History

Until the tumultuous events of the ‘Orange Revolution’ surrounding the presidential elections in Ukraine in late 2004, western experts almost without exception had celebrated the
Ukrainian post-Soviet transition as a huge success, lauding its apparent political stability and ethnic amity. This article challenges those assumptions, and offers a new look at the first decade of Ukrainian independence. Drawing from demographic data and witness affidavits from refugees who left Ukraine and requested asylum in the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and the European Union, the author argues that the first decade of Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union corresponded with widespread and serious harassment of Ukraine’s religious and ethnic minorities. Economic crisis in post-Soviet Ukraine bred scapegoating and marginalisation of Ukraine’s minorities, driving hundreds of thousands to seek sanctuary in the West.

Over three days in November 1941, in Sosenki Forest outside the city of Rovno, Ukraine, German death squads supported by local collaborationists murdered some 23,500 Jewish men, women, and children. Often remembered as "the second Babi Yar," the massacre was one of nearly a hundred similar German-sponsored, large-scale, anti-Jewish killing operations perpetrated in Soviet zones during the early months of World War II on the Eastern Front. Preceding the adoption of the "Final Solution" by the Third Reich, Rovno and other mass killings in the East were testing grounds for genocide. This study of the Rovno massacre is based substantially on remarkable new research that blends sources from multiple archives (and archival traditions), national memories, and first-person testimony that places victims' accounts side-by-side with those of German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian eyewitnesses. In its meticulous reconstruction of these events, The Holocaust in Rovno exemplifies the burgeoning movement to form a genuinely transnational history of the Holocaust.

This is the updated edited digital version of the final print edition of the expanded Russian translation of my piece on the Early Cold War in Western Ukraine. This edition includes an appendix with several full-text archival documents. It is 60 pages longer than an earlier draft.

Russian version of my study of the role of women in the Ukrainian nationalist underground, and the role of gender violence perpetrated by the Soviet police and Ukrainian nationalists against Ukrainian women suspected of collaboration (Moskal'ki).