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Anna Reid. Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997. xiv, 258 pp. 18.99 cloth.
Subscribers to the Economist maintain that they receive thoughtful and witty assessments of world affairs, in contrast to North American news journals' fare. Anna Reid's Borderland will only reinforce this conviction. This journalist for the Economist and the Daily Telegraph in Kyiv (1993-95) and holder of a Master's degree in Russian history and reform economics from the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies has produced a fascinating account of Ukraine's present and past interwoven with its geography and people. While the author of this ambitious undertaking does not fully succeed in grouping cultures and historical narratives in each account of a place and depictions of some of its inhabitants, this failing, as well as her occasional historical errors and omissions, can be forgiven.
The ten chapters take the reader from a description of the all-important Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, through Kamianets-Podilskyi, Donetsk and Odesa, Lviv, Chernivtsi, the villages of Matussiv [sic] and Lukovytsia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Crimea, and Chornobyl. In "The New Jerusalem: Kiev," Reid introduces Ukraine and the history of its ancient capital and Kyivan Rus'. Through her discussion of Kamianets-Podilskyi, she recounts the wars between the Cossacks and the Poles and Ukrainian-Polish relations. In "The Russian Sea: Donetsk and Odessa," the role of the Russian Empire in Ukrainian history and of the Russians of Ukraine is examined. It is with chapter four, "The Books of Genesis," that some of the structural strains of the volume emerge. While it is true that the earlynineteenth-century Ukrainian revival in the Russian Empire that resulted in Mykola Kostomarov's "Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People" had its greatest success in Austrian-ruled Galicia in the late nineteenth century, the discussion of that movement is dissonant in a chapter that has so little to do with imperial Russia. A deep analysis of late-nineteenth-century Galician affairs and twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalism might have been in order.
In the same way, Chernivtsi might not have emerged as "A Meaningless Fragment" had Reid dealt with the role of the Habsburgs (and put the chapter before the one on Lviv) rather than with the twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement that was centred in Galicia...