12 essential books to understand Russia’s war on Ukraine

If you’re an American reader horrified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, looking for a book to explain it all seems like the next logical step. Independent bookstores confirm this logic, reporting a run on titles in Ukraine and Russia. And in the two main library systems I frequent, all the titles on Ukraine, Russia and Putin that I searched for last week are checked, with a long wait for print and electronic versions. The publisher has not yet offered new books on the struggle between Ukraine and Russia, although this will certainly change.

Luckily, there are plenty of recently released and deeply informed titles about the intertwined history of these nations. All you have to do is find them. Here are some of the most notable:

UKRAINE

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
By Serheii Plokhy
Basic books: 448 pages, $20

This readable, detailed and authoritative study by a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, published in a revised paperback edition in 2021, is an essential aid to understanding Ukraine’s rich and complicated past. Plokhy spans 2,000 years of Ukrainian history as waves of invaders fought and died seizing the region’s strategic advantages and natural wealth. These claimants include the Kyivan Rus (Vikings whom Ukrainians and Russians refer to as their ancestors), the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans, the Mongols, the Poles and Lithuanians, the Russian Tsars, the Germans, the Soviet Union and now the Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The author expertly analyzes the religious conflicts, nationalism and anti-Semitism that have shaped and tainted the country’s past. And it vividly expresses the tenacity, courage and ruthlessness of the Ukrainians – it must now be ingrained in their genes – and their long struggle to gain independence from Russia.

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine
By Anne Applebaum
Anchor: 608 pages, $18

A Pulitzer Prize winner for ‘Gulag: A History’, Applebaum has deep ties to Central Europe; she lives in Poland, a close neighbor of Ukraine, and is married to a Polish politician. This 2017 book tells the horrific story of the treatment of Ukraine at the hands of Stalin in the 1930s, when the dictator drove his peasants from their farms and into collectives. The result was a catastrophic famine, the deadliest in European history, in which 3 million Ukrainians died.

Everything flows
By Vasily Grossman
New York Review Books: 272 pages, $18

Grossman was an acclaimed journalist and novelist who opposed Stalin’s regime. His latest novel features characters who come forward to confess the terrible things they did under Stalin, things that seemed rational under the circumstances. One woman’s account recreates the Ukrainian famine in gruesome detail, making it clear that Stalin’s actions constitute deliberate and successful genocide.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
By Timothy Snyder
Basic books: 560 pages, $23

Snyder, a Yale history professor, has published six books that deal with Ukraine and Russia (the latest is in 2019″The road to unfreedom”). His award-winning 2010 story, “Bloodlands,” re-examines the massacres carried out by Hitler and Stalin in central Europe between 1930 and 1945, when as many as 14 million non-combatants perished through murder, starvation and imprisonment in death camps – including many Ukrainians.

Midnight in Chernobyl
By Adam Higginbotham
Simon & Schuster: 560 pages, $20

As Russia and Ukraine battle near Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants, the Chernobyl books have a new sense of urgency. Higginbotham’s critically acclaimed 2019 account of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster reconstructs events on an almost minute-by-minute timeline.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
By Svetlana Alexievich
Dalkey Archives: 240 pages, $20

The Belarusian journalist, genius oral historian and 2015 Nobel Prize winner tells the story of the Chernobyl disaster in a kaleidoscopic retrospective through nearly 500 interviews with those who lived through it.

In times of war: voices from Ukraine
By Tim Judah
Books by Tim Duggan: 290 pages, $12 (Kindle)

This excellent 2015 book by the Economist’s correspondent in the Balkans (currently reporting from Kyiv) moves from Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea to the ensuing Ukrainian civil war to try to understand the history that motivates all sides, including eastern Russians. Ukraine who see Putin as a savior and western Ukrainians determined to fight the Russians. costs. In Ukraine, “what you believe today depends on what you believe in the past,” writes Judah. A prescient book that combines vivid profiles of Ukrainians with lucid history and grassroots journalism.

PUTIN’S RUSSIA

The faceless man
By Masha Gessen
Riverhead: 352 pages, $18

One of the most amazing things about this book is that the steely-nerved journalist, now a New York writer, was still living in Russia when it was published in 2012. She delves into childhood Putin’s worker, his career as a KGB agent, his political training as a government official in St. Petersburg, and, after his rise to the helm of Russia, his systematic building of an authoritarian system that dominated the government , corporations and the media, harassing, imprisoning and even murdering those who stood in his way.

The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
By Steven Lee Myers
Vintage: 592 pages, $19

Myers, former Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times, published this meticulously reported and documented biography in 2015. Its premise is that what drives Putin is the need for control, which is why the messy processes of democracy threaten him. and enrage him. The book ends with Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, a first step in Putin’s drive to finally reclaim Ukraine.

Mr. Putin: Agent in the Kremlin
By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy
Brookings: 543 pages, $34

Russia expert who served on the National Security Council during the Trump administration (and testified in his first impeachment trial), Hill co-authored this chilling psychological portrait of Putin as an extortionist, exploiter and manipulator who demands absolute loyalty and trusts only himself.

The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
By Masha Gessen
Riverhead: 544 pages, $18

Gessen left Russia in 2013 due to its crackdown on gay families and critical journalists. In this brilliant and sobering account, published in 2017, she follows four young Russians who spent most of their lives under Putin as he dismantled government institutions essential to a free and just society, took control of large corporations, suppressed the independent press and consolidated its wealth and power. Written with insight and biting humour, it’s a dark and chilling portrait of a country in the grip of a ruthless dictator.

Between two fires: truth, ambition and compromise in Putin’s Russia
By Joshua Yaffa
Crown: 384 pages, $17

This disturbing 2021 book by a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker brings together profiles of Russians who gave up some of their ethics and freedoms to Putin. Most prominent is Konstantin Ernst, a brilliant television producer and intellectual who transformed and polished Putin’s video image, attending high-level Kremlin meetings while running a national news channel broadcasting news and entertainment pro-Putin with a nostalgic view of Russia’s Stalinist past. In these portraits of talented people whose ambitions are warped by Putin’s will, there is nothing to suggest a public uprising against Putin because of the war, although that may change as Russian elites lose Western privileges that have become essentials of their life.