The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

The whole time I was reading this, I had one famous line that kept running through my head: “We have always been at war with Eurasia.” No, really. LITERALLY in thousands of years of history, there have only been brief years where these poor Ukrainians were not being killed, joining resistances that would lead to their deaths, being starved by their own government due to preventable famines, being shot at random, experiencing pogroms, being terrorized by Nazis, being terrorized by the Kremlin, dealing with nuclear fallout, and basically having a shitty quality of life if they managed to not die from all that.

I'm not even completely sure how to rate this. Did I enjoy it? For the most part, not really. It's very dense and pretty dry, and - up until the last half when historical events started ringing some bells -kind of hard to keep track of all the shifting cities and borders, and who was at war with whom and why. (Because they'd always been at war with the Ottoman Empire, or Poland, or other Soviet territories, or Austria-Hungary, or Germany, or or or.)

Did it do what it set out to do? The author is a history professor, who specializes in this subject, and as his goal was to write a history of Ukraine since the beginning of time immemorial, yeah I think he did his job. I imagine it would be an interesting class over a semester. And for that, I want to give it a decent amount of stars. Because it IS a really good overview - broad but not especially deep - and maybe I just shouldn't have tried to read a textbook like it was a novel. Am I the problem? Maybe.

I did learn a lot, even if I doubt I'll retain everything. Particularly the Holocaust stuff - I feel pretty well-versed in the subject, but I never knew particulars about the Ukrainian Jewry, or the fighting over the borders between the Nazis and the Soviet Red Army, and how the people could be on one side of the war one minute and on the other side the next because of shifting boundaries and occupations, and you just kind of had to ... live with yourself for anything you did or didn't do.

From reading other reviews it sounds like there has been an update after the version I got from the library, which came out in 2015, since Ukraine is once again at war with Russia. (They've only been independent for like 30 minutes, you can leave them alone for just a sec, Putin!)

I don't know what else to say.