A Brief
History of a Long War by
Mariam Naiem, Yulia Vus & Ivan Kypibida. Ten Speed Graphic, 2026. $19.99.
Although the full-scale war in which Russia has
sought to conquer Ukraine has raged now for over four years, any Ukrainian will
tell you that the conflict between their democratic nation and Putin’s
authoritarian imperialist petro-state has actually been going on since 2014,
when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and started supporting/taking part in a
violent separatist movement in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas region. But really,
they would go on (rightly), Russian aggression against Ukraine has endured for
generations, centuries. The only variant has been one of degree: the low simmer
of cultural marginalization, mockery and dismissal, the full boil of genocide
and war.
Explaining all of this in a brisk 100 pages of
comics is the task set before scholar, activist and journalist Mariam Naiem and
artists Yulia Vus and Ivan Kypibida (all Ukrainian), authors of A Brief
History of a Long War. This version, from Ten Speed Graphic (a division of
Random House), is a translation by Nata Hrytsenko and Naiem of an original 2025
French publication.
We may productively compare the book to the Italian artist Igort’s How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion (2022; English translation 2024) and The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks (2010/2011; translation 2016), as well as, to a lesser extent, Andrew S. Weiss and Brian “Box” Brown’s Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin (2022)[1] and German author Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018). All these works explore the individual’s entanglement with traumatic historical forces and their violent repercussions in the present day.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I have been trying to make the broad English-speaking community understand the cultural context of the Russian war in Ukraine. In particular, I aim to bring understanding of the colonial and racial aspects and practices of Russian culture with respect to Ukraine and other peoples colonized by Russia.
To that end, the authors of Brief History make
a tremendous amount of historical material pertaining to the conflict accessible
and relatable, through a deft use of cartooning, infographics and elaborate
page designs.
Part of making the (often horrific) nonfiction
elements relatable to a presumed non-Ukrainian reader involves the narrative
device of Vika, an ordinary young woman who at the beginning of the book is
startled awake by missiles exploding near her Kyiv flat in the middle of the
night. Checking her phone, Vika moves from her bedroom to a mattress in a
corridor. We learn, in a section titled “Living Through War for Dummies,” about
“the rule of two walls”: when the bombs are going off, you should always have
two barriers between yourself and the exterior; this usually means retreating
to a hallway or bathroom.
It’s a clever hook for the reader: Vika’s
experience shows the practical realities of living in a conflict zone, opening
up all sorts of questions as to what brought us to this point. That query in
turn leads her, while waiting for the all-clear, to google the phrase “What is
genocide?” into her phone. And we’re off to the races.
It’s a long story that leads us all the way back to
the origins of the nation, told mostly in page compositions which at times operate
more as illustrations than comics – understandably, given the excess of
information to convey. But Vus and Kypibida’s strong visual sense, clean line
work, full bleeds throughout and use of color (with oranges, ochre and browns
dominant) keep it all organized. Cartoony touches help, too: an hourglass with
little hammers and sickles inside instead of sand delivers loud and clear the
message that the USSR was living on borrowed time. If you’re going to approach
long-form history in comics, this is definitely one way to do it.
In short, Brief History takes us all the way
back to Kyivan Rus’, a Slav state founded in 882 CE, encompassing what we know
today as Ukraine and much of Western Russia. Although Kyivan Rus’ lost its preeminent
status in 1240 CE due to the Mongol Invasion and occupation (which lasted
centuries), Russians came to regard the region as the origin of their
civilization. (The very term “Kyivan Rus’” was not coined until the 19th
century – by Russian historians.) The authors utilize their visual/verbal
“hooks” in clever ways to make this ancient history palatable: we start the
section on Kyivan Rus’ through a graphic match by which we “enter” Vika’s
bedroom calendar, which is illustrated with a portrait of Prince Volodymyr, who
Christianized the people in 988 CE.[2]
Throughout these historical portions of the narrative,
stretching from medieval times and with an emphasis on the last hundred years, the
artists playfully mimic the styles of illustrated manuscripts, church
iconography, Byzantine paintings, woodblock prints and Soviet graphics, among
other fare. Despite the subtle parody, one theme crystallizes: for a very long
time, the Russian state has sought to dominate, suppress and even wipe out the
Ukrainians and their culture.
