The Frontline

Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present

ISBN 9780674268821

Publication date: 11/02/2021

The Frontline presents a selection of essays drawn together for the first time to form a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. Here he expands upon his analysis in earlier works of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s complex relations with Russia and the West, the burden of tragedies such as the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Juxtaposing Ukraine’s history to the contemporary politics of memory, this volume provides a multidimensional image of a country that continues to make headlines around the world. Eloquent in style and comprehensive in approach, the essays collected here reveal the roots of the ongoing political, cultural, and military conflict in Ukraine, the largest country in Europe.

Praise

Exceptionally illuminating for the current moment…What emerges from some of these essays…is a powerful sense that Putin’s wantonly destructive delusions and machinations have had the unintended effect of helping to consolidate Ukraine as the unified and distinctive nation whose existence he flatly denies.

—Larry Wolff, Times Literary Supplement
This collection is an excellent overview of some of the historical undercurrents which diffused the Ukrainian narrative—from west to east—across Ukraine’s Russified central and southeast oblasts over the past twenty years. Most importantly, these essays shed light on why the overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s citizens adopted this narrative and why they still defiantly resist returning to Russia’s colonial orbit.

—George O. Liber, Russian Review

Author

Serhii Plokhy is Mykhailo S. Hrushevs´kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Department of History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.