Serhii PlokhyReviews

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe is as far as I know impartial and meticulously researched. However, in the Titans of Nuclear - Chernobyl Miniseries podcast I've heard the number of radiation caused health problems is far less than what this book presents. In any case, the Chernobyl disaster is an attestation to the importance of proper communication and vigilance against authoritarianism.

A good summing up, up to the present moment.

A good overview of the socio-political causes and effects of the Chernobyl disaster, drawing a strong through-line from the incident to the fall of the USSR a few years later while continuing to acknowledge the broader cultural factors.

DNFing this at Three Mile Island.

This is a collection of scholarly "essays"/accounts of some of the world's worst nuclear accidents. There's nothing terribly bad about this book, but I'm just finding that it's not super engaging and rather dry. I'm glad I read part of it, because I learned some interesting facts about Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym and Windscale - the disasters I knew the least about. As far as TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima, I know there's better-written accounts I'd rather invest my time on.

On February 24, 2022, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II that summoned up ominous historical parallels. Memories of Munich resurfaced, as well as the price paid for inaction. The West heard terrifying if unmistakable echoes in the rumble of armored vehicles and boots on the ground, and this time responded rapidly and unhesitatingly to both condemn Russia and steadfastly stand with Ukraine. Post-Trump—the former president seemed to have a kind of boyhood crush on Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin—the United States, led now by the Biden Administration, acted decisively to partner in near-unanimity with the European Union and a newly re-emboldened NATO to provide political, economic, and especially military aid to beleaguered Ukrainians.
The world watched in horror as Russian missiles took aim at civilian targets. But there was also widespread admiration for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who defied offers to assist his flight to a safe haven abroad by reportedly declaring that: "The fight is here: I need ammunition, not a ride." But while most Ukrainians were indeed grateful for the outpouring of critical support from abroad, there was also background noise fraught with frustration: Russia had actually been making war on Ukraine since 2014, even if much of the planet never seemed to notice it.
Since, at least until very recently, most Americans could not easily locate Ukraine on a map, it is perhaps less than surprising that few were aware of the active Russian belligerency in Ukraine for the eight years prior to the full scale invasion that made cable news headlines. Many still do not know what the current war is really about. That vast sea of the uninformed is the best audience for The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History [2023] by award-winning Harvard professor and historian Serhii Plokhy.
The conflict in Ukraine has spawned two competing narratives, and although only one is fact-based, the other—advanced by Putin and his neofascist allies in Europe and the United States—has gained dangerous currency as of late. In the fantasy “world according to Putin,” Ukraine is styled as a “near abroad” component integral to Russia with a shared heritage and culture that makes it inseparable from the Russian state. At the same time, Ukraine has brought invasion upon itself by seeking to ally itself with Russia’s enemies. And, somehow concomitantly, Ukraine is also a rogue state run by Nazis—never mind that Zelenskyy himself is of Jewish heritage—that obligates Moscow’s intervention in order to protect the Ukrainian and Russian populations under threat. That none of this is true and that much of it is neither logical nor even rational makes no difference. Putin and his puppets just keep repeating it, because as we know from Goebbels’ time, if you keep repeating a lie it becomes the truth.
