the last book I ever read (Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty, excerpt seven)

from Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty:

‘Did you ever read any of the books I gave you?’

‘No, but I started one. I wasn’t enjoying it so I stopped.’ He felt he was hurting her by satying i.

‘That’s fair enough. Which one?’ Cal tried to recall. He felt a flutter of examination nerves and said,

‘It was something about a deaf-mute bloke in America.’

‘Carson McCullers?’

‘Aye, him, I think.’

‘Her. And you didn’t like it?’

‘It was odd. Maybe I’ll try again.’

the last book I ever read (Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty, excerpt six)

from Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty:

In the bathroom Cal trimmed round his black beard with Dermot’s razor. It was probably the first time in weeks he had seen a mirror and he was surprised at himself. He thought the beard suited him. People had always said that he was a good-looking boy and now, seeing himself, he could almost believe them. He must take after his mother because Shamie was no oil painting.

the last book I ever read (Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty, excerpt five)

from Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty:

An hour later he decided to go to bed, partly to enjoy the luxury of a mattress and pillows and partly because he had no cigarettes left. Not long after he fell asleep he had another terrible nightmare. They were becoming more frequent and more vivid. Now that he felt safe from the world outside he was being attacked from within his own head.

He dreamt that he was in a railway station in Rome and was waiting for someone to come off the train. All the people moving about on the platform were dressed as if they were in the school production of Julius Caesar. Only gradually did Cal notice that they had no eyes but instead domed seamless lids like Roman statues, yet they appeared to know where they were going. He looked across to the other side of the platform and saw Marcella dressed the same way. She had eyes that saw him, and she inclined her head to let him know that she recognized him. She was looking down into the tracks and Cal followed her gaze. There was a man in a blue boiler suit lying between the lines face downwards in the shape of a crucifix, his body pointing in the same direction as the track. His wrists lay limply over each shining rail. The train was approaching slowly, the driver hanging far out from the cab. Cal signalled frantically to Marcella but she didn’t seem interested in the plight of the man. She smiled. Cal had to turn away as the train inched forward. Although he did not look, he experienced himself the flange of the wheel and the hawser-straight track catching the gristle of the wrists between them. Blood fountained and gushed from the wounds and shot high into the ceiling of the station. The black steel girders, the curved Victorian glass roof dropped blood-drops like the start of a thunderstorm. They japed and streaked the white togas of the crowd with slashes of red. But the crowd did not seem to mind. Cal yelled at them, he screamed and screamed until he woke. He didn’t know where he was until the barking of one of the dogs reminded him. He was too scared to attempt to sleep again so he sat up and ached for a cigarette.

the last book I ever read (Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty, excerpt four)

from Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty:

On the Monday morning Cal started work on the farm. He was embarrassed at his lack of knowledge about almost everything. Although he had lived all his life in a country town he had had no contact with the kind of work which kept it going, except his brief week in the abattoir, where he was too busy trying not to throw up to learn anything. He seemed to stand about all that first morning with his hands in his pockets and his feet aching as Dunlop showed him round. Dunlop knew everything inside and out but was a poor teacher. He raced through the instructions for cleaning the milk filters at such a speed that Cal was afraid to interrupt him. At the end he had no idea how to dismantle one, never mind put it back together. He heard words he had never heard in his life before. Brown stomach, lungworm, black scour, bankrupt worm. He knew that Dunlop was showing off but he had no way of countering it.

the last book I ever read (Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty, excerpt three)

from Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty:

‘My husband was badly injured that time. One got him in the larynx and the other here in the lungs.’ She pointed to her chest and neck to indicate precisely where. She spoke to Cal as if he knew all about it and he found that unnerving. He nodded sympathetically, pausing long enough to put on his boots but not to tie them, and left. By the time he reached the tailboard of the van the laces were gritty with mud and soaking wet. Tying them up left black welts all over his hands.

the last book I ever read (Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty, excerpt two)

from Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty:

She went to mass and communion every morning and each night she made them say the family rosary before the table was cleared. She had a missal which bulged with memoriam cards, novenas and special prayers, and if people borrowed it they inevitably scattered the lot over the church floor. The little coloured strings for marking the place were worn past the point where they should have hung out at the bottom of the page.

