From pre-war years in Paris to the end of the 1920s in Kyiv, Ukrainians or artists from Ukraine produced some of the world's greatest avant-garde art and made major contributions to painting, sculpture, theatre, and film-making. This book tells their story and explores the roots of their inspiration.

Ukraine is at a historic crossroads, with the nations complex cultural identity at stake. Curator Alisa Lozhkina provides an authoritative overview of the countrys art, artists and movements from the dawn of Modernism to the Soviet period, to post-Soviet times and Russias invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She discusses Ukrainian art and artists within historical and political contexts as well as showing how they have contributed to, and interacted with, Ukrainian culture and identity as the nation transformed from provincial status on the periphery of the Russian Empire, to a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, through to independence and the challenges of its most recent history. Arranged broadly chronologically and fully illustrated throughout, The Art of Ukraine offers a powerful opportunity to explore the rich and complex Ukrainian artistic tradition.

In 2022, Russia heightened its initial 2014 assault and launched its imperialist full-scale war against Ukraine. The Kremlin continued to perpetrate its denial of Ukrainians as a nation distinct from the Russians. Russia’s Denial of Ukraine: Letters and Contested Memory explores the gradual and long-lasting integration of contested memory in the cultural memory of Ukraine. It emphasizes how narratives, which formed the contested memory in the nineteenth century, appeared to come to the fore with the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian War. At the same time, it offers the theoretical premise for exploring contested memory, social forgetting, and remembering. The ambivalent nature of contested memory manifests in weakening national aspirations and strengthening resilience and resistance against violence. Contested memory nuances the discussion of undermining a metropolitan center and dismantling oppression. Letters reveal public discourses shaped by cultural and political developments centering on the Ukrainians’ endeavors to remember themselves as a nation distinct from the Russians. Epistolary expressions by Mykola Hohol, Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko illustrate the circulation of contested memory sponsored and supported in many ways by Russia. Writers comment on their Ukrainianness and situate themselves in Ukraine’s entangled past in which empires clash and fall apart.

This book examines four dramatic periods that have shaped not only Ukrainian, but also Soviet and Russian history over the last hundred years: the revolutionary struggles of 1917-20, Stalin’s "second" revolution of 1928-33, the mobilization of revolutionary nationalists during the Second World War, and the Euromaidan protests of 2013-14. The story is told from the perspective of "insiders." It recovers the voice of Bolshevik historians who first described the 1917-21 revolution in Ukraine; citizens who were accused of nationalist conspiracies by Stalin; Galician newspapers that covered the 1933-34 famine; nationalists who fomented revolution in the 1940s; and participants in the Euromaidan protests and Revolution of 2013-14. In each case the narrative reflects current "memory wars" over these key moments in history. The discussion of these flashpoints in history in a balanced, insightful and illuminating. It introduces recent research findings and new archival materials, and provides a guide to the heated controversies that have today focused attention scholarly and public attention on the issues of nationalism and Russian-Ukrainian relations. The Euromaidan protesters declared that "Ukraine is not Russia," but the slogan was already current in 1917. This volume describes the process that led to its reappearance in the present day.

Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

Oleh Ilnytzkyj seeks to rectify the misinterpretations surrounding the Futurists and their leader Mykhail Semenko by providing the first major English-language monograph on this vibrant literary movement and its charismatic leader.

Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.