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"Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centuries, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars. Again and again, borderland turned into battlefield: during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, Russia's wars with Sweden in the eighteenth, the Civil War of 1918-1920, and under Nazi occupation. Ukraine finally won independence in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bigger than France and as populous as Britain, it has the potential to become one of the most powerful states in Europe. In this finely written and penetrating book, Anna Reid combines research and her own experiences to chart Ukraine's tragic past. Talking to peasants and politicians, rabbis and racketeers, dissidents and paramilitaries, survivors of Stalin's famine and of Nazi labor camps, she reveals the layers of myth and propaganda that wrap this divided land. From the Polish churches of Lviv to the coal mines of the Russian-speaking Donbass, from the Galician shtetlech to the Tatar shantytowns of Crimea, the book explores Ukraine's struggle to build itself a national identity, and identity that faces up to a bloody past, and embraces all the peoples within its borders."--Provided by publisher.… (more)
User reviews
These first ten chapters were written in the mid 90s, just a few years after independence from the Soviet Union, which came suddenly after the failure of the August 1991 coup attempt again Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Despite a bumpy start to independence, the author is fairly upbeat at the end of this section that Ukraine may grow along a path towards being a prosperous and significant mainstream European country. The book was republished in 2015 with a more downbeat assessment and four extra chapters on the events of the Orange Revolution of 2005 and the 2014 Russian invasion of the Crimea and the Donbass area of Eastern Ukraine. It does indeed make you realise that Ukrainians have had among the bloodiest history of any national ethnic group in Europe over the longest period of time and in the 20th century for example suffered hideously not only during the second world war (as of course did the Russians) but also in the Great Hunger (Holodomor) of the early 1930s, Stalin's state-inspired famine when the Soviet Union was exporting grain to pay debts at the expense of millions starving mostly in Ukraine.
At the end, the author reminds us that "back in the 1990s, I closed the original edition of this book with the hope that Ukrainians were set for a happier future, and the observation that ‘after a thousand years of one of the bloodiest histories in the world, they surely deserve it’. It’s truer than ever". Indeed, in the most recent years since the Maidan Square uprising of 2014, the central and western parts of Ukraine at least have matured and bear many hallmarks of a modern European country - which is probably why current events seem all the more shocking to us in Britain. I wonder if the author will write a third edition - sadly it would be likely to contain as much grim drama as the first two editions.
On Ukraine: ‘Ukraine is not dead yet’ is the less-than-inspiring opening line of the present-day Ukrainian national anthem.
On Russia: Russians
I was horrified by the Russian treatment of Ukrainians and Ukrainian Jews, the massive loss of life created by the Soviet political purges and vicious economic policies which starved the general population, almost certainly intentionally.
I also now have some basic understanding of why some Ukrainians have difficulty thinking of themselves as an independent nation, the tensions between different areas of Ukraine and the political corruption that continued after the break up of the USSR in 1991.
In summary, an informative, articulate and probably balanced outsider’s view of Ukraine.