Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

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As all the postings and appraisal of Anna Reid's book reflects this is a very good popular introduction to Ukrainian history. That is with stress on both *good*, *popular introduction* and *up to 1997*. If you have already read several histories of Ukraine, chances are slim you will find much new here. If you need an update on the orange revolution, you will simply not find what you look for here. If you find another book to cover the orange revolution, it might even be an advantage that it is published in 1997, in the sense that it is likely to focus more on the Kuchma era and describe what Ukraine was like in the 1990s than a book published more recently will.

Soviet buildings and sanatoriums, for example, are uniformly described as ‘drab’; recent art books focusing on Ukrainian Soviet mosaics that adorned various public buildings illustrate considerable evidence to the contrary.Kiev. The notion of Kievan rus, as distinct from Muscovy, was new to me. The maidan, as a movement and a symbol. Ivan Demjanjuk (Cleveland car worker and Nazi war criminal in WW2). Born in in the Zhytomyr Oblast of northern Ukraine Ukrainian heritage is under threat – and so is the truth about Soviet-era Russia" The Guardian (15 March 2022) The author fails to anticipate the incoming right-wing nationalist and populist turn in Poland under the Law and Justice party elected in 2015, and its combined hostility to certain laws and regulations of the EU - and to elementary aspects of contemporary liberal society like a basic respect for, let alone the institutionalisation of LGBTQIA+ rights at the legal level.

Ukraine is not dead yet’ is the less-then-inspiring opening line of the present-day Ukrainian national anthem. After reading this book, and seeing the hell that Putin has rained down on Ukraine – the question is not why Ukraine would want to join NATO and the EU, but why on earth they would EVER want to have anything at all to do with Russia. This book takes the reader on a fascinating and often violent odyssey, spanning more than 1,000 years of conflict and culture. Reid covers events from the coming of the Vikings, to Stalin's purges and beyond to the independence celebrations of 19991. She translates her obvious mastery of her subject into an accessible work, which should enrich the experience of any traveller to this new country * Independent on Sunday * More important than any other explaination to the political and economic disaster of the 1990s was the policy of Ukraine itself. Anna Reid manages to give a good introduction to this not-so-proud recent past. Indulgent’ is not a word the author would use to describe any period of Soviet rule in Ukraine, including in its most peaceful and prosperous period - despite the low-level and sometimes more significant relapses into the persecution of Ukrainian dissidents, like of literary critic and dissident communist Ivan Dzyuba who criticised the USSR’s nationality policies, or the Ukrainian general Petro Hryhorenko, who took up the cause of the Crimean Tatars as his own and suffered for it, and so on - that managed considerably better with dramatically improved living standards indicative of a modern and developed industrial society than that particular time, or probably any other time under Austrian control (early 1960s to late 1970s/early 1980s or so).O'Donnell, Michael (8 September 2011). "The untold tragedies of Leningrad". Salon Media Group . Retrieved 10 September 2011. Basically, this book discounts all the history of Ukraine and goes on to promote that corrupted shithole that it has become in the last 3 decades. And somehow it even manages to GLORIFY all that lawlessness and corruption that permeates the modern day Ukraine. I do realise that this is a book with a vividly highlighted political premise, which had a task to demonstrate that all the participants in this free-for-all did all right for Ukraine, except Russia. It somehow manages to fail miserably at this task. Anna Reid (born 1965) is an English journalist and author whose work focuses primarily on the history of Eastern Europe.

For Ukrainians, the war was fratricidal. Caught between Stalin and Hitler, they split three ways. The vast majority of direct participants – 2.5 million men 13– were conscripted straight into the Red Army. Several tens of thousands – known as ‘Hiwis’ – short for Hilfswillige or ‘willing-to-helps’, joined the Nazis in various capacities.” This is the final sentence of the first part of the book written in the 90s and it just breaks one's heart. The original book is really good. The history is well divided in time as well as in regions. We get to know more about each area of Ukraine, their history and their "present" (in the 90s). Misguided and barely informed account of what the author presumes to be a journey through history of Ukraine. There's just a tiny bit of history and a lot of banter 'oh, so, everyone hates Kiev when visiting but I've come to love it... blah-blah'.Be forewarned, the chapters on the the Stalin-induced famine of 1932 and the German invasion of 1941 are so horrific as to be almost unreadable. The statistics are staggering Bloomsbury Publishing Author Biography: Anna Reid". Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2011. Archived from the original on 10 May 2012 . Retrieved 10 September 2011. Here begins Ukraine’s great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine ‘Eastern Little Poland’; the Russian name for Ukraine was ‘Little Russia.' Probably the most frustrating aspect about the book is its tendency to make broad-brush statements and unbalanced assessments indicative of the author’s liberal-centrist outlook. Seriously, you can get a better understanding of Ukrainian history if you read Wikipedia on Ukraine, Poland and Russia, as the histories are entwined. This thing - it's as good as quotes it contains.