Ukraïnica and Other Teaching Resources

online resources

As professors, students, and scholars adapt to remote course instruction and limited access to libraries, HURI offers this list of resources that may be useful to those studying and teaching Ukraine. We will continue to add to the list as we identify additional resources, and we invite the scholarly community to send us suggestions for inclusion. Thanks to Emily Channell-Justice and John Vsetecka for their initial work compiling resources.

Features Resources

  • Ukraïnica: The Primary Database of Ukrainian Studies is a platform that connects a growing database of Ukrainian literary works, historical documents, and films in high-quality English translation with a syllabus-building tool for creating and exporting editable reading lists with references for primary and secondary course materials.
  • Fontes is a database of online, open-access resources for original research on the history of Ukraine. The name Fontes refers to the Latin word for “sources,” as our project aims to connect students, researchers, and the public with freely available resources for researching Ukraine’s past, from the prehistoric era through the twenty-first century.

Teaching and Studying Ukraine: List of Resources

General Academic Discussion

H-Ukraine: Information on events, conferences, special issues and volumes on Ukraine. Resources are accessible for teaching and research needs.

Includes the blog Khroniky, which brings together reports from the field in Ukraine. From editors Amber Nickell and John Vsetecka: “The blog’s goal is twofold: to make the process of working in and with Ukrainian institutions easier and to raise awareness about materials related to Ukraine located in and outside of Ukraine.”

Harvard Ukrainian StudiesThe peer-reviewed journal of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University serves as an international forum for new scholarship in all fields of Ukrainian studies. Available online through libraries and databases (JSTOR and PROQUEST). Articles, including the latest content, are also available on the journal's website, some of which are offered in open access on a rotating basis.

East/West Journal of Ukrainian StudiesPublished by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, this scholarly, peer-reviewed, online periodical publishes original research articles, reviews and review articles. Website offers free access to articles in PDF.

News Sources

Hromadske in English: Founded in 2014, Hromadske International is a fully independent news organization run by journalists.

Kyiv Post: The English-language Kyiv Post has been online since 1997. It is a for-profit news source funded by subscriptions, advertising, events, and ownership. Produces a weekly digest podcast, "From Ukraine with Love."

Film

Eastern European Movies (with subtitles): Paid service to access films from across Eastern Europe (searchable by country). $5/day for streaming; $30 (monthly) and $100 (unlimited) plans allow for downloading. Preview of movies available for free. 

Film recommendations: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965); White Bird with a Black Mark (1970); The Guide (2014); The Tribe (2014); Donbass (2018)

Kyivan Rus’ and Cossack Films: Includes both free-to-stream and paid access; films are in English or have English subtitles

Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University: Established in 2004, the UFCCU shows both classic and new films from Ukraine to the public in New York. Includes a list of films in the club’s library.

Related HURI contentQ&A article with Yuri Shevchuk, head of the UFCCU, about the film Arsenal (Dovzhenko)

Language

University of Illinois--Resources for the Study of the Ukrainian Language: Supplementary materials for students in their first year of study of the Ukrainian language

Anna Ohoiko's Ukrainian Language Podcast and Lessons: John Vsetecka says, "absolutely wonderful for language learning"

Online Ukrainian lessons from the Ukrainian Catholic University School of Ukrainian Language and Culture: Paid, but affordable, course instruction with a number of session options

Ukrainian linguistic portal dictionary: Provides declentions and conjugations; helpful for spelling

A map of Ukrainian Language and Studies courses in North American Universities.

Literature

Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature: Small number of publications in English; many resources in Ukrainian, including works of Taras Shevchenko, Ol’ha Kobylianska, Hryhoriy Skovoroda, and others.

Ukrainian Literature: A Journal in Translation (Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada): Downloadable English translations of classic and contemporary Ukrainian literature. Volume 5 includes several stories from HURI’s language instructor, Volodymyr Dibrova.

Library of Ukrainian poetry: This is a very comprehensive website devoted to Ukrainian poetry. On this site one can find Ukrainian poetry from the 17th-19th centuries, poetry of the 20th century, and works by contemporary poets. The website is up-to-date and easy to search. Search by author and by period (description by University of Toronto).

