3 Books: The War in Ukraine
So you’ve been following the war in Ukraine but want more information about it than the snippets you get from social media, television or podcasts. Excellent! We are here to help. Below you’ll find recommendations for three (or more) books I’ve found incredibly useful in trying to understand the current conflict. You can click on the images below for Amazon links to the works discussed below.
Honorable Mention #1: Timothy Snyder
Before we get to the three books I most recommend, a couple of honorable mentions from two authors who have been very prominent voices in the public sphere related to Ukraine. The first is Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a prolific author who specializes in Eastern European history; some of his early work such as the 2003 Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 was quite significant, being an early example of transnational history (i.e., the idea that historians should try to understand historical events beyond national political boundaries, which was basically the dominant way most 20th century historians examined the past). His big breakthrough came in 2010 with the publication of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. The book basically again tried to understand the history of Eastern Europe from a transnational perspective, combining analysis of Nazism and Communism to highlight the enormous loss of life that occurred in the area over the course of the two World Wars. Although it became a best-seller, one could argue there really wasn’t much new in it. It was kind of like a well-done Hollywood remake or Luke Combs’ recent cover of Macy Gray’s “Fast Car” that topped the country music charts. An entertaining synthesis, its value came largely from its broader perspective rather than introducing a new interpretation or uncovering new information. The same could largely be said for Snyder’s 2015 sequel Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning, which built upon the arguments originally introduced in Bloodlands. In particular, it argues that we need to understand Hitler and Stalin and their genocidal projects as being interdependent on one another. Stalin, Snyder claimed, provided a model for Hitler’s mass killing, and prepared the geographic space for the Holocaust by destroying civic institutions in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. Where Snyder has really found his voice as a public historian has been since 2016, as he has reacted to the increasing global popularity of authoritarian government with works related to this topic. A short list would include On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom and more recently he has made public lectures on Ukrainian history available in support of the Ukrainian state. So if you’re not familiar with Snyder I do recommend his work, and I have to say I really love how he understands the need for academics and professionals who study history to reach out to the broader public. Too often we academics simply sit in our ivory towers and talk to each other or our students, and we leave public history teaching to journalists (Jon Meacham, Doris Kearns Goodwin), conspiracy theorists (Alex Jones, etc.) and media types who too often use history to make political or ideological points about contemporary society rather than trying to understand why events have taken place in the past (I’m looking at you 1619 and 1776 projects).
Honorable Mention #2: Anne Applebaum
And speaking of journalists, the other big figure out there on Ukraine is of course the Polish-American author Anne Applebaum, who has written several award winning books on Russian and Soviet history. There’s a lot to like about Applebaum’s work – she’s a great writer, she’s spent a lot of time in the archives, and like Snyder she has tried to directly engage the public on historical issues, including now Ukraine. She’s probably best know for her 2003 book Gulag: a History, which won the Pulitzer prize, or the 2017 book Red Famine, which detailed the planned starvation of peasants in the Ukraine in the 1930s, i.e. the Holodomor. Both are thorough and well researched, and full of the historical details that really help readers get a clear sense of what life was like in Stalin’s Soviet Union. But like some of Synder’s work, I should point out that Applebaum’s is not really revolutionary. Others had written on these topics before her, most notably the historian Robert Conquest on the Holodomor and Stalin’s purges in the 1980s. Again, this is not to take away from the utility of Applebaum’s work, which is quite readable and which had better access to Soviet archives. It’s just to say that there is more out there than just her work, or frankly Snyder’s. We need clarity and overviews and updates, but sometimes more depth is really helpful too. Which brings me to the three books I’d most recommend reading to better understand the conflict in Ukraine….
#1. Paul D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia: from Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (2019)
So, having said all that let me make my first recommendation for understanding the war in Ukraine, which is Paul D’Anieri’s Ukraine and Russia: from Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (Cambridge University Press, 2019). D’Anieri is a professor of political science and public policy at the University of California, Riverside who specializes in Ukrainian politics. So this topic is kind of right up his alley.
The book basically focuses on Ukrainian-Russian relations since the break up of the Soviet Union going into a lot of detail about particular points of tension over the years between the camps. And part of the reason I very much enjoyed reading the book is that it eschews a lot of the polemics that usually frame discussion of this relationship, especially the Western vs. Russian mindset everyone seems ready to divide the country into. And this is probably because it was written before the 2022 invasion (though not the 2014 annexation of Crimea, which inspired its writing). So you find that even pro-Russian politicians like Viktor Yanukovych or Leonid Kuchma weren’t simply Russian yes men, they wanted an independent Ukraine with close ties to Russia.
The book also does a great job historicizing the conflict, showing how some of the concerns expressed by Russians in the 2010s had precedent in the 1990s. This would include local Russian separatist movements, a rejection of Ukrainian claims to Crimea and warnings to the West that Ukraine was part of Russia’s sphere of influence.
Finally, the book also discusses a number of important historical turning points that often get left out of the journalist narrative: the complexities of NATO and EU expansion, the role of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s disrupting post-Cold War dreams of a positive Russian-Western relationship, and of course the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
Anyway, it’s a great blow by blow analysis of thirty years of Russian-Ukrainian relations, and I strongly recommend it.
