Tatiana Kardinalowska’s Ever-Present Past is an exceptional and extremely readable testimony of the cataclysmic times she witnessed—the Ukrainian Revolution, the subsequent civil war and Ukrainian-Soviet War, and the first fifteen years of Bolshevik rule in Ukraine, including the periods of Ukrainization and then Stalinist terror. The daughter of a tsarist general, Kardinalowska (1899–1993) survived the terror of the 1930s and the Second World War and became a postwar refugee in the United States. Toward the end of her life she undertook to tell her story largely because of her contacts with major Ukrainian political and literary figures during the years she was the young wife of Vsevolod Holubovych, a prominent member of the Ukrainian Central Rada and the prime minister of the Ukrainian People’s Republic from January to March 1918, and later of Serhii Pylypenko, the leader of the Pluh association of Ukrainian peasant writers and an influential cultural activist in Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s. Like thousands of other members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, both Holubovych and Pylypenko were arrested and perished during the terror of the 1930s. Kardinalowska’s account is both authentic and moving. Her memoirs acquaint the reader with well-known Ukrainian politicians and writers. Holubovych, Pylypenko, Mykola Khvylovy, Volodymyr Sosiura, Valeriian Polishchuk, Ostap Vyshnia, and Yurii Smolych come alive with all their individual faults and virtues. Kardinalowska’s accounts of less noted persons—particularly her depiction of the NKVD interrogators and state prosecutors who persecuted Pylypenko and with whom she tried to intercede—provide some of the most revealing material in the volume. Her recollections of the Soviet Ukrainian famine-genocide of 1932–33 are among the most moving passages in the text.