Ukraine and Russia,Ireland and Britain: Quasi-colonial subjugation,anti-imperial nationalism and conflict,end of empire,and ‘the lost peace’: A review essay

The books under review

Ireland and Ukraine: Studies in Comparative Imperial and National History. Edited by: Stephen Velychenko, Joseph Ruane and Liudmyla Hrynevych. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2022. 700pp. €69.90 (pbk)

The Russo-Ukrainian War. By Serhii Plokhy. London: Allen Lane; New York: Norton, 2023. xxii + 376pp. £25.00 (hbk)

Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (2nd ed.). By Paul D’Anieri. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xiv + 372pp. £22-99 (pbk). £65 (hbk)

Lost Peace: How We Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War. By Richard Sakwa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. 448pp. $38.00 / £25.00 (hbk).

The first half of this review essay outlines and assesses the various ways in which a stimulating compendium of 27 essays entitled Ireland and Ukraine: Studies in Comparative Imperial and National History has compared and contrasted experiences of quasi-colonial subjugation, the development of anti-imperial nationalism and conflict, and protracted and violent transitions to full national independence in Ireland and Ukraine. Many of these essays focus on the various ways in which four centuries of recurrent tension, conflict and divergence between Ukraine and Russia have either resembled or differed from the five centuries of fraught relationships between Ireland and Britain.

The second half of this review essay mainly assesses competing attributions of responsibility for ‘losing’ or ‘squandering’ the apparent opportunity to enhance global peace and security during the 1990s, and for bringing about dramatic escalations of Russian aggression towards Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 – initiating a ‘Second Cold War’ from 2014 onward. These themes are illuminatingly addressed in the three major sole-authored books under review. This essay strongly appreciates the perspectives and insights offered in the new books by Serhii Plokhy and Paul D’Anieri, but it takes issue with the more controversial perspectives put forward in a wide-ranging book by Richard Sakwa.

A concluding section of the essay paints a grim picture of Ukraine’s prospects; argues that Europe’s NATO (North Atlatic Treaty Organization) states must belatedly step up and take much greater responsibility for sustaining Ukraine and safeguarding European security; and suggests that the ongoing conflict between Russia, on one hand, and Ukraine and the NATO countries, on the other hand, involves a ‘clash truth regimes’.

Part I: Ireland and Ukraine: Studies in Comparative Imperial and National History. Edited by: Stephen Velychenko, Joseph Ruane and Liudmyla Hrynevych. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2022. 700pp. €69.90

This book comprises 27 chapters (including the editors’ discerning introduction, but not counting Alfred Rieber’s set of apt conclusions). Twenty-four were first presented at a conference on Ireland, Ukraine and Empire: Dependence, Conflict and Memory, held in Kyiv on 15–17 November 2019. Other than the editors’ Introduction, all were completed before the massive escalation of Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

The editors’ introduction advances arguments for comparative study of imperial rule, colonial development, anti-imperial struggles, nationalism, and the protracted and sometimes turbulent experiences of decolonization in Ireland and Ukraine. Their main arguments in favour are that such forms of comparative study have not been undertaken in any substantial or systematic way before (at least not in visible published form), and that much can be learned from the perceived similarities and differences. They acknowledge that Ireland and Ukraine are profoundly different countries: ‘Ireland is an island off the northwest [coast] of [. . .] Europe with a population of 6½ million’, whereas ‘Ukraine is a continental country at the other end of Europe with 45 million people (2014)’ (p. 19). Nevertheless, there have been striking parallels in their experiences, including ‘incorporation into larger empires, devastating famines and long struggles for independence’, plus the fact that, ‘after annexation, each was a de facto colony, with a ruling class based on settler-colonialists ruling as a dominant pro-empire minority over an ethnically distinct majority’ (pp. 19–20); ‘In both cases, members of the colonised native population also participated in and contributed to the empire of which they were part. At once colonisers and colonised, they helped their imperial rulers to administer their own and other territories’. (p. 20). The editors claim that ‘both countries face many of the same kinds of economic and social challenges, including those resulting from dependence on foreign investment, foreign corporate ownership, [and] vulnerability to uneven international capital flows and international economic crises’ (p. 19). However, the differences are much larger and profounder than this suggests: Ireland is one of Europe’s more prosperous countries and has been a member of the European Union (EU) and its precursors since 1973, whereas Ukraine has become Europe’s poorest country, has not yet regained its 1991 level of per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and has its back to the wall militarily.

Stephen Velychenko (University of Toronto), one of the editors, argues that under both Tsarist and Soviet rule Ukraine underwent many experiences characteristic of colonial status – ‘conquest, mass deportation, economic extraction, a tiny overwhelmingly foreign middle class, selective modernization to benefit the metropole, and the cultural denigration of native populations’ (pp. 243–44). Using previously closed archives, Ukrainian historians after 1991 detailed the expropriation, deportation, repression and extraction that occurred [in Ukraine] after 1917. More now refer to Ukrainians as victims of colonialism, but there is no systematic or comparative approach to viewing Ukraine as a colony. (p. 242). There is no consensus or consistency among Ukrainian historians on ‘when Ukrainian lands first became Russian colonies, or when Ukraine becomes post-colonial’ (pp. 242–43). Velychenko emphasizes that 1665, 1667, 1709 or 1781 could be used as start dates, because the various Ukrainian lands were subjugated at different times, and that Ukraine’s postcolonial era could be seen as beginning in ‘1917, or 1991, or 2014’ (p. 243), although few would now recognize the Revolutions of 1917 as an enduring birth of post-colonial Ukraine. He also recognizes that ‘Ukraine, like Ireland, remains somewhat of an anomaly’ because, in the eyes of some specialists on imperialism and colonialism, ‘it shares too few characteristics of a colony to be defined as such. Thus, like Ireland, it figures rarely, if at all, in imperial and colonial studies. Ukraine was also absent from Dependency Theory and Modernisation Theory’ (p. 243), and ‘between 1800 and 1917 the Ukrainian lands did not constitute a single legal-administrative unit called a colony. They were never administered by a private trading company’ (p. 246). Within Ukraine, furthermore,

Writings about Russian colonialism were restricted to a minority among the educated. Then and now, the concept of colonialism was marginal in Ukrainian thought and public discourse. National leaders rarely used the term . . . The leaders of the 2004 and 2014 Maidans [the mass protests centred on Maidan Square in Kyiv] mobilised around classical republican liberal ideals, not anti-colonialism (p. 241).

Joseph Ruane (University College Cork), another editor, provides a magisterial and fine-grained analysis of the changing nature and meanings of colonial status in Ireland from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, viewed comparatively. Both Velychenko and Ruane discuss important differences between internal or territorially contiguous colonizations (often in Europe’s ‘peripheries’) within Europe and the external/overseas colonizations carried out by West European states, but Ruane (on pp. 205–14) assesses these differences and their implications very differently than does Velychenko (on pp. 245–52). Velychenko highlights comparisons with the original Latin American conceptions of ‘internal colonialism’ (which mainly focus on the ways that Hispanic and Russophone ‘creole’ elites treated colonized indigenous populations) and the implications of the so-called ‘water distinction’ for rights of secession (pp. 249–52), whereas Ruane emphasizes that settler-native distinctions were particularly wide and strong in Ireland (pp. 212–15). Ruane also highlights comparisons between Ireland, Ukraine and related forms of intra-European ‘internal colonialism’ from Roman times to the nineteenth century, and the ways that these differed from extra-European colonizations (pp. 205–14). Re the so-called ‘water distinction’, Velychenko cites various juridical theses that since 1960 the United Nations (UN) has only recognized rights of national self-determination and secession for colonies that were separated from their metropoles by substantial expanses of water, not those of territorially contiguous colonies, treating this as a potential juridical objection to Ukrainian independence (p. 252). However, in 1991–1992, Ukraine seceded from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) rather than from Russia, and the UN did not oppose the secession of any of the Union Republics from the (USSR) at that time. The UN hasn’t maintained insurmountable principled opposition to independence for contiguous entities such as Ukraine, Scotland, Quebec, Montenegro, East Timor or Iraqi Kurdistan. Thus in practice, this appears not to have been a troublesome distinction or obstacle, other than in the cases of Kosovo, Catalonia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Geoffrey Hosking (University College London) deftly compares the tribulations of Ireland and Ukraine under their respective imperial overlords (pp. 59–61). He also argues that both ‘England and Russia have been impelled by great power nostalgia into self-damaging actions’, including Brexit and Russia’s devastating war against Ukraine; and that corrupt manipulation by predatory oligarchs and the laundering of ill-gotten billions through London have helped to make postimperial Britain more like Russia, rather than the other way round (pp. 68–70). Oleksii Yas (Academy of Sciences, Kyiv) succinctly analyses changing conceptualizations of Ukraine as a colony in both Ukrainian and Russian historiography (pp. 159–76).

The chapter by Gennadii Kazakevych (Taras Shevchenko National University, Kyiv) and Olga Kazakevych (National Pedagogical University, Kyiv) succinctly describes the mythology surrounding the alleged Scythian origins of the Irish, and the short-lived but pioneering links established between Ireland and Ukraine by Irish Christian monks and by Viking/Nordic traders during the tenth century (pp. 37–53).

