Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

Product Information

The description of the disaster in Chernobyl shows how careless the Soviet Union dealt with a nuclear catastrophe and with human life. As we now know, Russia first did the second from 2014 onwards and then at the beginning of the war tried the first. News from Nowhere will not obtain personal information from other organisations, and will not share, pass on or sell personal information that we hold about individuals to anyone else. This applies in particular in his “Waiting Room Trilogy”, mainly in Erfolg (Success), 1930 and Geschwister Oppermann (The Oppermanns), 1933. Though its modern national movement dates back to the early nineteenth century, it did not win real independence until 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

All the glorious history of the Kievan Rus, it's beginnings and developments have been largely left dismissed. On 24 February 2022, Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale Russian invasion of the independent state of Ukraine and immediately I was keen to learn more about the history of the country being violated. Annexing the Black Sea steppe, Russia was "gathering the Russians lands," rebuilding the ancient kingdom of Rus.

A saga of technical incompetence and irresponsibility, of bureaucratic sloth, mendacity and plain contempt for human life, that Chernobyl affair epitomised everything that was wrong with the Soviet Union. In Kiev, there was a Central Council or Rada in competition with the Soviet of Soldiers and Workers, but it had very little power and survived less than a year. First only a few students followed the appeal but within three days around 100,000 turned up on the Maidan and it did not stop there. My mother used to read a lot of books when I was a child and I saw how much enjoyment these books would bring her. A country truly ravaged and torn on no end of occasions; no wonder they’ve decided enough is enough and it’s time to make a stand.

It’s true that the book is pro-Ukrainian, but for me that is makes these parts of the book harder to accept. Like a similar incident after reading Kapuscinski's story about Pinsk in Belarus, Reid has made me get off the train at 5 o'clock in the morning after a though night in the restaurant wagon caused by reading her chapter from this region - Chernivtsi is simply somewhere that you have to see before you die. Reid covers events from the coming of the Vikings, to Stalin’s purges and beyond to the independence celebrations of 1991.Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders, for centuries Ukraine was fought over by more powerful neighbours.