Politics in Europe have for many years come color-coded. In Ukraine the dominant color has been orange of late, but with undertones of red. Many wish to add a border of blue and gold, and others want more blue and white added to the red. Tim Snyder has written a very colorful biography of a fascinating, eccentric character, Habsburg Archduke Wilhelm. The skullduggery, derring-do, and scandals of Wilhelm's life and his tragic end, dying of tuberculosis in a Soviet prison, make this book an entertaining, even moving, read; but the overall effect is rather spoiled by the heavy layer of black-yellow varnish that Snyder insists on giving to Ukrainian history.

The book is not only colorful, it too is color-coded: gold for the Habsburg imperial ideology; blue for Wilhelm's childhood next to the Adriatic; green for Wilhelm's experience of “oriental Europe” and his embrace of the Ukrainian national cause; red for war and revolution after 1914; grey for “shadow kings” when it looked to Wilhelm that he might become king of Ukraine; white for Wilhelm's participation in the Reaction; lilac for his gay life in Paris; brown for his dabbling in Fascism and National Socialism; black, I assume, for then becoming anti-Nazi, a member of the ÖVP and anti-Communist; and finally orange for Wilhelm's dying for a Ukrainian cause that came to full fruition in the orange revolution.

As one can gather from this list, Wilhelm's was an intriguing life, and much of it is well told, even if the florid style might be too much at times. Snyder tries to show a Habsburg dynasty who, at least in one of its more junior lines, tried to join the nationalist bandwagon rather than oppose it. This is not the first time this had happened. As Snyder neglects to mention, Archduke Johann had tried to co-opt German nationalism against Napoleon, but the case Snyder has latched onto is interesting. As Snyder tells it, when Archduke Stefan succeeded to the properties of Archduke Albrecht, especially to the estate of Żywiec in the very western part of Galicia, he set about becoming the Polish Habsburg. Two daughters married into the Polish aristocracy, and Albrecht and Leo became strong supporters of the Polish cause. Wilhelm, the youngest son, rebelled and became a supporter of the “Ukrainian” cause in Galicia. (Oddly, the term “Ruthenian” is not mentioned at all in the book.) The fortunes of World War I might have brought crowns for both Stefan and Wilhelm, had the Central Powers won the war; but as they did not, the Polonophilic branch became good Poles, and the Ukrainophilic Wilhelm a free-floating Habsburg in interwar Europe.

Snyder claims that Wilhelm was named by Stefan after the one Habsburg to have been (almost) king of Poland. I have my doubts, but it is ironic that the twentieth-century Wilhelm also shared his namesake's fate of failing to gain a crown, if a Ukrainian one rather than Polish. Given this failure, Wilhelm derailed in the interwar period, getting involved in Ludendorffian plots and, of all people, Ignaz Trebitsch Lincoln, only to be entangled with a fraudster in Paris. In the late 1930s, he then sank first into Austro-Fascism and then, worst of all for a Habsburg, Nazism. At some point (perhaps in 1942), he saw the error of his ways: he began spying for Western intelligence and trying to wean Ukrainian nationalists from their German connections. He continued this perilous hobby in postwar Vienna, hence his kidnapping and arrest by the Soviets and subsequent death.

Snyder uses this life to make some interesting points about the nature of nationalism, especially Ukraine nationalism, as a nationalism of choice, and of the supranational or nonnational aspects of Europe past and present. Yet his characterization of modern Ukraine as “Wilhelm's project” (259) suggests too much identification with his biographical subject. Generally, Snyder is informative when dealing with Wilhelm's personal life, authoritative on Polish and Ukrainian politics, especially during World War I, but oddly superficial, even misinformed, when things get closer to Vienna. The troops who invaded tsarist Ukraine under Karl Philipp Schwarzenberg in 1812 would be surprised to learn that Austria was neutral at that point (13); Austrian politicians today would be equally perplexed to read that Austria abandoned its neutrality when it joined the European Union in 1995 (258). Snyder's book does, however, offer us a revealing view of the twentieth century from the perspective of a Habsburgian Ukrainophile.