And that truth is more complicated, so of course far more difficult to rebut. It is always challenging for nuance to compete with talking points, especially when the latter are reinforced in well-orchestrated efforts peddled by a sophisticated state-run propaganda machine that has an international reach. Ukraine and Russia, as well as Belarus, do indeed share a cultural heritage that can be traced back to the ninth century Kyivan Rus' state, but then a similar claim can be made about France and Germany and their roots in the Carolingian Empire a bit farther to the west—with the same lack of relevance to their respective rights to sovereignty in the modern day. And Russian origins actually belong to fourteenth century Muscovy, not Kyiv. In its long history, Ukraine has been incorporated into Tsarist Russia and its successor state, the Soviet Union, but its vast parcels were also at various times controlled by Mongols, by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, by Austria, and even by a Turkish khanate. Yet, Ukraine always stubbornly clung to its distinct sovereign identity, even when—like Poland under partition—it was not a sovereign nation, and even as the struggle to achieve statehood ever persisted. That is quite a story in itself, and no one tells that story better than Plokhy himself in his erudite text, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine [2015, rev.2021], a dense, well-researched, deep dive into the past that at once fully establishes Ukraine’s right to exist, while expertly placing it into the context of Europe’s past and present. Alas, it leans to the academic in tone and thus poses a challenge to a more general audience.
Fortunately, The Russo-Ukrainian War is far more readable and accessible, without sacrificing the impressive scholarship that marks the foundation of all Plokhy’s work. And thankfully the course of Ukraine’s recent past—the focus here—is far less convoluted than in prior centuries. While contrary to Putin’s claim, Ukraine is not an inextricable element of the Russian state, their modern history has certainly between intertwined. But that changed in the post-Soviet era, and the author traces the paths of each in the decades since Ukraine’s independence and Russia’s drift under Putin’s rule from a fledgling democracy to neofascist authoritarianism.
Ukraine became a sovereign state in 1991 upon the dissolution of the USSR, along with a number of former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Overnight, Ukraine became the second largest European nation (after Russia) and found itself hosting the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. As part of an agreement dubbed the “Trilateral Statement,” Ukraine transferred its nuclear weapons to Russia for destruction in exchange for security assurances from Russia, Britain, and the United States. This crucial moment is too often overlooked in debates over aid to Ukraine. Not only has Russia plainly violated this agreement that the United States remains obligated to uphold, but there surely could have been no Russian invasion had Ukraine hung on to those nukes.
Ukraine suffered mightily in its decades as a Soviet republic—most notably during Stalin’s infamous man-made famine known as the “Holodomor” (1932-33) that killed millions of Ukrainians—but 1991 and its aftermath saw a peaceful divorce and both nations go their separate ways. Each suffered from economic dislocation, corruption, and political instability at this new dawn, but despite shortcomings throughout this transition, Ukrainians looked to the West, saw greater integration with Europe as central to their future, and embraced democracy, if sometimes imperfectly.
Meanwhile, Russia stumbled. Some of this can be laid to missed opportunities by the West for more significant economic aid and firmer support for emerging democratic institutions when Russia needed it most, but much of it was organic, as well. Vladimir Putin, a little-known figure, stepped into a leadership role. With slow, calculated, and somewhat astonishing proficiency, former KGB operative Putin gradually dismantled democracy while generally preserving its outward forms, cementing his control in an increasingly authoritarian state—one which most recently seems barreling towards a kind of Stalinist totalitarianism. Along the way, Putin crafted an ideological framework for his vision of a new Russia, born again as a “great power,” by borrowing heavily from 1930s era fascism, resurrected and transformed for the millennium.
Interestingly, while I was reading The Russo-Ukrainian War, I also read The Road to Unfreedom [2018], Timothy Snyder’s brilliant study of how neofascism has gripped the West and Putin’s pivotal role in its course: interfering in US elections, sponsoring Trump’s candidacy, seeking to destabilize NATO, encouraging Brexit in the UK—and an aggressive revanchist effort to annex Ukraine to an emergent twenty-first century Russian Empire. Snyder both confirms the general outline of Plokhy’s narrative and zooms out to put a wider lens on the dangerous implications in these cleverly choreographed diabolical maneuvers that go well beyond the borders of Ukraine to put threat to the very future of Western democracy. As such, Putin may imagine himself as a kind of latter-day Peter the Great, and sometimes act as Stalin, but the historical figure he most closely imitates is Adolf Hitler.
