Remembering the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War in Western Ukraine

There was plenty of snow on the ground one Saturday in early December 2010 when my friends, Oksana and Viktor, and I decided we needed to go to Kosiv, a town in the Carpathians some fifty miles away from Chernivtsi. This small town on the Rybnytsya River in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is well known as …

“Go West”- Cue the Pet Shop Boys

I saw my first Soviet war memorial in Vienna when I was a grad student. I’d wandered onto Schwarzenbergplatz and, lo and behold, there it was: in front of a semi-circular white marble colonnade was a tall column topped by the figure of a Red Army soldier. He was wearing a gold helmet and had …

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started