Publisher's Weekly Review
With this fascinating and often grim portrait of Ukraine, Judah, a journalist who previously covered the Balkan wars, contributes to a greater Western understanding of the country since the Maidan revolution, Russia's capture of Crimea, and the Russian-backed uprising in the eastern Donbass region in 2014. This work stands out by splitting the difference between a purely journalistic account and a scholarly analysis. Judah offers a compassionate human view of these conflicts, mixing personal stories, history, politics, and reportage to document "what Ukraine is really like and what its people have to say." He travels through the country's distinct regions and shares anecdotes from a number of people he encounters there, including academics, government officials, teachers, doctors, and more colorful characters such as a "turbocharged" 59-year-old zookeeper and an 87-year-old "bomb shelter poet." Judah describes a vast, complex society in the midst of an uncertain, frozen conflict, and a country rife with corruption, political and ethnic divisions, and misinformation. Despite clearly evident splits in loyalties and a wide range of opinions on the current situation, ordinary people are often more concerned with their immediate needs than geopolitical struggles. Judah's special and timely book will provide lay readers with an apt introduction to Ukraine, and specialists will appreciate its atypical yet enlightening approach and its insights into the social aspects of ongoing conflicts. Maps & photos. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Judah (Kosovo, 2008) presents a collection of new and previously published pieces about Ukraine, which is in the midst of its greatest upheaval since independence in 1991, written with a mastery of the terrain honed by years of regional reporting for the BBC, the Times, Economist, and New York Review of Books. Judah captures the stark Soviet-era economic and social-engineering projects that wildly changed the local economies and ethnic makeup of many Ukrainian towns. He portrays a variety of people who pin their hopes of a brighter future alternatively on tighter European integration, stronger Ukrainian nationalism, or Russian rule, revealing the impossibility of a single national narrative. Notably missing are stories from Crimea, which did not grant Judah a travel visa after the 2014 Russian annexation. The inclusion of deep historical background, area maps, and statistical data makes this a great resource for understanding the ongoing fight for control of Europe's second largest country and all the other conflicts currently in play. A valuable addition to European history, politics, and military collections.--Kaplan, Dan Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
This book does not, nor does it try to, explore all of the complex and historical causes of the current crisis in Ukraine. Instead, Judah (The Serbs) takes a journalistic approach toward uncovering the emotions, attitudes, misunderstandings, history, and desires of ordinary people in the region, creating a picture of the country as a whole, present and past. Each chapter roughly focuses on one individual, with interviewees scattered throughout Ukraine. From leaders of the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic in the east to mothers of revolutionaries in distant L'viv in the west, seaport-owning burgeoning oligarchs outside Odessa, and schoolteachers, pensioners, soldiers, and even the minister of finance in between. Throughout, those for and against the Maiden protests and its aftermath understand that war is changing the landscape forever, and that the vast majority of the region's citizens only want peace and normalcy. VERDICT This book provides a new look at the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and how Western interest has waned. It will appeal to those seeking to understand the area's history, present, and possible future on a more personal level. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/16.]-Zebulin -Evelhoch, Central Washington Univ. Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
1. Weaponizing History Just because something is a cliché does not mean that it is not true. In his book 1984 George Orwell famously wrote: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." The war in Ukraine is not about history, but without using or, to employ the fashionable term, "weaponizing" history, the conflict simply could not be fought. There is nothing unique about this. In our times, in Europe, history was deployed as the advance guard and recruiting sergeant in the run‑up to the Yugoslav wars, and exactly the same has happened again in Ukraine. In this way people are mobilized believing horrendously garbled versions of history. On the Russian and rebel side, fear is instilled by summoning up the ghosts of the past and simply ignoring inconvenient historical truths. On the Ukrainian side, the ugliest parts of history are ignored, as though they never happened, thus giving the enemy more propaganda ammunition to fire. In this conflict the words "info-war" or "information war" have replaced the word "propaganda." In one way that is fitting because fighting the info-war is more complicated than disseminating old-fashioned propaganda. The battlefields include Facebook, Twitter, vKontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) and YouTube. On news and other websites tens of thousands of people "comment" on articles in such a way as to make