Dr Filip Slaveski discusses his latest book in this seminar convened by members of the Governance, Development and Peace research stream at ADI.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Filip Slaveski is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Research Fellow 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 (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Watch a short video on the journey that led Filip to write this book.