Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI)

📣 As Ukraine struggles for its existence, Iya Kiva offers lyric poems that acknowledge the deep trauma of war while radiating love and hope. Learn more about her new collection of poetry at the official book launch of 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘋𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘊𝘺𝘳𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝘓𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 on May 13. Poet Iya Kiva will be joined by translators Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk for a discussion hosted by Oleh Kotsyuba of HURI Books   🗓️ ONLINE | Wednesday | May 13 | 12:00-1:30 pm EDT 💙 Iya Kiva is a poet, translator, and journalist from Donetsk, now living in Lviv, Ukraine.   💡 Born out of the pain and loss of a fragmented present, Iya Kiva’s poetry, collected in the original and in English translation in 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘋𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘊𝘺𝘳𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝘓𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴, stitches memories of the past into Ukraine’s new reality. Since war broke out in her native Donetsk in 2014, she has become a prominent voice of Ukraine’s internally displaced citizens, finding new metaphors to express the ongoing uncertainties of this time. Kiva first began publishing in her native Russian, but, since the Donbas war, she has shifted to writing in Ukrainian. Her poems also reflect her mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish background and contribute to defining contemporary Ukraine—a culturally and linguistically diverse sovereign country. The book is available from @huri.books 💛 This event is organized by @huri.books , the publishing program at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute   🔗 Link in bio for more information (see “HURI Events”)

Back in September of 2024, Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska visited Harvard and gave Harvard Library three war-damaged books: a children’s book by Oleksandr (Sashko) Dermanskyi; an autobiography by Pavlo Belianskyi; and a novel translated from English to Ukrainian by Heather Gudenkauf. The books were rescued from a ruined warehouse of the Faktor Druk printing house in Kharkiv, which was struck by a missile in May 2024. They’ve recently come back from Preservation Services and are available to researchers in the reading room (as specimens only). In honor of #PreservationWeek, Christine Jacobson @cejacobson , Associate Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, discusses their importance to our collection, and Katherine Beaty @katicadillacycle , Book Conservator for Special Collections at the Weissman Preservation Center @harvardpreservation , shares about her work on the books. Special thanks to @huriharvard for providing Ukrainian-language captions! #BookConservation #PreservationWeek2026 #HarvardPreservation #HarvardUkrainianResearchInstitute #NewAcquisitions #HoughtonLibrary #HarvardLibrary #Harvard — Pavel Pashtet Belianskyi (b. 1977), Sashko Dermanskyi (b. 1976), Heather Gudenkauf, and Vivat Publishing. Books salvaged from Factor-Druk printing house, 2023–2024. MS Ukrainian 1. Gift of the Embassy of Ukraine to the United States of America, 2026.

📣 Please join us on May 6 for a book launch and discussion with author Alex Averbuch and translators Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. Oleh Kotsyuba will host the conversation about 📘 Furious Harvests, a bilingual poetry collection that transports readers to Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. The book is available from @huri.books   📍 ONLINE | Wednesday, May 6 at 2:00-3:30 pm EDT 💙 Alex Averbuch is a poet, translator, and interdisciplinary scholar who often draws on archival materials in his poetry. He is an assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and collegiate fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.   💡 Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of the grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other. 🔗 Link in bio for more information (see “HURI Events”)

📣 Focusing on practices of cultural resistance in Ukraine and Belarus, historian Tatsiana Astrouskaya challenges established conceptions of Soviet dissent, which are heavily based on activists in Moscow. Learn more in her upcoming lecture at HURI on May 5th! 💡 Culture and Resistance: Why is it Time for a New History of Soviet Dissent? 💙 Tatsiana Astrouskaya is a visiting scholar at Harvard, supported by HURI, and a research fellow at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe. Her research examines the history of cultural and political dissent, memory politics, and digital transformation in the post-socialist space. She is the author of the award-winning monograph 📘 Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus: Intelligentsia, Samizdat, and Nonconformist Discourses, 1968–1988. 🗓️ Tuesday | May 5 | 12:00-1:30 pm EDT 📍 IN-PERSON @ HURI | 34 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 🥪 Ukraine Study Group | Attendees are invited to enjoy an informal lunch.   🔗 Link in bio for more information (see “HURI Events”)

☢️It seems that today we know more than ever before about the history of the #Chornobyl tragedy. However, society hasn't yet developed a common understanding of Chornobyl, especially as it relates to the question of using nuclear energy to deal with the challenges of economic growth and climate change. Facts and history are twisting, and the determination of “truth” relies on the interpretation of some politicians, regimes, and countries, leaving the threat of nuclear disaster unresolved globally. In his book 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦, @serhiiplokhii points to the necessity of establishing a consensus on what happened in #Chornobyl, the consequences of the disaster, and the lessons it teaches. “An essential truth about Chornobyl is that we cannot live with conflicting 'truths' about the same event created and disseminated within isolated national, social, or cultural spaces. It was just such 'truths'that created the monstrous Chornobyl disaster: authoritarian control over economy and society, lack of free discussion and distribution of scientific information, and disregard for human life and health in the pursuit of allegedly higher economic or political goals, to name a few. ... We must reach agreement on the political, economic, and social conditions that produced disasters in the past if we are to prevent future catastrophes that may threaten the existence of humankind as a whole.” Swipe the carousel to learn more details about the events of that time ➡️ #HURIBooks #SerhiiPlokhy #UkrainianStudies #UkrainianBooks #UkrainianHistory #RussoUkrainianWar #ChornobylDisaster #NuclearPower @huriharvard