Mary Fisher-Slyzh library: The Electronic Ukrainian Library named after Mary Fisher-Slyzh is a rich resource of Ukrainian literature. This library is located on the website "Ukrainians in Sevastopol’”. The site provides access to a wide range of Ukrainian books in many areas, namely literature, drama, poetry, language, and history (description by University of Toronto).​

Contemporary Fiction in Translation

Oksana Zabuzhko

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996; trans. Halyna Hryn, 2011). From the author: “When you turn 30, you inevitably start reconsidering what you have been taught in your formative years—that is, if you really seek for your own voice as a writer. In my case, my personal identity crisis had coincided with the one experienced by my country after the advent of independence. The result turned explosive: Field Work in Ukrainian Sex.”

Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2009; trans. Nina Shevchuk-Murray, 2012). From Amazon: “Spanning sixty tumultuous years of Ukrainian history, this multigenerational saga weaves a dramatic and intricate web of love, sex, friendship, and death. At its center: three women linked by the abandoned secrets of the past—secrets that refuse to remain hidden.”

Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories (2020, trans. Nina Murray, Halyna Hryn, Askold Melnyczuk, Marco Carynnyk, Marta Horban). From Amazon: “Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine’s leading public intellectual, is called upon to make sense of the unthinkable reality of our times. In this breathtaking short story collection, she turns the concept of truth over in her hands like a beautifully crafted pair of gloves. At once intimate and worldly, these stories resonate with Zabuzhko’s irreverent and prescient voice, echoing long after reading.”

Serhii Zhadan

Depeche Mode (2004; trans. Myroslav Shkandrij, 2013). From Amazon: “Serhiy Zhadan’s first novel Depeche Mode depicts Ukrainian youth during the turbulent 1990s. Described by the author as “a book about real male comradeship,” the novel follows the unemployed narrator and his friends, Jewish anti-Semite Dogg Pavlov and Vasia the Communist, on their adventures around Kharkiv and beyond.”

Voroshilovgrad (2010; trans. Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler, 2016) From Amazon: “A city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. The bleak industrial landscape of now-war-torn eastern Ukraine sets the stage for Voroshilovgrad, the Soviet era name of the Ukranian city of Luhansk, mixing magical realism and exhilarating road novel in poetic, powerful, and expressive prose.”

Mesopotamia (2014; trans. Reilly Costigan-Humes, Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, Virlana Tkacz, Wanda Phipps, 2018). From Yale University Press: “A unique work of fiction from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation’s post-independence years. This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan’s ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home.”

What We Live For, What We Die For (2019; trans. Virlana Tkacz & Wanda Phipps) From Yale University Press: “These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory.”

Related HURI Content: Live stream of Serhii Zhadan's poetry reading at Harvard (via Facebook)

Yuri Andrukhovych

Recreations (1992, trans. Marko Pavlyshyn) From CIUS Press: Recreations is a novel of carnivalesque vitality and acute social criticism. It celebrates newly found freedom and reflects upon the contradictions of post-Soviet society. Recreations established Andrukhovych as a sophisticated but seductively readable comic writer with penetrating insights into his volatile times.

Perverzion (trans. Michael M. Naydan, 2005) From Northwestern University Press: “Perverzion constructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of the Ukrainian artistic superman--he used his masterful musicianship in a collaboration with Elton John during the pop star's secret sojourn in Ukraine--is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar to save the world from absurdity. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus descending into the decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate.”

The Moscoviad (1993, trans. Vitaly Chernetsky, 2008) From Spuyten Duyvil Press: “The literary dormitory at Moscow University becomes a kind of Russian Grand Hotel, serving the last supper of empire to a host of writers gathered from every corner of the continent, and beyond. Young poets from Vietnam, Mongolia, Yakutia, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Ukraine assemble to study, drink, frolic, and explore each other and the decaying city around them. When the supper turns into a bacchanal, who’s surprised?”

Twelve Circles (trans. Vitaly Chernetsky, 2015) From Spuyten Duyvil Press: “In the 1990s, Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen, an Austrian photographer with Galician roots, travels repeatedly through Ukraine. The chaos of the transitional post-Soviet era seems infinitely more appealing than the boring life of the West—especially since falling in love with his interpreter Roma Voronych. Andrukhovych relates all this madness absorbingly, with much wit and ironic joust. Lurkers here will come to understand that the postmodern folk novel from Ukraine they are reading is in fact about the West.”

Related HURI contentPoetry and Prose with Yuri Andrukhovych, a write-up of a literary reading at Harvard

Andrey Kurkov 

Kurkov is one of the most widely translated Ukrainian authors (his works are first published in Russian). Here are just two recommendations, but many more books are available through the press or online booksellers.