An incisive chapter by Evi Gkotzaridis (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) analyses English colonization of Ireland, the emergence of Irish national identity, the evolution of Irish nationalist historiography and Ireland’s road to independence. She also provides a synthesis of revisionist perspectives on the emergence of effective Irish nationalist movements between the 1860s and the 1920s (pp. 190–97). Britain gradually lifted political and economic restrictions on Catholics, the Irish gained increasing access to education, and agrarian legislation gradually put almost two-thirds of Ireland’s agricultural land back into the hands of Irish farmers. This steadily strengthened the Irish peasantry economically and educationally, generating mass support for Irish nationalism, setting in motion a revolution of rising expectations which culminated in Ireland’s National Revolution. The perspective that Ireland underwent a ‘revolution of rising expectations’, based upon the rise of a gradually prospering and increasingly educated and nationalist peasantry, is also briefly adumbrated in the chapters by Andy Bielenberg (on pp. 450–52) and Joseph Ruane (on pp. 216–19). These relatively upbeat perspectives bear some resemblances to revisionist perspectives on the ways in which the emancipation of Russian and Ukrainian peasantries in the 1860s, combined with the increasing commercialization and modernization of agriculture and the expansion of education and gradually rising peasant living standards, empowered the peasantry economically and fed a revolution of rising expectations which culminated in the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 (outlined in Bideleux 1985/2014: 11–23; Bideleux, 1990; Gregory, 1994: 21–23, 29–31, 37–54; Hoch, 1994; Leonard, 2011: 45–59, 200–5, 227–43; Mironov, 2012: 384–454).

However, Ireland and Ukraine largely overlooks the fact that the rise of major radical peasant and nationalist parties and movements in Ireland and Ukraine between the 1870s and the 1920s was part of a much wider upsurge in activism, political consciousness, socioeconomic strength, and vernacular languages, literatures and cultures in predominantly peasant societies in many parts of Europe during these decades – an upsurge which came to be known as ‘the Green Rising’ (see Bideleux 1985/2014: 29–70; Bideleux, 2018: 40–43, 49–51, 63; Bideleux, 2020; and Bideleux and Jeffries, 2007: 351–63). In addition to Ireland and Ukraine, this great groundswell of peasant-based movements was especially prominent in Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In a broadly similar vein, the chapters by Anna Shukalovych (Ivan Franco National University, Lviv) on Ukrainian writings on Irish nationalist movements from the 1880s to 1923, and by Oleksandr Zaitsev (Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv) on parallels between Ukrainian and Irish nationalist insurgent violence, emphasize that politicized Ukrainians looked to Irish nationalism as a ‘success story’ in a peasant society like their own and as a role model for Ukraine’s own peasant-based radical nationalist parties (pp. 383–95 and 471–88, respectively).

Ireland helped to pioneer the approach, orientation and field of study that came to be known as ‘postcolonialism’. Consequently, postcolonial approaches have long been applied to studies of Irish history, culture and literature. Similar ‘postcolonial’ approaches have only emerged much more recently in Ukraine, as until c. 1986 their absorption was inhibited by the Soviet ‘iron curtain’. However, they have been increasingly applied since the 1990s, fruitfully linking up with academic debates on how far Ukraine had been a colony of Tsarist and Soviet Russia, as well as on what ‘colonialism’ and the ‘post-colonial’ have meant in Ukrainian contexts. An incisive chapter by Mykola Riabchuk (Academy of Sciences, Kyiv) states that Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks (1952/1986) ‘is highly topical in Ukraine’ (p. 128). He uses this influential book to formulate more precisely the main challenges faced by the ‘minoritized’ Ukrainian-speaking majority under Russophone rule and draw comparisons and contrasts with Ireland under British rule. His key finding is that

In Ukraine, it was the Ukrainian language that marked natives with the main stigma – an explicit sign of belonging to a lesser world, to a subhuman race of rural bumpkins [. . .] marginalised in their wretched villages [. . .] and ridiculed in both official and non-official pop-culture. The [Ukrainian] language was the Ukrainians’ ‘black skin’, and this profoundly differentiated them from African Blacks: Ukrainians could [. . .] easily rid themselves of their ‘black skin’, of their ‘inferior’ language, and pass for ‘whites’. And millions of Ukrainians did so. In the process, they had to appropriate (and internalise) not only the language of the colonisers but also, in many cases, their contempt for the natives – fully in line with Fanon’s observation on his Black countrymen: ‘It is normal for the Antillean to be anti-negro. Through the collective unconscious, the Antillean has taken over all the archetypes belonging to the European’. (p. 113)

This ‘absence of visible racial barriers between coloniser and colonised’ sharply differentiated the plight of Ukrainians from Fanon’s conception of the position of colonized peoples in extra-European colonies:

In Ukraine, as in Ireland, various forms of hybridity were possible [. . .] Ukrainians could make careers in imperial bodies and [. . .] many of them did so – like Scots, or Welsh, or Irish after the Catholic Relief Acts, in the British empire (p. 111).

Ukrainians arguably became ‘co-founders and co-owners’ of the Tsarist empire (p. 111). ‘Ukrainians in the tsarist empire [. . .] were on the coloniser’s side, in as much as their Russified elite and [Ukrainian] rural migrants were themselves eager promoters of colonisation’ (p. 117). Furthermore, the development of Ireland since independence has steadily refuted English and Protestant claims to ‘racial and civilisational superiority’ over the Irish; by contrast, Ukrainian attempts at independent statehood between 1917 and 1922 were defeated, and Ukrainian independence since 1991 has failed to bring about the type of ‘national revival’ that Ukrainian linguistic nationalists dreamed of, because the various language laws enacted in Ukraine since 1991 had failed to make the Ukrainian language ‘a fully-fledged functional instrument in any sphere of public life’ (p. 118). Russophone elites – including extensively Russified Ukrainians – still dominate Ukraine’s major cities, big business and the public sphere, so Ukraine has only achieved ‘Potemkin Ukrainianisation’ (pp. 122, 125). A Ukrainian-speaking ‘minoritized majority’ remains thoroughly dominated by a Russophone ‘majoritized minority’ (great terminology!). Riabchuk’s overall conclusion from reading Fanon (1952/1986) is that, to end this deep-rooted pattern of Russophone dominance, it will be ‘necessary not only to recognize but also to radically change the underlying social-economic conditions that support the structural dominance’ of the current ruling elite (including the oligarchs) over the still ‘colonised majority’, and to ‘teach’ the latter not to be ‘the slave of their archetypes’ (p. 128).

Many nationalists have long worried that, in the absence of an official national language, their nation’s distinctness and identity will be submerged by the national languages of much larger adjacent nations (or, since the 1940s, by an increasingly dominant Anglophone global culture). This appears to be the main thinking behind the insistence of most Ukrainian, Israeli, Welsh, Catalan, Basque, Flemish and Quebecois nationalists on the vital importance of legislative privileging of their national languages in their respective public spheres and in large parts of their public education systems. The contribution by Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (University of Notre Dame) on the history and interplay of majority and minority languages in Ireland and Ukraine provides an informative account of the development and diffusion of written Gaelic in Ireland from the arrival of St. Patrick in 432 AD to the advent of printed texts in Gaelic in the late sixteenth century, followed by a steady decline under the impact of the English and Scottish Protestant onslaughts on Irish society and its Catholic Church and culture between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries (pp. 136–39). Starved of Church and state support and devasted by the impact of the 1846–1849 Great Famine on Irish Catholics, Gaelic speakers shrank to a low point of just 15.1percent of the total population in 1871 (p. 142). But from the 1880s onwards, as compulsory elementary schooling spread across the Union and Irish nationalists became increasingly aware of the potent roles of education and literacy in the development of national identities in Continental Europe, Gaelic began to be promoted, drawing added impetus from the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893 (p. 143). The Irish Free State established in 1922 made Irish the country’s official language, compulsory for public officials and supported by compulsory teaching of Irish in schools, but in the 1926 census, only 18.6 percent of the population were enumerated as Irish speakers (p. 149), even though by then at least some Irish was being taught in c. 25 percent of schools, and by the 1950s, it had become the medium of instruction in more than 50 percent of schools (p. 150). However, there was a major shift to bilingualism in the 1960s, and fluency in Irish ceased to be compulsory for civil service entrance and promotions in the 1970s, when ‘compulsory Irish was dropped from state certification in final school examinations’ (p. 150). Currently, although c. 40 percent of the population claim to speak some Irish, few actively use it (p. 150). Ó Giolláin concludes that the status of Irish as ‘the national language’ in the 1937 Constitution ‘was aspirational [. . .] but it is now largely symbolic’ (p. 153). ‘Constitutional status and sociolinguistic realities are two different things’. (p. 154).

The Conclusion by Alfred Rieber (Central European University, Budapest) argues that Ireland’s experience has shown that, ‘contrary to much conventional opinion, the promotion of a national language is not a necessary condition of a national movement or even the establishment of a nation-state’, and that ‘the adoption of English by the elites and by a majority of the population did not prevent the emancipation of the country from colonial status’ (p. 684). However, Joseph Ruane’s article advances a counterargument that Ireland’s vibrant reinvented, Anglophone-Irish culture is being gradually ‘displaced, relativised and diluted’ by stronger global Anglo-American cultural forces. Indeed,

some critics argue that Ireland finally emancipated itself from British colonial domination only to allow itself to be recolonized by an even more powerful global one [. . .] There are still references to Ireland’s distinctive culture and to a new self-confidence in ‘being Irish’, but it is not clear what exactly that means. (p. 224)

However, all cultures continually mutate. Any attempt to ‘freeze’ cultural change is potentially stultifying and counterproductive, even within countries as vast as China, India, the United States, Brazil and Russia. Despite the large decline in use of Gaelic, Irish identity has been spectacularly reinvented and ‘modernized’ in highly commercialized, ‘Europeanized’ and globalized forms, matching the successes of Ireland’s capitalism, its literary activities, its music and entertainment industry, and its tourism marketing boards. Moreover, like Welsh literature written in English (above all Dylan Thomas), Irish literature written in English has had a far greater global impact than Irish literature written in the indigenous language, and literature in English can be just as distinctive as literature written in the indigenous language (though others may beg to differ). In these respects, Scotland’s experience exhibits some similarities to Ireland’s. Scotland’s national culture has flourished, even though it only has autonomy rather than full independence, while its use of Gaelic has declined even faster than in Ireland. It is also striking that a very distinctive and dominant Anglophone Irish culture has flourished in Canadian Newfoundland, in the absence of any special legislative privileging, and without generating the civic and human rights issues continually raised by Quebec’s controversial legislative privileging of French.

