In her Four Essays on World War II, Olena Stiazhkina inscribes the Ukrainian history of World War II into a wider European and world context. Among other aspects, she analyzes the mobilization measures on the eve of the war, and reconsiders Soviet narratives on them. Scrutinizing social and political processes initiated by the Bolshevik leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, she outlines how mobilization and militarization became integral parts of Soviet politics. Today, the Kremlin uses Soviet and post-Soviet Russian narratives of World War II to justify its aggressive policies towards a number of democratic countries. Russia is engaged in falsification of the past to underpin claims of a so-called "Russian World" and its ongoing war against Ukraine. Against this background, Stiazhkina offers a new understanding of what happened in Ukraine before, during, and after World War II.

Dr. Olena Stiazhkina is Senior Research Fellow at the NANU Institute of History of Ukraine and Professor of History at Donetsk National Vasyl Stus University. Her previous books include Women in the History of Ukrainian Culture in the Second Half of the 20th Century (Skhidny vydavnychy dim 2002), Gender Relations in Modern Society (Skhidny vydavnychy dim 2006), A Person in the Soviet Province (Noulidzh 2013), Stigma of Occupation: Soviet Women of the 1940s in Their Self-Perception (Dukh i litera 2019).