Review of Andrew Harding’s A Small Stubborn Town

Very few nonfiction works which focus on the current war in Ukraine written by non-Ukrainians effectively capture the microcosms of small villages where Ukrainian resilience and perseverance in Russian aggression’s face brews a clever resourcefulness in the village’s inhabitants.

However, Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town might just be the exception. The slim, 140-page hardcover bears the story of Voznesensk, a quiet farming town where Russian forces expect an easy fight since Voznesensk consists of mostly pensioners. Nonetheless, Voznesensk’s residents, like the stalwart Svetlana and the stealthy Serhii, prepare their homes and themselves and lie in wait as Russian tanks approach the valuable Dead Water Bridge.

Located in Mykolaiv Oblast, Voznesensk carries historical significance. Founded in 1795 on the site of the Cossack settlement Sokoly after the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich, the city, during WWII, would be occupied by Axis forces from August 1941 until March 1944. Understanding the city’s historical importance and context helps readers understand how such a legacy might influence Voznesensk’s residents. At first, some readers might be confused at the importance of focusing on such a small town.  Nonetheless, the “seemingly innocuous” city, as Harding discusses, was a strategic goal for Russian forces because of its geographic significance to the Southern Buh River. The Southern Buh, located 30 kilometers north of Voznesensk, provides water for Ukraine’s second-largest nuclear power station, the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant. “If they seized the plant,” Harding writes, “…they would have the country’s entire energy system in their grip.” Thus, ensuring Voznesensk’s survival became a critical task because it also ensured Ukraine’s.

What Harding adeptly highlights, too, is the driving force behind the heroic motivations of those Ukrainians like Svetlana, who watched as Russian soldiers ransacked her home and turned it into a blood-soaked mess. Harding frequently refers to decades-old events like [the siege of] Grozny and asserts that “Plenty of Ukrainians were old enough to remember how the Russian army had destroyed its own city, not once but twice when fighting Chechen separatists in the 1990s.” The author also alludes to Syria, where Russian artillery pummeled and leveled entire cities, and Harding consistently points out that, while for many western readers the war began in 2022, for Ukrainians, it began in 2014 as “they’d watched Russian proxies fight in the Donbas.” Uniquely enough, Harding also manages to capture the extreme duress under which Ukrainians in Russian-occupied villages, towns, and cities lived. He points out that many of the Russian forces “were still waiting to reach the real Ukrainians—the ones who need liberating, the ones who will be grateful, who will throw roses in front of their tanks.” Therefore, historical—as well as personal—memories form the basis of Harding’s difficult, albeit necessary, reportage.

In addition, Harding places a microscope lens over the family relationships that Russia’s full-scale invasion ruptured. Svetlana’s story most adequately captures these ruptures. Despite having been born in Russia, Svetlana “cannot ever imagine going back to Russia now” because “Ukraine is her homeland.” Harding’s depictions of Svetlana’s conversations with her siblings who still reside in Russia show how effectively Russian propaganda, which Svetlana refers to as “Putin’s propaganda,” ultimately brainwashed members of the public like her siblings. Her siblings, like her brother Valeri, frequently tell her that she is making it up, that the Ukrainians are in-fighting with each other and “‘with Nazis.’” Svetlana’s experience, however, is not solitary, and as Harding acknowledges “everyone has relatives across the border, living in a parallel reality.” As a 2022 The New York Times article discusses, an estimated 11 million people in Russia have relatives living in Ukraine, and many of those relatives do not believe the war is real or that Russian forces are killing Ukrainians.

          Moreover, A Small, Stubborn Town establishes why Ukraine’s allies must continue to support Ukraine militarily as it continues to protect its borders and defend its sovereignty. Voznesensk, and the imperative role its residents played in its defense, serves as the primary example. Harding bluntly implies this, saying that the world may never know “what impact the brief, decisive battle in Voznesensk had on the large course of the war in Ukraine.” He posits a few alternative scenarios:  “Perhaps Russian troops would have pushed on and seized the great port city of Odesa. Perhaps the Kremlin would have been able to make an amphibious landing further along the coast. Perhaps Mykolaiv would have fallen too, along with the whole of southern Ukraine. Perhaps the war might have taken a very different turn.”

Nonetheless, Harding acknowledges, as the book concludes, that “the outcome of the wider war remains profoundly uncertain.” Nevertheless, Voznesensk and its story are symbolic of an awe-inspiring force that captured the world’s attention—Ukrainian defiance.

 A Small, Stubborn Town is a gripping account of why Ukraine managed to so effectively thwart Russia’s attempts to fully overrun its territory. The stories in its pages are a testimony to what can happen when a community dedicates itself not only to a cause, but also to its own survival. With snapshot clarity and a real-time narrative structure, it is a book that reminds readers that Ukrainians know for exactly what, and exactly why, they are fighting. It is, after all, a fight for their lives.

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