Books
Manual for Survival: a Chernobyl guide to the future by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2019A chilling exposé of the international effort to minimize the health and environmental consequences of nuclear radiation in the wake of Chernobyl. Governments and journalists tell us that though Chernobyl was "the worst nuclear disaster in history," a reassuringly small number of people died (44), and nature recovered. Yet, drawing on a decade of fine-grained archival research and interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story--one in which radioactive isotypes caused hundreds of thousands of casualties. Scores of Soviet scientists, bureaucrats, and civilians documented stunning increases in cases of birth defects, child mortality, cancers, and a multitude of prosaic diseases, which they linked to Chernobyl.
Chernobyl: The history of a nuclear catastrophe by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2018A Chernobyl survivor and award-winning historian "mercilessly chronicles the absurdities of the Soviet system" in this "vividly empathetic" account of the worst nuclear accident in history...
The Future Is History by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2017In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy.Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Is Russia Fascist? by Call Number: Click title to check availbilityPublication Date: 2021Through a detailed examination of the Russian domestic scene and the Kremlin's foreign policy rationales, Laruelle disentangles the foundation for, meaning, and validity of accusations of fascism in and around Russia. Is Russia Fascist? shows that the efforts to label opponents as fascist is ultimately an attempt to determine the role of Russia in Europe's future.
The Last Empire by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2014Drawing on recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, Plokhy presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union's final months and argues that the key to the Soviet collapse was the inability of the two largest Soviet republics, Russia and Ukraine, to agree on the continuing existence of a unified state. By attributing the Soviet collapse to the impact of American actions, US policy makers overrated their own capacities in toppling and rebuilding foreign regimes. Not only was the key American role in the demise of the Soviet Union a myth, but this misplaced belief has guided--and haunted--American foreign policy ever since.
Lost Kingdom by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2017In Lost Kingdom, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the nation's history. Spanning over 500 years, from the end of the Mongol rule to the present day, Plokhy shows how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin exploited existing forms of identity, warfare, and territorial expansion to achieve imperial supremacy. An authoritative and masterful account of Russian nationalism, Lost Kingdom chronicles the story behind Russia's belligerent empire-building quest.
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2014In the new Russia, even dictatorship is a reality show. Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.
Not One Inch by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2021Thirty years after the Soviet Union's collapse, this book reveals how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics between the Cold War and COVID.
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2018In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us--between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood--Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.
The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2014A gripping account of U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Soviet Union. The Limits of Partnership offers a riveting narrative on U.S.-Russian relations since the Soviet collapse and on the challenges ahead.
Putin's War Against Ukraine: revolution, nationalism, and crime by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2017Written by Taras Kuzio, a leading authority on contemporary Ukraine, the book is a product of extensive fieldwork in Russian speaking eastern and southern Ukraine and the front lines of the Donbas combat zone. Putin's War Against Ukraine debunks myths surrounding the conflict and provides an incisive analysis for scholars, policy makers, and journalists as to why Vladimir Putin is at war with the West and Ukraine.
The Man Without a Face by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2012This is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.
Mr. Putin by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2012For more than a dozen years—the equivalent of three American presidential terms—Vladimir Putin has presided over the largest nation on the planet, the second mostpowerful nuclear arsenal, and massive natural resources. Yet there is still debateabout who he really is. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy have gone a long way inanswering that question, starting with the title, which makes a crucial point: eventhough 'Mr. Putin' was, in his upbringing and early career, a prototype of the Soviet man,he's no longer 'Comrade Putin...'
Putin's World: Russia against the West and with the rest by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2019From renowned foreign policy expert Angela Stent comes a dissection of how Putin created a paranoid and polarized world -- and increased Russia's status on the global stage. This book looks at Russia's key relationships -- its downward spiral with the United States, Europe, and NATO; its ties to China, Japan, the Middle East; and with its neighbors, particularly the fraught relationship with Ukraine. Putin's World will help Americans understand how and why the post-Cold War era has given way to a new, more dangerous world, one in which Russia poses a challenge to the United States in every corner of the globe -- and one in which Russia has become a toxic and divisive subject in US politics.
Putin's People: how the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2020In recent years, Vladimir Putin's Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it? In Putin's People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country.
Ukraine Diaries: dispatches from Kiev by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2015Acclaimed author Andrey Kurkov gives powerful insight into life in Kyiv following the 2013 protests and before the 2022 Russian invasion.
Ukraine and Russia: From Civilied Divorce to Uncivil War by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2019roceeding chronologically, this book shows how Ukraine's separation from Russia in 1991, at the time called a 'civilized divorce', led to what many are now calling 'a new Cold War'. He argues that the conflict has worsened because of three underlying factors - the security dilemma, the impact of democratization on geopolitics, and the incompatible goals of a post-Cold War Europe.
Children of Rus': right-bank Ukraine and the invention of a Russian nation by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2013Exploring why and how the empire's southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, Hillis puts forth a bold new interpretation of state-society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.
