Understanding Modern Ukraine: History, Politics, and Society

Catalog description

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 initiated the most massive war in continental Europe since 1945, with the loss of tens of thousands of lives and displacement of millions of refugees. Its impact has been felt globally ? from the energy crisis in Europe and threats of starvation in Africa reliant on exports of Ukrainian grain, to implications for East Asian security in confrontation between China and Taiwan. For many, the historical experience of Ukraine that underlies this war is little known, and even less well understood. The territories that today constitute Ukraine historically were part ? sometimes concurrently, sometimes sequentially ? of the Russian and Habsburg Austrian empires, Poland, and -- to a lesser extent, Hungary and interwar Romania and Czechoslovakia, and earlier even the Ottoman Turkish empire. They were the heart of Central and Eastern Europe that Yale historian Timothy Snyder has dubbed ?the Bloodlands,? for the 14 million victims of the Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes. In this course we will study why Ukrainian lands were so central in European power politics and why Ukraine was ?and in the case of Russia, still is ? an object of empire building. The other side of the coin in our historical examination will be the internal development of the Ukrainian people, their complex attempts at nation building, and the ultimate achievement of independent statehood ? now again under threat from external imperialist forces.