WHEN:

Tuesday, 1 December 2015 from 17:30 

WHERE:

SSEES – 16 Taviton Street London WC1H 0BW

room 347

Admission:

Free, but registration is required. Register here

Tim Judah . . . does not tell us what to think about war but instead teaches us how: with courage, humility, attention to human
detail, and admirable historical intuition. Timothy Snyder

This new book, In Wartime, tells the stories of the people who live in Ukraine and their personal experiences of the country’s conflicts over the years.

The evening will consist of a 90-minute session “in conversation with the author” hosted by SSEES Ukraine specialist Professor Andrew Wilson, including a slideshow of some of the author’s photography from Ukraine. Copies of the book will be available for inspection and purchase.

When President Yanukovych announced on 21 November 2014 that the deals with Europe were off, he unwittingly lit the blue touch paper of revolt. By linking their fate to the West, many Ukrainians had thought that a state of law would be introduced. Hundreds of thousands came to demonstrate their support for the revolution in Kiev, yet were left alarmed and disappointed when the war broke out.

In this compelling book of reportage, Economist correspondent Tim Judah explores the impact of the ongoing conflict on the inhabitants of Ukraine.

Each section of the book is a story in itself: Judah meets with 91-year-old Mihailo Gasyuk, who remembers when Communist Party officials came to lecture his village near Lviv on collectivisation in 1939; a local mayor and mother, Elena Zhecheva, who explains how corruption blocks her and others from being able to do anything to make life better for the village; a former Soviet naval man who describes how in this conflict, the words ‘information war’ have replaced the term ‘propaganda’; and Natalya Kircheva, the deputy head of a primary school in Zhovtnevoe, who believes that “it is politicians fighting it out, not a people’s war.”

Filled with vivid, enlightening stories and illustrated with Judah’s own photographs from the region, In Wartime mixes people, stories, history, politics and reportage to delve into the experiences and attitudes of Ukrainians today.

About the Author

Tim Judah writes for the New York Review of Books and the Economist, most recently on the situation in Ukraine. In his career he has covered the aftermath of communism in Romania and Bulgaria and the war in Yugoslavia for The Times and the Economist. His most recent books are Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know and The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.