Among the most grisly examples we find the Holodomor.
The word, meaning “death by starvation,” refers to Joseph Stalin’s explicit
policy in the early 1930s to punish peasant resistance to the collectivization
of agriculture in the Soviet republic of Ukraine by seizing harvests, creating
an artificial famine. The Holodomor killed over three million people in Ukraine
(other regions suffered terribly as well). Vus and Kypibida depict all this (potentially
exploitative) death and destruction through a restrained palette that
highlights evil-looking caricatures of Stalin henchmen Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar
Kaganovich; dead bodies on Kyiv streets and by a railroad track, seen from a
distance; and statistics over a map. Here and throughout, the artists take
considerable pains to not sensationalize the human tragedies of genocide and
war, overwhelming as they get.
As it happens – and as with the 1915 mass killings
of Armenians by the Turks, the 1994 mass killings of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda,
and other such events – the question of whether or not to classify the
Holodomor as a genocide sparked considerable debate. The authors cover the
“controversy” in a section titled “Was the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine a
Genocide?” Only in 2006 did the Ukrainian parliament recognize the Holodomor as
a genocide. And while many other nations did too, Russia never has.
Again, Vus and Kypibida masterfully deploy page
composition to make plain the internalized, even banal, repercussions of historically
distant events like the Holodomor, which after all happened almost 100 years
ago. We see, against a black background, a loaf of bread with a candle, the
years “1932-1933” emblazoned along the top. Three overlapping McGuiresque panels
descend down the page, each showing families at a meal in different eras (1970,
1990, 2010), all punctuated by the mother figure admonishing the kids, “You
must empty your plate.” The final panel shows Vika as a child, reacting to the
phrase with a quizzical look. As a reminder that the aggressor’s persecution of
Ukraine has never ended, orange flames and smoke lick and spark along the
bottom of the composition. Brief History is replete with such displays
of how comics, in the words of Hillary Chute, “can make the twisting lines of
history readable through form” (199).
Through such compelling techniques, the authors
present a centuries-long litany of Russian imperialist abuses against their
country. Just to pick another: linguocide; one of many data points: the 19th-century
Valuev Circular, which outlawed Ukrainian in print, and whose eponymous drafter
opined, “There was not, is not, and cannot be any separate Little Russian
[derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians] language.” Fast forward to the 21st
century and Putin says exactly the same. And not just about language. This is
in fact the whole rationale for the war: the Ukrainians are not really a
separate culture or people; they’re just “Nazified” Russians in denial who need
to be brought back into the fold. By force.
There really is no end to such sins, such inhumanity, the authors show. I especially responded to a haunting page made up of photographs of Ukraine’s “Executed Renaissance” generation: the cohort of authors and artists in the 1920s/1930s who spearheaded the development of a new national literature and culture in the hopeful period just after the Revolution. Their scores of portraits descend from red cords, as if they’re all hanged. The final, devastating text box reads: “The Communist government eliminated 80 percent of these artists and intellectuals. Only 36 of 259 Ukrainian writers survived.”
The War
As the world saw on February 24, 2022, the Russian
military launched an invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. More than 8 million
Ukrainians fled the country.
Naiem, Vus and Kypibida cover the highlights and go
down some of the byways of what happened since: the repulsion of the invaders;
the horrific discovery of tortured and executed civilians in places like Bucha
(a suburb of Kyiv) in the wake of the Russian retreat; the devastating battles
in the East; the heroic, doomed defenders of Mariupol; Russia’s shelling of
non-military targets like apartment blocks, shopping centers and maternity
hospitals; the frightfully rising death toll.