them feel as though they are doing something useful. They are, as a boy who was about to start military training in Kharkiv told me, "sofa warriors." But some it seems are mercenaries too. According to numerous reliable reports, the Russian authorities contract firms to employ people to "comment" and spread, among other things, the central line of Russian propaganda, which is that the Ukrainian government, after the Maidan revolution, is nothing but Nazism reincarnated. What is odd is how much rubbish people believe, disregarding what they must know from their own experiences or those of their families. What has happened on the Russian side of the info-war, especially, bears close resemblance to the experience of Serbs in the early 1990s. Then, most of their media painted all Croats as Ustashas, after their wartime fascist movement, and Bosnian Muslims as jihadis. While of course, just as there were indeed then some admirers of the Ustashas, and some jihadis too, just as there are admirers of Ukraine's wartime fascists now, the big lie is to give them a significance they didn't and don't have. As in the Balkans, the same is happening again: in Russia all of the mainstream media is following the modern party line. As the rebels seized control of eastern regions of Ukraine in April 2014, they moved quickly to take over local TV buildings and transmission facilities, turning off Ukrainian channels and tuning in to Russian ones. On the other side of the line, Russian channels were switched off and removed from cable packages. However, in the age of satellite TV and the Internet, it is not possible to deprive everyone of all information, bar that which you want them to see, but it is nevertheless remarkable how people so often accept what they are told. In this story, or "narrative" to use the technical term, history is something of a foundation and bedrock and this is why rewriting history is as important as writing the news. What you believe today depends on what you believe about the past. In that sense it is important for the "political technologists," to use the pithy and apt term popular in post-Soviet countries, who might be understood by Westerners as turbo-spin doctors, to fashion a past which suits the future they are trying to create. When Vladimir Putin, Russia's triumphant president, spoke on March 18, 2014, to his parliament, the Duma, and other Russian leaders and announced the annexation of Crimea following its referendum, which took place with no free debate and was rammed through under the watchful eyes of armed men and Russian soldiers, he repeated the line that maybe even he believes, but certainly many Russians and those in rebel-held territory believe. There had been a coup d'état in Kiev against the lawfully elected government of President Yanukovych executed by "nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites." Some of these there were, just as there are plenty of the same on the Russian and rebel side, but to tar the whole revolution in this way made sense only to people who actually wanted to believe it. For supporters from Western countries and other foreign admirers of Putin and the rebels, it also provided what seemed like a noble "anti-fascist" cause to belong to, rather than subscribing to an invented and racist interpretation of events in which all Ukrainians were fascists and the Russians or the rebels were heroic liberators. "We can all clearly see the intentions of these ideological heirs of [Stepan] Bandera," said Putin, "Hitler's accomplice during the Second World War." In Kiev I talked with Professor Grigory Perpelytsia, a former Soviet naval man, who now teaches at the Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy. We walked down the hill from the academy and ducked into a dark restaurant serving hearty old-fashioned Ukrainian cuisine, meaning mostly large portions of meat. Putin, he said, wanted Russian troops to be welcomed with "flowers and songs"--as they were by many in Crimea, though anyone who did not feel this way was hardly likely to be on the streets. In order to achieve this, he said, Putin had launched an info-war against "Ukrainian fascists" and Banderovtsi. Many were receptive to this kind of message, he explained, especially older people in Russia and to a certain extent in Ukraine, because many still retained a Soviet mentality, "want to go back to the USSR" and perceived Russia to be its inheritor. To burnish this image Russia exploited the victory of the Second World War and the symbols of the USSR, which disoriented people and confused them. In Ukraine, all this served to consolidate divisions which already existed. One of the great failings of the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all. The modern Ukrainian state has no common soundtrack of history, which for Britain for example includes Churchill telling Britons they would fight on the beaches and in the hills, or de Gaulle telling the French that they had lost a battle but not the war. Reality might have been more complex, but nevertheless there are no serious challenges to these modern narratives--even in France, where there was plenty of collaboration. In Ukraine's case, however, the story is different and, as the conflict has shown, two baleful figures loom over it, those of Bandera and Stalin. Understanding this is essential to understanding Ukraine today. Excerpted from In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine by Tim Judah All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
