A History of Ukraine: The Gates of Europe(an War) - part 5

Something of a Ukrainian history lesson, using Serhii Plokhy's 2015 book The Gates of Europe, and focused on matters relative to today's war, including Ukrainian cultural development and nationalism, Russian influence, the role of Jews in this history, and even the Ukrainian Greek Catholic or Uniate Church.

This fifth part dives back into two pogroms addressed in the book, in Kishinev in 1903 and in Kiev in 1905, using Solzhenitsyn to add detail and texture to those events. In doing so he links Kishinev and the resulting western view of Russia to events related to the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War and then to the political uprising of 1905 and the Jewish role in those, particularly of the militant Jewish youth. In comparison Plokhy's view is a simplistic one that establishes the Jews as victims using a largely one-sided view of the pogroms and then plays down their role in the 1905 revolution anyway. In the process he also avoids detailing the pro-Russian/Tsarist reaction in the populace at large, again preserving the emerging Ukrainian pro-nationalism perspective of the book.