Graphic novelist Igort illuminates two harrowing moments in recent history--the Ukraine famine and the assassination of a Russian journalist.

Written and illustrated by an award-winning artist and translated into English for the first time, Igort’s The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks is a collection of two harrowing works of graphic nonfiction about life under Russian foreign rule. After spending two years in Ukraine and Russia, collecting the stories of the survivors and witnesses to Soviet rule, masterful Italian graphic novelist Igort was compelled to illuminate two shadowy moments in recent history: the Ukraine famine and the assassination of a Russian journalist. Now he brings those stories to new life with in-depth reporting and deep compassion. In The Russian Notebooks, Igort investigates the murder of award-winning journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya. Anna spoke out frequently against the Second Chechen War, criticizing Vladimir Putin. For her work, she was detained, poisoned, and ultimately murdered. Igort follows in her tracks, detailing Anna’s assassination and the stories of abuse, murder, abduction, and torture that Russia was so desperate to censor. In The Ukrainian Notebooks, Igort reaches further back in history and illustrates the events of the 1932 Holodomor. Little known outside of the Ukraine, the Holodomor was a government-sanctioned famine, a peacetime atrocity during Stalin’s rule that killed anywhere from 1.8 to twelve million ethnic Ukrainians. Told through interviews with the people who lived through it, Igort paints a harrowing picture of hunger and cruelty under Soviet rule. With elegant brush strokes and a stark color palette, Igort has transcribed the words and emotions of his subjects, revealing their intelligence, humanity, and honesty—and exposing the secret world of the former USSR.

"This excellent book serves as a warning to journalists not to be taken in by official sources and political ideology but to report what they actually learn through their own efforts. Gamache deserves commendation for his research and careful reconstruction of Jones' reportorial journeys." --Prof. Maurine H. Beasley, College of Journalism, U. of Maryland *** "...meticulously researched book [that] returns Gareth Jones to his rightful status, as one of the most outstanding journalists of his generation, in a tumultuous era that depended upon honest journalism as its main source of news."--Nigel Linsan Colley *** "Extraordinary...Jones' articles...caused a small sensation...Because [his] notebooks record immediate impressions and describe events as they were happening, they have an unusual freshness...in the past two decades, the fate of the two journalists has been slowly reversed. Duranty's work has become controversial; in 2003, the Pulitzer committee debated whether to retrospectively withdraw his prize...[whilst] Jones' reputation has revived thanks to the Ukrainian government's broader efforts to tell the history of the famine...the establishment of a Ukrainian state simply makes Jones seem less marginal, more central, more important."--Anne Applebaum, The New York Review *** Gareth Jones (1905-1934), the young Welsh investigative journalist, is revered in Ukraine as a national hero and is now rightly recognised as the first reporter to reveal the horror of the Holodomor, the Soviet Government-induced famine of the early 1930s, which killed millions of Ukrainians. This is the story of his life, his bravery, and his suspicious death. [Subject: Biography, History, Media Studies, Soviet Studies, Genocide Studies]

This is the story of Julia Alekseyeva and her great-grandmother Lola. Born in 1910 to a poor, Jewish family outside of Kiev, Lola lived through the Bolshevik revolution, a horrifying civil war, Stalinist purges, and the Holocaust. She taught herself to read, and supported her extended family working as a secretary for the notorious NKVD (which became the KGB) and later as a lieutenant for the Red Army. Interwoven with Lola's history we find Julia's own struggles of coming of age in an immigrant family in Chicago, and her political awakening in the midst of the radical politics of the turn of the millennium.

This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words. Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine.

"The epic tale of the rise to power of Russia's current president-- of his emergence from shrouded obscurity and deprivation to become one of the most consequential and complicated leaders in modern history." --

His name is Yossel. In another time, in another place, this 15-year-old boy could have grown to be a great artist. But in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II, Yossel, a Jew, is an 'untermensch' and thus has no rights - and no future.