J. Arch Getty and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Reflections on Stalinism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2024)

Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma (Academic Studies Press, 2026) explores transitional post-Soviet cultural consciousness in Ukraine at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The main themes in the book are postcolonial traumas in relation to past empires and old historiographical narratives; post-totalitarian consciousness, which is characterized by sociocultural ruptures, postcolonial resentment, and intergenerational crises; and post-memory as a means of overcoming historical and familial traumas. Against the backdrop of the Chornobyl catastrophe, the book examines the meeting of different generations and views the clown Verka Serduchka as a mediator between the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet world. The book focuses on three significant Ukrainian novels written between the two Maidans: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko (2009), Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan (2010), and Notes of a Ukrainian Madman by Lina Kostenko (2010). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The September, 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines transporting Russian gas to Germany was perhaps the greatest single act of sabotage in modern history. In The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World (Henry Holt, 2026), Bojan Pancevski makes a compelling case that the culprit was an intrepid team of Ukrainian intelligence agents, military personnel and civilian divers. In our conversation, he explains how he came to this conclusion. And we touch on the wider issue of what Pancevski calls the “Cossack spirit,” at the heart of the determination of courageous and resourceful Ukrainians to resist, by all means available, Moscow’s efforts to subdue Ukraine. Pancevski is the chief European political correspondent of The Wall Street Journal and has considerable experience covering Ukraine. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Books Publishing, 2025) is a unique reflection on the much-mythologised Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Ukrainian east, the old and recent history of the region as seen by an esteemed academic multi-disciplinary scholar Victoria Donovan in her numerous travels to the region prior to the full-scale invasion. Seen through a deeply empathetic lens of conversations with local curators, historians, museum workers, and artists, the region is shown in its complexity, with the uniqueness of its landscapes, endangered biodiversity, entangled colonialisms of its past and a threatened future. Since start of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014, its eastern region—Donbas—has been synonymous with conflict. With the escalation of that war in 2022, its, cities such as Bakhmut and Lysychansk have become familiar to us through the images and reports of brutal devastation. Victoria Donovan excavates a rich, multicultural history of this area, and paints a radically different picture. Travelling from the dramatic, jagged peaks of Bilokuzmynivka to the marshland of Mariupol, from a warehouse rave to an abandoned gypsum mine, the physical world and its importance to this region’s identity is brought to vivid life. But above all else, by speaking to those whose lives are embedded there now—curators, artists, railway workers, young people who have grown up amidst instability and destruction—Donovan amplifies local voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality of Putin’s war. Victoria Donovan is Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms, Southeast, Central and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews. Viktoriia Grivina is an independent anthropologist and writer, author of Kharkiv, a War City (Ibidem, 2025), and Kharkiv is a Dream: Public Art and Activism, 2013–2023 (Ibidem, 2025). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms (Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors, revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify control, including its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the Tsarist empire to Putin’s digital propaganda, Dr. Bogatova examines how Russia portrays itself as a disciplining “father,” a self-sacrificing “mother,” or an “elder brother” to post-Soviet states, protecting, subjugating, and manipulating them in the name of unity.  Blending psychology, discourse analysis, and historical inquiry, this groundbreaking book exposes how language sanitizes oppression, legitimizes conquest, and sustains imperial ambitions. A thought-provoking exploration of power, ideology, and resistance, it offers a fresh perspective on Russia’s enduring influence over its former empire. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function, avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these qualities, they remain largely unrecognized. This is a result of several factors, including the stigma of belonging to the Soviet era, corruption, neglect, as well as the ongoing threat of destruction from both unscrupulous developers and war. Photographer Dmytro Soloviov has crossed Ukraine documenting them to form the most comprehensive publication available on the subject.  With an introduction by renowned architecture critic Owen Hatherley, complete with historical images, Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine (Fuel, 2025) cements these buildings in a cultural and political context. Dmytro Soloviov is a photographer, tour guide, and activist, and the creator of the popular Ukrainian Modernism Instagram page. He frequently leads tours of modernist architecture in different cities in Ukraine. Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

He’s been called the man academics love to hate. One time, when the author disclosed that he worked with Pipes, the colleague responded, “I will forgive you.” Love him or hate him, Richard Pipes (1923–2018), left an indelible mark on Russian and Soviet history in his long and remarkable life. This conversation delves into Pipes’ personal and intellectual biography, scholarly contributions, the role he played in shaping late Cold War policy and a generation of American historians of the Imperial and Soviet Russia. Have a listen to get a better sense of this humanist historian—described as both polemical and preeminently polite—who cast such a long shadow on academia in and beyond the Cold War. Jonathan Daly is Professor of History at University of Illinois Chicago. In addition to The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior (Stanford University Press, 2025), he is the author of several monographs on Russian and Soviet history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton UP, 2025), Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other.  Alex Averbuch is assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and culture in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of extraordinary characters, his literature provided readers with a window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they confronted the forces of modernity that tore through Russia at the end of the 19th century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of his characters, was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. Jonathan Brent, Executive Director at YIVO, Jeremy Dauber, author of the recently published book, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye, and Adam Kirsch joined each other on stage for a lively discussion about the fascinating life and work of the "Jewish Mark Twain.” This discussion originally took place on October 17, 2013. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans examines the impact of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic restructuring programmes during active conflicts. Using a critical political economy perspective, the book explores how these restructuring efforts affect vulnerable communities’ survival amid violence. Chapters provide a detailed case study of Ukraine during the War in Donbas, analysing the controversial reforms in agriculture, gas and pension sectors. The resulting analysis offers valuable insights into how these reforms have influenced Ukraine’s political economy and the survival of conflict-affected populations since the 2022 Russian invasion. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.