Like Hitler, Putin first sought to achieve his objectives without war. For Ukraine, that meant bribery, disinformation, election interference, and other tactics. And Putin nearly succeeded with former president Viktor Yanukovych—who attempted to effect a sharp turn away from the West while placing Ukraine firmly into Russia’s orbit—until he was toppled from power and fled to Moscow in 2014. A furious Putin replayed Hitler’s moves in Sudetenland and in the Austrian Anschluss: puppet separatists agitated for independence and launched civil war in Ukraine’s east, and Crimea was annexed by Russia following a mock referendum. The war in Ukraine had begun.
The Obama Administration, in concert with the West, responded with economic sanctions that proved tepid, at best, and went on with their business. Ukrainians fought courageously in the east to defend what remained of their territory against Russian aggression. Meanwhile, Donald Trump moved into the Oval Office, voicing overt hostility towards NATO while projecting a startling brand of comraderie with Vladimir Putin. Snyder wryly observes in The Road to Unfreedom that the last advisor to the last pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was none other than Paul Manafort, who then became the campaign manager to candidate Donald Trump. You can’t make this stuff up.
If Snyder sometimes leans to the polemic, Plokhy strictly sticks to history, even if the two authors’ perspectives essentially run parallel. The Russo-Ukrainian War is most of all a well-written, competent history of those two nations and of their collisions on and off the battlefield that spawned a full-scale war—one that did not need to occur except to further Putin’s neofascist nationalist ambitions. If I can find fault, it is only that in his sympathy for the Ukrainian cause, Plokhy is sometimes too forgiving of its key players. In the current conflict, Ukraine is most certainly in the right, but that is not to say that it can do no wrong. Still, especially as I can locate much of the same material in Snyder’s work, I cannot point to any inaccuracies. The author knows his subject, demonstrates rigorous research, and can cite his sources, which means there are plenty of notes for those who want to delve deeper. I should add that this edition also boasts great maps that are quite helpful for those less familiar with the geography. Plokhy is an accomplished scholar, but an advanced degree is not necessary to comprehend the contents. Anyone can come to this book and walk away with a wealth of knowledge that will cut through the smokescreen of propaganda broadcast not only on Russian TV, but in certain corners of the American media.
This review goes to press on the heels of Putin’s almost-certain assassination of his most prominent political opponent, Alexei Navalny, in an Arctic gulag where he had been confined under harsh conditions for championing democracy and standing against the war in Ukraine, and just days away from the second anniversary of the Russian invasion, as Ukrainian forces abandon the city of Avdiivka and struggle to hold on elsewhere while American aid withers under pressure from Trump’s MAGA allies in the House of Representatives, who went on recess in a deliberate tactic to sidestep a vote on aid to Ukraine already approved by the Senate. Trump himself, the likely Republican nomination for president this year, recently underscored his longstanding enmity towards NATO by publicly declaring—in a “Bizarro World” inverse of the mutual defense guaranteed in Article 5—that he would invite Russia to attack any member nation behind on its dues, a chilling glimpse of what another Trump term in the White House would mean for the security of both Europe and America. Trump once again lives up to his alarming caricature in Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom: the fictional character “Donald Trump successful businessman” that was manufactured by Putin and then marketed to the American public. And just a week before Navalny’s murder, former FOX News host Tucker Carlson conducted a softball “interview” with Putin that gifted him a platform to assert Russia’s right to Ukraine and even cast blame on Poland for Hitler’s invasion in 1939. We have truly come full circle, and it is indeed the return of history.
These are grim moments for Ukraine. But also for America, for the West, for the free world. With all the propaganda, the misinformation, the often fake news hysteria of social media, the average American voter may not know what to believe about Ukraine. For a dose of reality, I would urge them to read The Russo-Ukrainian War. And, given the stakes this November—not only for Ukraine’s sovereignty but for the very survival of American democracy—I would advise them to take great care when casting their ballot, because a vote for Putin’s candidate is a vote for Putin, and perhaps the end of the West as we know it.

