The National History Center of the American Historical Association held a Congressional briefing on Friday, January 23 on the Ukraine crisis in historical perspective. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University and Professor Mark Von Hagen of Arizona State University discussed the historical roots of the current Ukrainian-Russian war and its larger regional implications. Professor Dane Kennedy, Director of the National History Center, moderated and reflected on the discussion.
Briefing Description
In their remarks, Professor Timothy Snyder, the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University, and Professor Mark von Hagen, professor of history at the Arizona State University School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, examined the history and implications of the Ukraine crisis that erupted in late 2013. As part of the briefing, the experts discussed the true nature of the conflict, and why it should be thought of as more than simply a Ukrainian civil war, but as a Russian-Ukrainian war as well. In addition, Professors Snyder and von Hagen discussed the history of the Ukraine since the First and Second World Wars, as well as how the United States, Western Europe, and Russia have affected the security of the Ukrainian political and economic environment, as well as those of other Eastern European states.
Further Readings Suggested by the Experts
Survey texts (long history)
Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History
Paul Robert Magocsi, History of Ukraine, 2d rev. ed.
Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 2d. rev. ed.
Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine
Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?” and responses Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Fall 1995)
Andrew Evans, Ukraine (Bradt Travel Guide)
Twentieth Century History
Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation
Andrew Wilson, Ukrainians: The Unexpected Nation
Broader contexts of Ukraine’s history:
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe Gulag: A History
Dominic Lieven, The Russian Empire and Its Rivals
Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multi-ethnic History
Jane Burbank, Anatolii Remnev, Mark von Hagen, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930
Mark von Hagen, “Writing the History of Russia as Empire,” co-edited with Catherine Evtuov, Boris Gasparov, Alexander Ospovat, in Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire. (Moscow, ITS-Grant, 1997)
Von Hagen, “Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas: Eurasia as Anti-Paradism for the Post-Soviet Era,” American Historical Review Vol. 109, No. 2 (April 2004): 445-68;
Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (2013)
Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999
The Red Prince: Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine
Ukraine Before the Twentieth Century
Ihor Shevchenko and Frank Sysyn, Ukraine Between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century
Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History
Serhii Plokhii, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History
Plokhii, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus
Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation
Ukraine in War and Revolution, 1914-1923
Taras Hunczak, ed., The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution
Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914-1918, Donald W. Treadgold Studies on Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (Published by the Herbert J. Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, University of Washington; Distributed by the University of Washington Press, 2007)
Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge, MA., 1997)
Ukraine Under Stalin
Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001)
Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (2007); Freedom and Terror in the Donbas (1998)
Ukraine and World War II
Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair (Harvard/Belknap)
Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russsia, 1941-1945
Ukraine after Stalin
Yaroslav Bilinsky, The Second Soviet Republic: Ukraine after World War II
Serhii Plokhii, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014)
Yalta: The Price of Peace
Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Ukraine, Neighbors and Minorities
Hans-Joachim Torke and John-Paul Himka, eds., German-Ukrainian Relations in Historical Perspective
P. J. Potichnyj, ed., Poland and Ukraine: Past and Present
P. J. Potichnyj and Marc Raeff, eds., Ukraine and Russia in Their Historical Encounter
Andreas Kappeler, Zenon Kohut, Frank Sysyn, and Mark von Hagen, eds., Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter 1600-1945
Jews and Ukraine
Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government
Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard H. Aster, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton, 1988)
Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (2002)
Yohan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew
Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-building and the Holocaust in Ukraine; with Ray Brandon, The Shoah in Ukraine
Ukrainian Literature and Thought
Dmytro Czyzhevskyi and G.S. N. Luckyj, A History of Ukrainian Literature from the Eleventh to the end of the 19th Century
Myroslav Shkandryj, Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times
Shkandryj, Jews in Ukrainian Literature
George Grabowicz, Toward a History of Ukrainian Literature
George Luckyj, Literary Politics in Soviet Ukraine, 1917-1934
Ralph Lindheim and George Luckyj, Towards and Intellectual History of Ukrainian Thought