Author: Volodymyr Kravchenko

Ukraine’s Presidential Elections: The Historical Dimension

Posted on by Volodymyr Kravchenko
Ukraine’s Presidential Elections: The Historical Dimension

As a historian, I do like all presidential elections in Ukraine. They are brief moments of veritas, when all the hidden social threads of history become visible for outsiders—especially when these threads repeat themselves. But as a Ukrainian, I do not usually like what I see. Each presidential election looks like either Judgement Day or a dangerous tightrope walk in a circus tent—you know what I mean—and even more importantly, history sometime repeats itself. Hundreds…

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‘Experts’ on Ukraine: All Hands on Deck!

Posted on by Volodymyr Kravchenko

‘Experts’ on Ukraine: All Hands on Deck! (Re: Vladimir Golstein, “Why Everything You’ve Read About Ukraine Is Wrong” (5/19/2014) To put it plainly, it has been a long time since I read so shoddy a text signed by a representative of an academic corporation as the article by an American Slavist at Brown University, Vladimir Golstein, published in Forbes on May 19 of this year.

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Ukraine after Yanukovych

Posted on by Volodymyr Kravchenko

Ukraine after Yanukovych through a Historian’s Eyes Volodymyr Kravchenko What we see in Ukraine today is the further dismantling of the Soviet order that took shape back in the times of Leonid Brezhnev. That was the period that saw the formation and rise of most of the present-day Ukrainian political, bureaucratic, and business elite. They include the just-replaced head of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, who is, fortunately, safe and sound; the head of the…

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Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia

Posted on by Volodymyr Kravchenko
Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia

Volodymyr Kravchenko Reviews Marcel H. van Herpen’s Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia Marcel H. van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 278 pp. Russia’s condition in recent years and everything associated with it has been attracting ever-increasing attention on the part of Western observers and politicians. The armed Russo-Ukrainian conflict of 2014, spilling across national boundaries, has added…

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