Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir

This book describes the authors academic journey from an undergraduate in London to his current research on Ukraine and Belarus as a History professor in Alberta Canada. It highlights the dramatic changes of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods his travel stories experiences and the Stalinist legacy in both countries. It includes extended focus on his visits to Chernobyl and the contaminated zone in the late 1980s and 1990s as well as a summer working with indigenous groups in eastern Siberia. Visiting Belarus more than 25 times since the 1990s he was banned for seven years before the visa rules were relaxed in 2017. In the case of Ukraine it chronicles a transition from a total outsider to one of the best-known scholars in Ukrainian studies commenting on aspects of the coalescence of scholarship and politics and the increasing role of social media and the Diaspora in the analysis of crucial events such as the Euromaidan uprising and its aftermath in Kyiv.David R. Marples is a Distinguished University Professor of Russian and East European History at the Department of History and Classics University of Alberta Canada.