100 Books Like Borderland

I loved this beautifully written novel which embraces and honours the Ukrainian spirit. It is 1942 and the Germans have arrived in a small town in Western Ukraine. When the schoolmaster and his wife are rounded up and murdered along with all the other Jews, Yaisa, a local peasant girl, instinctively hides their two young sons away. The massacre is witnessed with horror both by a Ukrainian Auxiliary, now remorseful at having joined the German police, and by a German engineer who is building roads with forced Ukrainian labour. Now the hunt is on for the Jewish boys – and for Yaisa too. An incredibly moving read that both hones in on one small town and pans out across the vast and varied landscape of Ukraine. 

I read this book as research for my own novel and found it an incredibly moving fictional account of one Jewish Ukrainian boy’s survival in WWII. Yar means ‘ravine’ and, in 1941, over the course of just two days, 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were lined up by German occupiers on the edge of Babi Yar outside Kyiv and machine-gunned, falling then into their mass grave. His whole family is murdered, but eighteen-year-old Solomon somehow survives this horror and escapes to the north of Kyiv, where he falls in with a group of Jewish partisans. Their mission is to destroy Nazis and to ensure the survival of Jews and Judaism. Hiding out in a dense forest, they subsist only with the selfless help of a non-Jewish Ukrainian couple and a Catholic priest. 

I love this book because it presents the story of a man in a very complex situation. He lives in the area of the Ukrainian Donbas region that is occupied by Russians who took over the area by force. So, his freedom is limited.

The time period in the book is just before the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. He is a beekeeper and lives a very simple life. I like that the book takes you into his mind as he makes his way through the period covered by the story. Things that first seem good, after thinking, may be bad, and vice versa.

I felt that his thinking accurately relates to the process of how people think. It is a very gentle story, but so compelling that I wanted to apportion reading the book so that I could digest, understand and most of all enjoy the story. 

For me, this engaging memoir of a Ukrainian who fought in WWII reads like a personal diary, such is the informality of Wenger’s skillful storytelling. In 1943, at the tender age of 20, he was forced from his village into the German Baudienst (building service). Conditions were miserable and when the Ukrainian Division was recruiting soldiers, he joined up, German uniform and all. Hunger, bitter cold, and flea-ridden beds were mild endurances compared to other horrors he experienced; early on, he was forced to witness a mass execution of Jews, later to join a firing squad against his friends. Wenger finally ended up in a British POW camp in Scotland, then married and settled in the UK. This incredible man turned 99 in February 2022, the day before Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Andrew Wilson is the foremost British historian of Ukraine. This book offers the most authoritative and readable single-volume history of Ukraine available in English.

Given the astonishing lack of knowledge about Ukraine, particularly evident in so much ‘expert’ commentary on the war, Wilson’s work is required reading for anyone wanting to understand what is happening today in Ukraine. The fifth edition takes the story up to the outbreak of the war and into the summer of 2022.

The author concludes that Putin’s war to destroy Ukraine has paradoxically helped Ukraine to overcome its internal divisions and transform itself into a genuine nation-state, supported by all sections of the population. 

This excellent collection of articles by the top connoisseurs of East European art and culture discusses how Ukrainians and Jews created new trends in art and literature in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil Kyiv, then short-lived capital of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and later of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This book proves that avant-garde images and trends emerge from the revolutionary utopianism and the desire to create a universalistic language understandable beyond the ethnic divide and languages.

Soviet rule completely changed the relationship between Russia as the imperial metropole and Ukraine as a peripheral territory in the empire.

It was through Terry Martin’s classic that I first understood the enormous political implications of the Soviets’ intricate nationality policy that invested the state’s various ethnic groups with their own national educational and administrative institutions, all the while depriving them of the right to political self-determination.

Martin’s analysis is as sharp as his prose is crisp and his detailed understanding of the Bolsheviks’ political reasoning remains impressive over twenty years after the study’s publication.

When it first appeared, I reviewed this book for The Moscow Times and called it “the best account yet of the Soviet collapse.” Plokhy pays particular attention to how events in Ukraine during 1991 proved crucial to the final breakup of the USSR (“the last empire” of the title).

Moreover, Plokhy’s conclusions help to explain how the narratives about the collapse contributed to Russia’s aggression against its neighbor in the 2000s. Everything Plokhy writes is worth reading, including his Gates of Europe, Chernobyl, and The Russo-Ukrainian War (he is prolific), but The Last Empire’s details have remained with me: the fierce desire for independence Ukrainians expressed in 1991 has remained true ever since.

What strikes me most about this book is how prescient it is. Published in 2000, this assessment of the first few years of Ukrainian independence accurately flags that Russia never fully accepted it and explains why an independent Ukraine threatens Russia. The introduction provides an excellent, brief history of Ukraine. Later chapters focus on politics, economics, social and cultural issues, and foreign policy up to 1998. Dyczok, an academic, was an eyewitness to key historical events, reporting from Ukraine during its 1991 declaration of independence and after. I particularly recommend the chapter on Ukrainian-Russian relations. Although written long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent invasion of Ukraine, much in that chapter foreshadows these critical events and helps account for why what happened did.

This is one of the first books in English on what we now call the Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s.

It’s now estimated that about 3.3 million people died in this famine, which Stalin imposed via a policy of “collectivization.” Under this policy, Ukrainian peasants had to turn over their entire harvests to the state, leaving nothing for themselves to eat: some even turned to cannibalism. Things were so bad that the government put up posters saying, “eating people is wrong.” 

When Conquest published this book in 1986, many people denounced him as a right-wing anti-communist, but since then many other scholars have proved him right. This was one of the first books I read when I started teaching courses on comparative genocide studies in the 1980s.