7 Must-Read Books to Understand Ukraine and Russia
7 Must-Read Books to Understand Ukraine and Russia
Keith Gessen is the author of A Terrible Country and All the Sad Young Literary Men, and is a founding editor of n+1. He has translated or co-translated, from Russian, the work of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Kirill Medvedev, and Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl. A regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and New York magazine, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia University and lives in New York with his wife, the novelist Emily Gould, and their two sons. Viking will publish his third book, Raising Raffi, June 7, just before Father’s Day.
There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century, by Fiona Hill
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For years D.C.’s preeminent expert on the mind and motivations of Vladimir Putin was a British scholar at the Brookings Institute named Fiona Hill. Somewhat surprisingly, she became the lead Russia expert at the National Security Council under Donald Trump, trying to keep U.S. policy on Russia on an even keel despite the unpredictable behavior of the American president. Early in her tenure, Trump mistook her for a secretary; after she made clear she wasn't one, people around the White House began referring to her as "the Russia bitch." Two years later, she became a national star when testifying against Trump during his first impeachment. In this memoir, she describes her childhood in a coal mining town in northern England, her studies of Russian history at Harvard, and then her complex and tumultuous time at the White House at a turning point in history.
Voroshilovgrad, by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler
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Zhadan is a poet, novelist, and musician whose Ukrainian-language works have brought the country's literary culture into the 21st century. Voroshilovgrad—the old Soviet name for the Eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, where Zhadan is from—was written before the war, but its story of an aimless, overeducated speechwriter who must return to his dusty old hometown to take care of family business reads like a lover letter to a disappearing world. Luhansk has been under separatist control since 2014.
Sofia Petrovna, by Lydia Chukovskaya
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Those who want to understand what fear feels and looks like, what Russians have been experiencing again in their country, and what they would like to bring now to Ukraine, should read this novel about a mother whose son is arrested during the Stalinist purges of 1937-38. Written by Chukovskaya in secret in the late 1930s, not long after her own husband was arrested and shot, the book was not published in Russia until 1988.
Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, by Sophie Pinkham
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A wry and heartfelt memoir of a brilliant young scholar's travels to Russia and Ukraine, with a particular emphasis on the complicated politics of Ukrainian nationhood in the years leading up to, and after, the Maidan Revolution. A particularly useful book for getting a feel for the texture of life in Ukraine.
Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest Over Ukraine and the Caucasus, by Gerard Toal
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This book of "critical geography" by a professor of geography who has long studied the attitudes and desires of people in the post-Soviet space is the fundamental text for understanding the complex social, historical, and linguistic geographies of the Russian "near abroad"—Georgia and Ukraine, in particular. Toal, who is Irish, is an especially shrewd observer of how the American colossus frequently damages the very countries it hopes to aid and embrace.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen
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This book, admittedly by my sibling Masha, is a riveting journalistic treatment of how Russia, which seemed poised to do such great things in the wake of the Soviet collapse, instead slowly slid back into authoritarianism and now Putinism. Told through the stories of ordinary but ambitious and hopeful young Russians, the book is heartbreaking in the sweep of its disappointment. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2017.
Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky.
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A series of short, impressionistic stories, largely of women's experiences before and after the war in Eastern Ukraine, this book, in Belorusets's own words, seeks to "focus on the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies and experiences of everyday life." It is a melancholy, sometimes darkly comic book, illuminating the complex, sometimes petty ways in which war touches and rearranges people's lives.
Keith Gessen recommends books that explain the history of Ukraine and Russia and the current events.