serhii plokhy the gates of europe a history of ukraine

The UK energy strategy released in April envisages the building of up to eight new reactors, even though the Hinkley Point C power plant now under construction is £3bn over budget and delayed by more than a year.

Having fallen from favour after the blasts at Fukushima, Japan in 2011, nuclear power is becoming popular again – as a way of reducing both Europe’s energy dependence on Russia and carbon emissions. Kyshtym only became public knowledge in 1989, even though it was second only to Chernobyl in the amount of radiation released. Two of the accidents – Chernobyl and the 1957 explosion at Kyshtym – happened in what was then the Soviet Union. “No one really loves to deliver bad news,” he told me during an interview at his publisher’s in London. For Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard and the author of several best-selling books, the common theme of secrecy connects each catastrophe. His new book, Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima, is a history of the nuclear age, told through analysis of six of its worst disasters. Ukraine is the country of Chernobyl, and Serhii Plokhy is the pre-eminent historian of that disaster. That it has not become another Chernobyl was more down to chance than intention. Russian planes bombed it from the air, damaging buildings around one of the reactors. But it was never designed to withstand the attack visited upon it on 3 March, eight days into the war in Ukraine. In this authoritative book, Harvard Professor and acclaimed author of Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy traces the history of Ukraine from the arrival of the Vikings in the tenth century to the current Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.įascinating and multilayered, The Gates of Europe is the essential guide to understanding not just Ukraine's past but also its future.From across the Kakhovka reservoir, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – the largest in Europe – looks like a fortress, its six reactors squatting like watchtowers along the shore.

Located at the western edge of the Eurasian steppe, Ukraine has long been the meeting place of empires - Roman to Ottoman, Habsburg to Russian - and they all left their imprint on the landscape, the language and the people living within these shifting borders. Anyone wanting to understand why Russia and the West confront each other over the future of Ukraine will want to read Serhii Plokhy's reasoned, measured yet passionate account' Michael Ignatieff 'This is present-minded history at its most urgent. 'An indispensable guide to the tragic history of a great European nation' Sunday Telegraph THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF CHERNOBYL: HISTORY OF A TRAGEDY

Serhii plokhy the gates of europe a history of ukraine