The chapter by Ostap Kushnir (Lazarski University, Warsaw) assesses whether Ireland and Ukraine have moved beyond colonial relationships with Britain and Russia, respectively. He employs the model of ‘settler colonialism’ elaborated by Lorenzo Veracini (2010) as a conceptual framework for the Irish case and supports the standard view that Ireland has been successful in this regard: ‘the Republic of Ireland, unlike Ukraine, has essentially evolved into a normal country that perceives England/UK as a regional neighbour’ (p. 541). Ukraine, by contrast, only ‘began to resolve colonial dependency issues and withstand Russian informational pressure’ after the Russian aggressions that started in 2014 (p. 561). He also discusses various ways in which Ukraine failed to tackle ‘colonial dependency issues’ effectively prior to 2014, and the reasons for this. A major factor is that ‘Ukraine is a comparatively young state still in the process of emancipation’, whereas ‘Ireland has had a century of sovereign existence’ (p. 561). However, due to his narrow focus on socio-cultural explanations, he overlooks the most glaring difference between the Irish and Ukrainian cases – namely that in per capita terms Ireland’s economy is many times richer than Ukraine’s. He also seems to conflate ‘postcolonialism’ (without a hyphen), which usually refers to a mode or school of thinking (comparable to ‘postmodernism’), with ‘post-colonial’ (with a hyphen), which usually refers to a status and conditions arising in a country after its former colonial relationship has been formally terminated. But this distinction is not yet universally accepted in Anglophone academia, so he is in good company!

The major eruptions of political violence in Ireland and Ukraine between the 1880s and World War II are compared in the four chapters by Róisín Healy (National University of Ireland, Galway), Darragh Gannon (Queen’s University, Belfast), Andy Bielenberg (University College Cork) and Oleksandr Zaitsev (Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv). Healy begins by claiming that, despite their shared reputations for exceptionally violent politics, political assassinations were relatively rare in both countries during the nineteenth century. However, since she excludes from consideration the quite high levels of nineteenth -century ‘agrarian’ violence (including killings) against landlords and officials in both countries, this claim is somewhat misleading. She more convincingly argues that both countries saw major upsurges in political violence (including assassinations) during the early twentieth century.

Gannon, Bielenberg and Zaitsev argue that the major escalations of political violence in both Ireland and Ukraine during World War I culminated in the Irish national revolution (1919–1923) and the Ukrainian national revolution (1917–1921). However, even though public perceptions of Irish political violence have long been just as high as those for Ukraine, actual levels of political violence were far greater in Ukraine. The explanations in these three chapters are broadly similar. World War I is seen as the main trigger of large-scale violence, which then carries over into the Irish and Ukrainian national revolutions. The much higher levels of political violence in Ukraine than in Ireland are attributed to: World War I being much more mobile and destructive on the Eastern than the Western Front; British security forces in Ireland being less violently repressive than their Central and East European counterparts; and Ukraine becoming part of Europe’s ‘shatter zone’ (Bartov and Weiss, 2013; Bugge, 2002) or ‘bloodlands’ (Snyder, 2010).

Bielenberg estimates that, between 1917 and 1923, there were roughly 17 ‘excess deaths’ per thousand persons in Ukraine, compared with 1 ‘excess death’ per thousand persons in Ireland (p. 463). He comments: ‘What was remarkable about the Irish Revolution (1919–1923) was not its violence, but its restraint’ (p. 464). Bielenberg draws attention to the horrific scale of violence against Jews in Ukraine between 1917 and 1920, citing Elias Heifetz’s estimate that around 120,000 Jews died in pogroms during these years (p. 454 and Heifetz, 2021). Heifetz’s message has been reinforced by Jeffey Veidlinger (2021), whose ‘conservative estimate is that forty thousand Jews were killed during the riots and another seventy thousand subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure as a direct result of the attacks’ (Veidlinger, 2021: 5).

Oleksandr Zaitsev’s lucid and incisive article comparing the ideologies and violence of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with those of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army Ukrayins’ka povstans’ka armiia (UPA), makes the volume’s sole substantial attempt to address the highly sensitive issues around Ukrainian nationalist involvement in anti-Semitic pogroms and other genocidal mass killings between 1918 and the mid-1940s, as well as the infamous willingness of some Ukrainian nationalists to ‘collaborate’ with Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1943. These profoundly regrettable involvements have continually supplied very damaging ammunition to Ukraine’s enemies and critics. The constant innuendo, therefore, needs to be confronted head-on, and it is somewhat disappointing that only Zaitsev and (very briefly) Bielenberg devote any serious attention to these deeply troubling issues.

The Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO, established in 1920, and the forerunner of the OUN-UPA tandem) openly advocated political violence from 1921 onward (p. 476). Zaitsev argues that ‘the social Darwinist concept of an inevitable struggle between nations was a basic component of [the] integral nationalism that lay at the heart of OUN ideology’ (p. 479). Although the influential Ukrainian integral nationalist Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973) ‘never belonged to OUN’ (p. 474), many OUN members’ regarded him as their ‘spiritual father’ (p. 479). Dontsov’s Natsionalizm (1926) declared that nations, ‘as in the organic world, are given to eternal competition among themselves, . . . not even two of them can fit into the same square: the weaker (at a given moment) must give way to the stronger’ (p. 479). Zaitsev adds:

From here, it is only a step towards accepting the need for ethnic cleansing, and some of Dontsov’s followers during World War II made it. This was facilitated by those OUN members who developed the notion of ‘hostile nations’, according to which enemies of Ukrainians were not only governments, but entire nations – Russians, Poles, and, later, Jews (pp. 479–80).

Influenced by such ideas, about 100,000 Poles and 15,000–20,000 Ukrainians perished in mutual mass killings between 1942 and 1947, according to the Polish academic Grzegorz Motyka, although the Ukrainian academic Ivan Patryliak puts the death tolls at 38,000–39,000 Poles and 13,000–16,000 Ukrainians (p. 483). Snyder (2003: 2) considers that this mutual killing claimed ‘more than 100,000 lives’. There had already been mutual mass killing of tens of thousands of Poles and Ukrainians during 1918–1922. To this, we must add the above-mentioned pogrom killings of 100,000 or more Jews (mostly by Ukrainians) during 1918–1922, and the genocidal killing of 1.4 or 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews by German forces and their mostly Ukrainian and Belarusian helpers during 1941–1943 (Veidlinger, 2021: 355; Desbois, 2008: v).

Zaitsev argues that the ‘struggles’ and activities of the OUN-UPA were ‘most closely analogous’ to those of Sinn Fein and the IRA: both movements enjoyed extensive peasant support and sought independent states that would unite all their lands and compatriots; ‘both used violence, including individual terror’; ‘both had a dual, political and military structure’; both combined ‘legal struggle with underground combat operations’; both intermittently engaged in partisan warfare; and, during World War II, both ‘tried to establish cooperation with Nazi Germany, but by 1943 had abandoned such attempts’ (pp. 473, 477). However, there were also major differences between them: Sinn-Fein and the IRA were Roman Catholic, whereas OUN-UPA was more secular and socialist; Sinn-Fein and the IRA were ideologically more eclectic and less fascist than OUN-UPA; and in total, the IRA killed a few thousand people, whereas OUN-UPA killed tens or even hundreds of thousands.

Perhaps as an attempted mitigation of their lethal ideologies, Zaitsev considers that ‘in a comparative context, the violence of the extremist wings of OUN and UPA was not exceptional’, and that mass targeting of groups by ethnicity by authoritarian regimes was fairly commonplace during 1918–1945 era (p. 480). In Zaitsev’s opinion, the ideas circulating in the OUN-UPA tandem most closely resembled those of Croatia’s Ustaše movement (p. 472). However, he claims that, in contrast to the Ustaše, the OUN-UPA formally renounced its ‘fascist ideology’ in 1943, and that

No OUN theoretician made any direct call for mass killings of hostile nationalities – with the single exception of Mykhailo Kolodzinsky [1902-39] in his Military Doctrine of Ukrainian Nationalists (1938). He did call for mass killings of Poles and Jews, but he was not among his organisation’s leading theoreticians (p. 479).

However, other sources regard Kolodzinsky as a much more prominent and influential figure.

