Reading List: Ukraine

The world is focused on the mounting crisis in Ukraine. McGill-Queen’s has compiled a reading list to help better understand Ukraine and its history.

Making Ukraine

Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century

Edited by Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu

This timely edited collection aims to investigate the various processes of negotiation, delineation, and contestation that have shaped the country’s borders throughout the past century.

Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West

By Thomas M. Prymak

There’s a lot more to Ukraine than its relationship with Russia, it has long been a multicultural state, a place where people from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have met and lived together.

Strategic Friends

Canada-Ukraine Relations from Independence to the Euromaidan

By Bohdan S. Kordan

Canada was the first country to recognize an independent Ukraine in 1991, and relations between Canada and Ukraine have been very important for both countries ever since.

Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire 

By Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva

Ivan Mazepa was hetman of Ukraine during one of its previous attempts to free itself from Moscow. An astute, highly cultured politician, Mazepa and his Swedish allies were defeated by Peter the Great at the battle of Poltava in 1709 but left a lasting legacy on Ukraine and its culture. A readable, compelling biography of a leader mythologized by artists and poets like Lord Byron, in his epic poem on Mazepa.

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

Living Conditions, Violence, and Demographic Catastrophe, 1917–1923

By Stephen Velychenko

Many people have heard of the Holodomor, the mass starvation in Ukraine (and Kazakhstan) brought about by Soviet policies of requisitioning food from the peasants. Ukraine experienced other deadly periods in the 20th century – Velychenko examines one of them, the violence and disease that followed the Russian Revolution and resulted in the death of millions in Ukraine. The memory of these disasters is important for understanding Ukraine today.