The Gates of Europe

'An indispensable guide to the tragic history of a great European nation' (David Blair Sunday Telegraph)
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. In this authoritative book, Harvard Professor 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. Fascinating and multilayered, The Gates of Europe is the essential guide to understanding not just Ukraine's past but also its future.

S. M. Plokhy (Plokhii) is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. A leading authority on Eastern Europe, he has lived and taught in Ukraine, Canada and the United States. He has published extensively in English, Ukrainian and Russian. For three successive years (2002-2005) his books won first prize of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. In the fall of 2009, he was honored with the Early Slavic Studies Association Distinguished Scholarship Award. He lives with his family in Arlington, Massachusetts.