July 8, 2016

BOOK NOTES: George Liber’s study of the making of modern Ukraine

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In the first half of the 20th century, specifically between 1914 and 1954, following two world wars, revolutions, famines, genocidal campaigns and purges, Ukrainians living in East Central Europe suffered nearly 15 million deaths, as well as numerous large-scale evacuations and forced population transfers.

“Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954” by George O. Liber, presents a case that the continuous violence of the world wars and interwar years transformed the Ukrainian-speaking population of East Central Europe into self-conscious Ukrainians. The Holodomor, two world wars, the Holocaust, mass killings and forced modernization drives made and re-made Ukraine’s boundaries, institutionalized its national identities and pruned its population according to various state-sponsored political, racial and social ideologies.

Prof. Liber’s book studies the terrifying scope and paradoxical consequences of mass violence in Europe’s “bloodlands,” and transforms the reader’s understanding of the entangled histories of Ukraine, the USSR, Germany and East Central Europe in the 20th century.

Divided into three parts, the book begins with an overview of the Ukrainian-speaking regions of East Central Europe before the outbreak of World War I, and compares it against the aftershocks following the war, including the 1917-1923 political collapse, revolution, social upheavals and Ukrainian movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1918-1939.

Part two – the second total war, according to the author – examines the “social engineering” prior to World War II under Soviet rule, including “managed diversity” in 1920s Soviet Ukraine, the hypercentralization, industrialization and the grain front of 1927-1934, and the political and cultural fronts of 1929-1941.

Part three focuses on the second world war (third total war) and its consequences in Ukraine under Stalin’s rule from 1945 to 1954.

Prof. Frank Sysyn of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, stated about “Total Wars,” “George Liber makes the concept of 1914-1945 as a modern ‘Thirty Years War’ the fulcrum of a timely and interesting take on Ukrainian history in the first half of the 20th century.”

Prof. Liber is professor of history at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Ala. Other books to his credit include “Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923-1934” (1992) and “Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film” (2002). Born in Australia in 1954, Prof. Liber and his family arrived in the United States in 1958.

“Total Wars” was made possible by the financial support of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of the U.S.A. and the Ivan and Elisabeth Chlopecky Fund. Readers may obtain copies (paperback, cloth and e-book) at local retailers and online from major booksellers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. For more information, readers can contact the publisher, University of Toronto Press, via its website, www.utppublishing.com; telephone, 416-667-7791 or 800-565-9523, or e-mail, [email protected].

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