Harvard Book Store welcomes Stephen Kinzer—award-winning writer and correspondent, and Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University—for a discussion of his new book, Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine.
About Boiling Point
From bestselling author Stephen Kinzer, the untold history of America’s secret seventy-five-year struggle in Ukraine that set the stage for today’s war.
The war in Ukraine has dominated world headlines for nearly four years. It caught most people by surprise. Until the Russian invasion in February 2022, few Americans even knew where Ukraine was. Once the fighting began, however, support for its cause surged instinctively–Russia was the aggressor, Ukraine its victim. Yet the war did not explode out of nowhere. For seventy-five years, Moscow and Washington fought over Ukraine in the most sustained covert conflict in modern history. Both sides wanted to keep it hidden. They succeeded–until now.
In this groundbreaking book, Stephen Kinzer tells that story for the first time. Beginning in the refugee camps of postwar Europe, where CIA officers recruited Ukrainians to infiltrate their homeland, it follows generations of rebels, exiles, traitors, and covert operatives through decades of clandestine missions. Nearly all of those early fighters were captured or killed, yet the CIA never gave up. From the late 1940s through the end of the Cold War, American leaders saw Ukrainians as their most effective weapon against Moscow, and they continued to press that strategy after Ukraine’s independence, especially as NATO expanded eastward.
Richly detailed and plot-driven, Boiling Point shows how the United States made Ukraine its most important European project of the twenty-first century, culminating in the Maidan uprising of 2014 and the escalation that led to war. With the vivid narrative and character portrayals that made All the Shah’s Men a classic, Stephen Kinzer reveals the backstory of today’s conflict: the last great untold spy-versus-spy story of our time.