These stats and fast-accumulating tragedies can
easily overwhelm; throw in the world’s spotty attention span, as well as the
clamor of other global crises (like superpower chosen wars in the Middle East),
and foreigners can easily forget about Ukraine’s ongoing struggle.
This again, I feel, is why Brief History’s
authors resort to the device of the very relatable Vika. Whoever, wherever we
are, we could totally see ourselves in her shoes, living in a city reeling from
near-nightly missile attacks and explosions. What would we do?
After she’s spent some time lying in the corridor,
Vika’s phone alerts her: “Attack drone threat. Please go to the nearest
shelter.” Another “Living Through War for Dummies” section walks us through the
basics: checking for supplies and keys to take along (you don’t know for how
long), finding the right sort of shelter nearest you, notifying friends and
family, hoping your building doesn’t get hit as you go down the stairs. Over
two mostly wordless pages totaling ten panels, Vika does so, as a piercing
orange graphic overhead signifies an air raid siren.
As far as bomb shelters go, Vika picks one of the
cushier ones. There, she meets several strangers, forming a cross-section of
Kyiv society. The encounters allow for exchanges that shed further light on the
day-by-day actualities of wartime. But as elsewhere in the book, the past
(which is never past) quickly rears its head.
Hence, when someone tells a child not to be scared
because “You are going to be a future Cossack!” and the child replies, “Who?”,
we fall into another historical rabbit hole. We get a multi-page verbal/visual portrait
of the Cossacks, a self-governing, democratically-minded ethnic group, most of
which resided in the Ukrainian lands and had a reputation for bravery in
battle. Some say Ukrainians regard Cossacks the way US folks see cowboys or the
Japanese view samurai: as the reified essence of their national spirit. “The
word ‘Cossack’ became a symbol of freedom, courage, and military valor in
Ukrainian culture,” a caption explains.
To their credit, the authors do not overly romanticize
the Cossacks, whose masculinist warrior culture had its faults.[3]
Nonetheless, their appeal is plain when invaders are pounding at the gate:
“they remain a symbol of democratic values and resistance to oppression.”
The fellow shelterers, who span the generations,
also share their memories of much more immediate historical events: the USSR’s
collapse in 1991, the Orange Revolution of 2004, the 2013/2014 Euromaidan protests that ousted
the corrupt pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. A series of four vertical
panels progressively fill up with the crowds overflowing Independence Square
(the text retains its Ukrainian name, Maidan Nezalezhnosti) to demand
Yanukovych’s ouster: “[T]he number of people increased day after day.”
Putin, humiliated by the “loss” of Ukraine in the
middle of his much-ballyhooed 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, could tolerate
none of this; the theft of Crimea and the war in Donbas soon followed. Another
composition expresses the stark divisions between Ukraine’s (mostly) Western-leaning,
Ukrainian-speaking West and the (mostly) Russia-welcoming, Russian-speaking
East through an ugly black rip along one side of a page, overlaid on a mass of
separatists rallying under statues of Lenin. “Southwest Against Maidan,” “Yes
to the Russian language” some signs say. At top right, a giant hand tugs on the
wayward territory, dragging it further East towards Moscow.
For all the torment of a country being torn apart, though, Brief History reminds us that Russia’s recent military incursions “united Ukrainian society and increased the sense of responsibility for the fate of the country.” Vus and Kypibida capture that unity with an image of several people working together to hoist a giant trident or trizub, Ukraine’s national emblem.
The Downside
Brief History wants you to take it seriously as a weighty work
of popular history that just happens to appear in comics format; among other
sources, it references the highly-regarded Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy.
