Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

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Reid references a number of writers and other famous and infamous Ukrainians in the book, and I found this enlightening. Among the people mentioned are: Probably the most frustrating aspect about the book is its tendency to make broad-brush statements and unbalanced assessments indicative of the author’s liberal-centrist outlook. Many Ukrainians pondered whether life might be better for them under Nazism than or under Stalinism. In Rivno, 17,000 Jews were murdered and “those who refused to undress beforehand had their eyes put out.” In Odessa, 19,000 Jews were herded into a fenced square sprayed with gasoline and burnt alive. It’s hard to imagine much hope in the Ukrainian soul while caught between the worst of both Stalinism and Nazism. Slavs at the time knew they were Untermenschen, when the Jews were gone, they would be next. The head of the Reichskomissariat Ukraine (Erich Koch) said, Ukrainians were “niggers” fit only for vodka and the whip”. Goring sought to kill all Ukrainians over the age of 15.

The siege of Leningrad: 900 days of solitude". The Economist Newspaper Ltd. 27 August 2011 . Retrieved 10 September 2011. When Chernobyl exploded, the Ukrainians were kept in the dark about the dangers, and unnecessarily exposed to high levels of radiation. More important than any other explaination to the political and economic disaster of the 1990s was the policy of Ukraine itself. Anna Reid manages to give a good introduction to this not-so-proud recent past.The Ukraine at the end of the book, still seemed a basket-case – and so completely unlike the pictures we see of unoccupied, free Ukraine today. Outside the war-zones, Ukraine now looks happy, united, prosperous, with a well-educated population living in a modern Western world: Stalin brought in the farm collectivisation that generated the appalling famine, made worse by the appropriation of any food grown in Ukraine and the deporting of many Ukrainians to gulags and other parts of USSR:

Ukraine could finally enter the contemporary world, and become just like Poland - a modern, liberal, and cosmopolitan European country; such assertions are particularly indicative of a liberal 90s myopia (even though the section where such assertions are made - Poland as ‘flourishing, law-abiding, genuinely democratic’ - are in an updated 2015 version of the book). The Poles didn’t find as many “political criminals” among us in twenty years,’ the Avhustivka villagers mourned, ‘as “older brother” Russia did in a year and a half.’ Along with millions of other Ukrainians, they believed Nazi rule could not possibly be any worse than Stalinism. Photographs (some cooked up by Soviet propagandists,) show smiling Galician peasants running out of their houses to welcome the Panzer crews with bread and salt.” Ivan Demjanjuk (Cleveland car worker and Nazi war criminal in WW2). Born in in the Zhytomyr Oblast of northern Ukraine Be forewarned, the chapters on the the Stalin-induced famine of 1932 and the German invasion of 1941 are so horrific as to be almost unreadable. The statistics are staggering rather than refraining from poking the bear, it is becoming unpleasantly clear, we are going to have to stop it biting off our leg.”Ukraine’s progress before the invasion should not be overstated. Shady oligarchs pulled strings behind the scenes, and the country was hobbled by pervasive corruption. (Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index puts Ukraine alongside Mexico and Zambia but ranks it as slightly less corrupt than Russia.) Not until the collapse of the Soviet Union had Ukraine been an independent, sovereign nation. There had been sporadic independence movements, but they seemed to have been often badly run, with no clear objective or direction, or subject to poor timing.