In cultural memory, #Chornobyl has become a symbol of global catastrophe—the destruction of the human world itself, the apocalypse. In 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘰𝘴𝘵-𝘊𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘯𝘰𝘣𝘺𝘭 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘺, Tamara Hundorova, @hundorova , examines how the #Chornobyl catastrophe reshaped Ukrainian literature, giving rise to a form of postmodern writing marked by trauma, irony, and an ongoing search for cultural identity. She argues that the #Chornobyl discourse itself catalyzed Ukrainian #postmodernism, as the disaster functions not only as a socio-techno-ecological event rooted in a specific time and place, but also as a powerful symbolic transition. It generates a post-apocalyptic mode of thinking in which the “end” of #civilization, culture, and the human is not realized, but indefinitely postponed within the post-atomic era. The book centers on the idea of the “post-Chornobyl library” as a metaphor for a culture that is simultaneously endangered and preserved. In Hundorova’s view, this library resembles an ark, a museum, or a temple—a space that safeguards fragments of meaning while also transforming them. It operates as a bridge between reality and fiction, past and present, self and other, play and apocalypse, as well as between high and mass culture. Ukrainian postmodernism is represented by @taras_prokhasko , Yuri Andrukhovych, Yuri Izdryk, Vasyl Kozhelianko, Volodymyr Dibrova, Bohdan Zholdak, Les Podervianskyi, @serhiy_zhadan , @_zabuzhko_oksana_ , Yevhen Pashkovsky, Volodymyr Tsybulko, Yuriy Tarnawsky. #HURIBooks #UkrainianStudies #UkrainianBooks #UkrainianHistory #ChornobylDisaster #NuclearPower #Postmodernism @huri_harvard

📣 On April 30, historian Andrii Portnov will discuss his new book, an intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak, hosted by Oleh Kotsyuba and joined by George Grabowicz and Frank Sysyn. The conversation will explore Pritsak’s life and legacy as the co-founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) and Harvard’s first professor of Ukrainian history. The book is available now from @huri.books 📘 Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian "Harvard Miracle"   📍 ONLINE | Thursday, April 30 at 2:00-3:30 pm EDT   💡 This is the first English-language intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak, the co-founder of HURI and the first professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. Andrii Portnov places Pritsak’s life and legacy in the context of Ukrainian and world historiography and illuminates the development of his scholarly interests from their emergence in interwar Poland, through the Sovietization of Western Ukraine and the perturbations of World War II, to German Oriental Studies in the 1940s and 1950s, North American Slavic studies, and to the international studies of the origins of Rus´. Pritsak’s intellectual trajectory unfolds as a combination of facing the challenges of establishing the field of Ukrainian studies in North America and engaging with influential scholars such as Dmytro Čyževskyj, Roman Jakobson, Ivan Krypiakevych, Oleksandr Ohloblyn, and Natalia Polonska-Vasylenko.   🔗 Link in bio for more information (see “HURI Events”)   #HURIBooks

Another prominent book that helps to gain a broader vision on the #Chornobyl and questions connected to nuclear power is 𝘜𝘬𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦'𝘴 𝘕𝘶𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵: 𝘈 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 by Yuri Kostenko, ed. by Svitlana Krasynska, introduced by Paul J. D'Anieri, translated by Lidia Wolanskyj, Svitlana Krasynska, and Olena Jennings. Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament is significant in several respects. First, it provides an inside look into the politics that shaped Ukraine’s policy on this crucial issue during the earliest months of independence. Second, it provides a documentary history, such as excerpts of debates and documents that have not previously been available in English. The 1986 #Chornobyl disaster didn’t just expose the dangers of nuclear energy—it helped shift public opinion, making the rejection of nuclear weapons morally acceptable. Between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal under pressure from russia and the United States, who argued that disarmament was necessary to reduce the global nuclear standoff and improve international security. Some believe that if Ukraine had retained its nuclear weapons, russia would not have acted as it did in 2014 or today. Others argue that the security assurances provided by Western states should have resulted in much stronger support for Ukraine after the invasion. However, despite the fact that Ukraine eliminated its vast arsenal in a remarkably short period and at its own cost, the amount of nuclear warheads around the planet is more than enough to destroy all of humanity several times over. #HURIBooks #YuriKostenko #UkrainianStudies #UkrainianBooks #UkrainianHistory #RussoUkrainianWar #ChornobylDisaster #NuclearPower #UkrainesNuclearDisarmament @huriharvard