Link to my review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Link to my review of: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder

Review of: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy – Regarp Book Blog https://regarp.com/2024/02/18/review-of-the-russo-ukrainian-war-the-return-of-hi...

Суббота, 26 апреля 1986 года, выдалась солнечной. В городе Припяти все стремились оказаться на улице, ловя яркие лучи. Кто-то ради раннего загара даже располагался на крышах домов, дети игрались в песочницах, а в местном ЗАГСе радостно зарегистрировали семь свадеб. Не сразу стало понятно, что весенний загар какой-то чересчур интенсивный. Еще бы – взрывом на Чернобыльской АЭС в 3 км от города был выброшен радиационный эквивалент 500 Хиросим. Щитовидки детишек на улицах подверглись излучению, в три раза превышающем крайнюю дозу, допустимую для работников ЧАЭС в экстремальных ситуациях. Но паники быть не должно было, и КГБ перерезало междугороднюю связь... В своей книге историк Сергей Плохий использовал недавно рассекреченные новой властью украинские архивы для более полного воссоздания картины произошедшего, включая реакцию властей и госорганов.

In these times, there is urgency and poignancy in learning more about my roots. I am glad I have found this book. Compressing history from the Ancient Greeks to 2014 into 400 pages and a coherent narrative is an impossible task, but the author succeeded admirably. For those not familiar with Ukrainian history, this is a great introduction. As for me, I wanted to take care of my blank spots – there were quite a few, but not as many as I thought there would be.

Just a word of warning: if you are expecting historical figures and settings to come alive, this book is not the place. “Gates of Europe” is packed with facts, facts, facts, and more facts. So, at times it is quite dense and academic (still very readable, though). But since I hadn’t expected to be entertained when I started reading, I was fine with the textbook style.

It's taken me a long time to finish reading this book, not because it wasn't good, but because I kept picking up other books alongside, and didn't want to rush this. Although it doesn't extend beyond 2016, and the war Russia started last year is a significant escalation, the dividing lines are all there in the book, across the centuries.

“The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History” is real-time account written by an historian possessing a deep appreciation of Ukrainian history and culture. It is an in-depth study of centuries long timeline leading to the current conflict.

The first chapter, “Imperial Collapse”, examines the myths and facts of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia developed over the last five centuries by princes and politicians, warriors and clerics, historians and linguists. Chapter 2 fast forwards to the 1990s and the parallel tugs-of-war between “Democracy and Autocracy” taking place in Ukraine and Russia. Chapter 3, “Nuclear Implosion”, raises the issue of the distribution of the Soviet nuclear arsenal from a perspective of how the balance of power between Ukraine and Russia would have been shifted had Ukraine retained the weapons stored in its territory, had not the Bush Administration policy of limiting the number of nuclear states prevailed. Chapter 4, “The New Eastern Europe” is the twenty-first century story of the during which Russia and its erstwhile vassals shifted their relationships through commercial and political deals. Chapters 5 through 11 are accounts of hot war from “The Crimean Gambit” to press time in December 2022. Chapter 12, “The Return of the West”, chronicles the remarkable coalescence of western nations in opposition to Russian aggression. Chapter 13, “The Pivot To Asia” is an analysis of Russia’s eastern turn to compensate for its lost markets and influence in Europe.

As I followed news reports, I have had many questions, not covered in the press. How long has Crimea been part of Ukraine? Since 1954. Has Ukraine been part of Russia, if so, when? Much more complicated. I knew generally that Russia had a fleeting experiment with democracy, but how did it return to autocracy? By what process did Ukraine reach its current political status? What road has led to the 2022 invasion? “The Russo-Ukraine War” provides answers to these and other questions. It also introduces new concepts that encourage further research and contemplation. Is this a continuation of the dissolution of the Russian Empire that began in 1917, or maybe even 1905? Is this truly the return of history, with its military aggression and all that it follows in its wake? Much to think about. I applaud Prof. Serhii Plotky for bringing his insights into this informative and thought-provoking book.

The book was written over the 1st year of the war (Feb 2022 to Mar 2023) at a faster pace than usual for a history book - and so can not be a comprehensive and detailed view of the war. That said, it gives a good coverage of the war to date in the second half of the book, with the first half covering a brief tour over the far history of the Ukraine/Russian Empire relationship and then a m ore detailed overview of events post the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and up to the commencement of the war in 2022.
The book is recommend for anyone wanting a better understanding of the reasons for the war and the main players and events. However, further reading is required (there are many detailed notes to the chapters) as the average western reader would have little to no background knowledge of the key players and the complex series of events from the collapse of the Soviet Union leading on to the war in 2022. While the author does attempt to cover these, it is a lot to ask in a single volume - and so I found I gained some better insight into the causes of the war and the positions taken by various countries/parties, this book is really an introduction only.½

Detailed description of the background and history of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The History of the Ukraine, packed into one book. A challenging read, requiring frequent examination of the maps, the historical timeline, "who's who," the glossary and, at times, a dictionary. For a better understanding, I should have looked up even more maps on my own.

Well written. Very pro-Ukrainian nationalism, but honest enough to show how views have varied over time.

I found this comprehensive history of Ukraine helped me understand what is going on there in the war with Russia. Plokhy manages to cover millennia of history while focussing tightly on the events of the last 80 years, which offers insights into the competing narratives of Russia and Ukraine about the current conflict.

