Steppe and Sky:
Author’s Notes
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2022

I am very fortunate, with a healthy and loving family and a once-troubled small business that has become at least reasonably stable. And a good dog, named Leopold.

In late February, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a massive, unprovoked invasion of his neighbor, Ukraine. Tens of thousands have been killed, many more injured, still more rendered destitute and/or homeless. It is an act of evil that defies description. There is no “both-sides” perspective here: this was, to repeat, an act of evil. As Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya put it:

There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell.

There’s a conflation of support and agree with in modern discourse, and I’ve never accepted that. There are many causes/issues with which I agree, but I’ve never done anything to advance them, so it feels like stolen valor to call myself a “supporter.” I wanted to do more than agree with the need to assist Vlad Putin’s victims. This little company is the platform I have, but changing a Twitter avatar to the steppe-and-sky or adding an “I Stand With Ukraine” graphic to a company newsletter just felt weak and hollow. When I see the destruction of Kyiv and Kharkiv, the slaughtered civilians of Bucha and Irpin, I so easily see the same carnage wreaked in Salzburg or Vienna. I wanted to do more than make a hollow gesture of virtue, and while that good fortunate has brought me many things that money cannot buy, it has not brought me a whole lot of money.

So I decided to try to leverage the thing I can do: write and publish a small book of Ukrainian history. It’s not much, but it’s actually doing something. I doubt that we’ll come close to the numbers I’d hoped to see when we announced the project, but it will still generate many times what I could have donated out of my own pocket, and so I consider it a great success already.

At first, I considered offering a more traditional wargame-related product, a small scenario book like our Campaign Studies, but given the cause it didn’t feel right to raise money for victims of war off a book asking the reader to play at war. That probably would have been fine, but it didn’t quite feel right to me, so we went with a straight work of history.

Steppe and Sky: Essays on Ukraine is exactly what the title promises. It’s a set of essays on Ukrainian history, and a very brief one at that. It only hits the high points. I happen to think it’s a good little book, but it’s by no means a deep and thorough exploration. But for a quick primer, I think it does its job very well.

Russia’s unprovoked aggressive war against Ukraine is more than a military operation. It’s an attempt to extinguish Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian national identity. So we’re going to counter that, in our own very small way, with a small book that tells how Ukraine has a very definite history, culture and identity (although, if Ukrainians didn’t have one before February 2022, they sure as hell have one now).

Ukraine’s history is ancient, rich and deep, and like all lands that history has shaped its modern culture. It’s a history of foreign domination: Mongol, Tatar, Polish, Austrian and Russian. We start with the earliest times, with the Swedish Vikings who founded the early Kyivan Rus state, on through the Mongol destruction of Kyiv (the 1240 destruction, that is), centuries of Polish-Lithuanian rule, the coming of the Russians (and the ethnic cleansing of the steppe), Civil War and the brief spell of independence, Soviet rule and intentional famine (the Holodomor, which starved millions) and Axis occupation.

We originally offered this little book to raise donations for civilian relief in Ukraine; that part’s closed now and we’re selling those books we have left to try to offset some of our costs (which were, as always, more than planned).

You can order Steppe and Sky right here.

Sign up for our newsletter right here. Your info will never be sold or transferred; we'll just use it to update you on new games and new offers.

Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published countless books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold. Leopold approves of this message.

Care to help out with those costs? You can send us some love (and cash) through this link right here.