The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present

by Serhii Plokhy

Overview

The Frontline presents a selection of essays drawn together for the first time to form a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. Here he expands upon his analysis in earlier works of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s complex relations with Russia and the West, the burden of tragedies such as the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Juxtaposing Ukraine’s history to the contemporary politics of memory, this volume provides a multidimensional image of a country that continues to make headlines around the world. Eloquent in style and comprehensive in approach, the essays collected here reveal the roots of the ongoing political, cultural, and military conflict in Ukraine, the largest country in Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674294530
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/21/2023
Series:	Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	420
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Serhii Plokhy is Mykhailo S. Hrushevs´kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Department of History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

A Note on Transliteration viii

Preface ix

1 Quo Vadis Ukrainian History? 1

I Cossack Stock

2 Placing Ukraine on the Map of Europe 17

3 Russia and Ukraine: Did They Reunite in 1654? 37

4 Hadiach 1658: The Origins of a Myth 55

5 The Return of Ivan Mazepa 65

II The Red Century

6 How Russian Was the Russian Revolution? 87

7 Killing by Hunger 95

8 Mapping the Great Famine 105

9 The Call of Blood 131

10 The Battle for Eastern Europe 163

11 The American Dream 169

III Farewell to the Empire

12 The Soviet Collapse 181

13 Chornobyl 183

14 Truth in Our Times 191

15 The Empire Strikes Back 225

16 When Stalin Lost His Head 241

17 Goodbye Lenin! 257

IV European Horizons

18 The Russian Question 283

19 The Quest for Europe 299

20 The New Eastern Europe 325

21 Reimagining the Continent 335

Notes 349

Index 387

Editorial Reviews

This collection is an excellent overview of some of the historical undercurrents which diffused the Ukrainian narrative—from west to east—across Ukraine’s Russified central and southeast oblasts over the past twenty years. Most importantly, these essays shed light on why the overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s citizens adopted this narrative and why they still defiantly resist returning to Russia’s colonial orbit.

George O. Liber

Exceptionally illuminating for the current moment…What emerges from some of these essays…is a powerful sense that Putin’s wantonly destructive delusions and machinations have had the unintended effect of helping to consolidate Ukraine as the unified and distinctive nation whose existence he flatly denies.

Times Literary Supplement - Larry Wolff