Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.Sample Book Insights:#1 Ukraine is a borderland country, and as such, they have inherited a legacy of violence. They have never been an independent state, and their neighbors have never recognized the existence of Ukrainian history.#2 Kiev is a city that visitors usually hate, but those who live there grow to love it. Its defining features are failures, absences. The city’s residents are living lives of a precariousness that is unknown in the West.#3 The past that gives Kiev its unique glamour is not the brash commercial city of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago, which was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilization.#4 The Scandinavians came to Russia in the eighth century as merchants, but they ended up ruling the country. They built their first outpost on Lake Ladoga, near St Petersburg, and in 830 they sailed their dragon-headed longboats downriver to the little wooden settlement atop sandstone bluffs that became the trading center of Kiev.