Eastern Ukraine with Olena Stiazhkina and Victoria Donovan

In this episode, we explore the industrial regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. From 2014 until 2022, this was where Russia focused its war of aggression against Ukraine, killing and uprooting thousands of people. Russia claimed these regions were culturally and historically Russian, but history, and the people of these regions themselves, tell a different story: the majority consider themselves Ukrainian, and they overwhelmingly voted for Ukrainian independence in 1991. To get a better understanding of this region’s complex identities and its history as a resource-rich region on the edge of empire, we spoke to Professor Victoria Donovan of the University of St Andrews about her book Life in Spite of Everything (Daunt Books, 2025) and to historian and novelist Olena Stiazhkina about her novel Cecil the Lion Had to Die (Harvard, 2024). (hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291645) Olena Stiazhkina (pen.org.ua/en/members/styazhkina-olena) is a historian and one of Ukraine’s most prominent prose writers. She is originally from Donetsk, where she lived until 2015, when she was forced to flee the Russian invasion. Her historical work has focused on the experience of everyday life in the Soviet Union and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine during World War II. She has written eleven books of prose, and currently has three books available in English: Zero Point Ukraine: Four Essays on World War II (Ibidem, 2021) (cup.columbia.edu/book/zero-point-ukraine/9783838215501/), Ukraine Love War: A Donetsk Diary, translated by Annie O. Fisher (Harvard, 2024) (hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291690) and Cecil the Lion Had To Die, translated by Dominique Hoffman (Harvard, 2024). Victoria Donovan (st-andrews.ac.uk/modern-languages/people/russian/vsd2) is Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St Andrews. Victoria’s research explores entangled colonialisms and industrial extraction with a focus on the Ukrainian East. She is the author of Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia 2019; a book co-authored with Darya Tsymbalyuk and others called Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2022) (research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/publications/limits-of-collaboration-art-ethics-and-donbas) and her most recent book is Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Books, 2025). Books recommended in this episode:

• Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War (Harper Collins, 2025)
• Volodymyr Kulikov, Iryna Sklokina (eds.), Pratsia, vysnazhennia ta uspikh: promyslovi monomista Donbasu (Centre for Urban History, L’viv, 2018)
• Yevgenia Belorusets, Lucky Breaks (Pushkin Press, 2022)
• Vitaly Matukhno, books produced by his “Gareleya Neotodryosh” project