#2. Serhii Plokhy’s 2015 textbook on Ukrainian history, The Gates of Europe
Ok on to book #2, which also helps us understand some of the historical roots of the current crisis. And this would be Serhii Plokhy’s 2015 textbook on Ukrainian history, The Gates of Europe. Plokhy is a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, who grew in Ukraine, where he completed his doctoral work in history. He has published several books on a variety of topics related to Ukrainian history, including important works on Ukrainian relations with the Papacy and the origins of Ukrainian nationalism (note: I have not yet read his recently published book on the current crisis, but you can find a link to it below).
If Uncivil Divorce is a deep dive into the immediate causes of the war in Ukraine, Gates of Europe is the opposite: a broad history of the Ukrainian people going back to their mythical origins. Among other things, the book uses this long view of history to answer questions such as “What has caused the Ukrainian crisis? What role does history play in those events? What differentiates Ukrainians from Russians? Who has the right to Crimea?” The book quickly moves through the Slavic and Viking invasions to unpack the mythological origins of both Ukraine and Russia people with the Kievan Rus. It then spends quite a bit of time in the early modern period, where it charts a kind of sorting of peoples that occurred involving Poles, Cossacks, Tartars and more. This is important because a key part of the ideology underwriting contemporary Russian claims to Ukraine come from this period, when the Ukrainian lands were essentially divided among the Russian, Polish, and later Ottoman and Austrian states. As these events occurred, the peoples living in the region had to develop new loyalties and some times new identities in response. It’s an incredibly complex history, but Plokhy does a great job of making it understandable for general readers.
The third section of the book explores the emergence of Ukrainian nationalism at the end of the 19th century, which is a complicated subject because there were really multiple versions of it. In the Russian Empire itself, Ukrainian nationalism tended to emphasize a closer connection to Russia, while in Austria it tended to emphasize Ukrainian independence. Finally, the last section of the book surveys the 20th century, including the complications of World War I and Polish-Ukrainian relations, World War II and independence. If you’ve been following some of the propaganda wars surrounding the current conflict, I highly recommend this book, as it will help you make sense not only of Ukrainian claims, but also helps you understand the Russian interpretation of historical events as well.
#3. Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face (2012)
Finally, you can’t really understand the origins of the current conflict if you don’t also get the perspective of its ruler Vladimir Putin, who after all was the one who decided to start the war in February 2022. Putin tends to be widely misunderstood in the American press, often portrayed as some kind of James Bond uber-villain/genius bent on global domination; or alternatively as a sober conservative, boldly defending the values of Western and Christian civilization against godless modernism, wokeism, LGBT, etc. In fact, Putin is really just a very ruthless politician who likes to gamble, to push boundaries and who has been very successful by doing so. He has an absolutely fascinating story that I’ll be going into detail about at some point in the podcast when we get to the 21st century in the podcast. Here it’s enough to note that he rose through the post-Soviet bureaucratic ranks largely because people thought he wasn’t very ambitious or powerful, he was basically elevated by Yeltsin and members of his entourage in 1999 because they thought he could protect them. And then in the early 2000s he rode his own ‘war and terror’ as a means of centralizing power and dismantling Russian democracy. But there really wasn’t much of the culture-warrior stuff you tend to see today until Putin got caught fudging election results in Dec. 2011. At that time he shifted to this language of anti-Western/anti-gay rhetoric as a way to delegitimize the large crowds that had begun to protest the results. They were, he argued, the product of foreign influence, of modern forces bent on eroding Russian morality. This then also further justified his continued centralization of power and use of violence, since he was protecting the Russian people from those who wanted to destroy the moral fabric of the country.
At any rate, Putin’s rise is a fascinating topic, and Russian journalist Masha Gessen’s Man Without a Face is a great entry point into the subject. Gessen is a Russian-American journalist who left the Soviet Union as a teenager in the 1980s. Gessen moved back to Moscow in 1991, and thus personally witnessed or lived through many of the events described in the book. In fact, in 2012 Gessen actually met Putin after he fired Gessen from the position of editor of one of Russia’s oldest scientific magazines, Vokrug Sveta, basically because she didn’t cover one of his events. He then tried to re-hire Gessen, making it clear that this time they should cover the regime favorably.
Anyway the book begins with a brief look at Putin’s rise to the Russian Presidency in 1999, as well as his expansion of Presidential powers during the Second Chechan War (1999-2009). It also includes chapters on Putin’s early years, his KGB service and his rise in the Russian bureaucratic ranks in the 1990s under St. Petersburg mayor Anton Sobchak. One can also read about the various scandals – the poisoning of dissidents, the arrest and confiscation of the assets of rival oligarchs, foreign critics, etc.
If you’re looking for something more penetrating, I’d also recommend Gessen’s 2018 The Future is History: How Totalitarianism reclaimed Russia, an almost 500 page book that follows the lives of four Russians through the end of Communism and into the present day. Arkady Ostrovsky’s The Invention of Russia: the Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News does something similar, focusing more on the evolution of Russian-Soviet media. But both are excellent studies that try to answer the question of what went wrong in the 1990s, why Soviet Russia did not evolve into a liberal democracy.