However, it is unacceptable to tar all Ukrainian and Irish nationals with the same brush. While tens of thousands of Ukrainians variously assisted Nazi Germany during World War II, more than 7 million fought in the Red Army against the Third Reich (Plokhy, 2015: 282). Anti-Semitism was rife in early to mid-twentieth-century Ukraine and there were tens of thousands of Nazi sympathizers among Ukrainian nationalists during the late 1930s and early 1940s, but anti-Semitism has hugely diminished in Ukraine since then. Since 2014 ultranationalist and anti-Semitic candidates have in fact received much lower shares of the votes cast in parliamentary and presidential elections in Ukraine than in most Western and Central European countries (and in Russia, even though it continually brands Ukrainians as neo-Nazis and fascists). Pew Research Centre surveys have also found that Ukrainians ‘are among the least anti-Semitic people in Europe’ (The Economist 2023a: 31). Thus, despite being a Russophone Jew, Volodymyr Zelensky won a landslide victory in Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election and still enjoys strikingly high approval ratings. This reveals the magnitude of Ukraine’s cultural transformation since the 1940s – and the mendacity of the constant claims by Putin’s regime and its apologists that post-Soviet Ukraine has become a neo-Nazi state.

Turning to Ireland, while some members of Sinn Fein and the IRA sought assistance from Nazi Germany during World War II, about 42,665 Irish citizens volunteered to fight in the British armed forces against the Axis Powers (O’Connor, 2014). Moreover, despite its formal neutrality, Ireland provided valuable covert assistance to Britain’s war effort: prompt reports on German submarine movements; weather reports crucial to the success of the D-Day landing and to reducing Britain’s transatlantic shipping losses; access to Irish intelligence reports; and use of Lough Foyle and the Donegal air corridor (then vital to transatlantic flights). Also, British airmen and maritime personnel who accidentally ended up in Ireland were immediately free to return to Britain, whereas their German counterparts were interned (Dwyer, 2010).

Taras Kuzio’s chapter comparing Northern Ireland with the Donbas puts forward rather generalized preconceptions or stereotypes of the political orientations of pro-Russian ‘proxy forces’ in the Donbas and of pro-British Protestant ‘proxy forces’ in Northern Ireland, and finds that they are strikingly similar (pp. 671–72). But this partly results from the way he appears to have preconceived them! The empirically stronger and more nuanced chapter by Hiroaki Kuromiya (Indiana University) challenges such stereotypes, particularly as formulated in Kuzio (2020):

Ukraine’s Donbas was never a stronghold of empire loyalists [. . .] It was historically anti-imperialist and anti-metropolitan [. . .] its elites sought to safeguard their own space free from outside forces, thus to some extent, embodying Ukrainian Cossack traditions. The Donbas was quintessentially Ukrainian in the sense that Ukraine’s modern national identity was based on the idealization of the Ukrainian Cossacks and their spirit of independence. (p. 613)

In 1991 the Donbas, with its large ethnic Russian minority, overwhelmingly, approximately 83%, voted for Ukrainian independence [. . .]. They believed that they would be better off without Moscow’s tutelage. Yet, independent Ukraine more often disappointed than met their expectations. Still, its regional elite did not want to join Russia. They instead sought to take over Ukraine. (p. 614).

Kuromiya’s more nuanced portrayal of the Donbas draws on his own major history of the region (Kuromiya, 1998), as well as recent empirical sources. James W. McAuley’s sophisticated chapter on pro-Russian paramilitaries in the Donbas and Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland provides a similarly nuanced portrayal of the outlooks of Ulster Protestant paramilitaries and (like Kuromiya) suggests that these differed substantially from those of pro-Russian paramilitaries in the Donbas:

Loyalist paramilitaries were engaged in a bloody, but ultimately highly localised conflict [. . .]. What is happening in Ukraine is, in essence, the result of an invasion, resulting in much wider and larger-scale conflict. In Northern Ireland, the conflict was largely confined to small arms and homemade bombs, whereas the people of eastern Ukraine encounter heavy weapons, landmines and munitions as part of their everyday reality. Although there is some evidence of local support for pro-Russian paramilitaries in [eastern] Ukraine, unlike in Northern Ireland, those paramilitaries are totally subordinated to Ukraine’s former imperial ruler [whereas Ulster] loyalist paramilitaries have involved themselves in politics independent of the former ruler. (p. 643)

This volume also offers illuminating comparisons between Ireland’s Great Famine (Gorta Mór, 1846–1849) and the Soviet Republic of Ukraine’s similarly devastating ‘terror-famine’ (Holodomor, 1932–1933) in chapters by Christophe Gillissen (University of Caen), Liam Kennedy (Queen’s University Belfast), Serhiy Blavatskyy (Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library, Lviv) and Oksana Weretiuk (Ivan Franko National University, Lviv). In addition, the chapters by Stephen Velychenko, Joseph Ruane and Geoffrey Hosking contain brief sections on these famines. Serhiy Blavatskyy compares the concurrent coverage of the two famines in the British press. He recognizes that being almost a century apart limits how much significance can be given to such comparisons. But it is interesting to see just how much concurrent press coverage there was. Oksana Weretiuk compares literary treatments of these two famines by fiction writers in the first generation after each famine.

There is a broad Western academic consensus that at least 1 million inhabitants of Ireland died as a result of the Gorta Mór, and that at least 1 million were forced to emigrate. Moreover, the potato blight and potato crop failures at the root of the Gorta Mór persisted for 4 years – twice as long as the Holodomor. By contrast, there have been three decades of heated academic disagreement over how many millions of people died in Ukraine during the Holodomor. But since c. 2016 most Western and Ukrainian academic specialists have broadly agreed that the death toll approached four million (Gillissen, p. 293; Applebaum, 2017: 360; Wolowyna, 2016).

Under the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010), Ukraine ‘sharply inflated the death toll [. . .] to 7-10 million victims’ (Marples et al., 2014: 295). This manipulation may have been designed to increase the credibility of the law passed in 2006 defining the Holodomor as a consciously intended act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, which ‘became a defining moment for the construction of Ukrainian national identity’ (Klymenko, 2016: 342). Yushchenko ‘understood the power of the famine as a unifying national memory for Ukrainians, especially because it had been so long denied. He undoubtedly “politicized” it’, (Applebaum, 2017: 358), thus encouraging Ukrainians to define themselves as a victim nation.

Unfortunately, this claim also incensed many millions of Russians, including Vladimir Putin. They have treated it as a Russophobic accusation that the Russian nation deliberately carried out genocide against the Ukrainian nation, even though Yushchenko insisted that the accusation was against the Soviet regime, not Russia (Applebaum, 2017: 359). His inflated estimate has often been uncritically accepted in media reports, as well as by some Western Parliaments. A death toll of 7 million had already been propagated by Robert Conquest (1986: 306), whose pioneering work generated interest and much-needed additional research on the Holodomor, but he was writing before much more complete and reliable data became available. At the other extreme, Soviet academics and media stolidly denied that any major famine-related or collectivization-related loss of life occurred in the USSR in 1932–1933. Under Putin, Russian media have often been almost as vehement in their denials.

The consensus estimate of just under 4 million ‘above-normal’ deaths in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 remains subject to substantial margins of error, both upwards and downwards. The reliability of Soviet registration of births and deaths must have been adversely affected by the massive upheavals caused by forced rural collectivization, the recklessly over-ambitious First Five-Year Plan and ‘dekulakization’ – the deportation of millions of so-called ‘kulaks’ or rich peasants from all over the USSR to very remote and inhospitable areas, where many died. The ‘just under 4 million deaths’ estimate pertains to all ‘above-normal’ deaths in 1932–1933. Nevertheless, significant numbers of these deaths may have been attributable to the other upheavals or to the concurrent typhus, typhoid, malaria, scarlet fever, diphtheria and whooping cough epidemics, which partly resulted from them (Table 23 in Bideleux 1985/2014: 273). Although R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft (2004: 431) have downplayed the role of the epidemics in boosting the recorded death rates during these famine years, on the grounds that medical care had advanced and morbidity rates were lower than in previous famines, the scale of these epidemics was far from insignificant and must have interacted with the upheavals and widespread malnutrition. We also know that birth rates plummeted during these years, partly because of these upheavals, and partly because abortion remained legally available in clinics until 1936 and was running at high levels. The USSR also had quite high rates of illegal (and, therefore, unrecorded) abortions. The magnitude of the collapse in birth rates, therefore, could have been significantly underestimated – that is more of the population shortfall may comprise people who were never born, as against ‘above normal’ deaths. This is made more plausible by the fact that birth rates also plummeted across much of Europe in these years (albeit because of the depression, high unemployment, social tensions and fears aroused by the rise of violent far-right and far-left extremist movements).

However, irrespective of whether further adjustments of the directly famine-related death tolls are needed and of whether there was conscious genocidal intent behind the Holodomor, there is no doubt that the ‘dekulakization’ campaigns and the brutal implementation of recklessly over-ambitious and ill-prepared forced industrialization and forced collectivization were colossal crimes against humanity, deliberately perpetrated by Stalin’s regime and killing millions of inhabitants of Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union in 1932–1933 (Applebaum, 2017: 362–3).

