This book provides a synthesis of Ukrainian history from World War I until the beginning of the 1950s. It ends with Iosif Stalin's death in 1953 and the large celebrations of Russian and Ukrainian unity during the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty in 1954. The author asks how the epoch of “total wars,” as he calls the period, shaped “the formation and evolution of modern Ukraine” in the twentieth century (11). For this purpose, he distinguishes three phases of total war that are discussed in the three major chapters of the book.
The first chapter deals with the period of World War I and the following revolution and civil war in the former Russian Empire until 1923. This was a phase that brought enormous devastation and suffering to Ukrainian lands, but also the first attempts at modern Ukrainian state-building. The time of collectivization and the “Great Famine” between the end of the 1920s and 1933 are at the core of the next chapter that the author called “Second Total War.” One may discuss if this term adequately describes that period, but there can be no doubt that it was an even more disastrous period for most of the Ukrainian lands in the Soviet Union and that it was the result of Soviet politics. As the “Third Total War,” the author then defines both World War II from 1939 until 1945 and the post-war years until the beginning of the 1950s, when war and deportations raged primarily in western Ukraine during the conflict between the Soviets and the Ukrainian resistance. This period brought even more death and suffering to Ukrainian territories than the previous two periods of total war.
In a way, the book addresses a similar topic as Timothy Snyder in his enormously influential Bloodlands of 2010. Though Snyder's book has a somewhat different time frame and territorial scope, starting in the beginning of the 1930s and including territories beyond Ukraine, the main focus on destruction, war, and mass violence in Ukrainian lands is similar. In contrast to Snyder, who tries to develop a sweeping explanation by focusing on politics of food by both the Soviet state and the German occupational regime, George Liber presents a more conventional, textbook-like narrative that focusses, on the one hand, on political events, decisions, and strategies, and, on the other hand, provides a lot of data on processes of social, cultural, and ethnic change. Furthermore, in contrast to Snyder's Bloodlands where for the most part only the Soviet and German states appear as historical agents, Liber also discusses the actions and aims of Ukrainian protagonists.
Minor points of critique refer to the chapter on World War II. Here the author sometimes tends to oversimplify German approaches and motifs with regard to Ukrainians and Ukrainian territories by explaining them mostly as a consequence of the perception of Slavs as Untermenschen (sub-humans) (214, 217). More importantly, when discussing the role and responsibility of the “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN) and the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) for the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943 and 1944, the author apparently relies mostly on some controversial Ukrainian literature, and only to a lesser degree on important Polish and other studies. The consequence is a narrative that tends to disconnect the attempt of “ethnic cleansing” of these regions' Polish population from the Ukrainian radical nationalists' ideology, but presents it rather as an unfortunate outcome of a Polish-Ukrainian territorial dispute that was fueled by brutal German measures of repression against the Polish and Ukrainian resistance (231–39).
In general, however, the book gives a clear, concise, and convincing account and is well documented by a wide range of English and Slavic-language literature. It is a valuable addition to synthetizing historical accounts on the history of Ukraine, such as Orest Subtelny's Ukraine: A History, Paul Robert Magocsi's History of Ukraine, or Serhii Plokhy's Gates of Europe, because of its more detailed, basic introduction into an important, but in many respects also highly controversial period of Ukrainian history.