Death and the Penguin (2002) From Penguin Books: Viktor is an aspiring writer with only Misha, his pet penguin, for company. Although he would prefer to write short stories, he earns a living composing obituaries for a newspaper. He longs to see his work published, yet the subjects of his obituaries continue to cling to life. But when he opens the newspaper to see his work in print for the first time, his pride swiftly turns to terror. He and Misha have been drawn into a trap from which there appears to be no escape.

Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev (2014, trans. Sam Taylor): From Penguin Books: “Ukraine Diaries is acclaimed writer Andrey Kurkov’s first-hand account of the ongoing crisis in his country. From his flat in Kiev, just five hundred yards from Independence Square, Kurkov can smell the burning barricades and hear the sounds of grenades and gunshot. Kurkov’s diaries begin on the first day of the pro-European protests in November, and describe the violent clashes in the Maidan, the impeachment of Yanukovcyh, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the separatist uprisings in the east of Ukraine. Going beyond the headlines, they give vivid insight into what it’s like to live through – and try to make sense of – times of intense political unrest.”

Taras Prokhasko

UnSimple (2007): Unsimple tells a story of strange people living through wars - but "story" is hardly a proper word for this text. It is closer to a meditation, or a prayer. It should be read silently, and slowly. A biologist by education, Prokhasko writes his texts as if they were penetrating into the very mysteries of life. He sits comfortably in the tradition of Western mystical writers like Meister Eckhart, and among European fin-de-siècle poets like Hofmannsthal, and in the French nouveau roman tradition with its non-linear structures and broken narration.

ANTHOLOGIES AND COLLECTIONS (IN TRANSLATION)

New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (2019; edited by Ostap Kin): New York Elegies attempts to demonstrate how descriptions and evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout its development. The collection thus gives readers the opportunity to view New York through various poetic and stylistic lenses. Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality. The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city.

The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology (2017; ed. Mark Andryczyk): The publication of The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology commemorates the tenth year of the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series. Co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Series has recurrently organized readings in the US for Ukraine’s leading writers since 2008. The anthology presents translations of literary works by Series guests that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in today’s Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays by fifteen Ukrainian writers, the anthology offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.

Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (2017: ed. Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky): The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.

Translation

TAULT: A nonprofit agency and translation house dedicated to increasing access to Ukrainian literature in English.

History

Dumbarton Oaks resources relating to Ukrainian History, Art, and Cultural Heritage: Kyivan Rus’ and Byzantium. In response to the current conflict in Ukraine, Dumbarton Oaks is launching a series of initiatives to inform the academic community and to support scholars at risk in the three areas defined by the institution’s founders, Robert and Mildred Bliss: Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape studies. Through this endeavor we continue our mission to promote scholarly excellence, intellectual tenacity, and democratic thinking..

Online course: "Ukraine: History, Culture, and Identities": Created by the Ukrainian Institute in Kyiv, this Massive Open Online Course is available for on-demand streaming. The course is free of charge, but registration is required on international educational platform Udemy. There are five lessons covering key moments in Ukraine's history, from Kyivan Rus' to contemporary Ukraine.

Online course:  "Crimea: History and People": The Ukrainian Institute's MOOC course provides an introduction to the past and present of Crimea and Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of Ukraine. The course consists of 12 video lectures. To take the course, you need to register on the international educational platform Udemy.

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy (2017): Book description: Award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy presents the authoritative history of Ukraine and its people from the time of Herodotus to the present crisis with Russia. As Ukraine once again finds itself at the center of global attention, The Gates of Europe provides unique insight into the origins of the most dangerous international crisis since the end of the Cold War.

Arolsen Archives: The world’s most comprehensive digital archive of Nazi persecution. From the website: “The documents were collected to help clarify the fates of the victims of persecution. They contain information on victims of the Holocaust and concentration camp prisoners, on foreign forced laborers, and on the survivors who were trying to rebuild their lives as displaced persons.” The online archive is continually growing. Contains information about operations in Ukraine as well as names of Ukrainian-born victims.

Blavatnik Archive: Foundation preserving primacy sources that contribute to the study of 20th-century Jewish and World history, with a special focus on Soviet history. The archive is free to access and includes nearly 113,000 items including video interviews, postcards, photographs, posters, drawings, diaries, letters, official documents, leaflets, periodicals, and books. The veteran testimonies collection includes 1,200 interviews with Jewish men and women who fought in the Soviet Armed Forces in World War II, taken in the USA, Russia, Germany, Estonia, Israel, Canada, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.