It is, furthermore, understandably biased towards a Ukrainian perspective. If
the first casualty of war is truth,[4]
not far behind is nuance. This is not to argue that the Ukrainians are not on
the right side of this war (they are) and the Russians are not on the wrong
side (they are). It’s simply to remind us that a text like this one, elaborate
and well-crafted as it is, has one primary objective: to, as mentioned, hold
the world’s easily-wandering attention on this still-unfolding crime against
a peace-loving nation, a peace-loving nation that by the way deserves entry
into the EU and NATO. That doesn’t mean one can reduce it to mere propaganda –
a position much easier to maintain with the daily pronouncements of Putin and
his ilk.
All the same, I found what Brief History
leaves out worth mentioning. Some of it has to do, I think, with the relatively
low page count and the concomitant imperative to condense. For example, in the
section on Mariupol, a panel shows a Russian bomber dropping munitions on a
city block, clearly not a military target. One building has a word, in Cyrillic,
written by it in large letters, so as to be seen from the air. You would not
know (especially if you don’t read Russian) that the word is deti
(children). The scene represents one of the most cruel atrocities of the war,
when on March 16, 2022 the invaders bombed a theater in which hundreds of
children were sheltering. The adults had written out the word in the square in
front of the building as a plea for mercy, which the Russians ignored. The
book’s authors are either counting on the reader to have foreknowledge of this
event or could not spare the real estate in the panel (nor in the end notes) to
explain.
Other choices by Naiem and her collaborators,
though, point to a more deliberate strategy to, shall we say, downplay
criticism of the Ukrainian war effort. We see no mention of documented problems
such as the growing fatigue of the Ukrainian people; the attempts by some young
men to illegally leave the country to avoid military service; soldiers abandoning
the fight at the front; and reports of corruption in Zelensky’s administration.
A perhaps more egregious offense appears late in
the book, when Vika and others speak to some broadcast journalists in the
shelter. A Black woman with an Afro holds up a mic to Vika’s face and asks, “What
do you want foreigners to know?” I understand that cartooning is an art that
often resorts to visual typage (including, historically, of the ethnic and
racialized sort) to make legible points to a reader; still I found it a bit
lazy and off-putting to reflexively equate Blackness with “foreignness” – not
only because there are native Black Ukrainians, but also because of my own
awareness of long-standing racism among Eastern European whites. That context
makes the Black figure overdetermined in a way that’s distracting to the book’s
purposes, in my opinion. Maybe I’m just quibbling? I don’t think so.
In any case, such infelicities, minor as they are, do not overly detract from Brief History’s triumph as a sensitive, very humane work about people living through the worst of times. I especially appreciated how the authors often cut away from (reality-based) fictions like Vika to bring us back to actual individuals in the here and now. One page is comprised of their photorealist portraits: the soldiers Pavlo Kaliuk and Mykyta Zavilinskyi; Dora Chomiak, CEO of the charity Razom for Ukraine; the university lecturer and volunteer Olha Kryvitchenko, all testifying directly to the reader. At the very least a book like this should put faces before us, to help non-Ukrainian readers see the war as something more than a set of far-away abstractions. In this, Naiem, Vus and Kypibida succeed brilliantly.
Comics and Decolonization
“[E]ven when we win, it will not bring all of our
people back. It will not give us back hours and hours in fear and doubt,
wondering if we will survive. But we’d like to believe that justice will
prevail.” So, in part, does Vika answer the Black journalist. It is an
open-eyed but hopeful summation of what, as you read this, so many in Ukraine
are living for. Soon after, she and the other shelterers receive the all-clear,
and they scatter for home – the decidedly uncanny “home” of wartime.
I work in a Department of Slavic Languages &
Literatures. Trained as a Slavist, for the past two decades I have taught and
written on the cultural productions of Central/Eastern Europe, especially
Russia and the Czech Republic. In the wake of the 2022 full-scale invasion, a decolonization
movement has swept Slavic Studies. While Russian expansionism and imperialism
are nothing new to those in my field, many of us are not only taking a more
critical stance towards how we approach and teach these facts of history and
culture; we’re also reassessing the foundations of our training itself.