He wondered if the reason he loved her so much was because she had died before he had reached adolescence. He could not remember ever fighting with her or being beaten by her. From the age of fourteen onwards he had been constantly at war with his father. Everything from the way he chewed his food to the number of cigarettes he smoked was the subject for a shouting match. And yet there were areas where Shamie was at a loss for words. Not long after Gracie’s death Shamie had found a purple bruise mark in the crook of Cal’s elbow. At night he gave himself love-bites, sucking until he tasted the coppery blood coming through the skin. His father asked him what had happened. Not knowing why, Cal said that he had hurt his arm in school – in a fight with another boy. His father just said that he sometimes wished Cal’s mother were alive still. She would have told him about it. At the mention of his mother Cal cried and his father left the room.

the last book I ever read (Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty, excerpt one)

from Cal: A Novel by Bernard MacLeverty:

He saw the Preacher standing waiting with his glass. It was the local doctor’s prescription for any anaemic with a strong stomach. The Preacher was tall and thin with the Adam’s apple of a vulture and skin that was made even paler, if that was possible, by the light reflected from the white tiles. He cycled the countryside on his breadcart of a bicycle with a small ladder strapped to the bar and a clutter of tools in the saddle-bag, nailgin tracts made from tin lids to trees and telegraph-poles. The Wages of Sin is Death. Romans 8:5’ was on a sycamore tree on the Magherafelt road; and further out ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life. John 11:25’.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt fifteen)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

I have a hobby I haven’t spoken about. I paint Scriptures. Been doing it a long time. I usually give them to people but lately I don’t because I’ve noticed I end up falling out with almost anyone I give one to.

When I shuffle off this mortal coil, I want every person to whom I gave a painting to gather in one place and have an exhibition. These people have never met. They are from all walks of life. I’d like them to meet if they haven’t trashed the paintings. And even if they have.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt fourteen)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

I meet the psychiatrist at the trunk of his car as I’m stomping back from the garden toward my room. He offers me a fig bar. What the fuck does a rocker want a fig bar for? Is he crazier than me? I tell him, “No, thank you, fig bars are for hippies.” I can see we ain’t gonna be getting along at all.

It’s late by the time all is settled for the night. I get to bed about one a.m. Dr. Phil’s show people are coming in the morning, because the condition upon which Phil helped me was that I had to do the show. And I had to do it before I had any treatments at this place where he had referred me. That way you don’t get to complain on camera afterward about how badly you’ve been exploited and how reckless your so-called medical care seemed at the place he recommends.

I mean, I’m not even sure anyone on my treatment team sought my medical records from any hospitals I’d been in. Including Englewood, from whence he’d plucked me. So they didn’t seem to know if I should be subjected to even one hour a week of individual trauma therapy, never mind nine hours a day. I felt brutalized. Making me even more unwell.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt thirteen)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

My favorite collaboration I’ve ever recorded was “Dagger Through My Heart,” which I sang on a tribute record for Dolly Parton where she chose the singers. Why it’s my favorite is because she sent me a lovely letter afterward thanking me and complimenting my interpretation of her song. I framed the letter and gave it to my stepmother, Viola, as a present. Because she and I both love Dolly.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt twelve)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

I had a great time making Faith and Courage because there were so many beautiful musicians and some of the most beautiful producers involved. As I’ve said, I can’t remember many details because I was constantly stoned. It was a risk working with so many different creative minds, so the fact that it all came together is simply amazing to me. Apart from “The State I’m In,” which I think is fucking terrible, I’m really, really proud of this record.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt eleven)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

I often think of Universal Mother as the most special album I’ve ever made, for many, many reasons, one of which had to do with my father. He had been going for singing lessons for many years with a gentleman by the name of Frank Merriman who taught a style of singing called bel canto. It literally means “beautiful singing” and came from Italy in the early nineteenth century. It has nothing to do with scales or breathing or any of that kind of stuff. The whole concept is that the emotions take you to the notes. When I lived in London and made my first two albums, I sang in an American accent. I sang like all of the people I idolized. I never sang like just me. It had been very uncool in the 1980s to sing with an Irish accent, and in fact, Bob Geldof was the first person to do it.