Historians: This resource is a collection of articles, discussions, and bibliographic citations to new books and journals in Ukrainian history. The site is a networking tool that enables communication between the regional centers of Ukraine, experts from different countries, different generations of intellectuals, and different disciplines (described by University of Toronto).

Online Histories of Ukraine: The website is sponsored by IREX and offers free online access to HTML and PDF versions of Natalia Yakovenko’s and Yaroslav Hrytsak’s histories of Ukraine (the former covering the history of Ukraine till the end of the 18th century, and the latter covering the years 1772-1996). The site also hosts an electronic version of a three-volume reference work on Ukrainian history (described by University of Toronto).

MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine - Historical Atlas: Includes interactive maps and information on the historical Podylla region, Rus' geneology and dynastic marriage, and the Holodomor. Users can create and analyze maps showing sets of data. See the "MAPA in the Classroom" lesson plan on the Holodomor for an introduction to using the web map and for suggested classroom use.

Beauplan's Ukraine: Provides open-access, georeferenced databases for the populated places, rivers, river fords, river rapids, islands, forests, mountains, valleys, and travel paths shown on a selection of Beauplan’s maps. Guillaume Le Vasseur, sieur de Beauplan (c. 1600–1673) was a cartographer, engineer, and architect who created the first descriptive map of Ukraine. Databases are compiled in Harvard's Dataverse and on Marquette University's epublications website.

The Center for Urban History of East Central Europe: Offers talks, programs, interactive maps, virtual walks, and many materials for teaching, as well as collections of historical maps, images, and media files related to urban history and development. Many resources are focused on Lviv.

Ivan Franko and His Community by Yaroslav Hrytsak (2019; trans. Marta Daria Olynyk): In this Ukrainian bestseller, now available in English for the first time, Yaroslav Hrytsak examines the first three decades (1856–86) in the life of Ivan Franko, a prominent writer, scholar, journalist, and political activist who became an indisputable leader in the forging of modern Ukrainian national identity. Hrytsak does so against the background of small communities—Franko’s family, his native village, his colleagues, the editors of periodicals for which he worked, and the revolutionary circles with which he interacted—during a time when multi-ethnic Habsburg Galicia evolved into several modern nations. This volume will remain a recognized standard for the study of the history of Ukraine and East Central Europe.

Courage and Fear by Ola Hnatiuk (2019; trans. Ewa Siwak): Courage and Fear is a study of a multicultural city in times when all norms collapse. Ola Hnatiuk presents a meticulously documented portrait of Lviv’s ethnically diverse intelligentsia during World War Two. As the Soviet, Nazi, and once again Soviet occupations tear the city’s social fabric apart, groups of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish doctors, academics, and artists try to survive, struggling to manage complex relationships and to uphold their ethos. As their pre-war lives are violently upended, courage and fear shape their actions. Ola Hnatiuk employs diverse sources in several languages to tell the story of Lviv from a multi-ethnic perspective and to challenge the national narratives dominant in Central and Eastern Europe.

Odessa Recollected: The Port and the People by Patricia Herlihy (2019): Odessa, a Black Sea port founded by Catherine the Great in 1794, shortly after the territory was wrested from the Ottoman Empire, became a boomtown on the southern fringe of the Russian Empire. More ethnically diverse by far than St. Petersburg, Odessa became a remarkable independent-minded, large cosmopolitan city, attracting and producing noted writers, artists, musicians and scholars. The present book brings together—indeed, re-collects—some of the most valuable and thought-provoking research on Odessa and its culture, community, and economy published by Patricia Herlihy over several decades of her work.

Politics and Society

Gender in Detail: A web resource for gender studies that focuses on non-academic writing about gender from academics as well as non-specialists. Mostly in Ukrainian, it includes a special section on English-language literature on gender in Ukraine.

MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine - Contemporary Atlas: Includes interactive maps and materials on sociological factors, such as language use, national identity, historical memory, religious affiliation and attitudes, and political preferences. Topics such as decommunization, Euromaidan, and Orthodox church transfers lend insight into post-Soviet Ukraine. See the Language lesson plan in the "MAPA in the Classroom" section for an introduction to using the web map and a suggestion for using MAPA as a teaching tool.

Chernobyl (Chornobyl)

Film recommendations:

The Russian Woodpecker (2015): Follows artist Fedor Alexandrovich as he attempts to find the truth behind the Chernobyl disaster as it related to the Duga, a nearby Soviet radar system. Set in the context of Euromaidan, the film combines current politics with the opacity of the Soviet past.

The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015): Tells the stories of the women who chose to return to the Chernobyl exclusion zone after the disaster. They try to live a normal life despite the fact that they live on dangerous land against the recommendations of authorities.