The Gates of Europe by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2015Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense fight with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine's territory and its existence as a sovereign nation. An authoritative history of this vital country, The Gates of Europe provides a unique insight into the origins of the most dangerous international crisis since the end of the Cold War.
The Ukrainian Night by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2018A vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential.
The orphanage : a novel by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2021A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine"A nightmarish, raw vision of contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege. . . . With a poet's sense of lyricism. Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.
Red Famine by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2017...Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum's compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.
A Biography of No Place by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2004This is a biography of a borderland betwen Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians and Russians lived side by side. Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, this book reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth-century progress.
The Internationalists by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2018The Internationalists tells the story of the Peace Pact through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals. It reveals the centuries-long struggle of ideas over the role of war in a just world order. It details the brutal world of conflict the Peace Pact helped extinguish, and the subsequent era where tariffs and sanctions take the place of tanks and gunships.
Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2005Focusing on the Zhytomyr region and weaving together official German wartime records, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, Wendy Lower provides the most complete assessment available of German colonization and the Holocaust in Ukraine.
The Economic Weapon by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2022The first international history of the emergence of economic sanctions during the interwar period and the legacy of this development.
East West Street by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2016East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity," both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, "the little Paris of Ukraine," a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. Powerful; moving; tender; a revelation.
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2010Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.
Articles
- "A historian corrects misunderstandings about Ukrainian & Russian history" from Ronald Suny in The ConversationLibrarian recommended!
The first casualty of war, says historian Ronald Suny, is not just the truth. Often, he says, “it is what is left out.” Russian President Vladimir Putin began a full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 and many in the world are now getting a crash course in the complex and intertwined history of those two nations and their peoples... We asked Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, to respond to a number of popular historical assertions he’s heard recently. 2/24/22 - "How the Kosovo Air War Foreshadowed the Crisis in Ukraine" from Masha Gessen in The New YorkerGessen writes about how twenty-three years later, Kremlin propagandists still use the NATO bombing campaign to justify their own actions.
- "History, Memory, and the Art of Protest in Belarus" by Stephen Norris in OriginsLearn about the history of Belarus, its relationship to Russia, and its recent history with fraudulent elections.
- "Clash in the Caucasus: Georgia, Russia, and the Fate of South Ossetia" by Stephen Jones in OriginsLearn more about the Russian-Georgian war from 2008.
- "Putin's Big Lie" from Anne Applebaum in The AtlanticIn a series of comments in late December (2020), the Russian president appeared to blame Poland for the outbreak of the Second World War.
Film
Maidan directed by Sergei LoznitsaCall Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2015Chronicles the uprising that toppled the government of Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich and has since developed into an international crisis between Russia and the West.
The Babushkas of Chernobyl by Call Number: Click title to check availabilityPublication Date: 2015The resilient babushkas are the last survivors of a small community who refused to leave their ancestral homes after the Chernobyl disaster. The film follows the women for over a year, capturing their unusual lives in the Dead Zone as well as other extraordinary scenes -- from radiation spikes just a few feet from the nuclear reactor, to a group of thrill-seekers called 'Stalkers' who sneak into the Zone illegally to pursue post-apocalyptic video game-inspired fantasies...While the babushkas' spirit mirrors the determination of the Ukrainian nation – a country that continues to survive despite its ongoing conflict with Russia - it remains unlikely Chernobyl will be repopulated anytime in the foreseeable future.
Podcast Episodes
- "It’s not about Ukraine. It’s about Putin" from the podcast, The Weeds.From the podcast, The Weeds. Dylan Matthews talks with Mark Galeotti (@MarkGaleotti), director of Mayak Intelligence, about what’s going on in Ukraine. They discuss in depth the historical tensions between Russia and Ukraine, Russia’s NATO problem, and the calculations and motivations behind President Vladimir Putin’s moves.
- Throughline: Ukraine's Dangerous Independence From NPR's Up First podcast.Months before Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, he published an essay on the Kremlin website called "On The Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine." In it, he suggested that Ukrainians don't really have their own identity — and that they never have. Historian Serhii Plokhii says that couldn't be further from the truth. The histories of the two countries are deeply intertwined, but Ukrainian identity is unique. In this episode NPR's Throughline explores that identity: how it formed, it's relationship to Russia, and how it helps us understand what's happening now.
UW-Green Bay War in Ukraine Roundtable
History professors Clifton Ganyard, Mark Karau. Eric Morgan, and Heidi Sherman, and moderated by David Coury discussed the war in Ukraine and its significance.
Teaching Resources
- New Fascism SyallbusThe #NewFascismSyllabus is a crowd-sourced collection of scholarly writings on the history of fascist, authoritarian, and right-wing populist movements and governments. It is intended to serve as an entryway into the scholarly literature for those seeking deeper insights into how past societies have gravitated towards authoritarianism, and seeks to provide comparative perspectives on how everyday people, as well as cultural authorities and civil institutions, coped and, in some cases, resisted these changes.