The fact is that Russia has gotten the lion’s share
of attention for so long first and foremost because Slavic Studies in the US emerged
during the Cold War, with lots of federal support. It’s not the only game in
town, just the biggest. The vast majority of us teach the Russian language
and/or Russian material, as opposed to other Slavic languages like, say,
Bulgarian or Slovak. Or Ukrainian. Ever since my undergrad days a very long
time ago, it’s been more Pushkin, Tolstoy and Bulgakov than Shevchenko, Gombrowicz
and Kundera. A lot more.
The war has cast a harsh light on these blind spots
and, frankly, on our professional inertia. Can we ever get away from seeing and
teaching the geopolitics of that part of the world primarily through Russian
eyes, even when we don’t want to? Cue the hand-wringing.
In 2023 a major institution in my field, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), adopted “Decolonization” as the theme for that year’s conference. It released a statement that read, in part:
Engaging decolonization … involves re-examining our current research, teaching, and professional practices. How have power relationships and hierarchies within the region and beyond shaped what we study, how we study it, and who has a place at the table? What does it mean to de-center Russian studies, and how should we do so?
Since then, new and revised curricula and teaching
resources have been drawn up with an emphasis on Russia’s former imperialist
subject peoples (especially Ukraine). Books like Diversity and
Decolonization in Teaching Russian Studies, edited by Thomas Jesús Garza
& Rachel Stauffer (2025), are now seeing print (full disclosure: I blurbed
it). We don’t send our students to Moscow and St. Petersburg for intensive
language study anymore, but to places like Riga and Yerevan.[5]
There have been shouting matches, ruffled feathers, intergenerational strife,
you name it.[6] I know
people who on the day of the full-scale invasion publicly pledged to give up
speaking Russian (their mother tongue) and learn Ukrainian. We can’t really get
away from the hard questions anymore. The realignment, if that’s what it is,
continues.
And in this sense we are allies to folks like
Naiem, who on her website describes her work as
“decolonizing the discourse on Ukraine in order to center Ukrainian
voices and de-center Russian and pro-Russian imperialist narratives.”
Here is where I think comics might play a useful
role, not only nonfiction Ukrainian works like A Brief History of a Long War;
the “Witnessing the War” comics section of the news platform War in
Ukraine; and Zhenya Oliinyk’s work for the New York Times (and her
Instagram), but also genre fare such as the steampunk alt-history series The
Will (Volia, 2017) by Viacheslav Buhaiov et al. and the horror-inspired Franko
(2022) by Heorhii Babanskyi and Anatolii Bielov, as well as grotesque black
comedy like Maksym Palenko’s lacerating daily cartoons, all of which fruitfully
tackle the war’s psychological, emotional and physical toll through allegory,
exaggeration and the grotesque.[7]
Comics help in the decolonization project the way
they always help: through spatio-temporal alchemy that visualizes how the
Holodomor reverberates across generations; turns a group of people together
raising a trident into a potent visual symbol of national renewal; taps
photorealist portraits to put testifying names to faces, and in myriad other
ways makes history grippingly “readable through form.”
Brief History has already prompted me to make some changes in my
own teaching. For one thing, some of the book’s infographics are so good, I
will likely use them in class.
Most years I teach one of my department’s required
courses for Russian Studies majors, RUSS 323: Modern Russian Literature. Given
some professional latitude in how to approach the task – and also faced with
the ineluctable reality that this material is vast – I have mostly chosen to
interpret the term “modern” to mean literature produced in Russia and/or in
Russian[8]
from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the present.
Sometime around Week 6, we discuss Stalin, the
1930s purges, and their impact on writers like Daniil Kharms, Mikhail Bulgakov
and Isaak Babel.[9] In my
unit on the forced collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine which produced
the Holodomor, I use the word “kulak” – a Russian term – to refer to the middle-class
peasants which the Soviets targeted as state enemies, for example in the
propaganda slogan “Liquidate the Kulaks as a Class.”