Gillissen offers a striking additional calculation: that the broadly agreed death tolls in the Irish and Ukrainian famines amount to 12 percent and 13 percent of their respective populations, and that these proportions were

among the highest among all the famines between the French famine of 1693–1694 and the North Korean famine of 1995–2000. Only the Irish famine of 1740–1741 (13%) and perhaps the Cambodian famine of 1975–1979 (between 7 and 11%) are comparable as far as mortality rates are concerned. (p. 293)

Gillissen notes the markedly differing perspectives adopted by most historians of Ukraine and most Western former ‘Sovietologists’ (p. 305). Most historians of Ukraine (and, we should add, most Western specialists on genocide) have adopted ethnocentric stances, perceiving the Holodomor as essentially a hate-motivated and consciously intended genocide perpetrated specifically against Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine (though the proportion of Kazakhs who perished in 1931–1933 was actually far higher). This stance appears implicitly to downgrade the relative importance of the substantial famine-related death tolls in other parts of the USSR (especially Kazakhstan), and of the regime’s brutal Marxist-Leninist class warfare against peasants and so-called kulaks. Conversely, most Western ‘Sovietologists’ have tended to take a more USSR-wide and economistic view. This duly acknowledges the high death tolls in several other parts of the USSR (notably Kazakhstan) and emphasizes the regime’s general incompetence, heavy-handedness, dire lack of knowledge and experience of agriculture, and Marxist-Leninist class hatred and class warfare against peasants and so-called kulaks, thereby implicitly diminishing the relative importance of ethnic hatreds directed specifically against Ukrainians (see Davies and Wheatcroft, 2004: 406–41; 2006). Indeed, Sovietologists routinely emphasized the arbitrary and indiscriminate nature of Stalin’s crimes against humanity and reign of terror up to 1937 or 1939, which seemed designed to instil great fear in everyone (no matter who or what they were), which was the opposite of targeting a specific ethnic group. That is the essence of reigns of terror – they need to appear indiscriminate. Starting in 1937, however, Stalin’s regime sharply changed tack. Confronted mounting risks of invasion by Nazi Germany and/or Japan, between 1937 and 1951 the regime brutally transported ‘13 whole nationalities’ (whose loyalties it questioned – mostly unfairly) ‘in unhygienic and overcrowded rail cars’ to remote parts of the USSR; hundreds of thousands of these people died prematurely, either in transit or in their mostly inhospitable and unprepared new locations (Pohl, 2000: 267; also Weitz, 2003: 79-81).

The policies and actions of Stalin’s regime during the early 1930s were in my view primarily driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology, crude economic ambitions and class hatreds, more than by a particular animosity towards Ukrainians (or Kazakhs). Nevertheless, Stalin does also appear to have been intent on punishing and crushing Ukrainian nationalism (Applebaum, 2017: 209–22, 364–6; and Velychenko’s chapter, pp. 259–60). Arguably, in 1932–1933 Soviet Ukraine was treble-targeted: (1) as the USSR’s proverbial ‘breadbasket’, which was normally expected to provide much larger per capita grain surpluses than less fertile areas; (2) as a strong concentration of prosperous peasants and ‘kulaks’, treated as class enemies; and (3) as a perceived ‘hotbed’ of nationalism, posing a potential political threat to the Soviet regime. The impact of Ukraine’s severe crop failure was greatly exacerbated by deliberate decisions and actions taken by the Soviet regime and its local officials in Ukraine, especially:

the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food [elsewhere]; the harsh [. . .] blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger. (Applebaum, 2017: 354)

Velychenko’s chapter makes a persuasive argument that the Holodomor could have been avoided if Ukraine had been an independent country, rather than under Soviet rule (pp. 259–60). But he less convincingly claims that ‘Ireland would most probably have had a famine even if it had been independent’ (p. 258). Liam Kennedy suggests the famines might have been avoided (or at least mitigated) in both Ukraine and Ireland if they had been liberal democracies with wide franchises (p. 323). Gillissen claims: ‘If Ukrainian grain had not been seized [for export?], there would have been enough to feed its population throughout the famine years’, whereas ‘In Ireland the collapse of the potato harvest from 1846 onwards would not have been compensated by banning agricultural exports’, because the potato crop failure was so severe and prolonged, although ‘such a measure would probably have alleviated some of the hardship’ (p. 297). However, I would go further: If these countries had been independent liberal democracies with open market economies, they would have been free to suspend exports, raise foreign loans to fund emergency imports and seek large-scale foreign aid; and voters and parties would have pressurized governments to take such measures. Although the rule is not foolproof, liberal democracies have rarely had famines, whereas dictatorships have had them much more often (Sen, 1981; Sen, 1999).

Unfortunately, ‘imagining’ or ‘constructing’ their nation as a victim of genocide has reinforced recent Ukrainian tendencies to make victimhood central to their national identity. The contribution from Yuliya Yurchenko (Greenwich University, London) represents postindependence Ukraine as having been largely a victim of external factors entirely beyond its control: toxic International Monetary Fund (IMF) designed loans; uncongenial neoliberal tutelage; assigned divisions of labour; the machinations of corrupt, nefarious and parasitic oligarchs; and debt dependency. ‘At the end of 2020, Ukraine again stared down the rabbit hole of debt, with few assets left to sell, low investor confidence’ (p. 533). Yurchenko’s thinking may have fallen victim to Ukraine’s ‘victim syndrome’, which encourages fatalism, pessimism, passivity and a tendency to blame Ukraine’s plight on external factors beyond its control.

From the 1850s to the 1960s, Irish nationalism similarly nurtured a strong sense of victimhood. This encouraged Irish economic thinking to remain relatively passive and fatalistic, and made Irish nationalist historians and ideologues slow to recognize that, despite the prevalent ‘woe is me’ mentality, the peasantry and the economy were becoming steadily stronger from the 1860s onward. It is only since the 1960s that Irish ‘revisionist’ histories have fully recognized these advances, contributing to much more positive ‘can do’ outlooks and Ireland’s greatly enhanced economic vigour (cf. Evi Gkotzaridis, pp. 190–96; Joseph Ruane, pp. 216–19).

The chapter on ‘Post-Euromaidan Ukraine’ by Andrzej Szeptycki (University of Warsaw/Ivan Franko National University) provides a hard-headed analysis of the nature of the (mainly economic) reforms which the country needed to implement, but didn’t. Partly for this reason, Ukraine has remained the only European postcommunist state that has never regained its 1991 level of per capita GDP. Unfortunately, its options have been further constricted by the escalation of its conflict with Russia. Szeptycki’s more positive vein of thinking is a potential antidote to Yurchenko’s more self-defeating sense of victimhood.

The contribution by Valentyna Popova and Viacheslav Popov (both National Academy of Sciences, Kyiv) on path dependency argues that postindependence Ireland and Ukraine have followed very different trajectories. Ireland has been able to modernize, prosper and undergo beneficial structural changes, whereas Ukraine has remained trapped by structural rigidities inherited from the Soviet era. ‘Unlike Ireland [. . .] Ukraine’s place in the world division of labour has remained the same’ (p. 511). However, this comparison is slightly misleading because it was not until the 1960s–1970s that independent Ireland began to discover its economic ‘mojo’ and its new hugely empowering self-confidence (cf. Ruane, p. 222).

Volumes of conference articles are often quite variable in quality. The overall standard in Ireland and Ukraine is high, with over half the articles very good to excellent. This book is the first of its kind, and thus a significant landmark. The juxtaposition sheds new light on many major themes. Those who study or lecture on Ireland and Ukraine can learn a great deal from reading this big book. Highly recommended!

Part II: More recent perspectives on post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia

Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War (2023) provides an illuminating and highly readable analysis of the main factors that launched Ukraine and Russia on the road to war, followed by a succinct account of the first year of the all-out war. The book concludes with some discerning and broad-brush assessments of the impacts of (and responses to) the war in the West, in China and in Turkey, along with some stimulating and well-articulated thoughts about potential trends and outcomes. Plokhy is a Professor of History at Harvard and has been a very prolific writer of books in English, Ukrainian and other languages. The most renowned is The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), which has made him the world’s most prominent spokesperson on Ukraine’s history. The salient themes of The Russo-Ukrainian War are that this is the latest stage in the disintegration of the Russian Empire, which began with the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the ‘Russian’ Civil War of 1918–1920; and that the Orange Revolution of December 2004 ‘put Ukraine and Russia and subsequently Russia and the West on a collision course that would eventually lead to war’ from 2014 onwards (p. 36).

The book was evidently written at considerable speed, to meet urgent Ukrainian and international demands for authoritative guidance on how to understand and contextualize this war. Some landmark events and processes are passed over too lightly, or are presented out of chronological sequence, which some people could find confusing. Readers unfamiliar with Ukraine’s history would benefit by starting with his more carefully considered Gates of Europe (Plokhy, 2015), despite its tendency to skip over some ignominious episodes. There is minimal duplication of content between these two books.

Among the sole-authored books under review here, this is the only one written by a Ukrainian. This imparts degrees of inbuilt authority, insight, authenticity and directness which the other two are hard-pressed to match. Considering that Plokhy was writing while his country was fighting for its very survival, his assessments and the language he uses are remarkably restrained, balanced and fair-minded. He does not shy away from making necessary criticisms of his country’s mistakes and shortcomings, while commending Ukraine’s extraordinary resilience, fortitude and valour. He also provides some touching vignettes on the fighting humour that has helped to keep Ukrainians going since 24 February 2022. This book is highly recommended.

Richard Sakwa’s The Lost Peace: How We Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War is a big, bold book with an impressively wide range. It is, in effect, four different books rolled into one. The author is an Emeritus Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent at Canterbury. For 20 years or more, he has been one of the most prolific and influential Anglophone writers on Russian and Soviet politics. Since 2014, however, some aspects of his work have taken a disturbing turn.

