The Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, the leading Western scholar on Ukraine, details Moscow’s historic insistence that Russia and its East Slavic neighbors occupy a joint historical space, and essentially comprise a single nation — despite strong language, cultural and religious differences.
Ukraine attempts to retain its independent, medieval Kyvian state over the centuries had off-again/on-again successes. At one point it was amalgamated into Poland.
In the 19th century Russian imperial authorities compromised (in a sense) by creating a tripartite nation composed of three tribes: Great Russian, Little Russian (Ukraine) and Belarusian. Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917 destroyed the forced alliance, and Ukraine was independent again until the communists seized power after World War I. The “Lost Kingdom” of Mr. Plokhy’s title refers to its involuntary incorporation into the USSR.
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@ Kirkus Reviews
@ Publisher Weekly
@ Hachette Books
For more on the history of the Ukraine:
- A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples by Paul Magocsi
- The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy
- History of Ukraine-Rus': The Cossack age 1650-1653 by Mihail Sergeevič Gruševskij
- Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past by Serhii Plokhy
- Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600-1945 by Andreas Kappeler, Zenon E. Kohut, & Frank E. Sysyn
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