This book was on sale on Audible a while back and seemed like the perfect kind of book to settle up my sense of Ukranian history. This part of the world as a whole is a big hole in my knowledge and for obvious reasons I wanted a separate history of Ukraine. The book is about as straight-forward as you could want, and the publication is timed with the recent Maidan Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, which was in reaction to a series of corrupt leaders.
The book then goes back to early AD in order to show the rise of the people of the area, which for the moment, are tied together with peoples who would inhabit modern day Russia as well. This tying together stays part of the history up to around 1800 or so as we begin to see a separation of the lines of history. This separation is especially important in the years after the Russian Revolution and throughout the history of the USSR. I don’t actually know much about the inner-workings of the USSR except in broad strokes, so seeing the ways in which the Ukranian controlled elements forged their own power for decades was fascinating.
I tend to struggle with history in any event because so much of it is not tied to direct narratives or clear arguments. I think I have a sense of things, and this book is to credit for that. Like with any other historical question, this one is not settled in one book, but that’s not the fault of the book itself.