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.
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If this is being done intentionally, it is most likely a defensive effort on the part of Ukrainians; most military flooding events are defensive in nature.
This was a tactic that was used extensively in World War II. The Germans, for example, blew up dams over the Roer River to cause flooding to interfere with the American invasion of Germany in 1944-45.
In Italy in 1943, the Germans flooded the Pontine Marshes south of Rome to slow the Allied advance there. The Germans also flooded parts of Normandy in anticipation of a possible Allied invasion and parts of the Netherlands to hinder the Canadian liberation of that country.
If you want to follow the militia trial in Michigan over the plot to kidnap its governor, here are some articles on the opening statements, etc.
Defense attorneys are variously claiming that it was "all talk" and no action, and that it was entrapment.
Of course, two people have already pleaded guilty.
This trial is the federal trial. This case is unusual in that some of the defendants were charged (only) federally and the others were charged (only) by the state of Michigan.
"Whitmer kidnap plotters wanted to help spark second Civil War, feds say"
The other day, trying to answer a reporter's question, I came across someone I hadn't thought of in ages. Today, doing unrelated research in my old Idaho files, I came across my records of him.
Because he's one of the nastiest persons I've encountered, I thought I'd share.
I'm talking about white supremacist Keith Gilbert and his long, awful extremist career. In the 1960s he served time in California for receiving stolen explosives & for assault with a deadly weapon. He later claimed he had gotten dynamite so he could try to kill MLKjr.
By the 1980s he was a follower of Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, living in Post Falls, Idaho.He later formed his own tiny groups, such as the Social Nationalistic Aryan People's Party and the Restored Church of Jesus Christ Aryan Nations
Today I thought I'd share another thread-profile on a historical American right-wing extremist. Up this time is Linda Thompson (1953-2009), a key pioneer in the militia movement and an unfortunately significant influence on Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Some extremists are active for decades, but Linda Thompson was different, suddenly rising from obscurity to become a national figure, then disappearing from the scene after only a few years. But her timing was unfortunately impeccable.
Thompson grew up in Georgia, served in the U.S. Army from 1974-1978 (allowing herself subsequently to call herself a "Vietnam-era veteran) as a clerk/stenographer, and graduated from law school in Indiana in 1988. She opened a law practice, first in Georgia, then Indiana.
There's a conversation going on elsewhere about a long dissertation; I'm not linking to it because I don't like the post that started it. But I don't mind talking about long dissertations more generally, and even using mine as an example.
My own personal opinion is that many individual dissertations are actually too short, and some entire fields allow remarkably short dissertations, considering that dissertations are supposed to be a substantial contribution in original research.
Having said that, there is such a thing as dissertations that are too long. Arguably, my own dissertation was one such. It was 820 pages long (that's dissertation-formatted pages, double-spaced and with generous margins, but still).
I was looking at some old-emails today and came across an interesting 1999 communication from a staff member of the John Birch Society that is kind of interesting, so I thought I would share it. The context of his e-mail is that in 1998 I had published a report on a certain type
of scam both aimed at & propagated by anti-gov't extremists. In that report, I discussed the problem of warnings by the gov't of a scam marketed to people distrustful of the gov't, and suggested that some fringe pubs, like the JBS's New American, might be approachable to warn.
In 1999, the then-research director for the JBS saw my comment and wrote me an e-mail about it, essentially gently pushing back at my suggestion--for interesting reasons. This e-mail I reproduce here. I have not included the name of the research director, who is still alive and