I didn’t begin to sing in an Irish accent until I went to see Frank Merriman as a student, which I did because I had dinner so often with him and my father when I happened to be in Dublin, and I was really impressed with what he had to say about singing. He described himself as a freer of voices, not a singing teacher, and he described singing as a spiritual study, which, in his presence, it really was. Studying with him led to the first time that I ever sang in my own voice, and I was able to say things that were really on my mind without having to code them as much as I had coded them in earlier albums. Frank freed more than just my voice; he freed my mind. In bel canto, you can’t have one without the other.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt ten)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

The huge single from the album, my cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was a song I was always—and am always—singing to my mother. Every time I perform it, I feel it’s the only time I get to spend with my mother and that I’m talking with her again. There’s a belief that she’s there, that she can hear me and I can connect to her. It’s why I’ve cried on the line “All the flowers that you planted, Mama, in the backyard, all died when you went away.” I love the song and never get fed up singing it.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt nine)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

The people who run the music industry aren’t punk at all. They’re a bunch of frightened people. But frightened of the wrong thing—namely, music. Hence in 1991, there was a rap category at the Grammys, but they didn’t televise the award. So there was a boycott amongst the rap community. Hence I once had Public Enemy’s logo shaved and dyed onto the side of my head so it would be seen on telly all around the world.

Showbiz just got real interesting. The kids are beginning to revolt (and no one has been revolting since John Lennon died).

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt eight)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

When John and I first met, the back of his car was full of clocks and woks. He and his mate had broken into some vast warehouse; it was coming up to Christmas and they had no money. They were selling some of the clocks and woks they’d stolen and giving others to the females in their lives as Christmas presents. John’s mother got a clock and a wok. The less revered females got one or the other.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt seven)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

So I’m at least a hundred grand in debt starting off, and I earn only five grand a year. If this record doesn’t make that money back and more, because it’s the second time it’s been recorded, I will never be financially independent of people with penises. Speaking of which, I’m also nearly as pregnant as a person can be. Baby is rolling around nicely and I’m beside myself with excitement. I hope it’s been okay in there when I’ve been recording vocals. Some of the songs are nothin’ but a load of yelling.

I got thrown out of an Italian café in Charing Cross last week by the old lady running the place because I had on, cut short so that my bump was exposed, a white T-shirt on which was printed ALWAYS USE A CONDOM. She wasn’t seeing the funny side.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt six)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

The day I’d left Ireland for good, a few weeks previous to signing the contract, Pete Townshend was on my plane. In those days the Aer Lingus planes had pairs of seats facing each other, like trains do. He was sitting opposite me. Either the Who had played in Ireland or there had been some massive gig he’d been attending. I had made my mind up before boarding the flight that I wouldn’t even look behind me out the window when we took off. I took Townshend’s presence as a sign I had chosen the right path and focused on his face as we slipped toward heaven. I hated Dublin. Everything reminded me of my mother. The shops were full of hats she would have loved but I could never now give her.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt five)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

We still love smashing chocolate because of the Santa episode, so every year at Christmas we stomp on a couple of chocolate Santas, and at Easter we smash up beautiful chocolate chickens with a hammer. We started that tradition when she was going through a breakup. She was crying in my kitchen and it was Easter and, well, someone had given someone a chocolate chicken in a basket, so I just handed her a hammer. She laughed through her tears while beating the thing to smithereens.

Though Éimear never got in trouble, it’s not that she wasn’t up to mischief. It’s just she never got caught like me. At school she was a prefect. Made life hell for me and my little gang, who were all the “bad” girls. She’d be chasing us and I would stop and make a square shape with my hand, calling her a square. Used to drive her crazy. But she is square compared to me. And I’m jealous. I secretly long to be square. It ain’t comfy being squ-oval.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt four)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

I love my stepmother. She’s the sweetest lady on earth. So when I say this, I mean it with kindness: the woman will never give you a lift anywhere. Secretly, I think she’s wise. If she starts with one of us, seven more will expect the same. She’s Protestant. They’re way more practical. They don’t have the guilt. She genuinely doesn’t care. No amount of big-eyeing or eyelash-batting or crying or foot-stomping or whining will result in you getting dropped off or picked up. Ever. You can sink or sodding swim. So when I saw her car coming toward me down Beechwood Avenue with my stepsister crying in the passenger seat, I knew my mother was dead.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt three)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

Yeats has made me wanna write songs but I ain’t ready yet. I haven’t fallen in love as many times as him, the silly old bugger. Always asking a woman to marry him and not getting the message when she said no and then asking her daughter, which makes you know why the mother said no so many times. He’s a freak. He looks a bit like a walrus. He’s quite off-putting. But his poems are paintings. My favorite is “No Second Troy,” although I get fed up with people rhyming desire with either fire or pyre. There’s got to be some other option.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt two)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

My siblings and I are banned from visiting my mother at the hospital. I’m glad because it means I don’t have to tell her I’ve been fired from my job at the café. They found out I stole fifty-four pence, but they knew I’d been stealing money all along. I can’t stop stealing. I got fired from the clothes shop for stealing skirts and cardigans for my mother. We all get summer and Easter jobs. Mostly at restaurants. We lie about our age.

