Any time a major world event unfolds people turn to libraries for information and perspectives to help understand. Here's a collection of materials to explore Ukraine’s history and culture, and its post-Soviet transformation into an independent state.
The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History Of Revolution by Marci Shore
In this lyrical and intimate book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true stories of activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it.
The Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum
In 1929, Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization -- in effect a second Russian revolution -- which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people perished between 1931 and 1933 in the U.S.S.R. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum reveals for the first time that three million of them died not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy, but because the state deliberately set out to kill them.
Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order by Rajan Menon and Eugene B. Rumer
Written in 2015, this title puts the Ukraine-Russia conflict in historical perspective by examining the evolution of the crisis and assessing its implications both for the Crimean peninsula and for Russia's relations with the West more generally. Experts in the international relations of post-Soviet states, political scientists Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer clearly show what is at stake in Ukraine, explaining the key economic, political, and security challenges and prospects for overcoming them.
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King
In Odessa, the greatest port on the Black Sea, a dream of cosmopolitan freedom inspired geniuses and innovators, from the writers Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir Jabotinsky and immunologist Ilya Mechnikov. Yet here too was death on a staggering scale, as World War II brought the mass murder of Jews carried out by the city’s Romanian occupiers. Odessa is an elegy for the vibrant, multicultural tapestry of which a thriving Jewish population formed an essential part, as well as a celebration of the survival of Odessa’s dream in a diaspora reaching all the way to Brighton Beach.
Mamushka: A Cookbook by Olia Hercules
Mamushka showcases the cuisine from Ukraine and beyond, weaving together vibrant food with descriptive narratives and stunning lifestyle photography. The book covers food from broths and soups to breads and pastries, vegetables and salads to meat and fish, dumplings and noodles to compotes and jams.
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev
Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell’s Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the wild and bizarre heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship-far subtler than twentieth-century strains-that is rapidly rising to challenge the West.
Prisoners in the Promised Land: The Ukrainian Internment Diary of Anya Soloniuk by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
The heart-wrenching story of one girl's experience at a Ukrainian internment camp in Quebec during World War I. Anya's family emigrates from the Ukraine hoping for a fresh start and a new life in Canada. Soon after they cram into a tiny apartment in Montreal, WWI is declared. Because their district was annexed by Austria - now at war with the Commonwealth - many Ukrainians in Canada are declared "enemy aliens" and sent to internment camps. Anya and her family are shipped off to the Spirit Lake Camp, in the remote wilderness of Quebec.
Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory by Lubomyr Y. Luciuk
Luciuk draws on personal diaries and correspondence, over 300 in-depth interviews, and previously unmined government archives to interpret the meaning and value of the Ukrainian experience in Canada. Using a host of contextual sidelights to illuminate larger historical issues, Luciuk produces an account that is both scholarly and intimate. Above all, he reveals how the Ukrainian-Canadian identity has been manipulated, negotiated and recast during the 100 years of its existence.
Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia by Joshua Yaffa
Between Two Fires chronicles the lives of a number of strivers who understand that their dreams are best--or only--realized through varying degrees of cooperation with the Russian government. With sensitivity and depth, Yaffa profiles the director of the country's main television channel, an Orthodox priest at war with the church hierarchy, a Chechen humanitarian who turns a blind eye to persecutions, and many others. The result is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation that is much discussed yet little understood.
Ukrainian by Olena Bekh
Teach yourself Ukrainian with this audio guide!
Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva
A collection of interconnected short stories that set in and around an apartment building in Ukraine, before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Something Unbelievable by Maria Kuznetsova
Set in Kyiv, Something Unbelievable explores with piercing wit and tender feeling just how much our circumstances shape our lives and what we pass along to the younger generations, willingly or not.
The Russian Woodpecker (film)
A thrilling investigation into the ghosts of the Soviet Union and the mind of an irradiated Ukrainian artist on a quest to discover the criminal behind the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine (film)
This documentary looks at people transformed by a democratic revolution, who give up their normal lives to fight a Russian invasion, in a war which has killed 10,000 and displaced 1.9 million Ukrainians.
For more films, visit Kanopy's collections about the history and current events of Ukraine and recent Russian history.
