Borderland: A Journey Through The History Of Ukraine by Anna Reid (PDF)

Description

Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centureies, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars. Again and again, borderland turned into battlefield: during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, Russia’s wars with Sweden in the eighteenth, the Civil War of 1918–1920, and under Nazi occupation. Ukraine finally won independence in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bigger than France and a populous as Britain, it has the potential to become one of the most powerful states in Europe.In this finely written and penetrating book, Anna Reid combines research and her own experiences to chart Ukraine’s tragic past. Talking to peasants and politicians, rabbis and racketeers, dissidents and paramilitaries, survivors of Stalin’s famine and of Nazi labor camps, she reveals the layers of myth and propaganda that wrap this divided land. From the Polish churches of Lviv to the coal mines of the Russian-speaking Donbass, from the Galician shtetlech to the Tatar shantytowns of Crimea, the book explores Ukraine’s struggle to build itself a national identity, and identity that faces up to a bloody past, and embraces all the peoples within its borders.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Anna Reid was the Kiev correspondent for The Economist and the Daily Telegraph and has written for the Washington Post, Financial Times, and The Spectator.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Borderland is a very well-researched account of Ukraine’s very complex history. In several places, the prose draws the reader into the author’s experience of her time in Ukraine conducting her research in interesting ways. However, the parts of the book that delve deeply into the present nation’s disjointed and constantly changing territorial governance over past centuries can be confusing, and not for the feint of heart. But if you want to better understand why Russia believes Ukraine to be part of its own territory, and the varied attitudes of modern Ukrainians about their cultural heritage, you will find answers in this book.

⭐A lot of the book is dedicated to the authors impressions of traveling through Ukraine in 1993 right after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence. I can see that this person is trying to draw another parallel perhaps but it makes the book unhelpful. She will dedicate pages to describing the poorest state of her hotel room and more of what it was to travel like at the time. Every single chapter starts with pages describing yet another small town in Ukraine and a bad train experience or something else that’s irrelevant today, 30 years later. It’s totally fine to do if the book was called “traveling through Ukraine in 1993” But it’s starting to get overbearing and irrelevant for a book that aims to be a journey through the history of Ukraine.BUT! It is a lot more interesting and readable than a dry history book.

⭐I knew nothing about Ukraine and my book group thought that it is time we knew why Putin was invading a peaceful country that did not have Nazis running it. My opinion of Putin has not changed. My sympathy for Ukrainians has increased. This is not a page turner, but it is fascinating how they managed to survive a 1000 years of terror.

⭐Reading this book gives a great historical perspective of what is going on now in 2022. Well written and well documented.

⭐I bought this book a few days after the Russian invasion to Ukraine because I realized that I knew very little about this country. However, I had a hard time trying to read it. The author’s writing can be difficult to follow at times with vague references and the use of Ukraine (Russian?) terms that were never explained. Sometimes she does a good job and other times I had no idea what she was trying to say. I got the impression that she cut and pasted a lot. On the contrary Chapter 10 is quite good, and it gives a good description of the situation during the 90s. The added new chapters are readable too. It’s curious that in this age of electronic printing, the format of the first edition of the book is quite different to the additional chapters added at the end in the second edition. I am afraid I do not recommend this book. If you want to read the history of Ukraine, I strongly recommend “The Gates of Europe” by Plokhy.

⭐Anna Reid does a splendid job of presenting a thorough history of this fascinating land, coupled with her own personal knowledge of living in Ukraine. This second edition adds chapters bringing that history up to the taking of Crimea. Borderland provides an excellent background for understanding the current war with Russia/Putin. Well written and an informative read.

⭐It was emotionally hard to comprehend the numbers and overwhelming to realize the pain experienced by so many due to evilness and hate of others.

⭐The history of Ukraine is wonderfully presented. Read this book and you will see the character of the second and third generation Ukrainians who are fighting today, April 11, 2022.