A genuinely fascinating book, which I read as part of an ongoing effort to understand current events in Ukraine and Russia. My main takeaway from Plokhy's work is that the history of Ukraine is so long, so complicated, and so multi-layered that it defies any simple summary. I will certainly be seeking out additional works to read on this subject.

Good book. Added the political context to accidents I had read about in other books. Concludes that nuclear is a bad idea, but his argument is anecdotal and childish.

Review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy
by Stan Prager (10-30-22)


Still reeling from the pandemic, the world was rocked to its core on February 24, 2022, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II that conjured up distressing historical parallels. If there were voices that previously denied the echo of Hitler’s Austrian Anschluss to Putin’s annexation of Crimea, as well as German adventurism in Sudetenland with Russian-sponsored separatism in the Donbas, there was no mistaking the similarity to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. But it was Vladimir Putin’s challenge to the very legitimacy of Kiev’s sovereignty—a shout out to the Kremlin’s rising chorus of irredentism that declares Ukraine a wayward chunk of the “near abroad” that is rightly integral to Russia—that compels us to look much further back in history.
Putin’s claim, however dubious, begs a larger question: by what right can any nation claim self-determination? Is Ukraine really just a modern construct, an opportunistic product of the collapse of the USSR that because it was historically a part of Russia should be once again? Or, perhaps counter-intuitively, should western Russia instead be incorporated into Ukraine? Or—let’s stretch it a bit further—should much of modern Germany rightly belong to France? Or vice versa? From a contemporary vantage point, these are tantalizing musings that challenge the notions of shifting boundaries, the formation of nation states, fact-based if sometimes uncomfortable chronicles of history, the clash of ethnicities, and, most critically, actualities on the ground. Naturally, such speculation abruptly shifts from the purely academic to a stark reality at the barrel of a gun, as the history of Europe has grimly demonstrated over centuries past.
To learn more, I turned to the recently updated edition of The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by historian and Harvard professor Serhii Plokhy, a dense, well-researched, deep dive into the past that at once fully establishes Ukraine’s right to exist, while expertly placing it into the context of Europe’s past and present. For those like myself largely unacquainted with the layers of complexity and overlapping hegemonies that have long dominated the region, it turns out that there is much to cover. At the same time, the wealth of material that strikes as unfamiliar places a strong and discouraging underscore to the western European bias in the classroom—which at least partially explains why it is that even those Americans capable of locating Ukraine on a map prior to the invasion knew almost nothing of its history.
Survey courses in my high school covered Charlamagne’s 9th century empire that encompassed much of Europe to the west, including what is today France and Germany, but never mentioned Kievan Rus'—the cultural ancestor of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Russia—that was in the 10th and 11th centuries the largest and by far the most powerful state on the continent, until it fragmented and then fell to Mongol invaders! To its east, the Grand Principality of Moscow, a 13th century Rus’ vassal state of the Mongols, formed the core of the later Russian Empire. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was in its heyday among the largest and most populous on the continent, but both Poland and Lithuania were to fall to partition by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and effectively ceased to exist for more than a century. Also missing from maps, of course, were Italy and Germany, which did not even achieve statehood until the later 19th century. And the many nations of today’s southeastern Europe were then provinces of the Ottoman Empire. That is European history, complicated and nuanced, as history tends to be.
Plokhy’s erudite study restores from obscurity Ukraine’s past and reveals a people who while enduring occupation and a series of partitions never abandoned an aspiration to sovereignty that was not to be realized until the late 20th century. Once a dominant power, Ukraine was to be overrun by the Mongols, preyed upon for slave labor by the Crimean Khanate, and throughout the centuries sliced up into a variety of enclaves ruled by the Golden Horde, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austrian Empire, the Tsardom of Russia, and finally the Soviet Union.
