The Ukrainian Weekly 2003, No.11
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Decommunization, Memory Laws, and “Builders of Ukraine in the 20Th Century”*
ACTA SLAVICA IAPONICA, TOMUS 39, PP. 1–22 Articles Decommunization, Memory Laws, and “Builders of Ukraine in the 20th Century”* David R. Marples INTRODUCTION This paper provides a critical overview of the Decommunization campaign in Ukraine up to the spring of 2017, which marked two years since the beginning of the program introduced by the four Memory Laws ratified by Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko in May 2015. In reality, the process of removing Soviet statues and memorabilia began well before Euromaidan, especially in Western Ukraine where Lenin monuments and others of the Soviet period were swiftly removed from the late 1980s into the early years of independence.1 But I address the formal campaign headed by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (hereafter referred to as INR), which began in the spring of 2015. I provide an analysis of the program and its results, the results of opinion polls, some critiques and also the reasons why it remains controversial, particularly outside Ukraine. The particular focus is 20th century “builders of Ukrainian independence” as defined by these laws because this question has solicited the most attention, along with the physical changes that have resulted to the map of Ukraine, mon- uments, and memorials. Decommunization has a wider context than the Mem- ory Laws, including a program of administrative decentralization and a new Education Law, introduced in draft form on September 5 and approved by the president on September 25, 2017, which will gradually render the Ukrainian language as the only language of instruction in schools and higher educational institutions.2 Clearly the decentralization program cannot be fulfilled while a conflict situation remains in the eastern parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. -
Ukraine's Party System Evolution: 1990-2017
RAZUMKOV CENTRE UKRAINE’S PARTY SYSTEM EVOLUTION: 1990-2017 The publication is supported by the Ukrainian Office of Konrad Adenauer Foundation 2017 UKRAINE`S PARTY SYSTEM EVOLUTION: 1990-2017 / Edited by Yu.Yakymenko. – Kyiv: Razumkov Сentre, 2017. – p.62 This publication presents an abridged version of the Analytical Report by the Razumkov Centre that examines the emergence and further transformation of Ukraine’s party system in 1990-2017. We have examined key drivers of change at each evolution stage, such as legislation on political parties and elections; political regime; most significant societal cleavages, nature and consequences of their influence; analysed current trends in Ukraine’s party system development. The publication will be useful for everyone interested in post-independence nation-building processes in Ukraine, development of political parties and the party system, experience of political transformations in post-Soviet countries. © Razumkov Centre, 2017 © “Zapovit Publishing House”, 2017 UKRAINE’S PARTY SYSTEM EVOLUTION: 1990-2017 olitical parties are an important institution of a democratic society, P which ensures aggregation and articulation of the interests of various social groups. Interaction among parties in their struggle for power and the exercise of political power by them form a party system. The process of party system formation in Ukraine has been going on for more than 25 years. This publication represents a shortened version of the Razumkov Centre’s report, which examines the fundamental stages of the party system formation in 1990-2017, including intra-party processes, institutional legal and socio-political conditions for their activities and inter-party relations.1 1. STUDY METHODOLOGY The Razumkov Centre’s study uses an approach that combines elements of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the analysis of party system dynamics and takes into account changes of the three following components that define party system and/or affect it. -
Parliamentary Assembly Assemblée Parlementaire
Parliamentary Assembly Assemblée parlementaire Committee on Rules of Procedure, Immunities and Institutional Affairs Commission du Règlement, des immunités et des affaires institutionnelles Committee on Rules of Procedure, Immunities and Institutional Affairs Commission du Règlement, des immunités et des affaires institutionnelles AS/Pro (2012) 03 def 24 January 2012 ardoc03_2012 Committee on Rules of Procedure, Immunities and Institutional Affairs Challenge on procedural grounds of the still unratified credentials of the Ukrainian parliamentary delegation Report presented by Mr Egidijus Vareikis, Chairperson, on behalf of the committee A. Opinion to the President of the Parliamentary Assembly 1 1. On 23 January 2012, the still unratified credentials of the parliamentary delegation of Ukraine were challenged on procedural grounds, in accordance with Rule 7 of the Assembly’s Rules of Procedure, on the ground that the composition of the delegation did not satisfy the criterion of fair representation of the political parties or groups. 2. At its meeting on 24 January 2012, the Committee on Rules of Procedure, Immunities and Institutional Affairs examined the various objections raised and established that the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly was appointed in compliance with Article 25 of the Statute of the Council of Europe and Rule 6 of the Assembly's Rules of Procedure, as regards the fair representation of political parties and groups in the delegation. 3. Consequently, the Committee concludes that the credentials of the Ukrainian parliamentary delegation should be ratified. 4. However, the Committee notes that the list of members of the Ukrainian delegation as transmitted to the President of the Parliamentary Assembly contains misleading information in particular as regards the political affiliation of three members: Mr Valeriy Pysarenko, representative, and MM Oleksandr Feldman and Volodymyr Pylypenko, substitutes, listed as members of the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc, actually sit in the parliament under other political labels. -