We’ve been alone in the house for almost the entire summer now without a soul checking on us since they took her to the hospital—not even the doctor, nobody. We’re having the time of our fucking little lives.

the last book I ever read (Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor, excerpt one)

from Rememberings: Scenes from My Complicated Life by Sinéad O'Connor:

I don’t go looking for any father because I have God. And God sends me stuff because I talk to Him. Naturally He’s the number-one father. But I’m a kid. I need a father’s voice, and poor God don’t have a voice. I like voices for some reason. I dunno why. Sometimes people’s voices make me want to cuddle them. But I’m really scared of cuddling.

My body won’t work if someone tries to cuddle me. I like my aunt Lily and it hurts her feelings I won’t cuddle her. I really want to. But I freeze and in my head I see a mountain of wolves all covered in blood, so much that they can’t move, and only one wolf is running about, the one who was at the very bottom of the pile when whatever happened happened and it has no blood on it. It’s looking for help.

the last book I ever read (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, excerpt fifteen)

from The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy:

Whereas pro-reform Ukraine pinned its hopes on Yushchenko, the former governor of Donetsk oblast and Kuchma’s last prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, championed President Kuchma’s oligarchic regime. He was also the choice of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who took over from Yeltsin in 2000 and was eager to have an ally, if not a client, in Kyiv. In 2004, Yushchenko and Yanukovych faced each other in the most strongly contested presidential elections Ukraine had seen since independence. In early September 2004, Yushchenko, who was leading the race, fell suddenly and violently ill. With the diagnosis unclear and his life in danger, his aides brought him to a clinic in Vienna, where the doctors came to a shocking conclusion. The Our Ukraine presidential candidate had been poisoned, and the poison was of a particular kind—a dioxin of a strain produced in a handful of countries, including Russia and excluding Ukraine. The correct diagnosis saved Yushchenko’s life. With his face disfigured by the poison and a reliance on heavy medication to deal with the excruciating pain, Yushchenko returned to the election trail, gaining more support.

In late October 2004, when Ukrainians went to the polls to choose among twenty-four presidential candidates, Yushchenko was in the lead, with Yanukovych a close second: each received close to 40 percent of the vote. They then proceeded to the second round, with Yushchenko gaining the support of most of the voters whose candidates did not make it to that stage. Following the second round of voting on November 21, independent exit polls showed Yushchenko clearly in the lead, with 53 percent of the popular vote against Yanukovych’s 44 percent. But when the government-controlled electoral commission announced the official results, most Ukrainian voters were in for a surprise. According to the official report, Yanukovych had won with 49.5 percent of the vote over Yushchenko’s 46.9 percent. The official results were rigged. As telephone intercepts of discussions between members of Yanukovych’s campaign staff showed, they had tampered with the server of the state electoral commission to falsify election results to Kyiv.

the last book I ever read (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, excerpt fourteen)

from The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy:

As often happens with former colonial administrators, a strong inferiority complex afflicted the Kyiv elites vis-à-vis their Russian counterparts, and they initially followed models developed in Russia to deal with their own political, social, and cultural challenges. It took them a while to realize that the Russian models did not work in Ukraine. Ukraine was different. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Ukrainian religious scene. By 1922, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which accounted for 60 percent of all Orthodox communities in the former Soviet Union, had split four ways: there were Greek Catholics who had emerged from the underground, Orthodox who remained under Moscow’s jurisdiction, adherents of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Kyiv Patriachate, and, finally, the Autocephalous (self-ruling) Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had its roots in the 1920 and also did not recognize the authority of Moscow. President Kravchuk’s efforts to turn the Kyiv Patriarchate into a de facto state church, as Russia had done with the Moscow Patriarchate, failed. So did President Kuchma’s attempts to do the same with the Ukrainian branch of the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Ukrainian scene remained as pluralistic at the turn of the twenty-first century as it had been after the declaration of independence. If anything, it became even more diverse. Eventually, all political forces had to accept the reality that Russian political solutions generally did not work in Ukraine. President Kuchma explained why in a book published in 2004, close to the end of his second term in office. The title was telling indeed: Ukraine Is Not Russia.