That long history was written with much blood and suffering inflicted by its various occupiers. Just in the last hundred years that included Soviet campaigns of terror, ethnic cleansing, and deportations, as well as the catastrophic Great Famine of 1932–33—known as the “Holodomor”—a product of Stalin’s forced collectivization that led to the starvation deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians. Then there was World War II, which claimed another four million lives, including about a million Jews. The immediate postwar period was marked by more tumult and bloodshed. Stability and a somewhat better quality of life emerged under Nikita Khrushchev, who himself spent many years of residence in Ukraine. It was Khrushchev who transferred title of the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. The final years under Soviet domination saw the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The structure of the USSR was manifested in political units known as Soviet Socialist Republics, which asserted a fictional autonomy subject to central control. Somewhat ironically, as time passed this enabled and strengthened nationalism within each of the respective SSR’s. Ukraine (like Belarus) even held its own United Nations seat, although its UN votes were rubber-stamped by Moscow. Still, this further reinforced a sense of statehood, which was realized in the unexpected dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence in 1991. In the years that followed, as Ukraine aspired to closer ties with the West, that statehood increasingly came under attack by Putin, who spoke in earnest of a “Greater Russia” that by all rights included Ukraine. Election meddling became common, but with the spectacular fall of the Russian-backed president in 2014, Putin annexed Crimea and fomented rebellion that sought to create breakaway “republics” in the Donbas of eastern Ukraine. This only intensified the desire of Kiev for integration with the European Union and for NATO membership.
A vast country of forest and steppe, marked by fertile plains crisscrossed by rivers, Ukraine has long served as a strategic gateway between the east and west, as emphasized in the book’s title. Elements of western, central, and eastern Europe all in some ways give definition to Ukrainian life and culture, and as such Ukraine remains inextricably as much a part of the west as the east. While Russia has left a huge imprint upon the nation’s DNA, it hardly informs the entirety of its national character. The Russian language continues to be widely spoken, and at least prior to the invasion many Ukrainians had Russian sympathies—if never a desire for annexation! For Ukrainians, stateless for too long, their own national identity ever remained unquestioned. The Russian invasion has, rather than threatened that, only bolstered it.
Today, Ukraine is the second largest European nation, after Russia. Far too often overlooked by both statesmen and talking heads, Ukraine would also be the world’s third largest nuclear power—and would have little to fear from the tanks of its former overlord—had it not given up its stockpile of nukes in a deal brokered by the United States, an important reminder to those who question America’s obligation to defend Ukraine.
As this review goes to press, Russia’s war—which Putin euphemistically terms a “special military operation”—is going very poorly, and despite energy supply shortages and threats of nuclear brinksmanship, the West stands firmly with Ukraine, which in the course of the conflict has been subjected to horrific war crimes by Russian invaders. However, as months pass, and both Europe and the United States endure the economic pain of inflation and rising fuel prices, as well as the ever-increasing odds of rightwing politicians gaining political power on both sides of the Atlantic, it remains to be seen if this alliance will hold steady. As battlefield defeats mount, and men and materiel run short, Putin seems to be running out the clock in anticipation of that outcome. We can only hope it does not come to that.
While I learned a great deal from The Gates of Europe, and I would offer much acclaim to its scholarship, there are portions that can prove to be a slog for a nonacademic audience. Too much of the author’s chronicle reads like a textbook—pregnant with names and dates and events—and thus lacks the sweep of a grand thematic narrative inspiring to the reader and so deserving of the Ukrainian people he treats. At the same time, that does not diminish Plokhy’s achievement in turning out what is certainly the authoritative history of Ukraine. With their right to exist under assault once more, this volume serves as a powerful defense—the weapon of history—against any who might challenge Ukraine’s sovereignty. If you believe, as I do, that facts must triumph over propaganda and polemic, then I highly recommend that you turn to Plokhy to best refute Putin.