Ukraine and Russia People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives
EDITED BY i AGNIESZKA PIKULICKA-WILCZEWSKA & RICHARD SAKWA Ukraine and Russia People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives This e-book is provided without charge via free download by E-International Relations (www.E-IR.info). It is not permitted to be sold in electronic format under any circumstances. If you enjoy our free e-books, please consider leaving a small donation to allow us to continue investing in open access publications: http://www.e-ir.info/about/donate/ i Ukraine and Russia People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives EDITED BY AGNIESZKA PIKULICKA-WILCZEWSKA & RICHARD SAKWA ii E-International Relations www.E-IR.info Bristol, England First published 2015 New version 2016 ISBN 978-1-910814-14-7 (Paperback) ISBN 978-1-910814-00-0 (e-book) This book is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license. You are free to: • Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material Under the following terms: • Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. • NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission. Please contact [email protected] for any such enquiries. Other than the license terms noted above, there are no restrictions placed on the use and dissemination of this book for student learning materials / scholarly use. -
Conviction of Communist Regime Crimes in Ukraine
Country Report conference “Crimes of the Communist Regimes“ 24-26 February 2010, Prague Volodymyr Viatrovych, Candidate of Historical Sciences Director of the SSU Branch State Archives Conviction of Communist regime crimes in Ukraine Ukraine is one of the countries which suffered most from the Communist regime crimes. Millions of the Ukrainians had been repressed by the Communist regime since 1918 when Ukraine was occupied by Bolshevik’s troops till 1991 when at last it gained independence. Ukraine became an experimental ground for communists where they perfected scenarios of seizure of power and repressions against dissidents. Later, after 1939 these scenarios were used in the Baltic States, and since 1945 – in Central and Eastern European States. A well-known lawyer, the author of term Genocide and one of the authors of Convention On Condemnation of Genocides Rafael Lemkin called the communists policy in Ukraine a classical sample of Soviet Genocide1 with the following stages: repressions against intelligentsia, liquidation of Ukrainian national church, subduing of the main layers of Ukrainian people – peasants who were violently hit by artificial famine. The last step was the dispersion of the Ukrainians by means of deportation and colonization of their lands by the representatives of other nations. Lemkin saw in communist actions a clear-cut consistent plan aimed at elimination of Ukrainian nation. Apparently this plan was not similar to final solution of Jewish problem by the Nazi and did not provide for Holocaust of all the Ukrainians. However, according to Rafael Lemkin the realization of this plan would have meant that Ukraine would perish just as if all the Ukrainians were killed because it would lose the part of the nation which preserved and developed its culture, belief, unifying ideas which paved the way for it and gave a soul to it i.e. -
Citizenship and Nation-Building in Ukraine
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE Citizenship and nation-building in Ukraine by Oxana Shevel Purdue University ■ PAPER PRESENTED AT THE WORKSHOP Understanding the Transformation of Ukraine: Assessing What Has Been Learned, Devising a Research Agenda Chair of Ukrainian Studies University of Ottawa (Canada) 15-16 October 2004 DRAFT/NOT FOR CITATION ■ 1. Introduction Although citizenship policy is a key element of nation-building in any state, citizenship policy has been a rather neglected area of Ukrainian studies. Just a handful of articles on the citizenship problem and policy in Ukraine have been written,1 and, to my knowledge, there is no book-length treatment on the subject. This apparent scholarly neglect could be attributed to the fact that in the post-Soviet Ukraine citizenship issue turned out to be a “dog that did not bark.” Unlike in Estonia and Latvia, where initial citizenship laws dis- enfranchised a significant part of the non-titular populations from citizenship, in Ukraine the first citizenship law embraced the so-called “zero option” and extended Ukrainian cit- izenship to all permanent residents of Ukraine. In subsequent years, the only aspect of citizenship policy that attracted media attention was the issue of dual citizenship, specif- ically Ukraine’s disagreements with Russia over it. Dual citizenship controversy found its reflection in the press headlines in the early and the mid-1990s, but has since receded from the headlines and has not received much scholarly attention either. In sum, Ukrainian citizenship policy has been an understudied issue. This paper makes a case against such neglect. It argues that important insights into the larger dynamic of 1. -