the last book I ever read (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, excerpt thirteen)

from The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy:

The vote for Ukraine’s independence spelled the end of the Soviet Union. Those participating in the referendum had changed not only their own date but the course of world history. Ukraine freed the rest of the Soviet republics still dependent on Moscow. Yeltsin made a final attempt to convince Kravchuk to sign a new union treaty when he met with him at a Belarusian hunting lodge in Belavezha Forest on December 8, 1991. Kravchuk refused, citing the results of the referendum in all oblasts of Ukraine, including Crimea and the east. Yeltsin backed off. If Ukraine was not prepared to sign, Russia would not do so either, he told the newly elected Ukrainian president. Yeltsin had explained to the president of the United States more than once that without Ukraine, Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim republics. A union including neither Ukraine nor Russia, with its huge energy resources, had no political or economic attraction for the other republics. At Belavezha the three leaders of the Slavic republics—Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Stanislaŭ Shushkevich of Belarus—created a new international body, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which the Central Asian republics joined on December 21. The Soviet Union was no more.

the last book I ever read (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, excerpt twelve)

from The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy:

The rift between the new leadership in Moscow and the leaders of Ukraine came to the fore soon after the worst technological disaster in world history—the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant located less than seventy miles north of Kyiv—hit Ukraine. The idea of bringing nuclear energy to Ukraine belonged to Ukrainian scientists and economists; Petro Shelest, who wanted to create new sources of electrical energy for the rapidly developing Ukrainian economy, had lobbied for it in the 1960s, during his tenure as party bosses of the republic. By the time the Chernobyl nuclear power station went online in 1977, Ukrainian intellectuals, including one of the leading lights of the sixties generation, Ivan Drach, were welcoming the arrival of the nuclear age in their country. For Drach and other Ukrainian patriots, Chernobyl represented a step toward the modernization of Ukraine. He and other enthusiasts of nuclearization failed to notice, however, that the project was run from Moscow, with most of the power plant’s skilled personnel and management coming from outside Ukraine. The republic was getting electrical energy but had little control over what was going on at the plant, which, like all Soviet nuclear facilities, and indeed most of Ukraine’s industrial enterprises, was under the jurisdiction of all-union ministries. The plant itself and the accident that occurred there became known to the world under the Russian spelling of the name of the nearest city—Chernobyl, not Chornobyl.

When on the night of April 26, 1986, the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl power station exploded as a result of a turbine test that went wrong, the Ukrainian leaders suddenly realized how little control they had over their own destinies and that of their republic. Some Ukrainian officials were invited to join the central government commission dealing with the consequences of the accident but had little influence there, finding themselves obliged to follow instructions from Moscow and its representatives at the site. They organized the resettlement of those dwelling in a thirty-kilometer zone around the station but were not allowed to inform the population of the republic about the scope of the accident and the threat that it posed to the health of their fellow citizens. The limits of the republican authorities’ power over the destiny of Ukraine became crystal-clear on the morning of May 1, 1986, when the winds changed direction and, instead of blowing north and west, turned south, bringing radioactive clouds to the capital of Ukraine. Given the quickly changing radiological situation in a city of more than 2 million people, the Ukrainian authorities tried to convince Moscow to cancel a planned parage marking International Workers’ Day. They failed.

the last book I ever read (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, excerpt eleven)

from The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy:

The idea of Lebensraum for the Germans was not Hitler’s creating. First formulated before World War I, it envisioned the acquisition of German territory all over the world. Germany’s defeat in the war made colonial expansion across the British-controlled seaways all but impossible, and Hitler saw room for growth in eastern Europe alone. “It would have been more practical to undertake that military struggle for new territory in Europe rather than to wage war for the acquisition of possessions abroad,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (19180, which included the recognition of a Ukraine independent of Russia and occupied by German and Austrian troops, provided one model for German eastward expansion. But Hitler had little appetite for nation building in the east. His goal was different: to wipe out the existing population all the way to the Volga and settle the fertile lands of eastern Europe—Ukraine in particular—with German colonists. “Too much importance cannot be placed on the need to adopt a policy that will make it possible to maintain a healthy peasant class as the basis of the national community,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “Many of our present evils have their origin exclusively in the disproportion between the urban and rural portions of the population.”

