Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954

About this book

Between 1914 and 1954, the Ukrainian-speaking territories in East Central Europe suffered almost 15 million "excess deaths" as well as numerous large-scale evacuations and forced population transfers. These losses were the devastating consequences of the two world wars, revolutions, famines, genocidal campaigns, and purges that wracked Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and spread new ideas, created new political and economic systems, and crafted new identities.

In Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954, George O. Liber argues that the continuous violence of the world wars and interwar years transformed the Ukrainian-speaking population of East Central Europe into self-conscious Ukrainians. Wars, mass killings, and forced modernization drives made and re-made Ukraine's boundaries, institutionalized its national identities, and pruned its population according to various state-sponsored political, racial, and social ideologies. In short, the two world wars, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust played critical roles in forming today's Ukraine. A landmark study of the terrifying scope and paradoxical consequences of mass violence in Europe's bloodlands, Liber's book will transform our understanding of the entangled histories of Ukraine, the USSR, Germany, and East Central Europe in the twentieth century.

Contents

Note to Readers Note on Ukraine's Administrative Territorial Structure Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian Measurements
Maps
Introduction

1. The Ukrainian-Speaking Provinces before the Great War

PART ONE: THE FIRST TOTAL WAR AND ITS AFTERSHOCKS
2. The First World War and Imperial Convulsions
3. Political Collapse, Revolutions, and Social Upheavals, 1917-1923
4. Ukrainian Movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, 1918-1939

PART TWO: THE SECOND TOTAL WAR: SOCIAL ENGINEERING
5. Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s: Managed Diversity
6. Hypercentralization, Industrialization, and the Grain Front, 1927-1934
7. Hypercentralization and the Political / Cultural Fronts, 1929-1941

PART THREE: THE THIRD TOTAL WAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
8. The Second World War: The Killing Fields
9. Stalin's Ukraine, 1945-1954
Conclusion

Customer Reviews

Biography

George O. Liber is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.