⭐This is a fascinating and also rather depressing history of Ukraine. At the time of my writing this review, the Russian invasion of the country is just over a week old, and sadly represents just the latest in a many centuries long history of war, massacre and disaster, for much of which time the Ukrainians have not had their own state, but been part of Russian, Polish, Lithuanian or Austro-Hungarian states or empires. This is a book of two (uneven) halves, written during the author’s various sojourns in the capital Kyiv. This is a 1000 year history of war and violence, from the founding of the Kievan Russ state and its historic decision to adopt Byzantine Christianity, separating future Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians from their Polish Catholics to the west; Islam was also an option but Prince Volodomyr liked pork and wine! It is a history involving Mongols, Cossacks, Poles, Jews and many others in a colourful and violent interplay of nations and ethnic groups.These first ten chapters were written in the mid 90s, just a few years after independence from the Soviet Union, which came suddenly after the failure of the August 1991 coup attempt again Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Despite a bumpy start to independence, the author is fairly upbeat at the end of this section that Ukraine may grow along a path towards being a prosperous and significant mainstream European country. The book was republished in 2015 with a more downbeat assessment and four extra chapters on the events of the Orange Revolution of 2005 and the 2014 Russian invasion of the Crimea and the Donbass area of Eastern Ukraine. It does indeed make you realise that Ukrainians have had among the bloodiest history of any national ethnic group in Europe over the longest period of time and in the 20th century for example suffered hideously not only during the second world war (as of course did the Russians) but also in the Great Hunger (Holodomor) of the early 1930s, Stalin’s state-inspired famine when the Soviet Union was exporting grain to pay debts at the expense of millions starving mostly in Ukraine.At the end, the author reminds us that “back in the 1990s, I closed the original edition of this book with the hope that Ukrainians were set for a happier future, and the observation that ‘after a thousand years of one of the bloodiest histories in the world, they surely deserve it’. It’s truer than ever”. Indeed, in the most recent years since the Maidan Square uprising of 2014, the central and western parts of Ukraine at least have matured and bear many hallmarks of a modern European country – which is probably why current events seem all the more shocking to us in Britain. I wonder if the author will write a third edition – sadly it would be likely to contain as much grim drama as the first two editions.

⭐Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine’ is a very readable and informative book on a country which I have visited briefly, but knew relatively little about. First written in the late 1990’s, it now includes a final section summarising the events of the last few years, including Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the unrest in the east of the country.Although I enjoyed this book, its main focus is that of a travel writer, with the author adding historical background as appropriate. Consequently there are times when I found it a bit confusing as it doesn’t cover events strictly chronologically. However, it’s a very helpful introduction to a country which not many of us know a lot about.

