that led to the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. The author of this book argues that those deaths were more than just the unintended result of bad policy: they were part of a deliberate attempt to punish and silence Ukraine’s independence movement.

SECONDHAND TIME: THE LAST OF THE SOVIETS BY SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
When the Soviet Union broke apart in the early ’90s, many former Soviets were left feeling understandably confused, angry, and powerless about the loss of the only home nation they’d ever known. When Putin boasts about how “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia,” he’s playing on the sense of disillusionment and lost glory so starkly conveyed in this compelling oral history.

THE GATES OF EUROPE: A HISTORY OF UKRAINE BY SERHII PLOKHY
In The Gates of Europe, Harvard professor Plokhy gives a comprehensive history of Ukraine, starting in 45,000 B.C.E and ending in the war in Donbas, that highlights the long battle for sovereignty and identity. Complete with maps, a glossary of Ukrainian terms, and a “Who’s Who” section on major historical players, this book is a critical text for understanding Ukraine’s intricate and complex history.

FROM COLD WAR TO HOT PEACE: AN AMERICAN AMBASSADOR IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA BY MICHAEL MCFAUL
This riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of US-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of Putin as Russian president. From the first days of McFaul's ambassadorship, the Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine him, hassling him with tactics that included dispatching protesters to his front gates, slandering him on state media, and tightly surveilling him, his staff, and his family.        

VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL BY SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH, TRANSLATED BY KEITH GESSEN
The effects of the 1986 nuclear disaster on Ukrainians and Belarusians cannot be overstated.  Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning book compiles a tapestry of real accounts from those who were closely affected by the blast. Haunting and gripping, this book provides additional insight into the gritty, survivalist nature of the Ukrainian people.

IN WARTIME: STORIES FROM UKRAINE BY TIM JUDAH
With In Wartime, Tim Judah lays bare the events that have turned neighbors against one another and mired Europe’s second-largest country in a conflict seemingly without end. Judah talks to everyone from politicians to poets, pensioners, and historians. Listening to their clashing explanations, he interweaves their stories to create a sweeping, tragic portrait of a country fighting a war of independence from Russia—twenty-five years after the collapse of the USSR.

LOST KINGDOM: THE QUEST FOR EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF THE RUSSIAN NATION, FROM 1470 TO THE PRESENT BY SERHII PLOKHY
 In Lost Kingdom, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the nation's history. Spanning over 500 years, from the end of the Mongol rule to the present day, Plokhy shows how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin exploited existing forms of identity, warfare, and territorial expansion to achieve imperial supremacy. An authoritative and masterful account of Russian nationalism, Lost Kingdom chronicles the story behind Russia's belligerent empire-building quest.

YOUNGHEROES OF THE SOVIET UNION: A MEMOIR AND A RECKONING BY ALEX HALBERSTADT
Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. In Ukraine, he tracks down his paternal grandfather to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped three generations of his family. He visits Lithuania to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to Moscow where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers’ wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living dealing in black-market American records. Along the way, Halberstadt traces the fragile and indistinct boundary between history and biography.