Soviet history

Today at 5 PM EDT, Ukrainian literary scholar and journalist Hanna Protasova delivered a lecture on representations of the Holocaust in Ukrainian literature. This talk kicked off the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) evening lecture series, which...

As the anniversary of the Chernobyl (Chornobyl) nuclear disaster approaches, we’re highlighting the latest—and timely—publication of HURI Director Serhii Plokhii (Plokhy): Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although the Cuban missile...

Archival documents are a rich source of data for students and scholars conducting original research. For those studying the Soviet period, gaining access to the right information can prove difficult, if not impossible, as access to sensitive collections...

The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story, Serhii Plokhy’s latest publication, tells the captivating story of Bohdan Stashinsky , a KGB assassin who eventually defected to the West. The product of meticulous archival research, the book sheds new...

As a research fellow at HURI, Olga Bertelsen is studying human behavior during the Holodomor. However, the talk she gave on Monday, March 20 for our Seminar in Ukrainian Studies covered a completely different topic: corruption among the Soviet Ukrainian...

One hundred years ago, a series of upheavals in the Russian Empire ended the rule of the Tsars and ushered in a new era of communism. The Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was declared by the Central Rada in November in response to the Bolshevik coup in...

Excerpted with permission from The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy. Copyright 2015. Available from Basic Books. The Ukrainian Revolution: 1917 in Kyiv The Romanov dynasty, if not the empire itself, came to an end in early March 1917...

Mayhill Fowler came to HURI in 2012 as a Mihaychuk Research Fellow, just having defended her PhD dissertation at Princeton University. “HURI was the first place I had to deeply reconsider my dissertation. It was instrumental in reshaping that chaotic...

Kicking off HURI's series " Ukraine in the Flames of the 1917 Revolution" onWednesday, October 18, Yuri Shevchuk will lead a discussion of Oleksandr Dovzhenko's Arsenal following a free screening of the film. Shevchuk is a lecturer in the Department of...

It's been more than three decades since the worst nuclear disaster in history, the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl* Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. The incident unleashed 500 times as much radiation as the bomb used on Hiroshima...