⭐I was really interested to find out more about the history of Ukraine, and thought that this could be a good book to start with.The country has certainly been through a lot – having been a vassal state of Lithuania, Poland, bits of it in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Ottoman empire – and of course the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union. None of its masters treated the Ukrainian people particularly well, though prize for biggest b***rds has to go to the Russians. Starting with the Russian empire: “1876 Russification climaxed with the Edict of Ems. Taking the waters in that German spa, Aleksandr II signed a decree banning all import and publication of Ukrainian books and newspapers, all stage-shows, concerts and public lectures in Ukrainian, and all teaching in Ukrainian, even for infants. Ukrainian-language books were to be removed from school libraries, and Ukrainophile teachers transferred to Great Russia. During cholera outbreaks, even public health notices were to be posted in Russian alone.”Stalin brought in the farm collectivisation that generated the appalling famine, made worse by the appropriation of any food grown in Ukraine and the deporting of many Ukrainians to gulags and other parts of USSR: “Killing more people than the First World War on all sides put together, the famine of 1932–3 was, and still is, one of the most under-reported atrocities of human history, a fact that contributes powerfully to Ukraine’s persistent sense of victimisation.”Then came WWII, and the Germans: “For Ukrainians, the war was fratricidal. Caught between Stalin and Hitler, they split three ways. The vast majority of direct participants – 2.5 million men 13– were conscripted straight into the Red Army. Several tens of thousands – known as ‘Hiwis’ – short for Hilfswillige or ‘willing-to-helps’, joined the Nazis in various capacities.” “‘The Poles didn’t find as many “political criminals” among us in twenty years,’ the Avhustivka villagers mourned, ‘as “older brother” Russia did in a year and a half.’ Along with millions of other Ukrainians, they believed Nazi rule could not possibly be any worse than Stalinism. Photographs (some cooked up by Soviet propagandists,) show smiling Galician peasants running out of their houses to welcome the Panzer crews with bread and salt.” “For all Ukraine, the war years were ones of unparalleled violence, destruction and horror: 5.3 million of the country’s inhabitants died during the war – an astounding one in six of the entire population. (The equivalents for Germany, France and Britain were one in fifteen, one in seventy-seven and one in 125.) Of these, about 2.25 million were Jews. … Altogether, the Holocaust killed 60 per cent of the Jews of Soviet Ukraine, and over 90 per cent of the Jews of Galicia.”When Chernobyl exploded, the Ukrainians were kept in the dark about the dangers, and unnecessarily exposed to high levels of radiation.Not until the collapse of the Soviet Union had Ukraine been an independent, sovereign nation. There had been sporadic independence movements, but they seemed to have been often badly run, with no clear objective or direction, or subject to poor timing. “Split between rival powers for centuries, talking about history at all only emphasised disunity. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Balts all knew they were rejoining Europe; Ukrainians were not sure where they belonged or even where they wanted to belong.”The author has spent a lot of time in Ukraine, and the little snippets of information about her experiences in the country in the 1980s and 90s were very interesting. The first part of the book was researched and written in the 1990s, and ends with Ukraine at a crossroads – poor, badly and corruptly run, still suffering from a Soviet hang-over – and unsure whether to continue to stay aligned with Russia, or to veer more West. The second half ends in 2015, after the Orange Revolution, and after the invasion of Crimea, but before Zelensky took power. She ends with a warning, which – given the timing – is rather prescient: “rather than refraining from poking the bear, it is becoming unpleasantly clear, we are going to have to stop it biting off our leg.”“If we let Russia wreck Ukraine – if we are feeling too poor, anxious, or distracted to fight Ukraine’s corner – we will not only be undermining our own security, but betraying 46 million fellow Europeans. It would be a strategic and moral failure on the scale of the crushed Hungarian Rising and Prague Spring – and with much less excuse.”The Ukraine at the end of the book, still seemed a basket-case – and so completely unlike the pictures we see of unoccupied, free Ukraine today. Outside the war-zones, Ukraine now looks happy, united, prosperous, with a well-educated population living in a modern Western world: “Just as flourishing, law-abiding, genuinely democratic Poland helped inspire the Maidan, a flourishing, law-abiding, genuinely democratic Ukraine might hold out the prospect of a freer future to Russia’s boxed-in young, and give heart to her persecuted liberals. And for Russians in general, nothing would better demonstrate the benefits of Western-style government than to see their ‘little brothers’ next door doing well – which is exactly why Putin is so determined not to let that happen.”After reading this book, and seeing the hell that Putin has rained down on Ukraine – the question is not why Ukraine would want to join NATO and the EU, but why on earth they would EVER want to have anything at all to do with Russia.I hope with all my heart, that this horrendous war ends soon, with an independent and intact Ukraine, free at last to decide whom it wants to befriend, and whom to shun. A clear break with the past and a look forward to a golden future.

⭐The author takes the reader on a journey through Ukraine, exploring and explaining through conversations with Ukrainians and others the kaleidoscopic peoples of this fascinating country. She describes gently and eloquently the ebb and flow over the centuries of different nationalities, religions and ethnic groups across its fertile plains and the forces driving them. The story of this beautiful but turbulent country is brought up to the latest turmoil with the invasion of Crimea and the Donbass by Russian troops and the courageous resistance of the Ukrainian people. I am left wishing that they succeed in their efforts to be recognised by the World as an independent, self-governing country an d not just an appendage of it’s powerful neighbours.It is a wonderful but challenging read.

⭐I bought this a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. It’s a great introduction to the country and people. Highly informative and well written. I reread it again in 2022 for obvious reasons. I hope the third edition when Anna writes it has a happy ending.

Keywords

Free Download Borderland: A Journey Through The History Of Ukraine in PDF format
Borderland: A Journey Through The History Of Ukraine PDF Free Download
Download Borderland: A Journey Through The History Of Ukraine 1999 PDF Free
Borderland: A Journey Through The History Of Ukraine 1999 PDF Free Download
Download Borderland: A Journey Through The History Of Ukraine PDF
Free Download Ebook Borderland: A Journey Through The History Of Ukraine