Thread by @egavactip

Ukrainian history is not an area of expertise of mine, but I do have areas of interest/expertise that involve Ukraine: World War II, partisan warfare, the Holocaust, & the Eastern Borderlands region of Europe. So I thought I'd share some of the books I have, for those interested.

I have many books on the Eastern Front in World War II and, obviously, the region of Ukraine figures in many of them. But they're not *about* Ukraine. So I won't include them. But I will mention one book, as it focuses on one of the most important battles that took place there.

This is David Stahel's book Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East. It is the second of a series of revisionist (I mean that in the scholarly sense) books on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It's interesting but it helps to already be familiar w/the battle.

Oh, while I am at it, I guess I will mention the Battle of Odessa in 1941, where Soviet forces fought hard against Romanian (and later German) attackers. One of the few Soviet general memoirs translated into English is Nikolai Krylov's Glory Eternal: Defense of Odessa 1941.

There's a more recent book on the battle of Odessa that's been translated into English: Odessa 1941-44: Defense, Occupation, Resistance and Liberation, by Nikolai Ovcharenko, but in my opinion, it's bad.

To look at the Holocaust in Ukraine, I suggest starting with The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, by Yitzhak Arad. It's very good, though tremendously depressing.

One of the aspects of the Holocaust and the Axis occupation of Ukraine is that Romanian units participated in part of both. Most Romanian atrocities occurred in areas of "Greater Romania," but also in places like Odessa.

An interesting recent book is Grant Harward's Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust.

I also learned a lot from Radu Ioanid's The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Roma under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. Pictured below is the new second edition, coming out soon.

Finally, there's a book that looks specifically at the Romanian occupation of Ukraine: Vladimir Solonari's A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–1944.

A good starting point on the Nazi occupation of Ukraine is Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, by Wendy Lower.

Also very good is Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule, by Karel C. Berkhoff.

Because of my interest in partisan/guerrilla warfare in the WW2 era, I've read a number of books on the Ukrainian partisan movement of the OUN/UPA. This is an area fraught with danger and many books are biased or unreliable.

This is especially so for accounts of the UPA written by exiles, who gloss over its fascist nature and its genocide of Poles and portray it simply as anti-communist freedom fighters. I don't recommend books like these:

UPA memoirs are equally biased but they give insight at least into certain individual perspectives. Two examples are The Winding Path to Freedom: A memoir of life in the Ukrainian Underground, by Roman D. Mac,

and Thousands of Roads: A Memoir of a Young Woman's Life in the Ukrainian Underground During and After World War II, by Maria Savchyn Pyskir.

Even some modern scholarly works are quite biased, such as the very pro-Ukrainian book The Culmination of Conflict: The Ukrainian-Polish Civil War and the Expulsion of Ukrainians After the Second World War, by Stephen Rapawy.

However, one book that does show the dark side of the UPA/OUN is a biography: Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe.

Stalin, of course, went to great efforts to fight Ukrainian nationalists and re-implement Soviet rule. This started even before the liberation of the territory, as the (so-so) book Stalin’s Commandos, by Alexander Gogun shows.

Jan T. Gross explores an even earlier period, when Stalin took western Ukraine from Poland in 1939: Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia

Another interesting book is Timothy Snyder's Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine.

Snyder also wrote another interesting book on an area I am interested in--the borderlands between central and eastern Europe, with mixed nationalities and shifting geographies. It's a complicated story. His Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin looks at the region broadly.

Another borderlands book that I found surprisingly interesting is the study of this (now) western Ukrainian city by Christoph Mick:

Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City

Finally, an oddball book that doesn't fit with these other themes: Lynne Viola's Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine.

Anyway, I just thought, given the current interest in Ukraine, that some people might find one or more of these books interesting, so I decided to share. If you do decide to try one of them, please let me know what you thought of it.