In the Donbass and Crimea almost all the schools have their books and lectures in Russian, while in Lviv school kids speak almost no Russian at all. In May the insurrection in the Donbas turned into a war and Ukraine sent his army in the area who fought against the separatist forces which were backed by Russia. I marked all cities for which there is a specific chapter in the book with a blue box around the name. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. I felt that I was scratching the surface, but at least I have some awareness of that surface now for further reading around the subjects.

The earliest sections make for sometimes eerie and often queasily ironic reading in light of recent events. On page 291 she goes on about the de-Communisation laws passed in 2015, which banned Nazi and soviet symbols and propaganda.After Hrushevsky’s ten volume history of Ukraine was written, it became hard to pretend Ukraine didn’t exist. Her employment seems to have provider her with a great degree of access to all levels of Ukrainian society.

Often controversial but never stuffy, she takes her reader at the same time on a tour of Ukraine, relating past events to a modern context . She first looks at Putin’s role in answering this question and gives some inside in the situation in Crimea and in the Donbas at the time when the book was written in 2015. I wrote a blog post about Paul Celan in November last year and as mentioned there, I have been interested in him and read about him and therefore also about Czernowitz since my school days, therefore for more than 30 years. rather than refraining from poking the bear, it is becoming unpleasantly clear, we are going to have to stop it biting off our leg.Ukrainians were accepted during WWII by the Nazis (out of a much larger Ukrainian applicant pool) to work as SS Galicia. Autorka nie boi się śmiałych tez, wydaje się być obiektywna, mimo nieskrywanej sympatii do Ukraińców It continues to look into the relationship between Ukraine and Poland and their 500 years of shared “common history, first under the Polish king, then under the Russian tsar”. During the 1920s and 1930s they had a similar fate as the Ukrainians, including a brief period in which Tatar-language books were printed and schools, libraries, museums and theatres opened. In particular the uncertainty what should happen to Galicia meant that no part of Ukraine was given independence and in the end Ukraine was split in four, with parts been given to Poland, parts to Romania, parts to Czechoslovakia and central and eastern Ukraine to Russia.

Talking to refugees, politicians and victims of widespread Russian war crimes, she adds a new chapter to the complex biography of a country on the frontline of the conflict between democracy and dictatorship.Taking the waters in that German spa, Aleksandr II signed a decree banning all import and publication of Ukrainian books and newspapers, all stage-shows, concerts and public lectures in Ukrainian, and all teaching in Ukrainian, even for infants. 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. Also in the current war, conscripts are sent to fight in the war in Ukraine, even so it is against the law of the Russian Federation, and better-off potential conscripts in particular from the European parts of Russia know ways to avoid conscription altogether. The ninth Chapter “The Empire Explodes: Chernobyl” is about the catastrophe in Chernobyl in 1986 and the last days of the Soviet Union. Northerners then lived in log cabins and ate black bread while southerners lived in wattle and daub (like English peasants) and ate white bread.