Book 1 is idealistic, outlining the visions of cooperation between the world’s major nuclear powers which might conceivably have steered the world towards greater peace and harmony, nuclear disarmament and a more inclusive security architecture after the ending of Cold War in 1989–1991. This part makes moderately effective use of the major warnings, inspiring visions, generous sentiments and bold optimism in the political thinking of Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Mikhail Gorbachev. However, other strands of their thinking and governing were considerably less pacific than those described here, and readers are given quite heavily edited and sanitized glimpses of these eminent statesmen.

Gorbachev believed that the winding down of the Cold War in 1987–1991 opened up an opportunity to realize the cooperative global order and the visions of peace building and nuclear disarmament envisaged in his writings and speeches on ‘New Political Thinking’ and a ‘Common European Home’. Unfortunately, if these opportunities to build ‘a more equitable, law-governed, peaceful, and prosperous global order’ really existed and were not just naive fantasies, they were not seized. Sakwa maintains: ‘There was a positive peace to be had after 1989 but it was squandered’ (p. 11). Sakwa largely blames this on successive ‘eastward enlargements’ of NATO, which he presents as profound ‘betrayals’ of alleged promises by Western leaders that they would not do this.

However, the disintegration of the Soviet Union in late 1991 meant that Gorbachev no longer enjoyed a power base from which to promote his global peace and security project. This may in any case have been a nonstarter, because he unrealistically envisaged the project as a way of preserving a liberalized Soviet Union. This would have been unacceptable to most of the Soviet Republics (perhaps even Russia at that time) and would not have been welcome to most Western countries and Central Europeans. No one really knows whether there really was a viable ‘peace opportunity’ at that time. Sakwa provides an idealized portrayal of Gorbachev and of the level of trust and support he purportedly enjoyed in 1989–1991. He was much admired in the West, but much less so in Russia, East Central Europe and the Baltic Republics. Vytautas Landsbergis, the first president of post-Soviet Lithuania (whom I hosted in Swansea for a week in March 1994), repeatedly impressed on me that during 1990–1991 most Eastern Europeans saw Gorbachev as a Great Russian ‘empire-saver’ who was doing his utmost to hold the USSR together and repeatedly threatened to crack down militarily on the secessionist Soviet Republics of Lithuania and Latvia. He deployed Soviet armoured divisions around Lithuania in particular and indulged in sabre-rattling attempts to intimidate President Landsbergis’s government. The Baltic leaders regarded Russia’s wayward President Boris Yeltsin, who shared their desire to secede from the USSR, as a much more democratic and reliable ally. Gorbachev maintained an imperial mindset, albeit a relatively liberal one, and supported Putin’s annexation of Crime in 2014. The way he is presented in this book is thus somewhat misleading.

Book 2 is a somewhat messy and repetitive account of the evolution of the two intertwined and sometimes conflicting international systems established mainly under US and UK leadership in 1944–1947. One of these, commonly known as the ‘UN Charter system’, essentially comprises the UN, its subsidiary institutions and agencies, and the system of international law which it administers. This ‘international system based on the UN Charter’, which Sakwa also refers to as ‘the Charter system’, combines ‘state sovereignty, the right of national self-determination (which facilitated decolonization) and human rights. The UN Charter bans war as an instrument of policy and provides a framework for the resolution of international conflicts’ (p. 4). This kind of ‘cooperative sovereign internationalism’ has been central to the Non-Aligned Movement since the mid-1950s. It remains at the heart of various post-Western alignments today for the way that it

eschews the creation of military alliances and blocs, and (formally at least) rejects the view that global order requires some sort of hegemon to take the lead. Commitment to the UN Charter and subsequent protocols entails allegiance to principles of human dignity and human rights, but state sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states are prioritized. [The system] formally respects the interests of all powers, great and small, while committed to the multilateral resolution of the problems besetting humanity. This is the ideal, of course, and the practice of international politics typically falls short [. . .] Although in recent years it has come under unprecedented strain, no one has come up with a serious alternative. (p. 5)

Sakwa presents Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China as the two great champions and defenders of the UN Charter system and ‘sovereign internationalism’. He controversially contends that the liberal ‘alliance of democracies discourse’ has ‘undermined the fundamental principle of sovereign equality’, which – in his view – is now upheld by Moscow and Beijing, who assert that ‘authoritarian states should have the same rights as democratic ones’ (p. 314). Nevertheless, Russia has seriously undermined this principle, especially since 2014. Indeed, Sakwa acknowledges that ‘Russia’s tightening authoritarianism undermined the credibility of its defence of the Charter international system’ (p. 102).

The other major international system is the ‘narrower liberal’ one led by the United States since 1945. With intellectual roots in eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment concepts of ‘progress, rationality, free trade and cooperation’, this ‘liberal internationalism’ was ‘premised upon a community of liberal democracies based [. . .] on the open trading and financial system created within the framework of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944’ and its ‘military arm’, derived from the April 1949 Washington Treaty, which created NATO (p. 5). In Sakwa’s view,

The interweaving of [this] liberal internationalism with American geopolitical power and ambition meant that this was a ‘hegemonic’ peace order dominated by the US and its allies [. . .] With the end of Cold War I, liberal internationalism not only proclaimed its victory but also its universality – there could be no separate ‘spheres of influence’ since US-led peace was proclaimed as a global project. (p. 6)

Cold War bipolarity gave way to post-Cold War unipolarity: ‘In the absence of serious competition, liberal internationalism turned into something more radical and expansive [. . .] Liberal hegemony, embedding American leadership, globally’ (p. 6).

In book 3, there is a fairly discerning account of the meteoric economic rise of China, and of the ways this has assisted the rise of ‘the Global South’. The chapter entitled ‘Global China’ emphasizes that ‘China will prove a much more enduring and formidable challenge [to Western liberal democracies] than the Soviet Union ever was’ (p. 136). Sakwa’s ‘Conclusion’ accurately observes that ‘The Global South is mobilising the resources offered by Charter internationalism to challenge the political West’s dominance’ (p. 317), and that, in combination with the resurgence of China, ‘the gradual reassertion of India marks no less of a potentially irreversible shift towards multipolarity’ (p. 321). The precept of ‘sovereign internationalism’ promoted by the Beijing-Moscow Axis strongly appeals to authoritarian and populist rulers and hybrid regimes in ‘the Global South’, because it offers them a relatively free hand to act in whatever way they wish in their respective ‘spheres of influence’. Sadly, it does indeed appear that many (perhaps most) of the current rulers of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia have become much more impressed and attracted by China’s perceived strength, agency, infrastructural prowess, and capacity to deliver and get things done, than by Western liberal democracies (which are increasingly perceived as chaotic, unstable, ineffectual and hypocritical) and their liberal values, respect for civil liberties and minority rights, and support for Ukraine. This has the potential to leave the West (and Ukraine) increasingly beleaguered and bereft of wider support.

Book 4 is much more disturbing, in my view. It seems intent on lending legitimacy and respectability to Putin’s military aggression against Ukraine since March 2014. Sakwa’s account (mainly in Ch. 4 ‘The Road to War’ and Ch. 10 ‘War in Europe’) comes straight out of President Putin’s playbook. It seems designed to validate Putin’s repeated claims that Ukraine’s so-called ‘Revolution of Dignity’ (the mass protests centred on Kiyiv’s Maidan Square in late 2013 and early 2014) was in reality an illegal, US-orchestrated and US-funded, far-right coup d’état, carried out by ultranationalist and neo-Nazi thugs against a freely-elected legitimate government headed by President Viktor Yanukovych; and that these supposed extremists hijacked the new government (pp. 247–50). This parrots Putin’s pretext for his multipronged assault on Ukraine since 24 February 2022 and is a condensed and much starker rendition of the highly controversial accounts of these events previously provided in Sakwa (2015/2016, 2017). A much more balanced, substantiated and accurate (but far from uncritical) first-hand account is available in Wilson (2014 and 2022: 348–78). The Lost Peace contains endless denunciations of Western stances, actions and policies, yet rarely proceeds beyond the mildest or most softly stated criticisms of Putin. Sakwa even claims that it was the Ukrainian government’s attempt to restore its jurisdiction over the Donbas in April 2014 that ‘provoked a war in which by 2021 over 14,000 people had died’ (p. 249), thus appearing to pin the blame for the 14,000 casualties arising from the Russian-backed insurgency in the Donbas on the Ukrainian government’s attempts to take back control of sovereign Ukrainian territory! So much for principled respect for ‘sovereign internationalism’! Another pivotal but highly controversial claim in The Lost Peace is that, while ‘Putin bears responsibility for pulling the trigger on 24 February 2022, [. . .] the gun was primed by the European security impasse of the preceding three decades’ (p. 49). ‘Russia argues that it was pushed to the wall by the intransigence of the political West in refusing the balanced implementation of the core principles of the post-Cold War peace settlement’, namely ‘prioritizing choice over the indivisibility of security’ (p. 197). Sakwa (2015/2016) even appeared to take seriously Russian demands for regional autonomy (not municipal self-government) for the Donbas region in the framework of a decetralized and federalized Ukraine. However, this would have given the Russian-dominated Donbas a veto over Ukraine joining the EU and/or NATO, while also making it much easier for Russia to tear Ukraine apart the way it engineered the second and third partitions of Poland in 1792 and 1795 (Bideleux and Jeffries, 2007: 185–6 & 198–9). The Lost Peace and Sakwa (2015/16) also conflate linguistic nationalism with ultranationalism and neofascism by this reasoning, you would have to classify Wales’s Plaid Cymru as an ultranationalist neo-Nazi party, which would be preposterous. In fact, starting in 2014, far-right ultranationalist and neo-Nazi parties and presidential candidates have routinely received much lower shares of the vote in Ukraine than is the case in most EU member states (Wilson, 2014: 152–3; 348–78).

