76 Culture The Economist March 19th 2022
hanging on the walls. Amazingly, none was
visibly damaged.
In cities farther from the border, muse
ums similarly stayed open right up until
the invasion. They have had more time to
prepare. Odessa has sent some of its trea
sures to Lviv, but institutions there are
scrambling to safeguard their own collec
tions and suitable storage is limited. (Art is
sensitive to changes in temperature and
moisture and cannot safely stay in damp
cellars for long.) Lviv itself may soon be in
the line of fire: on March 13th a missile tar
geted a nearby military base. Though sev
eral European museums have said they
will whisk art abroad, the Ministry of Cul
ture has not yet taken them up on the offer.
In the meantime, curators are appealing to
foreign colleagues for specialist packing
and conservation materials.
Next in line for bombardment, proba
bly, is Kyiv. At the time of writing,itshis
toric centre is untouched andthefighting
to date has been concentratedintheouter
suburbs. The potential lossesareawfulto
contemplate. They include StSophia’sCa
thedral, whose blueandwhitebelltower
appears over broadcasters’ shoulders as
they film from the rooftop baroftheInter
Continental hotel across the square.Inside
St Sophia’s central dome, preserved
through nine centuries of warfareandrev
olution, is a mosaic of the Virgin,hands
upraised against a gold background.
Since Mr Putin makes muchoftheearly
medieval kingdom known asKievanRus,
from which the cathedral datesandboth
Russia and Ukraine are descended,Ukrai
nians hope that he might spareher.Judg
ing by his treatment of new mothersinMa
riupol, whose maternity hospitalwasde
stroyed on March 9th, this maybewishful
thinking. Opposite St Sophia’sstandsan
equally fine monastery, St Michael’softhe
Golden Domes. Razed to the groundbyJo
seph Stalin in the 1930s, itwas rebuilt,
complete with soft, earthtonedfrescoes,
in the late 1990s. Now Moscowmaydestroy
it all over again.
Another threat to Ukraine’sheritageis
the potential loss of archives andlibraries.
Over the past 15 years or so,Russiahas
closed its most sensitive archivestoallbut
a small coterie of approvedresearchers.
Ukraine’s institutions, by contrast,were
open, making it a centre for thestudynot
only of Ukrainian history but ofthatofthe
whole Soviet Union. Not knowingwhenor
if they will be accessible againisa blowto
scholars worldwide. The evenbiggerfearis
that Russian occupiers will destroy ar
chives or purge them of materialthatdoes
not fit Mr Putin’s view of the world.Inthe
words of the Kharkiv architecturalhistori
an: “They want to deconstruct notjust
buildings, not just infrastructure,notjust
the Ukrainian state. They wanttodecon
struct us, the Ukrainian people.”nAreadinglistThe testaments
The Gates of Europe: A History of
Ukraine. By Serhii Plokhy. Basic Books; 395
pages; $29.99. Allen Lane; £25
The author is the most distinguished
historian of Ukraine writing in English.
“Chernobyl”, his book on the nuclear
disaster of 1986, is a masterful account of
its causes and consequences. This one
covers the many centuries in which the
territory of Ukraine was plundered and
invaded by powers from all points of the
compass. Mr Plokhy shows how Ukrainian
language, culture and identity flourished
in adversity—which helps explain why,
though they achieved a modern state of
their own only 30 years ago, Ukrainians
are fighting heroically to defend it.Borderland: A Journey Through the
History of Ukraine.By Anna Reid.
Basic Books; 368 pages; $18.99.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £10.99
Once a writer for The Economist in Kyiv, the
author first published this blend of mem
oir, travelogue and history in 1997, but
updated it in 2015. She ranges from Lviv in
the west to Donetsk in the east, and from
the capital to the Black Sea coast. Her
narrative takes in portraits of fascinating
Ukrainians, bygone and contemporary,
including Taras Shevchenko, the national
poet, and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a 17th
century Cossack hetman. Ms Reid does not
avoid the horrors of the country’s past,
with its genocide, deportations and fam
ine; but she also finds room for hope. The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate
History of Revolution.By Marci Shore.
Yale University Press; 320 pages;
$26 and £25
The title comes from a poem by Vladimir
Mayakovsky, and the book is a fragmen
tary, cerebral account of the prodemoc
racy uprising in Ukraine in 201314 and its
aftermath. The author captures the feel
ings of people swept up in the tumult in
Kyiv—the sense of solidarity, and of moral
imperative—and the motives of those who
headed east to fight the Russianbacked
separatists in the Donbas. She describes
the bizarre mashup of atavistic ideology
and modern technology at work in the
Kremlin’s meddling, and the implications
of Ukraine’s fate for the future of Europe.Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.
By Anne Applebaum. Doubleday; 496
pages; $35. Allen Lane; £25
The famine that Stalin inflicted on Uk
raine in 193233 killed around 4m people.
Especially after the Soviet Union collapsed
and Ukraine won independence, the Holo
domor, as the catastrophe is known, be
came an essential part of Ukrainian histo
riography and identity. Anne Applebaum,
a Pulitzerprizewinning author who wrote
for The Economistin the 1980s and 1990s,
evokes the awfulness of the episode and
its lingering psychological legacy. Starva
tion, she argues convincingly, was used to
suppress Ukrainian nationalism. She
draws out the similarities between the
subterfuge and criminality of BolshevikSix books that explain the history and culture of Ukraine