The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

The historiography of Russia and to some extent Poland are extensive, reflecting the crucial historical and political dominance of the first and the important role of the second country in European affairs. Ukraine by comparison, the second largest European country after Russia, seems to be the voiceless orphan, suffering from the Historians’ neglect, often denied historical definition or wrongly assimilated to its big Russian neighbour. It’s history is complex and like many of its Eastern European neighbours tragic, particularly during the last century and the present one. Even its name as a polity was transformed over the centuries from Kievan Rus to Cossack Hetmanate, from little Russia or Ruthenia to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Ukrainians were described as Ruthenians, or little Russians. It took the recent brutal conflict to propel the Ukraine into our conscience and to focus our minds on the profound chasm separating it from its Russian neighbour. The complexity of its history arises from its geographical location at the gates of Europe, its partition and absorption by different Empires. It was crossed and occupied by many invaders from the East; the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Huns, the Khazars , the Pechenegs, the Mongols hordes and the Tartar tribes, but also from the North with the Vikings ( Varingians) who established the first dynasty of Kievan Rus, until their state was destroyed by the Golden Horde in 1240. Its proximity to the Black Sea exposed its lands first to the small Greek settlements, then to the Byzantine Greek cultural influence who converted its inhabitants to Orthodox Christianity, followed by the Ottomans who attempted to subjugate them into vassalage. Its historical Destiny since the 14th Century, was bound to the large Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, but never accepted as a third equal member. As a result its small scattered urban population and elites were exposed to the Catholic and Westernising influences brought from Poland. The creation of a separate minority Greek Catholic Church, divided from mainstream Greek Orthodox Church, intensified religious antagonism and cultural polarisation in theses lands, divided geographically by the great Dnieper river. The Polish Lithuanian landowner nobility supported by a more advanced urbanised Polish society exploited its Orthodox peasantry. This culminated in a number of rebellions spearheaded by a free martial peasantry, the Cossacks. Living along the Dnieper river, and jealous of their rights and privileges , they launched numerous rebellions against the Poles, often allied but also betrayed by the Tartars of the Crimean Khanate. Eventually an autonomous Cossack Hetmanate (1649-1764) was founded. It was ruled by Khmelnytsky and his heirs, but fell under the tutelage of the newly formed Russian Czardom, the rulers of the Muscovy principality. It was an unfortunate compromise to safeguard the autonomy of its Orthodox peasant communities and guard against the interference of the Polish Lithuanians and the Ottomans. The tragic aspects of this historical journey are rooted in the subjugation and partition of what became Ukraine between successive Empires; the Mongol, the Polish-Lithuanian, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Soviet. Treated as a vassal or a colony to be exploited; its linguistic and cultural identity denigrated. Alternatively as a junior member of a larger entity in Tsarist Russia and its successor the Soviet Union, patronised and dominated by a ruling elite from the larger nation. Its lands throughout the 20th Century were exposed to extensive devastation and destruction, first during the First World War, followed by the bloody Civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution , then the Russian Polish wars of 1920’s. But the greatest tragedy inflicted on its population happened during the Stalinist brutal collectivisation of agriculture and the requisitioning of grain in the mid 1930’s leading to the genocidal famine that killed millions, the so called ”Holodomor”. More atrocities were perpetrated during the German Nazi invasion and occupation. Followed by further famines after the war due to mismanagement of agriculture during Khrushchev. The final chapters shed light on the events that led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the independence of the Ukraine and its people’s struggle as they grappled with the newly found democracy, and the encroachments of Putin’s Russia, bent on reviving the Tsarist Empire. The author shows unusual historical objectivity and scholarly authority, yet his narrative is passionate without emotionalism, even as he describes the recent tragic events of his country. It was written just before the Russian invasion. An important book to explain the present.

well written but detailed helps with understanding Ukraine and Russia. Big read

Well written and a fascinating read. It seems well balanced and researched. No obvious political bias, even in the modern section. The bits that are left out or skimmed over need more complex and detailed 'objective' reading to get to the core of current politics - this is not that book but it gives a good canvas from which to start. By the time I had reached the 16th century many of the roots of the current problems were already clearly in place. It is truly an amazing country, full of history and the diversity that waves of conquests create - if only they could put aside the differences and celebrate the similarities; could forgive the past mistakes; learn from the mistakes and not repeat them - I hope so. If you want to understand this complex country this is a very good place to start - know the history and you at least have some chance to understand.

