Lee Lecture: The Fall of the Grand Alliance (1944–45)

Serhii Plokhy joins us to discuss his 2019 book, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen Behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance. Plokhy relied on the declassified KGB and U.S. Air Force documents to examine the reasons for the steady deterioration of relations between the Soviet and American airmen on U.S. bases in Soviet Ukraine during World War II.

While both sides were fighting for the same goal of Germany's unconditional surrender, differences arose that no common purpose could overcome. They can be classified as the clash between democracy and autocracy. Soviet secret policemen watched over the operations, shadowing every move, and eventually trying to prevent fraternization among American servicemen and Soviet citizens, forcing the Americans to leave the bases. The story of the American bases foreshadowed the eventual collapse of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War.

Kyrill Kunakhovich, UVA assistant professor of history and a specialist on the Cold War, moderates the conversation.

Thank you to Parker (A&S '71) and Barbara Lee for sponsoring this lecture series. The Lee Distinguished Lecture Series addresses World War II and its aftermath. The Karsh Institute of Democracy and the UVA Library are proud to co-host this event. Additional co-sponsorship comes from UVA's Center for German Studies and the European Studies Program.

Speakers

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. A leading authority on Eastern Europe and Russia, he has published extensively on the international history of Cold War. His books won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English-language book on the international relations for The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014), Taras Shevchenko National Prize (Ukraine) for The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), and Ballie Gifford Prize and Pushkin House Book Prize, UK for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, (2018). His latest book, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis was released in April 2021.

Kyrill Kunakhovich is an assistant professor in history at the University of Virginia and a historian of modern Europe, with a particular focus on central and eastern Europe in the 20th century. His first book, Communism's Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany, explored the political role of cultural spaces in the Eastern Bloc. Under communist regimes that banned free speech, political discussions shifted to spaces of art: theaters, galleries, concert halls, and youth clubs. Kunakhovich shows how these venues turned into sites of dialogue and contestation. While officials used them to spread the communist message, artists and audiences often flouted state policy and championed alternative visions. Cultural spaces therefore came to function as a public sphere, or a rare outlet for discussing public affairs.

Communism's Public Sphere won the Kulczycki Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; received Honorable Mention for the Oskar Halecki Award from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; and was shortlisted for the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize.