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In Wartime by Tim Judah
This book deals with the aftermath of the Maidan Revolution and annexation of Crimea, and the rise of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas. It's not a history of the conflict, but a study of the human impact and the resulting faultlines in Ukrainian society. It reminds me a bit of Hillbilly Elegy - partly I guess because both are ultimately about economically depressed rustbelters getting manipulated into disastrous revolt by Vladimir Putin, but more particularly because of how well it captures the mindsets of the rebels as well as their opponents. Judah knows he's walking on a minefield of Kremlin propaganda, but just because the rebels' beliefs aren't wholly indigenous doesn't mean they aren't sincerely held, or that there aren't threads of truth woven in with the lies.
Like the MAGA movement in America, the separatists are acting out on decades-old value clashes and culture wars. Judah interviews people who feel that Ukrainian nationalism is tainted by its embrace of Stepan Bandera, a WWII German collaborator; workers from failing mines and defunct collective farms whose livelihoods have disappeared in the absence of Soviet subsidies; non-ethnic Ukrainians whose new nationality was foisted on them by surprise when the USSR broke up; victims of corruption who believe, wrongly but sincerely, that public integrity is better in Russia.
The book helped me understand some of the messy social context that's only alluded to in current news coverage. The sections on nationalists and apolitical people caught in the crossfire are just as insightful, but I think the separatist parts jumped out at me most because they're the voice that's been missing. It's hard to look at the war that's raging now and imagine that anyone in Ukraine could ever have welcomed Putin. But the areas in the east that are currently getting wiped off the map were once full of desperate, disenchanted people who thought Russia would make their lives better.
The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy
I haven't actually finished this yet; I'm only up to the Cossacks. It is an ENTIRE history of Ukraine, from the Scythian period right up to the present, and I'm finding it heavy going. To be honest, I think the scope is a little too ambitious: the author has tried to be both comprehensive and engaging, but the result is that whole centuries pass by in one short paragraph of dry summary plus a few paragraphs of 'human interest' anecdotes starring historical figures who are barely introduced before they're dead on the next page. There's so much fascinating material touched on! Vikings! Romans! Genghis Khan! I'd love to bury myself in any one of these topics, but I don't really feel like Plohky's treatment does them justice.
I'm persevering anyway, because 1) it's the most recommended history of Ukraine I've been able to find and 2) I paid for it as an e-book since the library didn't have it. Don't get me wrong, I'll be glad to be in possession of the knowledge it contains. It's just not the most fun I've ever had.
Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick
The research that went into this blows my mind a little. Combing through pretty much every source available - from diaries and memoirs to newspaper clippings to copies of bureaucratic correspondence - Fitzpatrick paints a vivid picture of what life was like for ordinary Soviet citizens in the 30s. The focus is almost entirely urban: collective farmers and the ubiquitous kulaks do inevitably poke their heads up now and then, but Fitzpatrick has another book called Stalin's Peasants on rural life in the same time period.
True to its promise, the book's contents are scrupulously mundane - in a good way. There was no escaping The State during Stalin's reign, but Fitzpatrick only makes ideology and major political figures relevant in her work insofar as they influence people's day-to-day lives. For that reason, the Great Terror - which understandably looms large over so much writing about the period - is almost an afterthought compared to the previous waves of small-t terror that primarily targeted people other than party elite. Denunciations and repression are major themes, but so are popular humour, communal apartment living, rationing and family law.
With the latter especially, I was interested in how much people not only expected but demanded that the party involve itself in their private lives. Fitzpatrick cites huge volumes of correspondence from jilted lovers and abandoned wives to senior officials, soliciting not just practical help collecting child support but also a degree of emotional/moral support. As huge as the cultural disconnect is - my local senator is nowhere on the list of people I'd ever want to contact about marital troubles - this quirk of Soviet life makes sense: as Fitzpatrick points out, people were used to being dependent on the party for everything from the food on their tables to the scheduling of their after-work social lives. The resulting relationship had a sort of parent-child dynamic. If the personal was political, then the party had not only a right to meddle in it but a responsibility to offer direct personal support when things went wrong.
They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulić
Drakulić fled her Croatian home early on during the Yugoslav Wars; she was at the Hague to watch the trials, and wrote this collection of character studies on key defendants (among others - Milošević's wife, accused of no war crimes but considered heavily complicit in her husband's, gets her own chapter).
It's a fascinating read that paints vivid portraits of its subjects and their motives, from a soldier at Srebrenica ordered to shoot on pain of death to an unassuming fishing enthusiast turned gleeful wartime sadist. Per the quote above, Drakulić's focus is very much on portraying war criminals as relatable fellow humans, not to evoke sympathy but to show how the right (or rather, horrifically wrong) circumstances risk tempting all of us into behaviour we'd prefer to think of as alien to our nature.
