Russian soldiers dug trenches in the most contaminated part of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, either oblivious or ignorant of the risks. The ninth Chapter “The Empire Explodes: Chernobyl” is about the catastrophe in Chernobyl in 1986 and the last days of the Soviet Union. When I was writing my blog post about Paul Celan’s Paris last November, I was wondering whether we would be able to visit Odesa in 2022 and whether I could combine a trip to Odesa with a visit to Chernivtsi (former Czernowitz), the city in which Paul Celan was born in 1920 and which he left in 1945 to go first to Bukarest, then to Vienna and finally to Paris.

I also realised that the reason why this text fits so well, is because the current situation of an attack by a neighbour and a challenge to Ukrainian freedom and cultural identity is not really new. Reid has stepped forth with an ambitious, fluent, and remarkably comprehensive synthesis that should be required reading for anyone interested in the region.

I think that this link between a specific place and a specific chapter in history works generally really well. The country has certainly been through a lot – having been a vassal state of Lithuania, Poland, bits of it in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Ottoman empire – and of course the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union.

She adds that the Russian parliament had twice condemned the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine and passed in 1993 a resolution declaring Sevastopol as Russian territory. If you follow Julia Davis on Twitter and watch the excerpts she shares from Russian TV talk shows, you have the impression this is still the case on Russian TV. Ukrainians were the most common nationality in the 50’s Gulag but many of the post-Stalin Soviet leaders had deep connections to the Ukraine. If you want to know more about the Holodomor than this chapter offers, I can highly recommend the book Red Famine.

My mother used to read a lot of books when I was a child and I saw how much enjoyment these books would bring her. First only a few students followed the appeal but within three days around 100,000 turned up on the Maidan and it did not stop there. Though the protests grew substantially over the next few days …, what turned them into a mass movement was the government’s clumsy use of violence. It would be a strategic and moral failure on the scale of the crushed Hungarian Rising and Prague Spring – and with much less excuse.

Anna Reid said that even so the protest found a greater echo in the Donbas, the majority of the population disapproved the armed seizure of public buildings and did not want to join Russia. That is the same argument Putin uses to justify his invasion into Ukraine and it fits with the impression one gets if one listens to excerpts from Russian state TV which equates all signs of Ukrainian culture, state and language with “Neo-Nazis”.In the mid-1920 Russia tried another approach and gave some room for Ukrainian culture, literature, newspapers and language.

The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. Amazingly, the protesters continued to press forward, relying on sheer force of numbers to overwhelm the better armed opposition. Centre of the first great Slav civilisation in the tenth century, then divided between warring neighbours for a millennium, Ukraine finally won independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to Anna Reid the population of Crimean Tartars were in 1897 down to a third of the population and by 1921 down to a quarter.

I could rant about most pages of this book endlessly since it fails to show how the Slavic history progressed for Ukraine to happen. When Chernobyl exploded, the Ukrainians were kept in the dark about the dangers, and unnecessarily exposed to high levels of radiation. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.