Zero Point Ukraine: Four Essays on World War II

by Olena Stiazhkina, Andreas Umland (Editor), Svitlana Kulinska (Translator)

Overview

In her Four Essays on World War II, Olena Stiazhkina inscribes the Ukrainian history of World War II into a wider European and world context. Among other aspects, she analyzes the mobilization measures on the eve of the war, and reconsiders Soviet narratives on them. Scrutinizing social and political processes initiated by the Bolshevik leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, she outlines how mobilization and militarization became integral parts of Soviet politics. Today, the Kremlin uses Soviet and post-Soviet Russian narratives of World War II to justify its aggressive policies towards a number of democratic countries. Russia is engaged in falsification of the past to underpin claims of a so-called “Russian World” and its ongoing war against Ukraine. Against this background, Stiazhkina offers a new understanding of what happened in Ukraine before, during, and after World War II.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783838275505
Publisher:	ibidem
Publication date:	03/30/2021
Series:	Ukrainian Voices , #10
Sold by:	Libreka GmbH
Format:	eBook
Pages:	294
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Dr. Olena Stiazhkina is Senior Research Fellow at the NANU Institute of History of Ukraine and Professor of History at Donetsk National Vasyl Stus University. Her previous books include Women in the History of Ukrainian Culture in the Second Half of the 20th Century (Skhidny vydavnychy dim 2002), Gender Relations in Modern Society (Skhidny vydavnychy dim 2006), A Person in the Soviet Province (Noulidzh 2013), Stigma of Occupation: Soviet Women of the 1940s in Their Self-Perception (Dukh i litera 2019).

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Essay I World War II in the Life and Death of Ukrainians: An Attempt to Adjust the Methodological Framework 15

Essay II The Regime of Continuous War: Mobilization, Militarization, and Practices of Maintaining an Undeclared State of Emergency in Soviet Ukraine From the 1920s to the 1940s 47

Essay III Occupation Regimes in Ukrainian Lands: Establishment and Fall/Stabilization, Similarities and Differences 95

Essay IV Ukraine in 1943-1953: Re-Sovietization and an Unexpected Turn of the Unfinished War 173

Abbreviations 275

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

Olena Stiazhkina knows how to put historical processes under a microscope. How did the Soviet Union militarize everyday life in Ukraine since the early 1920s? Here you get answers that will change your knowledge both of Ukrainian history and of how the “building of a new society” by a totalitarian regime affected everyone, even children. This fascinating book reinforces interest not only in the history of Ukraine but in the history of whole Eastern Europe.

Andriy Kurkov

Each essay is written in elegant yet precise, clear manner. This is not a trite account of the past but a profound reflection of a historian, an attempt to overcome the limitations of the national history. The book allows to see the other war, to capture and feel the things that are usually left ‘behind the scenes’: the permanent state of emergency prevailing over the Soviet mode of living, the analysis of occupation regimes and the end of the war for Ukraine—the war, which, as Stiazhkina demonstrates, was not only a ground zero for emergence of the Soviet empire but also a ground zero in the countdown of its fall. Olena Stiazhkina is among those who put in motion the tombstone of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ myth, under which, within the concept of the ‘Great Russian People’, Ukrainians were immured.

Tamara Vronska

Olena Stiazhkina knows how to put historical processes under a microscope. How did the Soviet Union militarize everyday life in Ukraine since the early 1920s? Here you get answers that will change your knowledge both of Ukrainian history and of how the “building of a new society” by a totalitarian regime affected everyone, even children. This fascinating book reinforces interest not only in the history of Ukraine but in the history of whole Eastern Europe.

Each essay is written in elegant yet precise, clear manner. This is not a trite account of the past but a profound reflection of a historian, an attempt to overcome the limitations of the national history. The book allows to see the other war, to capture and feel the things that are usually left ‘behind the scenes’: the permanent state of emergency prevailing over the Soviet mode of living, the analysis of occupation regimes and the end of the war for Ukraine—the war, which, as Stiazhkina demonstrates, was not only a ground zero for emergence of the Soviet empire but also a ground zero in the countdown of its fall. Olena Stiazhkina is among those who put in motion the tombstone of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ myth, under which, within the concept of the ‘Great Russian People’, Ukrainians were immured.

From the Publisher