• In “The victory of Ukraine” (The New York Review of Books, April 7), columnist, author and historian Anne Applebaum writes about three books: “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine” by Serhii Plokhy; “‘Tell Them We Are Starving’: The 1933 Soviet Diaries of Gareth Jones,” edited by Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, with an introduction by Ray Gamache; and “Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor” by Ray Gamache. In her eloquent narrative explaining the significance of these three works, Ms. Applebaum tells readers about the events of 1917, when a historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, was elected chairman of Ukraine’s Central Rada, and of 1920, when the Bolsheviks took control of Ukraine. “The dream of Ukrainian independence disappeared again for 70 years. As a consequence, Ukrainian historiography disappeared too; the Kremlin feared its potentially disruptive power,” she writes.
Ukraine re-established its independence in 1991. “But even as Ukraine rapidly develops its own historical debate and its own national literature, it is still missing from Western historiography, the Western literary canon, and even from Western political consciousness: Ukraine’s right to exist as a nation at all is routinely questioned in Western capitals,” Ms. Applebaum observes. And that is why the three books reviewed are significant.
“The Ukrainian state that Hrushevsky fought to create now exists. But in order for it to survive, Plokhy argues, foreigners have to understand the history of Ukraine as well,” Ms. Applebaum notes. “Recent events in Ukraine inspired Plokhy to condense its complex, thousand-year history into a single, readable, English-language volume.”
Noting that others have chosen “to dig into the country’s unfamiliar history and to showcase people and subjects that could have an echo in the West,” Ms. Applebaum goes on to write: “One of the most extraordinary of these stories, rediscovered and retold several times in recent years, is the tale of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who was one of the very few foreign witnesses to the Ukrainian famine.” Jones, a 27-year-old journalist, got permission to visit a tractor factory in Kharkiv. “He boarded the train from Moscow and got off early. For three days he walked along the railway line with no official minder or escort, passing through more than 20 villages and collective farms and recording his thoughts, notes and impressions.” Jones was murdered in 1935, but his notebooks were found in 1980. “In ‘Tell Them We Are Starving’ both a transcription and an evocative facsimile of the notebooks are introduced by [Nigel] Colley and Ray Gamache, the author of ‘Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor.’ ”
“Now that the existence of Ukraine is becoming more widely understood and accepted there will be more such stories, and more such reassessments. It’s not very often that shifts in European politics throw up new possibilities for historians. But even if it achieves nothing else, the revolution in Ukraine has already made readers and writers of history think twice about what they think they know,” Ms. Applebaum concludes.
The full text of the article may be read at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/07/the-victory-of-ukraine/.