Susan Viets' 3 favorite reads in 2024

No Country for Love is a remarkable, layered novel, part history, part murder mystery but is most strikingly powerful for conveying complex human emotions and the choices one woman made to survive, and ensure the survival of her children, during a blood-soaked period of twentieth-century Ukrainian history. The author, Yaroslav Trofimov, was born in Ukraine and the novel, based on his grandmother’s life, takes place, as he said, “in Ukraine at a time it was the deadliest place on Earth.”

It is meticulously researched, bringing to life the hope and idealism of the early years of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic when a young Debora Rosenbaum rushes to the capital, Kharkiv, in 1930 to help build a factory plant and falls in love. Stalin’s purges follow and difficult choices must be made. As Stalin’s deadly policies reach into the Ukrainian countryside, Debora witnesses first-hand the horror of the Holodomor, including corpses of starved Ukrainians who perished during the man-made famine and the terrible choices some took to live.

As Debora matures and settles into married life, Trofimov portrays intimate domestic scenes and all that those she loved faced when Germans rolled into Kyiv during the Second World War and after. The choices are grim and the consequences, etched on the next generation. Strong feelings of love, in its different phases and types, course through the novel. More darkly, No Country for Love also reflects on what it means to be possessed and controlled and the consequences of both giving into and breaking free of that. Beautifully written and intriguingly structured, this is a must read and a prequel to Trofimov’s work of non-fiction, Our Enemies Will Vanish.

Our Enemies Will Vanish is the definitive account of the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine told from the perspective of an award-winning Wall Street Journal correspondent who was born in Kyiv. I find this book especially meaningful because I was a reporter based in Kyiv when Ukraine declared independence in 1991. This war, however, is what feels like Ukraine’s true fight for independence.

The background to it is deftly explained in early parts of the book. The truly personal account begins with time Trofimov spent in Ukraine in early 2022. He discovered that regions, including parts of the East, which had once been quite pro-Russian were not anymore for reasons including the horrendous experience of occupation following Russia’s first invasion in 2014.

The full-scale invasion began on February 24, leaving Trofimov wondering whether Kyiv, where he grew up and had his “first awkward kiss,” would “meet the same fate as Baghdad in 2003, as Tripoli in 2011? As Kabul in the summer of 2021.” Those were conflicts Trofimov covered as a war correspondent; now he found himself donning protective gear in his own home city.
His account of the chaotic first day of the war is gripping. Russian troops tried to seize a Kyiv airport to take over the capital but were repelled by the Ukrainians. Russia launched attacks from the north, east and south, anticipating that it would secure victory over Ukraine within 10 days, but failed, meeting resistance that it never expected, suffering “from a fatal blind spot with it came to Ukraine: believing Russians and Ukrainians are one people.” There are endless accounts of bravery, beginning with that of the President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who refused offers of help to flee the country, staying put in Kyiv despite the danger.

Trofimov and two colleagues, a security expert, Stevo Stephen and a photographer, Manu Brabu were also brave. Early on, they witnessed refugees fleeing Irpin, the site of a battle, precariously navigating a makeshift pipe and plank crossing to get out. Trofimov and his colleagues headed in the opposite direction towards the fighting, only narrowly missing shelling that tragically killed others. Time after time they drove into the worst of the war to better understand and report on it. The devastating destruction of Mariupol in the south, the horrors of the slaughter in Bucha, Russia’s retreat in the north, Ukraine’s successful counter-offensives in 2022 and so many other key events of the first year are told in riveting and often grim detail.

There are moving accounts of Ukrainian military and civilian deaths and indications of the impact of bearing witness to the aftermath. Those who died in the Irpin shelling Trofimov describes included a Baptist volunteer who had gone to the city to help evacuate people. Another was a woman who had already escaped once from a Russian-occupied area only to die trying to flee again. She had been the chief accountant of a Palo Alto technology firm. A professional photo of her later published, “smiling confidently in a green blouse, with manicured nails . . . was hard to reconcile . . . with the crumpled, bloodied corpse under a tattered blanket.”

With his years of experience as a war correspondent, his fluency in Russian and Ukrainian, his deep understanding of Ukrainian culture and politics and his incisive analysis and understanding of both Russia and key countries in the West, there is no better guide than Trofimov to lead you through the terrible first year of this war and the geopolitical significance of it.

In August 1989, I helped some East Germans escape to the West and later wrote about this in Picnic at the Iron Curtain. I was a young reporter based in Hungary and those were chaotic days with momentous changes to cover every month. There was little time to step back and reflect, which is exactly what Matthew Longo has done with his excellent account of The Picnic some thirty years later.
This event, where hundreds of East Germans ran across the border in a human stampede from Communist Hungary to freedom in Austria was, according to the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, “where the first stones were removed from the Berlin Wall.” That Wall fell three months later, in November 1989.

Longo’s book is striking for both accurately evoking the atmosphere of the picnic while also carefully documenting and perceptively analyzing the historical and political circumstances leading up to it. He transported me back in time, triggering many strong memories and emotions, including how afraid I was for the East Germans who risked so much trying to escape.

Through Longo we meet the young activists, members of the fledging Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) at a dinner with Austria’s Otto von Habsburg where the idea of the picnic is born though not as an escape plan for East Germans. Inspired by Habsburg’s “vision for a borderless Europe,” the picnic is meant to be a chance to be “out with the people, out by the Iron Curtain itself,” where Austrians and Hungarians would celebrate in a party. MDF activists successfully organize it, partly thanks to the patronage of a reform-minded communist politician, Imre Pozsgay, at a time when the government was dominated by hardliners.

Those hardliners had sought a solution to, or a scapegoat for, Hungary’s economic crisis by appointing a young reform-minded Prime Minister, Miklós Németh. He in turn believed the solution to the economic crisis lay in dismantling the Iron Curtain. Uncertain whether this would provoke a military response from the Soviet Union and largely in secret, he arranged for the first section of the Iron Curtain to be cut. The response from Moscow was silence, but East Germans began flooding into Hungary, seeing their opportunity to escape now that the physical barrier preventing that had been removed.

Longo’s book is part personal account, and part philosophical reflection on walls, borders, borderlessness and freedom. It ends with a trip back to Hungary in 2019, a few months before the 30th anniversary of the picnic and a reflection on the significance of it now.
Longo’s account of the events is all the richer for the many interviews that he conducted with politicians, and organizers and a border guard directly involved; with East Germans bold enough to crash the picnic; and, equally importantly, with those who failed in their attempts to leave. An East German who tried to escape via Hungary was caught and ended up in prison back home. Two days after the picnic, an East German trying to cross into Austria was shot dead by a Hungarian border guard. The stakes couldn’t have been higher for each person involved and for Europe.