📣 Join us for a lunchtime lecture at HURI on April 28! Sophia Kalashnikova Horowitz’s doctoral research examines the development of the Soviet informer network and of the practices of informer work. Between 1934 and 1965, the political police continually optimized their information-gathering systems, moving through different models of informer work. Informer work was an ongoing, uneven negotiation between informer and handler.   💡 Citizen Participation in Soviet Political Policing: Reinventing the Mass Informer Network and Developing the Skilled Informer, 1934-1965   💙 A lecture by Sophia Kalashnikova Horowitz, Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard University. 💛 Sophia’s dissertation, “The Development of the Soviet Political Police Informer Network: Agent Work as Practice and Experience, 1934-1965,” examines the social and institutional history of political police informing under Stalin and Khrushchev. On the basis of files from the archives of Ukraine (State Security Service archive), Lithuania (Special Archive), Latvia (National Archive), Estonia (National Archive), Moldavia (National Archive), Georgia (National Archive), and Germany (Stasi Archive), it argues that a mass informer network was an inherent part of the Soviet system of political policing and that over time, more informers were recruited using a complicated incentive system rather than primarily through coercion, though this method remained a constant aspect of recruitment on some level.    🗓️ Tuesday | April 28 | 12:00 - 1:30 pm   📍 IN-PERSON @ HURI | 34 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138   🔗 Link in bio for more information (see “HURI Events”)   #UkraineStudyGroup

This year, April 26 marks the 40th anniversary of the #Chornobyl nuclear disaster. In 1986, Reactor No. 4 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, releasing large amounts of radioactive material into the surrounding environment. Up to 50 people died immediately, and thousands more later suffered from radiation-related illnesses and long-term health issues. The #Soviet government’s attempt to cover up the disaster ultimately failed. The event quickly reached international news and became a symbol of systemic failure within the Soviet Union. The Chornobyl disaster has been widely perceived in Ukraine as a crime committed by Moscow against the Ukrainian people. However, the Chornobyl story is not only about Ukraine. Its consequences are global, raising urgent questions about nuclear safety and the use of nuclear energy worldwide. For this reason, we have prepared a selection of books that explore Chornobyl from different perspectives. The first book in this selection is 𝘋𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘎𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘩 by @serhiiplokhii , which was published this February. Written in the form of essays, interviews, and reflections on the russo-Ukrainian war, the book also draws attention to the issues of nuclear terrorism, which has become a real threat to the entire world from russia. As we see, international organizations were completely unprepared for russian nuclear blackmail. #HURIBooks #SerhiiPlokhy #UkrainianStudies #UkrainianBooks #UkrainianHistory #RussoUkrainianWar #ChornobylDisaster #NuclearPower @huriharvard

🇺🇦🫂 What does solidarity with Ukraine mean in a global context? Through our @ukraineoncampus initiative, Razom supported 17 student leaders to attend the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program (TCUP) conference at the @huriharvard . Our goal was to equip them with the knowledge and networks necessary to champion Ukraine within their own universities and beyond. Beyond the academic panels, Razom hosted a dedicated student workshop where participants from over a dozen universities connected to exchange strategies for academic, cultural, and public engagement. From hearing human rights defender Maksym Butkevych and University of Cambridge Professor Rory Finnin, to engaging with Razom advisors Melinda Haring and Nate Mook, these students saw firsthand how diverse expertise strengthens a global movement. Swipe to hear from five student leaders on how they define solidarity and how they are carrying Ukraine’s voice into classrooms and public discourse worldwide ➡️

📣 Join us TOMORROW - April 17 - for the 2026 Petro Jacyk Symposium as we analyze the profound impact of four years of warfare on Ukraine. Swipe through to meet the distinguished presenters and experts leading this year’s crucial discussions.   💡 This special event is hosted by Andrea Graziosi, Mark Kramer, Terry Martin, and Serhii Plokhii   💙 Presentations by Paul D'Anieri, Ambassador John Herbst, Sergey Radchenko, Michael Kofman, Oxana Shevel, Vladyslav Rashkovan, and Nataliia Levchuk 💛 With additional remarks by Catherine Wanner and Oleh Wolowyna   🗓️ Friday, April 17, at 9:15 am - 5:00 pm   📍 IN-PERSON AND ONLINE | CGIS South Building | Belfer Case Study Room (S020)   🔗 Link in bio for more information (see “HURI Events”) This is the 2026 Petro Jacyk Symposium in Ukrainian Studies, convened by the current Jacyk Distinguished Fellow, Andrea Graziosi. It is the first of a two-part series examining the effects of the ongoing war. The first part, organized by HURI, looks at changes in Ukraine. The second part, organized by the Davis Center, focuses on the Russian Federation. For more information on the second installment, please visit the Davis Center's website.