All in all, this is a highly partisan account of events in Ukraine since 2013, seriously at odds with accounts that are more sympathetic (but not uncritical) towards Ukraine – notably Wilson (2014; and 2022: 348–78) and D’Anieri (2016 and 2023). For many Western liberals (with a small ‘l’) and social democrats and most Ukrainians, book 4 will arouse considerable anger, as did Sakwa (2015/2016) and Sakwa (2017). Quite a few reviewers, including Sergei Zhuk in Ireland and Ukraine (p. 282), Toal (2018) and D’Anieri (2016), appear to regard Sakwa as a prominent and sophisticated apologist for Putinism. That view has no doubt been reinforced by his regular participation in the ‘Valdai International Discussion Club’ gatherings hosted by the Putin regime.

Here and in Sakwa (2015/2016, 2017), the United States is portrayed as almost continually endeavouring to do the USSR or Russia down since 1990 or 1991, by ‘aggressively’ promoting democracy, human rights, civil society and eastward enlargement of NATO and nefariously favouring Ukraine over Russia. He presents this as a major cause both of the ‘lost peace’ and of the sharp deterioration of Russia’s relations with the West and with Ukraine. However, these are distorted portrayals. The United States actively supported Gorbachev’s efforts to avert the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991 (D’Anieri, 2023: 32–33) and leaned heavily on Ukraine to remain within the Union in 1990–1991. From 1990 to 1994, the United States accorded much more support and respect towards Russia than towards Ukraine, and it repeatedly leaned on Ukraine to surrender its nuclear weapons, which greatly increased its vulnerability to Russian pressure and intimidation (D’Anieri, 2023: 50–54, 65, 75). The United States hasn’t continually engaged in ‘aggressive’ eastward expansion of NATO’s reach. It has often urged caution and applied the brakes. Moreover, for historians of East Central Europe and the Balkans, the overriding perception has been that most of the demand and the drive for eastward enlargement of NATO came, not from the United States, but from states in these regions, who very understandably and legitimately sought the enhanced security, political stability and business confidence that NATO membership has in fact conferred. Sakwa acknowledges this (pp. 77–80). Admittedly, the eastward enlargement of NATO does pose a serious ‘security dilemma’, namely that moves ostensibly undertaken to increase the security of these states could in the longer term reduce it, by further isolating and antagonizing Russia. That is a major reason why I shared the widespread misgivings about it at the time and supported a more incremental and inclusive approach based on Partnership for Peace. But whatever the drawbacks or downsides of Eastward enlargement of NATO, they don’t begin to justify the enormity of the loss of life, devastation and disruption that Putin has been inflicting on Ukraine and (to much lesser degrees) its neighbours since 2014. This view is fully shared by D’Anieri (2023), reviewed next, and by Sarotte (2021), whom Sakwa evidently holds in very high esteem. Moreover, Ukraine’s wholly legitimate aspirations to NATO membership are clearly not the real issue. When Ukraine’s official representatives offered to formally renounce these aspirations and declare Ukraine’s permanent neutrality in March 2022, Russia refused to call off its military decimation of Ukraine (D’Anieri 2023: 304), revealing that Putin is primarily interested in grabbing as much territory as possible and emasculating or undermining Ukraine. The NATO enlargement issue is largely a red herring.

The Putin regime is not only inflicting colossal harm on Ukraine and many millions of Ukrainians. It is also seriously damaging Russia’s interests, squandering many tens (potentially hundreds) of thousands of Russian lives, seriously damaging and distorting Russia’s economy, reversing decades of partial reforms, liberalization and democratization, turning Russia into an ever-more corrupt, racketeering, authoritarian and repressive pariah state. Much of the South-eastern Ukrainian territory recently occupied by Russia was already more of a net economic liability than an asset back in 2013, mainly because the region’s declining, obsolescent and energy-intensive ‘rust-belt’ industries were dependent on large external subsidies which were big drains on Ukraine’s relatively meagre public resources and revenues. But Putin’s armed forces are so relentlessly pulverizing these areas and their major economic installations, that it will cost hundreds of billions of Euros to rehabilitate them. Putin is thus sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives, displacing many millions of people and splurging many hundreds of billions of Euros to conquer regions that, for Russia, would be massive ongoing economic drains, rather than a net economic gains. Therefore, such conquests not only involve colossal crimes against humanity but don’t even make much sense as naked territorial greed, which casts more doubt on the regime’s sanity.

It can readily be conceded that eastward enlargement of NATO has been contrary to Russia’s security thinking and interests, that it posed risks, and that it might have been wiser to have pursued it in a more cautious and incremental manner through Partnership for Peace, in endeavours to keep Russia ‘on side’, as has been compellingly argued by Mary Elise Sarotte (2021: 1–8, 15). Indeed, for most of the reasons that Sakwa puts forward, Bideleux and Jeffries (2007: 616) stated: ‘There can be no lasting security for East Central Europe, the Baltic States or the Balkans so long as Russia remains a “loose cannon” . . . The emphasis should be on creating a pan-European security architecture and a barrier-free “single European space,” in which all who are willing and able to abide by a common set of rules and norms should be allowed to participate on an equal basis’, to avoid freezing ‘Russia (or Ukraine, for that matter) out of the “common European home”’. Bideleux (2009) added that

The great tragedy is that during the 1990s, while Russia was mired in economic and social collapse and its ruling elites were eagerly seeking Western economic aid and . . . fuller acceptance ‘into the Western fold’, the leading Western powers passed up a golden opportunity to surmount Europe’s East-West divide and durably neutralize the actual or potential ‘Russian threat’ which had been NATO’s chief raison d’être. Western leaders studiously ignored many articulate and high-profile voices calling on them to construct a genuinely pan-European civil order and security architecture embracing Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and the Caucasus, so as to leave no parts of Europe ‘out in the cold’ or consigned to ‘buffer zones’ (p. 132).

Furthermore,

ill-considered eastward enlargements of NATO . . . strongly alienated and marginalized Europe’s largest nation, drove it into the arms of authoritarian nationalists, siloviki [wielders of power, mainly in the security ministries and security services] and oligarchs, and reinforced the creation of a new East-West divide . . . The main responsibility resides with Russia’s illiberal nationalists, siloviki and oligarchs, but Western leaders ought not to escape their share of responsibility for this disappointing denouement and for having helped to create the Putin phenomenon. (p. 134).

In this regard, Sakwa’s latest book makes relatively few positive additions to what he and many other long-standing critics of Western parsimony, myopia and eastward enlargement of NATO have been saying for the past two decades or more. Indeed, he presented a much more cogent, incisive and focused case in Sakwa (2020: 145–88), large parts of which are compatible with Bideleux (2009) and many other Western liberal-cum-social democratic critiques. The main additions in Sakwa (2015/2016) and in The Lost Peace appear to be somewhat disingenuous Putinist narratives – for example, ones portraying Ukraine as a neo-Nazi state and Russia and China as the true champions and defenders of a UN Charter system and human rights regime, which they claim is being aggressively and wantonly destroyed by a demonized US-led West.

Paul D’Anieri, a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside, has published extensively on Ukraine and Russia. His Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (D’Anieri, 2023) begins and ends by presenting and assessing rival thematic conceptualizations of the sources of conflict between post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia (pp. 1–20, 308–24). The largest part of the book provides a broadly chronological analysis of the evolution of relations between Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2014 (pp. 21–217). Processes, issue areas and prominent individuals or initiatives tend to be presented thematically and out of chronological sequence. In his words, ‘we combine a chronological narrative with a set of social science concepts that help reveal the dynamics and patterns that connect events over [a span] of more than thirty years [since 1989]’ (pp. 8–9). He then incisively analyses the evolution of armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia from March 2014 to August 2022 (pp. 217–95, 300–7). Like Plokhy, he also puts forward stimulating thoughts about potential war-induced outcomes, for Ukraine, Russia, China and the West (pp. 296–98, 319–25, 331). Despite the systematic and seemingly detached nature of his declared method, he allows himself to take impassioned stances in the last third of the book. He is very clearly aligned with the West and Ukraine against Putin’s Russia, albeit not uncritically so, and he offers a deeply pessimistic prognosis:

The analysis . . . presented in this book forces us to be pessimistic about the chances of resolving either the Ukraine-Russia conflict or the broader conflict between Russia and the West any time soon . . . [T]he two conflicts have become one, and each makes the other harder to solve . . . [All] the underlying causes of the conflict . . . remain in place and have been exacerbated by the war itself, which has strengthened mutual perceptions of aggressiveness and bad faith . . . Even if the fighting stops, a return to violence will remain possible, and the various actors’ measures to prepare for that eventuality will likely spur a new spiral of conflict and resentment . . . The disagreement that Ukraine and Russia have today is not fundamentally changed from the disagreement the two sides had in December 1991. As then . . . Russia’s ambitions for Ukraine are at odds with Ukraine’s desire for independence and democracy. (pp. 320–21).

In 1991–1993, there was a lot of premature and misplaced celebration of the allegedly ‘peaceful dissolution’ of the Soviet Union, in contrast to most previous ends of empire. This was linked to widespread Western praise of Gorbachev for his roles in this supposed happy ending. However, there were in fact serious armed conflicts in Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan, and Chechnya, as well as between Armenia and Azerbaijan, while the start of Russian aggression against Ukraine was merely postponed to 2014.

