"‘Imperial multiculturalism’ […] is thus rightly a central guiding theme of the narrative about this city. The author has succeeded in creating a remarkable and highly topical work with his history of Dnipro”.
—Kerstin S. Jobst, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (translated from German)
“Overall, the book offers a vivid assemblage of interwoven storylines and episodes from the city’s multi-dimensional past, which combined result in an entangled history of Dnipro as a European city. This book is an essential read for everyone wishing to understand the multi-layered history of Ukraine and diversity of its regions.”
— Olena Palko, European History Quarterly
“Andrii Portnov has written a fascinating, well-illustrated book about an ‘entangled’ history of the Ukrainian city of Dnipro/Dnipropetrovsk… After reading Portnov’s amazing study about a history of the city of my youth, I reevaluated Dnipro’s complicated past… Portnov’s book is a most interesting and important contribution to the field of the Ukrainian studies, demonstrating the role of such multinational cities as Dnipro in the Ukrainian struggle against the Russian and Soviet empires.”
— Sergei I. Zhuk, Russian Review
“It is rare to find a book title more apt than the one selected by Andrii Portnov for his monograph Dnipro. An Entangled History of a European City. … I claim so because Portnov, in publishing the first English-language monograph on the history of Katerynoslav (1776–1926), then Dnipropetrovsk (1926–2016), and now Dnipro (since 2016), today the fourth largest city in Ukraine by population, has expertly demonstrated how to apply this approach to the past in practice. … Portnov’s historical tale of Katerynoslav / Dnipropetrovsk / Dnipro faithfully and consequently reflects the entangled character of the city’s history.”
— Tomasz Stryjek, Kultura i Społeczeństwo
“One outstanding feature of the book is its ability to bring different strands of Ukrainian historiography into dialogue. … [T]he footnotes are a priceless treasure trove of source material, secondary literature in Western languages, Russian, and, most importantly, Ukrainian and Polish. The book is written in straightforward, relatable English and is easily accessible to readers possessing no prior knowledge of Ukrainian or Russian history. … Although Portnov’s book ends before Russia’s attempted total invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it offers very timely reading, integrating different strands of Ukraine’s history into the story of a city. … In combining a multitude of different sources, research literature, and narrative styles (from interviews to close reading of sources to birds-eye geopolitical analyses), this book highlights the complexity and often contradictory nature of Dnipro’s history. This does not always make for easy reading, but following the different paths of this European city is worthy of the reader’s time.”
— Boris Belge, H-Soz-Kult
“This book is a great example of a history of a place that resists any linear genealogy. Andrii Portnov introduces this place—Dnipro (Ekaterynoslav/Katerynoslav, Dnipropetrovsk/Dnepropetrovsk)—as a city without ‘a single national majority, well-established self-identification, or a broadly recognizable mythology,’ and manages to avoid ascribing it one. His ‘entangled history’ approach combines a thorough, sometimes truly fascinating exploration of local circumstances with a broader perspective on the dynamics that Dnipro embodied in the pre-1917 and Soviet imperial formations. The book discusses the overlapping (national and social) revolutions, cultural movements in the city, considerable economic transformations, local religious and linguistic patterns, and aspects of basic everyday coexistence, cooperation, and competition of the city’s various ethnic and confessional communities. Dnipro is simultaneously a microhistory and a decentered history of ‘European,’ imperial, and national modernity. Finally, Portnov’s ‘entangled history’ explains the evolution of typically ‘Eastern Ukrainian’ Dnipropetrovsk into a center of Ukrainian resistance against pro-Russian separatism after the Euromaidan (2013–14) and later, its defiance of Russian aggression. The book thus offers a unique view, still lacking in English, on modern Ukrainianness. It deserves to be broadly read by all those interested in historical complexity and human agency’s potential to overcome the determinism of the past.”
— Marina Mogilner, Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European Intellectual History, University of Illinois at Chicago
"This is a brilliant study of Katerynoslav-Dnipropetrovsk-Dnipro – the changes of the name are a first indicator of the dramatic fate of this extraordinary urban project. Andrii Portnov draws a fascinating portrait of the city that evolved from a new Athens in Southern Russia to a Soviet Manchester and finally to a stronghold of Ukrainian independence. He explains the rather surprising resistance against the covert Russian aggression in 2014 against the background of the multifaceted history of the city. Portnov takes an innovative, methodologically reflected approach and includes cultural, religious, social and political aspects in his nuanced analysis. As Portnov convincingly shows, the entangled history of Dnipro can be read as a history of Ukraine in nuce.”
— Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schmid, Eastern European Studies, University of St. Gallen (Switzerland)
“The fascinating city of Dnipro on the river bearing the same name is indispensable for understanding modern Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe. Surprisingly for the city of its size and importance, very little has been written about Dnipro. Andriy Portnov’s pathbreaking study finally gives the city its due. Portnov promises and delivers an ‘entangled history’ at its very best. Not only are the fates of the city’s many ethnic groups intertwined and interdependent, the city itself is written into a broader story of global processes and events that have shaped the modern world. As the book shows those global forces themselves are interlocked and materialize in all their complexity only in concrete tangible places, and Andriy Portnov’s Dnipro is one of those places.”
— Andriy Zayarnyuk, Professor of History, University of Winnipeg
“Professor Portnov has written an outstanding history of Dnipro, one of the most interesting cities in Ukraine. He reveals how, by the turn of the twentieth century, this Russian imperial outpost in the, South named Katerynoslav after Catherine II, became a ‘new Manchester,’ an industrial hub straddling a major river, the Dnipro. In 1926 the Soviets renamed it Dnipropetrovsk after the local Bolshevik leader Hryhorii Petrovsky. A major center of Jewish settlement that produced important Zionist leaders, Dnipropetrovsk saw the brutal murder of its Jews during the Holocaust. The Soviets then turned it into a well-supplied ‘closed city’ producing intercontinental ballistic missiles. By examining the situational responses of the local elites and civil society, Portnov solves the puzzle of present-day Dnipro, now stripped of Petrovsky’s ghost: how this eastern Ukrainian city became a Ukrainian stronghold against Russian aggression. This book makes a major contribution to the field.”
— Serhy Yekelchyk, author of Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know
