"Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia" by Alison Fleig Frank. Austrian Galicia was the third largest oil producer in the world from 1890 to 1910.
"Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine" by Omer Bartov.
"An Atlas of Geology and Mineral Deposits of Ukraine" by Leonid Galetskyi.
"Heroes and Villains; Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine" by David R. Maples.
"Investing in Russia, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Kazakhstan" by Gil Feiler and Alexandre Garese.
"Party Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: A Comparative Study of Political Institutionalization in the Baltic States, Russia, And Ukraine" by Andrey Meleshevich.
by Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin
Author Information: Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Former Chair of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, Official Historian of the Security Service (MI5), Honorary Air Commodore of 7006 Squadron (Intelligence) in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, Chair of the British Intelligence Study Group, and former Visiting Professor at Harvard, Toronto and Canberra. Professor Andrew is also co-editor of Intelligence and National Security, and a regular presenter of BBC Radio and TV documentaries, including the Radio Four series What If?. His twelve previous books include a number of path-breaking studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history. He is currently a govenor of Norwich School.
In recent years he has collaborated with two KGB defectors, Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin, producing detailed histories of the KGB and its operations using material and documents provided by the two. In addition to The Sword and the Shield, he has also collaborated with Mitrokhin on The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005). (bios: Wikipedia)
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was a Major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. He collected notes over the course of 30 years that form the majority of revelatory information in the book collaborations he had with Andrew.
Book Description: Vasili Mitrokhin, a veteran K.G.B. officer, becomes progressively disenchanted with the Soviet system. In 1972, he is made responsible for checking and sealing some 300,000 K.G.B. files in a move from the Lubyanka headquarters to a new building. He uses this privileged access to take longhand notes of the most sensitive files that pass through his hands. Over the next 12 years he hides thousands of pages of these notes at his dacha. In 1992, Mitrokhin defects to Britain, bringing his cache with him. He makes the smuggled archive available to British intelligence and teams up with Christopher Andrew, a leading writer on Soviet intelligence, to produce this volume. (From this excellent NYT review)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter IIU.
by Martin Cruz Smith
Author Information: Martin Cruz Smith is the author of Gorky Park, as well as Stallion Gate, Polar Star, and Rose, among other novels. He lives in California with his wife and three children.
Book Description: In his critically acclaimed Gorky Park, Smith created one of the iconic detectives of contemporary fiction, Arkady Renko. Cynical, quietly subversive, brilliantly analytical and haunted by melancholy, Renko has survived, barely, the journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find his transformed nation just as obsessed with secrecy, corruption and brutality as was the old Communist dictatorship.
In Wolves Eat Dogs, Renko enters the privileged world of Russia's new billionaire class. The grandest of them all, a self-made powerhouse named Pasha Ivanov, has apparently leapt to his death from the palatial splendor of his ultra-modern Moscow condominium. While there are no signs pointing to homicide, there is one troubling and puzzling bit of evidence...in Ivanov's bedroom closet, there's a mountain of salt.
Ivanov's demise ultimately leads Renko on a journey through Chernobyl's netherworld. The crimes he uncovers and the secrets they reveal about the New Russia, make for a tense, unforgettable adventure. [from Cruz's site, more or less]
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by Orange Ukraine reader Susan: ...set in large part in Prypat and the Chornobyl area. After reading your Chernobyl article it sounds like Smith did a great job capturing the area. It is part of the Arkady Renko series (Gorky Park is the first book). I find reference to Ukraine in mainstream fiction quite rare so this was an interesting read.
The book has also gotten quite a lot of positive critical reviews.
Cruz's Site
Metacritic 'Universal Acclaim' Rating
Powell's
Amazon
by Timothy Snyder
Author Information: Timothy Snyder received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, and has held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, and at Harvard. He is the author of Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Harvard University Press, 1998); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003); and Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Yale University Press, 2005). He is also the co-editor of Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). His current project is a family history of modern nationalism. (from his Yale Faculty Bio)
Book Description: Modern nationalism in northeastern Europe has often led to violence and then reconciliation between nations with bloody pasts. In this fascinating book, Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian nationhood over four centuries, discusses various atrocities (including the first account of the massive Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s), and examines Poland's recent successful negotiations with its newly independent Eastern neighbors, as it has channeled national interest toward peace. (Powell's synopsis)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent reader and commenter WRY: "This is one of my very favorite books on the formation of national identity and similar concepts. Man, what a hell of a book. It's all here, the question of Russian/Ukrainian/pan-slavic identity, the question of overlapping national identities, Ukrainian nationalism during WWII etc etc. plus all the other countries mentioned."
Faculty Bio from Yale
Check out the high-caliber recommendations of this book
Powell's
Amazon
by Paul Robert Magocsi
Author Information: Paul Robert Magocsi was born, raised and educated in the state of New Jersey. After completing undergraduate studies at Rutgers University (1966), he was awarded a Ph.D. from Princeton University (1972). He then went on to Harvard University, where for close to a decade he was a member of the prestigious Society of Fellows (1973-76), a senior research fellow, and a lecturer in the Government Department. A professor of history and political science at the University of Toronto since 1980, Dr. Magocsi was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1996.