Review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy https://regarp.com/2022/10/30/review-of-the-gates-of-europe-a-history-of-ukraine...

No prizes for guessing why I'm reading this in 2022. Serhii Plokhy provides a useful overview of some 2500 years of the territory which is now—still—an independent Ukraine, and I appreciated getting to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge particularly of the early modern period/19th century. Plokhy's explorations of the various forms that nation-building has taken in Ukraine over the past two hundred years or so are instructive. This is a straightforward read, though it has many of the usual weaknesses of the "sweeping work of synthesis aimed at a general audience" school of history writing, particularly since Plokhy is writing a fairly old-school kind of political history. (I flipped through the index to confirm my suspicion that I could count all the women referenced therein on both hands, and in fact I had fingers left over. I think that if Plokhy had paid at least as much attention to gender as he did to questions of religious affiliation and ethnic identity construction, the cultural analysis aspect of The Gates of Europe would have been strengthened.)

There are currently 440 nuclear reactors operating worldwide, supplying 10% of the world's electricity. Because of climate change, the European common has now designated nuclear as "green energy." This book takes a fresh look at some of the major nuclear accidents over the years in the context of the debate over the safety of nuclear energy. It is well worth reading. I will just briefly describe the accidents discussed in the book:

1. "Castle Bravo" Test--1954. This was the first attempt to explode an H bomb, whose power comes from fusion not fission, and before the test no one was fully aware of just how powerful it would be. The blast was much larger than expected, and fallout covered a much larger area than expected. Many Marshall Islanders were affected, as well as some soldiers, and a Japanese fishing vessel. In fact, the test only became known because on return to port the fishermen were found to be radioactive.

2. Kyshtym 1957--This was the first Soviet reactor and level 6 plutonium processing chemical plant. At first, radioactive waste was dumped into nearby lakes, but by 1953, began to be placed in underground tanks. On September 29, 1959 one of these tanks exploded, spreading a radioactive cloud. There was fear that other tanks would explode. Several villages around the site had to be relocated. 85% of the area is still an ecological disaster area.

3. Windscale 1957--The reactors at Windscale were modeled on the US reactors at Oak Ridge, which was air cooled and used graphite to moderate the neutrons. Great Britain had the A-Bomb, but wanted the H-Bomb, and great pressure was put on Windscale to produce more plutonium and other materials needed for an H-Bomb. Because of its design, the rods at Windscale needed periodic annealing to release Wigner energy that developed in the graphite, but because of the pressure to produce more, Windscale decided to reduce the number of anneals. During an anneal, the temperature did not act as expected and Wigner energy was not fully released. In attempting to repeat the process a fire resulted. Cartridges were stuck, temperatures kept rising, they couldn't use water to put out the fire, and radiation was released. These reactors were shut down in 1957 and never reopened. The last fuel was not removed until 1999, and demolition did not begin until 2019. Demolition is expected to be complete in 2022.

4. Three Mile Island 1979--This was a Pressurized Water Reactor which uses water rather than graphite to moderate reactions. This type of reactor is considered safer than a graphite reactor. This accident resulted from a malfunction in the pilot operated relief valve, or PORV. Here the PORV opened to relieve pressure, but then unknown to operators failed to close, allowing water to escape. The staff, thinking too much water was going in, shut off the water supply. One historian later stated, "If the operating staff had accidentally locked itself out of the control room, the TMI accident would never have happened." By shutting off the water supply, the staff brought the reactor perilously close to meltdown. The reactor was never reopened. It took until December 1993 to remove the fuel. Final cleanup will take until 2078.

5. Chernobyl--The Chernobyl accident resulted from the Positive Scram Effect, a known phenomenon in RRMK reactors. When rods are inserted into the core for shutdown, there is an immediate spike in the intensity of the reaction, which is the opposite of what they were meant to do. If water stops flowing, the intensity of the reaction increases. Although these effects were known, the operators at Chernobyl were not told about them.

6. Fukushima 2011--This accident was caused by an earthquake/tsunami, and was exacerbated by the chaos and lack of communication between the site, the government, and TEPCO, owner of the plant. The Prime Minister of Japan later wrote, "Because Japan possessed unparalleled nuclear technology and superior experts and engineers, I believed that a Chernobyl-type accident could not occur at a Japanese nuclear power plant. To my great consternation, I would come to learn that this was a safety myth created by Japan's "Nuclear Village."' The situation at Fukushima did not stabilize until August 2011, 5 months after the event. There are still 1.23 million tons of contaminated water stored on the site. In 2021, the Japanese government decided to start releasing the contaminated water into the ocean, and there are ongoing protests to this plan. The release will take decades and is scheduled to start in 2023.

And the next nuclear accident??? Who knows where or when but it's inevitably coming.

4 stars

This book takes a regional approach to the history of Ukraine. That is, instead of looking at the history of any particular ethnic, religious or national group, it looks at the region of modern Ukraine and examines the history of the region across many groups.

What emerges is a portrait of Ukraine as a permeable boundary, a gate: it's a place where nomads met more settled populations; a place where different ethnic groups met, clashed, and merged; a place where Orthodox Christianity, Catholic Christianity, and Islam all had both political and religious influence. It was a place where east meets west, and a place where authoritarianism met (and in continues to meet) democracy.

