Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir

by David R. Marples

This book describes the author’s academic journey from an undergraduate in London to his current research on Ukraine and Belarus as a History professor in Alberta, Canada. It highlights the dramatic changes of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, his travel stories, experiences, and the Stalinist legacy in both countries. It includes extended focus on his visits to Chernobyl and the contaminated zone in the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as a summer working with indigenous groups in eastern Siberia. Visiting Belarus more than 25 times since the 1990s, he was banned for seven years before the visa rules were relaxed in 2017. In the case of Ukraine, it chronicles a transition from a total outsider to one of the best-known scholars in Ukrainian studies, commenting on aspects of the coalescence of scholarship and politics, and the increasing role of social media and the Diaspora in the analysis of crucial events such as the Euromaidan uprising and its aftermath in Kyiv. David R. Marples is a Distinguished University Professor of Russian and East European History at the Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, Canada.

Genres: Ukraine, History

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 22, 2020

Reviews

[Matt]

Marples' memoir is quite the interesting read. While looking back at his life as a historian, he brings to life stories from his travels, which saw him witness some interesting events in the former Soviet Union. As one of the few Westerners to take an interest in Soviet nuclear power before 1985, he overnight became a prominent individual with the meltdown at Chernobyl. He later became a major researcher on Belarus, and witnessed first-hand the country's slide from chaotic post-Soviet state to authoritarian dictatorship (complete with a 7-year travel ban, since lifted, on him). At the same time he shows the political battle of academia, in particular how statements he's made on Second World War Ukrainian nationalists led to prominent Ukrainian-Canadian organizations blocking his appointment to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (which he says he has no regrets about). At the same time Marples' discusses his personal life, or at least partly, and gives some insight on how someone from a small town in England could end up in Canada and become a renown scholar of both Ukraine and Belarus.