Author of, among other things Ukraine: A Historical Atlas (3rd ed., 1987); The Russian Americans (1989); The Rusyns of Slovakia (1993); Editor-in-Chief of of Rusyn History and Culture (2002).
Book Description: In an easy, accessible style, Prof. Magocsi provides a good introduction to the fundamental questions that surround the issue. Why did Russian, Polish and Soviet historians challenge the legitimacy of the concept of a Ukrainian history? How and why did Western historians largely accept this perspective? How did Ukrainian historians answer these arguments?
In so doing, Prof. Magocsi has gone beyond the polemics and produced an eminently useful reference work. The 784-page door-stopper volume was designed as a university textbook, but will also be of interest to the general reader. "Ukrainians are a large people and deserve a large history," Prof. Magocsi said at the official book launch, held at the new premises of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies's University of Toronto on December 12, 1996. (from the Ukrainian Weekly)
The book also addresses a great number of controversial topics head-on, particularly interaction (and collaberation) between Ukrainian militias and the Nazis in Western Ukraine during WWII.
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent reader and commenter WRY: "I must also put in a plug for Paul Robert Magocsi's "History of Ukraine". I haven't read Subtelny, but as I understand it, Subtelny's book is more about the Ukrainian people, where Magocsi is concerned with the history of all peoples on the territory that is now Ukraine. But I'll defer to anyone who has read both books."
Bio on Carpatho-Rusyns.org (Magocsi has contributed a lot to the study of this region and ethnic group)
Faculty Bio from U Toronto
Ukrainian Weekly book review
Carpatho-Rusyn Article by Magocsi
Powell's
Amazon
Author Information: Professor emeritus of political science and international relations, University of Delaware. He has published several articles and chapters on Ukraine and the Soviet Union, as well as the books Endgame in NATO's Enlargement: The Baltic States and Ukraine and The Second Soviet Republic: The Ukraine After World War II. Bilinsky also served as president of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States and was editor and major contributor to volume 14 of its Annals.
A graduate of Harvard College, Bilinsky was a special student in Soviet affairs at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and received his doctorate from Princeton University. (from UD faculty listings)
Book Description: This book contains a lot of information on topics such as language use and identity, as well as accounts of what happened in the areas taken over by the USSR from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945 and the supression of the Greek Catholic church. This is an excellent book, may be hard to find. Somewhat dated, obviously, but Ukrainophiles will not care! Bilinsky is sympathetic to Ukrainian nationalism. (Orange Ukraine reader WRY's review)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent reader and commenter WRY.
Bilinsky reviews four other Soviet history books
Bilinsky's great article detailing why Holodomor should be considered genocide
TomFolio's Copy
Questia's e-book
Author Information: Ania Savage is a journalist who has taught at the University of Denver and the Metropolitan State College of Denver. Her writings have appeared in such national publications as the New York Times and USA Today. Wrote the book while traveling to teach at Kyiv State University.
Book Description: Nearly fifty years after fleeing Ukraine during World War II, Ania Savage returned with her mother and aunt--their first trip back to their homeland. She records both the changes they found in Ukraine in the early days of post-Soviet existence and the memories they had gone to seek.
Savage threads personal themes into narratives of Ukraine's larger history, events that include stumbling upon the excavation of a mass grave from the Stalinist era. She moves through the discoveries of her trip with an honest and passionate voice as she witnesses the rebirth of a nation and as she and her family reconnect with their past. (from Texas A&M University Press)
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter WRY: "A low-key account of a woman's trip to Ukraine to visit her mother's home village."
Author Information: The author, Miron Dolot (a pseudonym), is a language teacher in California, who as a 15-year-old boy, lived through Stalin's forced collectivization and the genocidal famine known as Holodomor. (From the Institute for Historical Review)
Book Description: The first book-length account of this mass murder to be written by one who lived through these terrible events. The author, Miron Dolot (a pseudonym), is a language teacher in California, who as a 15-year-old boy, lived through the winter of 1932-33 in a Ukrainian village that became "a ghost town" that looked "as if the Black Death had passed through."
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter WRY: "Account of the terror-famine. Gripping and horrific; an inexpensive paperback on Amazon.com."
Author Information: Nathaniel Davis is the Alexander and Adelaide Hixon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Harvey Mudd College. He served in the U.S. Foreign Service for thirty-six years, in Moscow, as assistant secretary of state, as ambassador in three posts, and as Lyndon B. Johnson's senior advisor on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. (Perseus Books Bio)
Book Description: Drawing on newly opened Soviet archives, Davis (emeritus, humanities, Harvey Mudd College), who served the US as an expert on Soviet affairs, presents a secular history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 20th century. This update of the 1995 edition includes recent challenges, e.g., Protestant proselytizers and internecine power plays, that have supplanted those from Communist rule.
Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter WRY. Perseus books has an extensive list of other positive reviews of the book.