Dr. Serhii Plokhii

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and the Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. His current research is focused on the history of the American airbases on the Soviet territory in 1944-1945. Taking off from airfields in Britain and Italy, American airplanes bombed their targets in Central Europe and landed behind the Soviet lines, repeating the bombing on their way back to Britain or Italy. The three airbases located in Poltava region of Ukraine became the only place where the allies got the chance to live and fight side by side. In his research based on recently declassified archives of the Red Army counterintelligence services, he will explore the experiences and perceptions of rank-and-file participants in Soviet-American encounters and reconstruct the history of the failure of the World War II alliance from below. The book based on his current research will be released by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2019.