Reading Serhii Plokhy’s History of Ukraine in Wartime Kharkiv

The last time I re-read The Gates of Europe was in Kharkiv. I was waiting for a friend at Makers, a coffee shop and artistic hangout in the city center. Kharkiv is the easternmost city in Ukraine that lies only 30 kilometers from the Russian border. This unfortunate geography makes it a target of near-daily bombardment. Just weeks earlier, Makers had replaced its large oval windows after a night of shelling, but when I sat there reading in its high-ceilinged, sunlit space, it felt like any other café in a busy urban center. Except that my phone kept buzzing with alerts about incoming drones and ballistic missiles.

Serhii Plokhy, a Harvard historian, published The Gates of Europe in 2015, one year after the annexation of Crimea and the start of war in the Donbas. Although the book spans over two thousand years of history, the narrative felt startlingly immediate, like reading the blueprint of a city I was only beginning to understand. Ukraine, in Plokhy’s telling, is not a periphery of someone else’s empire. It is the center of its own story—layered, scorched, reborn. That I was reading the history of Ukraine in Kharkiv, a city that embodies these layers and this capacity for rebirth, felt deeply significant. Clearly, I have a taste for immersive reading experiences.

Plokhy opens with Herodotus and ends in the smoke and uncertainty of the Donbas. He moves briskly from Scythians to Sarmatians, from Byzantium to the Baptism of Rus’, through Mongol invasions, Cossack uprisings, Habsburg borderlands, Soviet famines, and finally to the post-2014 war. What could have been a dizzying chronology becomes, in his hands, a coherent argument: Ukraine has always existed at the gates—of Europe, of empire, of history’s shifting definitions—and it has always resisted easy categorization.

What I admire most is his restraint. Plokhy avoids sentimental nationalism. He doesn’t collapse Ukraine into its Russian or Polish pasts. Instead, he insists on complexity. He allows contradictions to stand: a hetman loyal to the Tsar but dreaming of autonomy; a language both native and politicized; a land fertilized by poetry and blood. The book is smooth to read, but it’s solid, serious history. This is why I return to it. Sometimes I re-read it in full. Other times I revisit specific chapters: on the Cossacks, on WWII, on Kharkiv.

And yet, during this latest reading, The Gates of Europe inspired me to think deeper about the less tangible archives. Since 2024, I’ve spent over six months in Ukraine, visiting more than twenty towns across nearly every region. Each place left its own unique imprint on me—its scents, its palette, its cadence of customs and gestures. I kept wondering: what did the weekly market in a Poltava town smell like three hundred years ago? What fragrance lingered in a village church during Palm Sunday rites? Did the steppe gleam sunflower gold the way it does now, or was it once splashed with other hues?

This is where I step in—not as a historian, but as a chronicler of the sensory, the invisible, the fragile. My Ukraine lives not only in footnotes but in the taste of sour cherries, the sound of a local wedding song, the faint scent of smoked pears drifting through warm August air.

I often return to a passage in Serhii Plokhy’s work on the Soviet famine—the Holodomor—where he lays out the staggering numbers: millions dead, entire regions emptied of life. But the magnitude of that suffering, historians warn, is ultimately incomprehensible without testimony. To begin to grasp it, one must read memoirs, fiction, poetry. Or travel, meet people, and listen. That’s all part of research and seeking deeper understanding.

I was raised by my great-grandmother, a Holodomor survivor. Her fragmented stories shaped my earliest understanding of history. Much of my writing, and especially my work in oral history, has been an attempt to trace the shape of that inherited trauma. It was passed down like a bitter inheritance: not always in words, but in silence, gestures, and the rituals of daily life. To write is, for me, a form of listening to the voices that were nearly lost, and to the quiet grief still carried in many Ukrainian homes.

Such textured, sensory history is impossible without the scaffolding of rigorous research. When I finished The Gates of Europe in Kharkiv, I was reminded why I so often recommend it. Plokhy invites you to look into layered histories, unspeakable traumas, and astonishing resilience. And he invites you to look outward—toward a Europe that has too long ignored this threshold, and now can no longer afford to.

I recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand Ukraine beyond war headlines. But read it slowly. Let it build. And after the final page, turn to a Ukrainian poet, an artist, a grandmother’s recipe. Let the history breathe in the present tense.

What books have helped you better understand a place—or changed how you see its history?

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, 2015.