The often drawn-out and inherently messy process by which large empires come to an end is an important theme in Plokhy (pp. 29–32) and in several chapters of Ireland and Ukraine, notably those by Hosking, Ó Beacchaín, Gkotzaridis and Ruane. It is instructive to widen the focus to consider the protracted unwinding of Spanish rule in Latin America and the Philippines, French rule in Algeria and Vietnam, and Portuguese rule in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, because it is widely underappreciated how costly and lengthy these processes tend to be. The main Spanish American Wars of Independence dragged on from 1808 to 1833, with a Cuban sequels in 1868-78 and 1895–98. These were hugely draining and damaging, both to Spain and to several of its former colonies in the Americas. In a vainglorious bid to hang on to its African colonies, Portugal fought brutal colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau from the early 1960s to 1974. These wars absorbed on average 8 percent of Portugal’s GDP for c. 15 years (Newitt, 1995: 537), drained it of scarce manpower, and cost millions of African lives. France’s dogged determination to hang on to Algeria (1954–1962) cost about 800,000 Algerian lives (Stone, 1997: 41), and its earlier bid to keep Vietnam (1946–1954) cost between 0.5 and 1.0 million Vietnamese lives but initiated processes costing a total of 3.6–4.1 million Vietnamese lives between 1946 and 1975 (Goscha, 2016: 244, 407, 487). In comparison, the duration and the cost in human lives of the current Russo-Ukrainian War have been relatively low so far, but these other ‘end of empire’ wars are a dire warning of what could yet be in store for Ukraine.

In 1963 and again from 1986 onward, Vietnamese war veterans published big-selling novels that questioned whether Vietnam’s allegedly ‘glorious’, ‘heroic’ and ‘victorious’ wars against France and the United States had really been ‘glorious’, ‘heroic’, ‘victorious’ and worthwhile, and their strongly negative answers were the exact opposite of what the ‘victorious’ communist dictatorship wanted to hear (Goscha, 2016: 330–1, 488–9). In 2, 10 or 20 years from now, Ukrainian writers may be publishing books and essays in a similar vein, because Ukraine is facing extremely grim prospects. Western ‘Ukraine fatigue’ is steadily growing, Western support for Ukraine is fracturing and, even if Joe Biden gets re-elected to the US presidency (which looks increasingly uncertain), the volume of US support for Ukraine approved by Congress seems set to plummet, as renewed US introversion and myopia are setting in. Ukraine’s infrastructure and its capacity to sustain a viable economy and an effective war effort are being steadily degraded and will increasingly hinge on the extent of the rest of Europe’s willingness to step up and belatedly shoulder full responsibility for European security, instead of continuing to free ride on the United States. Tragically, European resolve looks increasingly flaky, uneven and doubtful, as Europeans are also prone to introversion and myopia, whereas Russia is managing to scale up production of key weapons and ammunition much faster than Ukraine and NATO countries (The Economist 2023b: 21). Russia’s defence spending is being ramped up from 2.7 percent of GDP in 2021 to 6 percent in 2024, and it also spends a great deal on other armed and training security forces outside its defence budget (Financial Times, 22 September 2023). About half of Ukraine’s budget is now Western-funded (The Economist, 2023b: 9), and high proportions of its energy requirements are now externally supplied. Sustaining Ukraine will require greatly increased Western and Central European defence spending and mass production of weapons and ammunition, which may not be forthcoming – with unthinkable consequences.

There is a significant omission from the books under review: competing ‘truth regimes’. Most people appear to imagine that ‘truth’ is something tangible, clear-cut and objective. However, Foucault and postcolonialism have taught academics in the humanities that ‘truth’ is a construction and that different cultures, civilizations, religions and – to varying degrees – differing academic disciplines live by differing rules and criteria for determining what constitutes ‘truth’. This is highly relevant to the current Russo-Ukrainian War.

Each society has its own regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish “true” and “false” statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; and the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as truth. (Foucault, 1980: 131).

It seems self-evident to most Westerners and Ukrainians that the whole of Ukraine, including Crimea, rightfully belongs to the Ukrainian Republic. However, it appears equally self-evident to most Russians that Crimea, the Donbas and the Black Sea Steppes rightfully belong to Russia. It is not very plausible to suppose that Putin and most Russians are lying through their teeth about this. It is much more likely that most Russians are judging this matter in accordance with the truth regime and truth criteria supported by Russian culture, whereas most Ukrainians and most Westerners are judging this matter in accordance with the truth regime and truth criteria supported by Western culture. What seems self-evident to us need not seem self-evident to them, and vice versa. Differences of this kind are hard, often impossible, to resolve by reasoned argument.

This suggests that we are facing a huge and intractable problem, analogous to the core problems that bedevilled the decolonization of Algeria and of Portugal’s African colonies. At the start of the Algerian War of Independence, most French people apparently believed that Algeria was rightfully part of Metropolitan France, and at the start of Portugal’s African wars in the early 1960s, most Portuguese apparently believed (more tenuously) that these colonies were not alien acquisitions but rightfully part of metropolitan Portugal. By analogy, it is probably going to be exceedingly difficult to achieve a ‘meeting of minds’ on the rightful future ‘ownership’ of Crimea, the Donbas and the Black Sea littoral.

No Russian points of view are represented in the Ireland and Ukraine volume – perhaps deliberately, to avoid a potentially ugly ‘clash of truth regimes’. Indeed, the only overtly angry contribution to this volume is Sergei Zhuk’s chapter entitled ‘Inconvenient Truths: Peripheral History from the Metropolitan Perspective’. Zhuk provides aggrieved commentary on his condescending former ‘Moscow friends’ (with whom he appears to have parted company on Russo-Ukrainian issues) and alludes to mutual accusations of bad faith and betrayal. However, these former ‘Moscow friends’ are not necessarily being treacherous. It is more likely that the two sides simply adhere to sharply differing ‘truth regimes’.

Zhuk also strongly denounces what he sees as Russocentric biases in the ways that Ukraine and Russia have been perceived by Western (mainly ‘Anglo-American’) academics in the field that became known as Russian or Soviet Studies during the Cold War. Zhuk claims that these Anglophone specialists on the Tsarist and Soviet empires were ‘accustomed to Russocentric concepts of imperial Russian/Soviet history that marginalized the political interests and cultures of non-Russians’ (p. 285). ‘Many influential foreign specialists demonstrated an obvious Russocentrism or Russophilia, and sometimes even outrageous Ukrainophobia, in attempts to justify Putin’s policy in Ukraine and condemn Ukraine and Ukrainians’ (p. 271). One of the two academics whom he singles out for attack by name is Richard Sakwa, primarily for his book Frontline Ukraine (2015/2016). However, it is inappropriate to tar all Anglophone Russian/Soviet Studies specialists with the same brush. Having been part of this camp for the past 50 years, my perception is that its members fall into at least two different categories.

One category (to which I belong) has pleaded guilty to having had a mild tendency to look at the Soviet Union and the Tsarist Empire through ‘Muscovite’ lenses – or from what Zhuk calls ‘the metropolitan perspective’. Most of the friends and colleagues in the former Russian/Soviet Studies field with whom I have had contact since the 1990s have pleaded guilty to this ‘sin’, and we have ‘repented’ since then. The main excuse that we can offer is that, in the course of studying Russian language and culture, visiting Russia and making Russian friends, we easily fell in love with Russia and things Russian, and many of us developed somewhat idealized perspectives on Russia and ‘the Russians’. Many of us hoped or even believed that, with the termination of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state system, Russia (along with Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic Republics and possibly Armenia) would gradually morph into relatively ‘normal’ liberal democracies. This idealization of Russia tended to survive the blatant totalitarianism of the Soviet regime and the instability and schizophrenia of the Yeltsin regime – these were quite plausible scapegoats. It was the advent of Putin’s regime that finally demolished our illusions. Russia’s mounting aggression since 2014 has once again posed the question: is Russia ‘civilizationally’ different from Western and Central Europe; and is Russia’s ‘truth regime’ substantially different from its more Westerly counterpart(s)? Alexander Herzen’s highly influential essay The Russian People and Socialism [1851] argued that Russia’s distinctive village commune system and communal ownership of peasant land made Russians more amenable to various forms of collectivism than countries based on more individualistic private property systems (including Ukraine), and that this amounted to a substantial civilizational difference between Russia and the rest of Europe. This was a secular, liberal and left-leaning version of the key claim made by conservative nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox Slavophile thinkers: that Russia civilization differed fundamentally from that of the more secular, commercialized, materialistic and individualistic West (see Bideleux 1985/2014: 28–35). However, civilizational stereotyping tends to raise hackles and substantive conceptual and empirical objections which a focus on rival ‘truth regimes’ seems to largely circumvent.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, some Russian/Soviet Studies specialists have become ever-more immersed in and committed to Russian collaborations and friendships, and increasingly captivated by Russian worldviews. Some have, so to speak, ‘gone native’ and may even have embraced Putin’s ‘Russian truth regime’. These people are evidently the prime targets of attack in Zhuk’s chapter. But the phenomenon that is vexing him can perhaps be best understood as a ‘clash of truth regimes’, which is being greatly intensified by Putin’s war against Ukraine. We have not only entered a ‘Second Cold War’ since 2014; in some respects, we seem to be experiencing major throwbacks to nineteenth-century geopolitical and ‘civilizational’ thinking.