Freedom in the World - Ukraine (2010)
Page 1 of 6 Print Freedom in the World - Ukraine (2010) Political Rights Score: 3 * Capital: Kyiv Civil Liberties Score: 2 * Status: Free Population: 46,030,000 Overview Infighting among Ukraine’s top politicians ahead of the 2010 presidential election left key offices vacant for many months in 2009, and populist fiscal policies further jeopardized the country’s economy amid a serious global recession. Perceptions of widespread corruption grew, although the exclusion of a suspicious intermediary company from gas deals between Russia and Ukraine indicated some progress. Also during the year, the authorities arrested a key suspect in the 2000 murder of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, but investigators had yet to identify the officials who ordered the killing. Despite its numerous problems, Ukraine continued to boast a vibrant civil society and a pluralistic political environment. In December 1991, Ukraine’s voters approved independence from the Soviet Union in a referendum and elected Leonid Kravchuk as president. Communists won a plurality in parliamentary elections in 1994, and Leonid Kuchma defeated Kravchuk in that year’s presidential poll. Over time, Kuchma’s government faced growing criticism for extensive, high-level corruption and the erosion of political rights and civil liberties. The 1999 presidential election—in which Kuchma defeated Communist Party challenger Petro Symonenko—was marred by media manipulation, intimidation, and the abuse of state resources. The 2000 murder of independent journalist Heorhiy Gongadze and credible evidence that appeared to implicate Kuchma contributed to mass demonstrations and calls for the president’s dismissal. Reformist former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine bloc led the party-list portion of the 2002 parliamentary elections, marking the first electoral success for the democratic opposition since independence. -
Continuing Controversy in Ukrainian Politics and External Relations
2The Holodomor: Continuing Controversy in Ukrainian Politics and External Relations Blake Hulnick Following Stalin’s rise to power in the early years of the Soviet Union, one of the regime’s first priorities was a rapid collectivization of the agricultural process, beginning as early as 1917. Where agrarian peasants in the “bread basket” of the new Soviet Union, encompassing much of present-day Ukraine, once cultivated grain on an individual basis, they were now called upon by the Soviet authorities to shift to a cooperative agricultural mode. The transition was rocky, replete with peasant revolts and other resistance to Moscow’s central planning scheme. By 1931, however, the collectivization process was proceeding apace, and authorities implemented a grain procurement plan with quotas for collection from individual regions. Quotas were based on harvest estimates from the previous year, and when harvests, particularly in Ukraine, failed to meet these expectations in 1932, the Soviet government took drastic measures, including authorizing coercive methods of grain procurement, and, where grain was not available, the seizure of all other available foodstuffs. The resulting 57 Insights famine in 1932 and 1933, especially pronounced in the ethnically Ukrainian areas of Ukraine and Russia, claimed the lives of several million people. The apparent ethnic specificity of the famine’s effects and Stalin’s known conflicts with Ukrainian nationalism led many to term the event an ethnically targeted campaign, or genocide. The precise number of people who died in the famine, subsequently termed the “Holodomor” by Ukrainian historians, remains the subject of intense debate. Similarly, the causes and motivations for the grain procurement methods and the destruction they caused remains a particularly divisive issue among politicians and historians in Ukraine, Russia, and the Ukrainian diaspora. -
Memory of Stalinist Purges in Modern Ukraine
The Gordian Knot of Past and Present: Memory of Stalinist Purges in Modern Ukraine HALYNA MOKRUSHYNA Thesis submitted to the University of Ottawa in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the PdD in Sociology School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa © Halyna Mokrushyna, Ottawa, Canada, 2018 ii Table of Contents Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... iv Preface ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Methodology ....................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Research question ............................................................................................................................................................................ 10 Conceptual framework ................................................................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 2: Social memory framework ......................................................................................................................................... -
The Ukrainian Left During and After the Maidan Protests