This multifacted nature of Ukraine leads to a history that cannot be simplified down to a single narrative of "This is the true nature of Ukraine. These are the true Ukrainians." Instead, we see groups with shifting allegiances, countries with different claims to the lands that make up Ukraine, the ebb and flow of independence.

Throughout it all, we see the emergence of a Ukrainian identity based on a shared sense of history and geography. The emergence of this identity was, in a way, artificial: it was driven by the intentional actions of a set of people who spread a sense of Ukrainian identity. However, given the complex, interwoven history of the nation, the important takeaway is that any sense of shared regional identity will be a bit artificial in that sense: it's a deliberate choice about which elements of the identity to promote over others. In that sense, the Ukrainian identity is the most true because, unlike other competitors, it is the one that the people freely chose for themselves.

Written after Russia's aggression in Crimea but before Russia's current war of aggression against Ukraine, this book provides valuable historical insight into the current violence.

I only got half-way through this book before it was due back at my library. I intend to take it out again at some point so I can finish it. The author manages to cover the historical record from pre-Christian eras up to the very recent past but never makes the reader feel bogged down in the details.

Reading this book, you can't help but feel angry at the hiding of facts and wilful denial of the scale of the disaster by the Soviet authorities in the aftermath. But the book itself is well-written and easy to follow, even if the subject matter is hard.

This is the first history of the Cuban missile crisis that I have read. Having lived through it I thought I knew what happened. The new information that Plokhy provides comes from recently declassified documents from the Ukrainian Security Service archives.

The book is pretty scary, emphasising how poorly the two sides were informed and how much mutual misunderstanding there was. Fortunately both Kruschev and Kennedy were very fearful of a nuclear interchange (unlike some of their advisers) and so consistently withdrew from the brink.

I was starting my second year at Oxford in October 1962. We knew that Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles were heading for Cuba and that the Americans were preparing a blockade of the island. We did not know that there were already nuclear armed intermediate range ballistic missiles already set up and ready to fire from Cuban sites. Neither, it appears, did Jack Kennedy. It was also not known that, fearful of hostile Soviet activity in Berlin, Kennedy was preparing an offer to the Russians of removing the U.S. intermediate range missiles based in Turkey. He had not shared this with most of the Pentagon, his own advisers nor NATO and the Turks. The U.S. military was in favour of an invasion ignorant of the Soviet nuclear missiles waiting for them.

On October 24th. the U.S.A. altered its alert level to Defcon2, the highest level short of actual war. The 1500 bombers of the Strategic Air Command took to the skies and flew repeated missions to the Soviet border. I was in my college beer cellar on that evening and we could hear the aircraft taking off from Brize Norton and passing over the city. I remember thinking that I was in as good a place as any to face annihilation; at least we could drink some very good wine from the fellow’s cellar before the end. Fortunately it was a missed opportunity and, largely because of the two leaders’ fear of nuclear war, the problem was resolved and tension eased.

Plokhy reminds us that the world owes Kennedy and Kruschev another debt for initiating the test ban treaty which began the significant reduction in global nuclear arsenals.

The book ends with a chilling epilogue reminding us that the problem of nuclear weapons has not gone away, rather it has increased with the withdrawal byTrump and Putin from the Inermediate-range nuclear forces treaty. Tactical nukes are on the agenda again with Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea all being in the frame. The author suggests that it is important for citizens to re-learn the lessons of the past in order to make politicians act on them. Bring back CND!

A stylistic curiosity; the word “unbeknownst” was used more often than in any other book I have come across. Given the deficiencies of intelligence on both sides it was often needed!

I'd been aware of this whole episode of the war going back into the 1970s and, even then, it seemed like an exercise in operational and diplomatic overreach. In this day and age the author has enjoyed access to Soviet documentation of the time, and Plokhy's findings do nothing to undermine my long-time understanding. Call this a reinforcement of the tenets of hardcore realism and that merely enjoying a common enemy is not enough to sustain actual comity amongst polities that are naturally antagonistic.

Excellent, readable history of the personalities, science, and politics of the catastrophe involving both the Soviet Union and Ukraine by a Ukranian with mostly Ukrainian sources.