Chernobyl, HBO Limited Series (2019): Dramatic retelling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and its aftermath. Available for streaming on HBO Now (requires subscription). Additional content, including the scripts, on the HBO website.

Related HURI content: Online event, "What Is the Cost of Lies? A Conversation with HBO Chernobyl's Writer and Creator Craig Mazin" (April 2020; via YouTube)

Book recommendations:

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, Serhii Plokhy (2018): From the book jacket: “Draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno and put the reactor to sleep.” A readable and thorough history of the disaster.

Related HURI content: Serhii Plokhii's talk, Atomic Energy and the Arrogance of Man (Harvard; April 2018; via YouTube); Q&A article with Plokhii on Chernobyl"Chernobyl's Warnings: When Hubris Meets 'Atoms for Peace'"

Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, Kate Brown (2019): From the book jacket: “Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed.”

Related HURI content: Kate Brown's talk at Harvard, Chernobyl: The Great Nuclear Acceleration (Sept 2019; via YouTube)

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham (2019): From Amazon: “Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters.”

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, Svetlana Alexievich (1997): From the book jacket: “The first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown—from innocent civilians to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster—and their stories reveal fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live.”

Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Adriana Petryna (2003): Anthropologist Adriana Petryna did extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and among the families of workers and others affected by the disaster, resulting in her exploration of “biological citizenship,” when claims on suffering leads to access to biomedical resources, social status, and recognition. From Princeton University Press: "What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?”

The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s by Tamara Hundorova (2019; trans. Sergiy Yakovenko): Having exploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Union and tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness. The Post-Chornobyl Library in Tamara Hundorova’s book becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s, which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma of the 26th of April, 1986. Ukrainian postmodernism turns into a writing of trauma and reflects the collisions of the post-Soviet time as well as the processes of decolonization of the national culture. 

Fiction:

Baba Dunja’s Last Love, Alina Bronsky (2015): A fictionalized story about an elderly woman who returns to the exclusion zone. From the book jacket: “Life is beautiful. Or at least tolerable. That is until one day a stranger turns up in the village with a young girl who is clearly being used as a pawn in some vindictive game.”

Additional resources:

"Chornobyl: The Tombstone of the Reckless Empire" (article) by Serhii Plokhii (originally published in Spanish in the March/April 2016 issue of Política Exterior, under the title “La lápida del imperio temerario” by Serhii Plokhy)

The Chernobyl Files: Declassified Documents of the Ukrainian KGB (e-resource at Harvard Library) offers access to full-text PDF copies of declassified documents from 1971-1991 pertaining to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and its fallout. The papers include documentation of the disaster details as well as internal investigations that examined structural and other shortcomings that contributed to the explosion and how much the Soviet government knew in advance.(Note: Harvard Library link requires sign-in. May be available at other university libraries for those without Harvard access.)

Zero Corruption Talk: Lessons of Chernobyl in Times of Pandemics: Online discussion with Francis Fukuyama, Serhii Plokhii, Miranda Patrucic, Roman Borisovich, and Rebecca Harms; moderated by Nataliya Gumenyuk.

Chernobyl/Chornobyl: As the World Once Knew It: An interactive story-map journal, this project takes website visitors through five pre-disaster maps of Chornobyl and demonstrates what can be learned from them

Folklore, Oral History, and Other Heritage Projects

Polyphony Project: Recordings of over 2,000 songs from 100 villages in Ukraine. From the website: “The mission of the Polyphony Project is to explore, preserve and present the living musical folklore of Ukrainian villages. In addition to recording the intangible cultural treasures of the Ukrainian peasantry using state-of-the-art technology, our priority is to make this heritage of unparalleled value accessible to contemporary society.” The website includes videos, geotags, lyrics, and an advanced search engine so anyone can explore this rich resource.

AHEYM Project: (Indiana University) The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM, meaning “homeward” in Yiddish) includes about 800 hours of Yiddish language interviews with nearly 350 people in Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia. From the website: “The interviews include linguistic and dialectological data, oral histories of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, Holocaust testimonials, musical performances, anecdotes, folk narratives, children’s ditties, folk remedies, fragments of Purim plays, reflections on contemporary Jewish life in the region, and guided tours by local residents of sites of Jewish memory in the region.” The entire collection has been digitized and is accessible here.

