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The contributors to this collection explore the multidimensional transformation of independent Ukraine and deal with her politics, society, private sector, identity, arts, religions, media, and democracy. Each chapter reflects the up-to-date research in its sub-discipline, is styled for use in seminars, and includes a bibliography as well as a recommended reading list. These studies illustrate the deep changes, yet, at the same time, staggering continuity in Ukraine’s post-Soviet development as well as various counter-reactions to it. All nine chapters are jointly written by two co-authors, one Ukrainian and one Western, who respond here to recent needs in international higher education. The volume’s contributors include, apart from the editors: Margarita M. Balmaceda (Seton Hall University), Oksana Barshynova (Ukrainian National Arts Museum), Tymofii Brik (Kyiv School of Economics), José Casanova (Georgetown University), Diana Dutsyk (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), Marta Dyczok (University of Western Ontario), Hennadii Korzhov (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute), Serhiy Kudelia (Baylor University), Pavlo Kutuev (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute), Olena Martynyuk (Columbia University), Oksana Mikheieva (Ukrainian Catholic University), Tymofii Mylovanov (University of Pittsburgh), Andrian Prokip (Ukrainian Institute for the Future), Oxana Shevel (Tufts University), Ilona Sologoub (Kyiv School of Economics), Maksym Yenin (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute), and Yuliya Yurchenko (University of Greenwich).

In 2004 and 2005, striking images from the Ukraine made their way around the world, among them boisterous, orange-clad crowds protesting electoral fraud and the hideously scarred face of a poisoned opposition candidate. Europe's second-largest country but still an immature state only recently independent, Ukraine has become a test case of post-communist democracy, as millions of people in other countries celebrated the protesters' eventual victory. Any attempt to truly understand current events in this vibrant and unsettled land, however, must begin with the Ukraines dramatic history. Ukraine's strategic location between Russia and the West, the country's pronounced cultural regionalism, and the ugly face of post-communist politics are all anchored in Ukraine's complex past. The first Western survey of Ukrainian history to include coverage of the Orange Revolution and its aftermath, this book narrates the deliberate construction of a modern Ukrainian nation, incorporating new Ukrainian scholarship and archival revelations of the post-communist period. Here then is a history of the land where the strategic interests of Russia and the West have long clashed, with reverberations that resonate to this day.

This pioneering work treats the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the intelligentsia of the empire. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally nationalizing great power states and discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This territorial expansion evolved into a competition of mutually exclusive concepts of Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects.

Essays on how chaos, totalitarianism, and trauma have shaped Ukraine’s culture: “A milestone of the scholarship about Eastern European politics of memory.” —Wulf Kansteiner, Aarhus University In a century marked by totalitarian regimes, genocide, mass migrations, and shifting borders, the concept of memory in Eastern Europe is often synonymous with notions of trauma. In Ukraine, memory mechanisms were disrupted by political systems seeking to repress and control the past in order to form new national identities supportive of their own agendas. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, memory in Ukraine was released, creating alternate visions of the past, new national heroes, and new victims. This release of memories led to new conflicts and “memory wars.” How does the past exist in contemporary Ukraine? The works collected in The Burden of the Past focus on commemorative practices, the politics of history, and the way memory influences Ukrainian politics, identity, and culture. The works explore contemporary memory culture in Ukraine and the ways in which it is being researched and understood. Drawing on work from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and political scientists, the collection represents a truly interdisciplinary approach. Taken together, the groundbreaking scholarship collected in The Burden of the Past provides insight into how memories can be warped and abused, and how this abuse can have lasting effects on a country seeking to create a hopeful future.

A vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. In this lyrical and intimate book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true stories of activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.

Pp. 283-297, "Mykhailo Drahomanov and the Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations", discuss the views of the Russian nationalist as expressed in two articles. In the first (1875) he opposed legal discrimination against Jews, as it was based on medieval prejudice and did not achieve its aim of safeguarding the peasants' interests. The second was a response to the pogroms of 1881-82. He blamed the Russian policy of concentrating the Jews in the Pale of Settlement for Ukrainian-Jewish tensions. He also criticized the Jews as a parasitic class which felt no solidarity with the Ukraine. He saw the solution in a Jewish socialist movement and a federation of Russia and Austro-Hungary, in which Jews would enjoy equal rights. Pp. 299-313, "The Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Nineteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Thought, " discuss the approaches of three Ukrainian thinkers to the "Jewish question": Mykola Kostomarov, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Ivan Franko. Kostomarov published an article in 1862 in "Osnova" to counter accusations in the Jewish journal "Sion" against the Ukrainian cultural movement. He supported Jewish emancipation, but accused the Jews of clannishness, indifference to the fate of their country, and acting as instruments of Polish oppression and exploiters of the peasants. Franko was a disciple of Drahomanov; he adopted the idea of Ukrainian independence and advocated Jewish-Ukrainian cooperation.

In The Carpathians, Patrice M. Dabrowski narrates how three highland ranges of the mountain system found in present-day Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine were discovered for a broader regional public. This is a story of how the Tatras, Eastern Carpathians, and Bieszczady Mountains went from being terra incognita to becoming the popular tourist destinations they are today. It is a story of the encounter of Polish and Ukrainian lowlanders with the wild, sublime highlands and with the indigenous highlanders—Górale, Hutsuls, Boikos, and Lemkos—and how these peoples were incorporated into a national narrative as the territories were transformed into a native/national landscape. The set of microhistories in this book occur from about 1860 to 1980, a time in which nations and states concerned themselves with the "frontier at the edge." Discoverers not only became enthralled with what were perceived as their own highlands but also availed themselves of the mountains as places to work out answers to the burning questions of the day. Each discovery led to a surge in mountain tourism and interest in the mountains and their indigenous highlanders. Although these mountains, essentially a continuation of the Alps, are Central and Eastern Europe's most prominent physical feature, politically they are peripheral. The Carpathians is the first book to deal with the northern slopes in such a way, showing how these discoveries had a direct impact on the various nation-building, state-building, and modernization projects. Dabrowski's history incorporates a unique blend of environmental history, borderlands studies, and the history of tourism and leisure.

From a preeminent scholar of Eastern Europe and the prizewinning author of Chernobyl, the essential history of Russian imperialism. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimea and attempted to seize a portion of Ukraine -- only the latest iteration of a centuries-long effort to expand Russian boundaries and create a pan-Russian nation. In Lost Kingdom, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the nation's history. Spanning over 500 years, from the end of the Mongol rule to the present day, Plokhy shows how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin exploited existing forms of identity, warfare, and territorial expansion to achieve imperial supremacy. An authoritative and masterful account of Russian nationalism, Lost Kingdom chronicles the story behind Russia's belligerent empire-building quest.