Lexington Books
Pages: 250
•
Trim: 6 x 8¾
978-1-4985-2340-0 • Hardback • April 2016 • $109.00 • (£84.00)
978-1-4985-2342-4 • Paperback • May 2019 • $47.99 • (£37.00)
978-1-4985-2341-7 • eBook • April 2016 • $45.50 • (£35.00)
Michael T. Westrate is on the faculty at Villanova University.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Lived Environment, Lived History: Kharkiv and the Academy
Chapter 3: Men and the Military: “New Soviet Military Men”
Chapter 4: Women and Gender: “That’s Women’s Work!”
Chapter 5: Ethnicity and Nationality: “My Address Is the Soviet Union!”
Chapter 6: Religion: “Ours Is the Religion of Our Grandmothers”
Chapter 7: Conclusions: Living Soviet
Michael T. Westrate’s monograph is extremely timely. His fascinating microhistorical study using oral history methods examines what Soviet identity meant to those who professed it, both in the run-up to and after the collapse of the Soviet Union... All in all, this a concise and readable monograph that provides a compelling insight into a very particular milieu of Soviet society.
— Europe-Asia Studies
[T]his is a useful source of information about Soviet military elite attitudes and beliefs.... It is a strength of the volume that each chapter includes an informative survey of the existing literature, complementing the information obtained from the interviews.
— Slavic Review
Westrate has produced something rare and extremely valuable: a work based on years of painstaking ground-level research in Ukraine which is both an excellent, accessible piece of writing in itself, as well as a scholarly invaluable work. Refreshingly free of the distant punditry too often parroted about the Soviet Union’s collapse, his research arsenal is loaded with painstakingly collected personal histories. The study of the personal attitudes of members of one of the USSR’s elite armed forces academies speaks volumes about how the former Soviet Union’s formal dissolution is even today an ongoing process in which psychology, emotions, and disruptions play a central role. Given the current new ‘Cold War’—as some have labeled it—between Russia and the West and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, this is a must read for policymakers, students of the region, and general readers alike.
— Lawrence Scott Sheets, author of Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse
Living Soviet in Ukraine from Stalin to Maidan: Under the Falling Red Star in Kharkiv is an intriguing oral history that provides numerous insights into the Soviet way of life. It covers the lives of the two generations of the Soviet military officers and their families in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the quintessence of the Ukrainian-Russian historical and cultural borderland, now lost in the grey zone between the Soviet and post-Soviet epochs. Recent events reveal the importance of the complex historical and cultural legacies of the Kharkiv borderland region with its overlapping Russian, Soviet, Orthodox, Ukrainian, and regional identities.
— Volodymyr V. Kravchenko, University of Alberta