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  • Book cover of The Holocaust by Bullets

    Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: The story of how a Catholic priest uncovered the truth behind the murder of more than a million Ukrainian Jews. Father Patrick Desbois documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in Ukraine in WWII. Using innovative methodology, interviews, and ballistic evidence, he has determined the location of many mass gravesites with the goal of providing proper burials for the victims of the forgotten Ukrainian Holocaust. Compiling new archival material and many eye-witness accounts, Desbois has put together the first definitive account of one of World War II’s bloodiest chapters. Published with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “This modest Roman Catholic priest from Paris, without using much more than his calm voice and Roman collar, has shattered the silence surrounding a largely untold chapter of the Holocaust.” —Chicago Tribune “Part memoir, part prosecutorial brief, The Holocaust by Bullets tells a compelling story in which a priest unconnected by heritage or history is so moved by an injustice he sets out to right a daunting wrong.” —The Miami Herald “Father Desbois is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and history.” —The Wall Street Journal “An outstanding contribution to Holocaust literature, uncovering new dimensions of the tragedy . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  • Book cover of The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History
    Serhii Plokhy

     · 2023

    “Compelling.… [E]rudite, objective and immensely readable.” —Ben Hall, Financial Times An authoritative history of Europe’s largest military conflict since World War II, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Gates of Europe. Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war—and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated. Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault—on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament—the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia’s ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable. Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia’s idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post–Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.

  • Book cover of Ukraine and Russia
    Paul D'Anieri

     · 2019

    D'Anieri explores the long-term dynamics of international conflict between Ukraine, Russia and the West, revealing the historic roots of the conflict over Ukraine. He demonstrates how the security dilemma, the impact of democratization on geopolitics, and the incompatible goals of a post-Cold War Europe have led to 'a new Cold War'.

  • Book cover of Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-century Ukraine
  • Book cover of The Ravine
    Wendy Lower

     · 2021

    A single photograph--an exceptionally rare "action shot" documenting the horrific murder of a Jewish family--drives a riveting forensic investigation by a gifted Holocaust scholar.

  • Book cover of The Tatars of Crimea

    Examines the situation of the Crimean Tatars since the breakup of the USSR and of their continuing strutle to find peace and acceptance in a homeland.

  • Book cover of The Conflict in Ukraine

    When guns began firing again in Europe, why was it Ukraine that became the battlefield? Conventional wisdom dictates that Ukraine's current crisis can be traced to the linguistic differences and divided political loyalties that have long fractured the country. However this theory only obscures the true significance of Ukraine's recent civic revolution and the conflict's crucial international dimension. The 2013-14 Ukrainian revolution presented authoritarian powers in Russia with both a democratic and a geopolitical challenge. President Vladimir Putin reacted aggressively by annexing the Crimea and sponsoring the war in eastern Ukraine; and Russia's actions subsequently prompted Western sanctions and growing international tensions reminiscent of the Cold War. Though the media portrays the situation as an ethnic conflict, an internal Ukrainian affair, it is in reality reflective of a global discord, stemming from differing views on state power, civil society, and democracy. The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know explores Ukraine's contemporary conflict and complicated history of ethnic identity, and it does do so by weaving questions of the country's fraught relations with its former imperial master, Russia, throughout the narrative. In denying Ukraine's existence as a separate nation, Putin has adopted a stance similar to that of the last Russian tsars, who banned the Ukrainian language in print and on stage. Ukraine emerged as a nation-state as a result of the imperial collapse in 1917, but it was subsequently absorbed into the USSR. When the former Soviet republics became independent states in 1991, the Ukrainian authorities sought to assert their country's national distinctiveness, but they failed to reform the economy or eradicate corruption. As Serhy Yekelchyk explains, for the last 150 years recognition of Ukraine as a separate nation has been a litmus test of Russian democracy, and the Russian threat to Ukraine will remain in place for as long as the Putinist regime is in power. In this concise and penetrating book, Yekelchyk describes the current crisis in Ukraine, the country's ethnic composition, and the Ukrainian national identity. He takes readers through the history of Ukraine's emergence as a sovereign nation, the after-effects of communism, the Orange Revolution, the EuroMaidan, the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, the war in the Donbas, and the West's attempts at peace making. The Conflict in Ukraine is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces that have shaped contemporary politics in this increasingly important part of Europe. What Everyone Needs to Know(R) is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

  • Book cover of In the Midst of Civilized Europe

    FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

  • Book cover of Where the Iron Crosses Grow

    The Crimean Peninsula was the setting for the destruction of a number of armies in World War II, both Soviet and German. When the Soviets fortified Sevastopol in 1941 it heralded the beginning of a period of intense fighting over the Crimea. In this remarkable work, acclaimed author Robert Forcyzk assembles new research to investigate the intense and barbaric fighting for the region in World War II, where first Soviet and then German armies were surrounded and totally obliterated. Forcyzk's unique account provides a definitive analysis of the many unique characteristics of the conflict, exploring the historical context as it uncovers one of the most pivotal theaters of the Eastern Front during World War II.

  • Book cover of Ukraine

    In 1988 Orest Subtelny's Ukraine was published to international acclaim, as the definitive history of what was at the time a state within the USSR. With this new edition of Ukraine: A History, Subtelny revises the story up to the spring of 2000.