I've previously read several substantial histories of Russia which tells the story of the foundation of Kievan Rus by the Viking Rurikids in the 8th Century AD, and the eventual emergence of Muscovy as the dominant principality which would go on to become the centre of the sequence of polities that have had Russia at their heart, one way or another, ever since. Given the recent eruption of horribly miserable events I thought it was time that I tried to get my facts straight regarding the parallel historical trajectory of the Ukrainian grouping of peoples and occasional polity that has remained centred on the central principality of Rus, Kiev. Having read Harvard professor of Ukrainian history, Serhii Plokhy's The Last Empire detailing the frantic days of the collapse of the USSR and admiring his lucidity and tautness of narrative, this seemed a natural contender for a place to start. I began reading with some concrete questions in mind that I hoped would be answered: i) to what extent is present day Ukraine a viable project as an independent nation state, given the bewildering complexity of its ethnic, linguistic and religious makeup and configuration, ii) to what extent, if at all, is there any truth in Putin's recent claim that the Russians and Ukrainians a single people and iii) having seen a typically contextless BBC report containing footage of an old Russian lady saying ' I hope the Cossacks don't come back, that would be terrible', I wanted to understand who indeed are the Cossacks and which segments of Ukrainian society might have cause to fear their 'return'. Well, suffice to say I got all the detail I could possibly want and probably more. Ukrainian history is so dizzyingly complex that it is hard to keep it all in the head, even when it is presented with maximal clarity as Plokhy in fact does. There literally cannot be another country with a recognised boundary on the Earth's surface today that has endured a more tumultuous history of comings and goings, dismemberments and reassemblies, changes of rulership, pogroms, massacres and all manner of tribulations than that of what the world is still only quite recently recognising as the nation of Ukraine. There was a recent fashion to describe poor, oft dismembered Poland as God's Playground as a metaphor for millennial political chaos, but there were several centuries where Poland itself, as the Jagiellonian Empire or the Polish-Livonian Commonwealth, was an empire spanning the Baltic to the Black Sea and during which, and ever since really, Ukraine was God's Playground caught between the empires of Poland, Romanov Russia, the Ottomans and later the Habsburgs. Amidst all this the remarkably resilient Cossacks, remnant of the once Turkic speaking Khazars, with their constantly shifting alliances, whether as feudal aristocracy, or servants of the Tsars against all comers, or servants of others against the treachery of the Tsars. The long cherished dream of independent nationhood for Ukraine was finally realised in 1918 as part of the post WWI settlement but was almost immediately caught in the middle of the Russo-Polish war, and by 1922 Ukraine had been absorbed into the USSR as a notionally independent republic, but one that suffered terribly under the years of Communism and the resumed see-sawing of empires in WWII. Real independence came finally as a result of the collapse of the USSR, finally announced in 1991, but even then the struggles of Ukrainian democratic politicians to get out from under the clutches of gangster oligarchs with connections back to the Soviet security services and Moscow elites has continued to spiral until we arrive at the sorry conditions of today, when no one can even guess where Ukraine will be a year from now; a still independent land of smoking ruins, nominally independent under a festering occupation or simply reabsorbed back into the revived Russian Empire? As it happens most of what one needs to know about the circumstances of today was encompassed in the final couple of chapters detailing the recent history of Ukraine since the USSR imploded. A timeline is given detailing rigged elections, murdered journalists, imprisoned or exotically poisoned politicians, etc., that make it apparent that there is a viable nation of people who have been making every possible effort to construct a modern, working Ukrainian state into which all ethnic, linguistic and religious groups are quite effectively integrated. The constant fly in the ointment would seem to be the gangster oligarchs and their Russian cronies who continue to milk billions of public money into foreign banks. No doubt Russia Today and its ilk would tell a rather different story. But I am old fashioned enough to place my trust, at least for now, in the narrative of a credited Harvard history professor over that of journalists from a country that will give you 15 years just for calling the epic destruction we are seeing on our screens every night a war. For all the tortuous complexity of Ukraine's history the simple issue today seems to boil down to the fact that hardly anyone in Ukraine wants to live inside Putin's despotic dysfunctional kleptocracy, and its people would seem to be willing to endure apocalyptic sacrifice to resist that possibility.

This is a book that can only have been written by a historian who is very familiar with his subject. The author takes us way back to the likes of the Vikings and Genghis Khan, and what I could have done with was a series of maps showing me what was where and when. The book moves right up to after Russia took Crimea in 2014 but finishes short of this latest intrusion by Russia. I found the content to be particularly interesting once it got into the 20th century (Stalin, Khrrushchev, etc.). On the whole the book was educational, informative and very interesting, despite the apparent minute detail.

A run through Ukrainian history from beginnings to Stalin woes, new independence and the Putin threat of today. Essential reading.

El libro es excellente. Tomo el curso gratiuito de Timothy Snyder “History of Ukraine” de Yale University que se encuentra en YouTube (en inglés) y este libro es el texto principal para su curso. Estoy encantada con el libro, pero desgraciadamente se está deshojando y lo voy a tener que mandarlo a arreglar.

Too good a book to put down once you start reading it. How many of us even knew the early settlers in today's Ukraine were Vikings from the North? At least I didn't! On a serious note though, the author captures the Ukrainian history from the Viking period to the beginnings of Kievian Rus. Then he dwells onto the rise of the Cossacks, the influence of the Romanov dynasty after being assimilated as a part of Russia, wars with Poland & Lithuania and finally the two great wars of the 20th Century to the present Donbass region conflict. I would certainly recommend it to anybody who wants to understand the development of a country closely related to stability in Europe and Central Asia.

This book comprehensively goes through history, with great detail and organization. The stories are written in such a way that it comes to life. As a result, this book became one of my reference books for Ukrainian history. The maps appendices - Historical Timeline, Who's Who in Ukrainian History, Glossary, and Further Reading - are also helpful. (For the next edition may I suggest including a current map of Ukraine with each major city labeled?) I have been recommending this book to anyone interested in Ukrainian and European history.

If you want to know how far back Ukrainian culture goes by the way 45,000 years before Christ, this book is for you. Yeah, it’s complicated but so is the history of Ukraine I must read for anybody needing to understand why the passion and spirit of these people run so deep, did you know they Domesticated the horse? A very well written, in-depth history of the region that any history buff should know and really just everybody should know not an easy read but necessary, one five stars

Rápida entrega e produto conforme previsto. excelente.