Transformation of Civil Society: Oral History of Ukrainian Village Culture of the 1920s-1930s: (Prairie Center for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage) An oral history collection including testimonies of 126 Ukrainian villagers from across central and eastern Ukraine. From the website: “The villagers’ testimonies offer firsthand accounts of village life prior, during, and after collectivization of the Ukrainian farmers.” Interviews are available for streaming and are searchable and geotagged.

Related HURI content: Natalia Khanenko-Freisen's talk, "Remembering Decollectivization in Ukraine: An Oral History" (Oct 2018; via YouTube)

Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies) Information on history, land, people, culture, art, and literature of Ukraine.

Art Galleries and Museums

Pinchuk Art Centre: Several exhibitions are available to explore online. Includes:

Exhibition of 20 artists shortlisted for the Pinchuk Art Centre Prize in 2020

Seven o’clock lectures: Lectures about Ukrainian contemporary art (in Ukrainian)

Research Platform: Archive of contemporary Ukrainian art (in Ukrainian)

Ukrainian Art Gallery: Online images of art from Ukrainian artists. From their website: "ukrainianart.com is a showcase for artists from the Ukraine. We offer some of the finest examples of Ukrainian Realist, Impressionist and Contemporary paintings serving International art collectors, museum curators, art dealers, interior designers and just art lovers."

Mystetskyi Arsenal: Includes descriptions of past projects along with photo galleries. 

Holodomor Museum: Includes archival collections, educational materials, and an online 3D tour

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Includes online exhibition on Ukraine 

Podcasts

Ukraine Calling (Hromadske): A weekly roundup of events in Ukraine, in English.

Borscht Belt (Atlantic Council): Podcast of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Sean’s Russia Blog Podcast: Despite the name, includes interviews with academic experts and writers from around the region. Episodes on Ukraine include TCUP Director Emily Channell-Justice, Kate Brown, Olena Nikolayenko, Jared McBride, and Brian Milakovsky, among others.

Digital Archives

Hoover Institution Archive--Ukraine: Website description:The Hoover Institution’s Ukrainian holdings cover its emergence and development as an independent state since 1991, as well as earlier periods when it was a national republic of the USSR and a region divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Numerous collections relating to the Russian Civil War, especially the Vrangel’ collection, describe the political situation in Southern Russia, the Crimea, Odessa and throughout much of the geographic area of the contemporary Ukraine in 1917-1921. The papers of Lev Dobriansky are an extraordinary resource for understanding the role of Ukrainian émigrés in formulating anti-communist policy. For the period of independence, researchers will find much of value in the Taras Kuzio and Kost’ Bondarenko papers, as well as the Ukrainian subject collection, with its rich holdings of political ephemera, party publications and election campaign materials from the 1980s to the present.

CIUS Archives: Digitized Archives of the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (University of Alberta), includes newsletters, journals, books, research reports, press releases, photos, and audio/visual material.

Territory of Terror Museum (Lviv) Online Archive: Website description: The archive is a collection of digital copies of archive documents, video-, phono-, and photo documents from different periods in the history of Ukraine, that are gathered for their research and publishing. Digital archive is organized according to the thematic principle, based on publicity and social responsibility.

From the University of Toronto Digital Collections--Slavic and East European Resources list

First Wave of Ukrainian Immigration to Canada, 1891-1914: The exhibit features written and oral accounts of some of the first Ukrainian settlers to Canada, as well as photographs and other illustrative material.

Izbornyk: Rare and unique manuscripts and historical maps are the major strengths of this resource, with additional resources in Ukrainian literature, language, history, and nationalism.

Makhno Movement: This website is devoted to Nestor Makhno, who was a colorful figure of the Ukrainian Revolution, 1917-1920. The web-site hosts memoirs and articles by Makhno, as well as by participants of his anarchist movement, photos of Makhno and his soldiers, and some research material on him and the movement.

Prozhito:Prozhito is a web-archive of digitized personal diaries in Russian and Ukrainian languages. Users can search for entries by author, date, location, gender, age, language, and/or subject matter.

Ukrainian Liberation Movement: This electronic archive provides access to digitized copies of documents on the history of the Ukrainian liberation movement in the 20th century. The collection contains documents about the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, and others, as well as documents of the dissident and mass national-democratic movement in the second half of the 20th century. It also includes documents of the NKVD-MGB-KGB, Gestapo, and German security service and others. Presently, the archive consists of more than 10,000 documents. This archive is a joint project of the Center for the Liberation Movement, Lviv National University named after I. Franko, and the National Memorial Museum of Victims of Occupation Regimes "Prison at Lonsky."

Centers and Associations