Hitler’s rural utopia for the Germans required not only the acquisition of new territory but also its deurbanization and depopulation. His vision for eastern Europe differed greatly from the one introduced by the Bolsheviks and promoted by Joseph Stalin. Both dictators were prepared to use brute force to build their utopias, and both needed Ukrainian territory, soil, and agriculture to achieve their goals, but they had dissimilar attitudes toward the cities and the population at large. Ukraine would learn what that meant in practice and assess the degree of difference between the two regimes during its three-year occupation by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. With its pre-1914 reputation as the breadbasket of Europe and one of the highest concentration of Jews on the continent, Ukraine would become both a prime object of German expansionism and one of the Nazis’ main victims. Between 1939 and 1945 it would lose almost 7 million citizens (close to 1 million of them Jewish), or more than 16 percent of its prewar population. Only Belarus and Poland—two other countries within the sphere of Hitler’s Lebesraum—sustained higher proportional losses.

the last book I ever read (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, excerpt ten)

from The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy:

The famine produced a different Soviet Ukraine. Stalin managed to keep it in his embrace by purging the party and government apparatus of those who would not go against their own people and take the last food supplies from the starving: of more than five hundred secretaries of district party committees, more than half lost their positions in the first half of 1933, many of them arrested and exiled. The rest would toe the party line no matter what. Those were the cadres Stalin wanted to keep, at least for the time being. He also got a new “socialist” peasantry. Those who survived the famine had learned their lesson: they could survive only by joining the party-controlled collective farms, which were taxed at a lower rate and, in the spring of 1933, were the only farms to receive government relief. The collectivization of the absolute majority of households and land, now an accomplished fact, dramatically changed the economy, social structure, and politics of the Ukrainian village.

Was the Great Ukrainian Famine (in Ukrainian, the Holodomor) a premeditated act of genocide against Ukraine and its people? In November 2006, the Ukrainian parliament defined it as such. A number of parliaments and governments around the world passed similar resolutions, while the Russian government launched an international campaign to undermine the Ukrainian claim. Political controversy and scholarly debate on the nature of the Ukrainian famine continue to this day, turning largely on the definition of the term “genocide.” But a broad consensus is also emerging on some of the crucial facts and interpretations of the 1932-33 famine. Most scholars agree that it was indeed a man-made phenomenon caused by official policy; while it also affected the North Caucasus, the lower Volga region, and Kazakhstan, only in Ukraine did it result from policies with clear ethnonational coloration: it came in the wake of Stalin’s decision to terminate the Ukrainianization policy and in conjunction with an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres. The famine left Ukrainian society severely traumatized, crushing its capacity for open resistance to the regime for generations to come.

the last book I ever read (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, excerpt nine)

from The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy:

Vladimir Lenin himself spelled out the “lesson of 1919” for his followers. According to Lenin, the Bolsheviks had neglected the nationality question. Consequently, the Bolshevik army returned to Ukraine in late 1919 and early 1920 under the banner of the formally independent Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and tried to address the Ukrainians in their native language. Russification was out; cultural accommodation of the national revolution in Ukraine was in. In a move reminiscent of imperial co-opting of local elites, the Bolsheviks opened their party’s door to the Ukrainian leftists; these former Socialist Revolutionaries had acceped the idea of a Soviet organization of the future Ukrainian state and became known as Borotbists after the title of their main periodical, Borot’ba (Struggle). Accepted into the Bolshevik Party on an individual basis, they provided the Bolsheviks with badly needed Ukrainian-speaking cadres and a cultural elite. Peasants, too, were accommodated and given the land they had been promised for so long: in the spring of 1920, the Bolsheviks postponed their plans for establishing big collective farms on lands confiscated from the nobility and allowed the peasants to divide the land of their former masters.

The new strategy worked. In the course of 1920, the Bolsheviks were able to establish control over central and easter Ukraine and fend off the last real threat in the region. In late April 1920, the Polish armies of Józef Piłsudski, supported by the remnants of Petliura’s army, launched an advance on Kyiv from the front line in Volhynia and Podolia. Piłsudski’s goal was the creation of a Ukrainian buffer state between Polan and Soviet Russia. The offensive met with initial success. On May 7, Petliura once again entered Kyiv as head of the Ukrainian government, but this time there was no Galician army at his side. The price he had to pay for the support of his Polish allies was hardly of much importance in practical terms, but it had enormous symbolic significance. The chief otaman agreed to recognize Polish control over Galicia, delivering the final blow to the troubled relations between the two Ukrainian states.