It's worth noting that this was published in 2004 and a few things are now out of date. More criminals at the time unpunished have now been sentenced; less encouragingly, Biljana Plavšić - who Drakulić singled out positively for her guilty plea and seemingly genuine remorse - has since admitted that it was all a ploy to lighten her sentence. But the book's real power is in its emotional insight anyway. It ends on a nauseating scene of the accused all cohabiting peacefully at Scheveningen while they awaited their sentences - Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks, soldiers and commanders and Milošević himself, living in inter-ethnic harmony after violently robbing their countries of the chance to do the same.
Absurdistan by Eric Campbell
Campbell is an ABC foreign correspondent who writes a bit like how my dad talks. The tone is what I can only describe as classic Educated Aussie Bloke: you want to sound like the sort of person who can point to Chechnya on a map and make witty remarks on ex-Soviet privatisations, but not in a way that would alienate you from the blokes at your mate Ian's backyard barbecue. You're politically incorrect, but only on purpose to be funny, not like those bogans who are politically incorrect because they don't know better. You're serious, but not too serious. You care just enough to not be a total prick but not so much that it brings down the mood.
To be fair, Campbell does know his shit. He's had an impressive career, and he breaks the mould here and there by making himself vulnerable with details of his own life: his collapsed marriage, his health scares, and the impact of war zone reporting and constant stress on his mental health. But I find the glib, dismissive, 'these people aren't like us' note of his narrative overpowering - so much so that despite having read it twice now (years ago, for work-adjacent reasons) and enjoyed it both times, and despite the fact that the scope includes multiple wars and at least a fifth of the world's total landmass, I'm hard pressed to find much to say about it. I hardly retained anything from my first read and I can already feel the second starting to slip away.
In brief: the author was posted in Moscow during the 90s, then in China in the early 2000s. The book is a collection of vignettes from his time there and in the surrounding regions, with a focus on political and social dysfunction and - per the title - an eye for the absurd. It was a fun way to kill a couple of hours, but I wouldn't recommend it. Except maybe to my dad.
This book deals with the aftermath of the Maidan Revolution and annexation of Crimea, and the rise of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas. It's not a history of the conflict, but a study of the human impact and the resulting faultlines in Ukrainian society. It reminds me a bit of Hillbilly Elegy - partly I guess because both are ultimately about economically depressed rustbelters getting manipulated into disastrous revolt by Vladimir Putin, but more particularly because of how well it captures the mindsets of the rebels as well as their opponents. Judah knows he's walking on a minefield of Kremlin propaganda, but just because the rebels' beliefs aren't wholly indigenous doesn't mean they aren't sincerely held, or that there aren't threads of truth woven in with the lies.
Like the MAGA movement in America, the separatists are acting out on decades-old value clashes and culture wars. Judah interviews people who feel that Ukrainian nationalism is tainted by its embrace of Stepan Bandera, a WWII German collaborator; workers from failing mines and defunct collective farms whose livelihoods have disappeared in the absence of Soviet subsidies; non-ethnic Ukrainians whose new nationality was foisted on them by surprise when the USSR broke up; victims of corruption who believe, wrongly but sincerely, that public integrity is better in Russia.
The book helped me understand some of the messy social context that's only alluded to in current news coverage. The sections on nationalists and apolitical people caught in the crossfire are just as insightful, but I think the separatist parts jumped out at me most because they're the voice that's been missing. It's hard to look at the war that's raging now and imagine that anyone in Ukraine could ever have welcomed Putin. But the areas in the east that are currently getting wiped off the map were once full of desperate, disenchanted people who thought Russia would make their lives better.
The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy
I haven't actually finished this yet; I'm only up to the Cossacks. It is an ENTIRE history of Ukraine, from the Scythian period right up to the present, and I'm finding it heavy going. To be honest, I think the scope is a little too ambitious: the author has tried to be both comprehensive and engaging, but the result is that whole centuries pass by in one short paragraph of dry summary plus a few paragraphs of 'human interest' anecdotes starring historical figures who are barely introduced before they're dead on the next page. There's so much fascinating material touched on! Vikings! Romans! Genghis Khan! I'd love to bury myself in any one of these topics, but I don't really feel like Plohky's treatment does them justice.
I'm persevering anyway, because 1) it's the most recommended history of Ukraine I've been able to find and 2) I paid for it as an e-book since the library didn't have it. Don't get me wrong, I'll be glad to be in possession of the knowledge it contains. It's just not the most fun I've ever had.
Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick
The research that went into this blows my mind a little. Combing through pretty much every source available - from diaries and memoirs to newspaper clippings to copies of bureaucratic correspondence - Fitzpatrick paints a vivid picture of what life was like for ordinary Soviet citizens in the 30s. The focus is almost entirely urban: collective farmers and the ubiquitous kulaks do inevitably poke their heads up now and then, but Fitzpatrick has another book called Stalin's Peasants on rural life in the same time period.
True to its promise, the book's contents are scrupulously mundane - in a good way. There was no escaping The State during Stalin's reign, but Fitzpatrick only makes ideology and major political figures relevant in her work insofar as they influence people's day-to-day lives. For that reason, the Great Terror - which understandably looms large over so much writing about the period - is almost an afterthought compared to the previous waves of small-t terror that primarily targeted people other than party elite. Denunciations and repression are major themes, but so are popular humour, communal apartment living, rationing and family law.
With the latter especially, I was interested in how much people not only expected but demanded that the party involve itself in their private lives. Fitzpatrick cites huge volumes of correspondence from jilted lovers and abandoned wives to senior officials, soliciting not just practical help collecting child support but also a degree of emotional/moral support. As huge as the cultural disconnect is - my local senator is nowhere on the list of people I'd ever want to contact about marital troubles - this quirk of Soviet life makes sense: as Fitzpatrick points out, people were used to being dependent on the party for everything from the food on their tables to the scheduling of their after-work social lives. The resulting relationship had a sort of parent-child dynamic. If the personal was political, then the party had not only a right to meddle in it but a responsibility to offer direct personal support when things went wrong.
They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulić
And the more you realise that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become. Of course, this is because the consequences are more serious than if they were monsters. If ordinary people committed war crimes, it means that any of us could commit them. Now you understand why it is so easy and comfortable to accept that war criminals are monsters, rather than to agree with Ervin Staub that ‘evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception’.
Drakulić fled her Croatian home early on during the Yugoslav Wars; she was at the Hague to watch the trials, and wrote this collection of character studies on key defendants (among others - Milošević's wife, accused of no war crimes but considered heavily complicit in her husband's, gets her own chapter).
It's a fascinating read that paints vivid portraits of its subjects and their motives, from a soldier at Srebrenica ordered to shoot on pain of death to an unassuming fishing enthusiast turned gleeful wartime sadist. Per the quote above, Drakulić's focus is very much on portraying war criminals as relatable fellow humans, not to evoke sympathy but to show how the right (or rather, horrifically wrong) circumstances risk tempting all of us into behaviour we'd prefer to think of as alien to our nature.
It's worth noting that this was published in 2004 and a few things are now out of date. More criminals at the time unpunished have now been sentenced; less encouragingly, Biljana Plavšić - who Drakulić singled out positively for her guilty plea and seemingly genuine remorse - has since admitted that it was all a ploy to lighten her sentence. But the book's real power is in its emotional insight anyway. It ends on a nauseating scene of the accused all cohabiting peacefully at Scheveningen while they awaited their sentences - Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks, soldiers and commanders and Milošević himself, living in inter-ethnic harmony after violently robbing their countries of the chance to do the same.
Absurdistan by Eric Campbell
Campbell is an ABC foreign correspondent who writes a bit like how my dad talks. The tone is what I can only describe as classic Educated Aussie Bloke: you want to sound like the sort of person who can point to Chechnya on a map and make witty remarks on ex-Soviet privatisations, but not in a way that would alienate you from the blokes at your mate Ian's backyard barbecue. You're politically incorrect, but only on purpose to be funny, not like those bogans who are politically incorrect because they don't know better. You're serious, but not too serious. You care just enough to not be a total prick but not so much that it brings down the mood.
To be fair, Campbell does know his shit. He's had an impressive career, and he breaks the mould here and there by making himself vulnerable with details of his own life: his collapsed marriage, his health scares, and the impact of war zone reporting and constant stress on his mental health. But I find the glib, dismissive, 'these people aren't like us' note of his narrative overpowering - so much so that despite having read it twice now (years ago, for work-adjacent reasons) and enjoyed it both times, and despite the fact that the scope includes multiple wars and at least a fifth of the world's total landmass, I'm hard pressed to find much to say about it. I hardly retained anything from my first read and I can already feel the second starting to slip away.
In brief: the author was posted in Moscow during the 90s, then in China in the early 2000s. The book is a collection of vignettes from his time there and in the surrounding regions, with a focus on political and social dysfunction and - per the title - an eye for the absurd. It was a fun way to kill a couple of hours, but I wouldn't recommend it. Except maybe to my dad.
