Slaveski - Remaking Ukraine after World War II : The Clash of Local and Central Soviet Power

Remaking Ukraine after World War II

Ukraine was liberated from German wartime occupation by 1944 but remained prisoner to the consequences for much longer. This study examines Soviet Ukraine s transition from war to peace in the long aftermath of World War II. Filip Slaveski explores the challenges faced by local Soviet authorities in reconstructing central Ukraine, including feeding rapidly growing populations in the post-war famine. Drawing on recently declassified Soviet sources, Slaveski traces the previously unknown bitter struggle for land, food and power among collective farmers at the bottom of the Soviet social ladder and local and central authorities. He reveals how local authorities challenged central ones for these resources in pursuit of their own vision of rebuilding central Ukraine, undermining the Stalinist policies they were supposed to implement and forsaking the farmers in the process. In so doing, Slaveski demonstrates how the consequences of this battle shaped post-war reconstruction, and continue to resonate in contemporary Ukraine, especially with the ordinary people caught in the middle.

Filip Slaveski is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Fellow (DECRA) at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. A historian of the Soviet period, specialising also in East European and German twentieth-century history, he is the author of The Soviet Occupation of Germany: Hunger, Mass Violence and the Struggle for Peace, 1945 1947 (2013).

Edited by

PETER BALDWIN, University of California, Los Angeles

CHRISTOPHER CLARK, University of Cambridge

JAMES B. COLLINS, Georgetown University

MIA RODRGUEZ-SALGADO, London School of Economics and Political Science

LYNDAL ROPER, University of Oxford

TIMOTHY SNYDER, Yale University

The aim of this series in early modern and modern European history is to publish outstanding works of research, addressed to important themes across a wide geographical range, from southern and central Europe, to Scandinavia and Russia, from the time of the Renaissance to the present. As it develops the series will comprise focused works of wide contextual range and intellectual ambition.

A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/newstudiesineuropeanhistory

Remaking Ukraine after World War II

The Clash of Local and Central Soviet Power

Filip Slaveski

Deakin University, Victoria

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108840255

DOI : 10.1017/9781108879293

Filip Slaveski 2021

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First published 2021

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names : Slaveski, Filip, author.

Title : Remaking Ukraine after World War II : the clash of local and central Soviet power / Filip Slaveski.

Description : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.