Naiem, Vus and Kypibida’s A Brief History of a
Long War reminded me that the Ukrainian equivalent for kulak is “kurkul.”
The Holodomor was a tragedy brought down on Ukraine by its age-old oppressors,
and it was Ukrainians who endured its agonies. It makes sense to me, then, to
use “kurkul” and other such Ukrainian words in this class unit from now
on.
Some of these changes might seem small, but they
really aren’t. Decolonization can start with just such tiny shifts in
terminology that lead to new perspectives, new ways of understanding – away
from the point of view of the victimizers, towards that of those who bore their
crimes.
And that makes everything else possible.
Bibliography
Alaniz, José. “Igor Baranko and National Precarity in Ukrainian Comics.” Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections. Ed. Alaniz & Martha Kuhlman. Leuven University Press, 2020: 215-238.
Chute, Hillary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.” Twentieth-Century Literature. Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2006): 199-230.
The Guardian. “Who Coined the phrase, ‘The First Casualty of War is Truth’?”. 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21510,00.html.
Naiem, Mariam. “About Me.” https://mariam.space/about/.
Zabuzhko, Oksana. “No Guilty People In The World? Reading Russian Literature After The Bucha Massacre.” Times Literary Supplement (April 22, 2022). https://www.the-tls.com/literature-by-region/european-literature/russian-literature-bucha-massacre-essay-oksana-zabuzhko.
[1] See my review here: https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/accidental-czar-creative-take-putin-biography.
[2] In 2016 – two years after they stole Crimea at
gunpoint – the Russians erected a 60-foot statue of Volodymyr just outside the
Kremlin walls, along a major traffic artery (you can’t miss it). This was a
declaration that he “belonged” to them, not the Ukrainians. The Russians call him
by their version of the name, Vladimir, which of course just happens to also be
the given name of the current despot – while Volodymyr is that of the current
president of Ukraine! Very funny, fate. Incidentally, in folk etymology, the
name means “ruler of the world.”
[3] See for example, Isaak Babel’s short story “My First
Goose” (1926), set in Ukraine during the Polish-Soviet War era.
[4] The sentiment, widely attributed to the isolationist
Senator Hiriam Johnson in 1918, apparently dates as far back as Samuel Johnson
writing in The Idler in 1758: “Among the calamities of war may be
jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which
interest dictates and credulity encourages” (The Guardian, “Who Coined”).
[5] A lot of us are personally boycotting Russia too; I
haven’t gone since 2017. That was a terrible trip.
[6] A 2022 essay by the Ukrainian novelist Oksana
Zabuzhko, in which she accused Western Slavists of aiding and abetting Russian
aggression by long giving Russian culture a pass, launched a thousand fights.
She wrote, “[P]rior to February 24, I had only ever met one European Slavist
who, in 2014, deeply disturbed by the Orwellian turn in Moscow, asked
forgiveness from Ukrainians for having spent his life looking at Kyiv ‘through
Russian spectacles’ as ‘the third city of the Russian Empire’, and for not
properly seeing the capital [Kyiv] of a 1,000-year-old local culture, a culture
towards which the Russian Empire has behaved much as the Russian Army has
behaved in Bucha: what it could steal, it stole, and what it couldn’t, it
destroyed. Such realizations may now become more common. Because the road for
bombs and tanks has always been paved by books, and we are now first-hand
witnesses to how the fate of millions can be decided by our reading choices. It
is time to take a long, hard look at our bookshelves” (Zabuzhko).
[7] For a pre-2022 discussion of Ukrainian comics and
national precarity, see Alaniz.
[8] Some of the works we cover are by émigré authors who
left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution.
[9] As it happens, two of these writers have strong
connections to Ukraine. Bulgakov grew up in Kyiv, Babel lived in Odesa.