THE UKRAINIAN LEFT DURING AND AFTER THE MAIDAN PROTESTS Study requested by the DIE LINKE. delegation in the GUE/NGL Volodymyr Ishchenko [email protected] ABSTRACT The paper seeks to present a balanced, well documented and nuanced discussion covering the full range of positions of the Ukrainian left and activities in relation to the Maidan and Anti-Maidan movements and the war. It covers all the major groups and parties who at least identify with the socialist and/or anarchist tradition: from ‘old left’ parties originating from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to ‘new left’ organisations, unions and informal initiatives that did not have any relation whatsoever to the CPSU. The paper gives a brief overview of the most important (and often still unresolved) questions about major political events in Ukraine starting from 2013. Then it describes and explains the positions and political activities of the various Ukrainian organisations on the left towards the Maidan uprising, the Anti-Maidan movement and the war in eastern Ukraine. The paper attempts to answer the following questions. How did different left wing organisations try to intervene in the Maidan and Anti-Maidan movements and how successful were their interventions? To what extent were they able to defend the left agenda against liberals and (both Ukrainian and Russian) nationalists? To what extent did they rather follow the agenda of their political opponents? What were the differences not only between the different left wing organisations but also between -
The Holodomor of 1932-33: Papers from the 75Th-Anniversary
The Holodomor of 1932-33 Papers from the 75th-Anniversary Conference on the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide University of Toronto, November 1, 2007 THE HARRIMAN REVIEW November 2008 HARRIMAN REVIEW Volume 16, Number 2 November 2008 The Holodomor of 1932-33 Papers from the 75th-Anniversary Conference on the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (University of Alberta) Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine (Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, University of Toronto) Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, Toronto University of Toronto, November 1, 2007 Andrij Makuch, Guest Editor Frank E. Sysyn Preface 1 Mykola Riabchuk Holodomor: The Politics of Memory and Political Infi ghting in Contemporary Ukraine 3 Liudmyla Grynevych The Present State of Ukrainian Historiography on the Holodomor and Prospects for Its Development 10 Hennadii Boriak Holodomor Archives and Sources: The State of the Art 21 Iryna Matiash Archives in Russia on the Famine in Ukraine 36 Cover: “Earth” (Zemlia) by Bohdan Pevny, reproduced by permission of the Patriarch Mstyslav I Ukrainian Museum of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA. The Harriman Review is published quarterly by the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Copyright © 2008 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. All rights reserved. Harriman Institute 420 West 118th Street, MC 3345, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027 Preface diaspora has played a signifi cant role in this process, the hen, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Ukrainian government has played an ever greater role by Ukrainian diaspora communities in the West sponsoring offi cial commemorations of the Holodomor initiated plans to commemorate the fi ftieth W and raising the issue of its recognition as a genocide by anniversary of the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, foreign governments and international organizations. -
From Kuchma to Yushchenko Ukraine’S 2004 Presidential Elections and the Orange Revolution
From Kuchma to Yushchenko Ukraine’s 2004 Presidential Elections and the Orange Revolution Taras Kuzio The elections of 2004 KRAINE’S presidential election on October 31, U2004, had far greater political significance than completed Ukraine’s transition merely selecting the country’s third post-communist president. The election also represented a de facto ref- from a post-Soviet state to a erendum on President Leonid Kuchma’s ten years in European state. office, which were marred by political crisis and scan- dal throughout most of his second term. The principal scandal—Kuchma’s complicity in the murder of an op- position journalist, Heorhiy Gongadze—began in Novem- ber 2000 and has come to be known as “Kuchmagate.”1 Hostility to Kuchma helped to revive and bolster civil society and opposition groups, giving them four years to organize and prepare for the 2004 elections. Much of this groundwork became apparent during the Orange Revolution—named for Yushchenko’s campaign color—that followed the November 21 runoff between Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. In April 2001, after parliament voted no confidence in Yushchenko’s government, the locus of opposition to Kuchma shifted from the Communist Party (KPU) to Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party and the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc. The KPU and its Socialist Party (SPU) allies had been the main source of opposition to Kuchma from 1993, when the KPU was again legal- ized as a political party, until 2000–2001, when national democrats and centrists joined forces under the Yushchenko government. Yushchenko’s shift to opposition against Kuchma and his oligarchic allies set the stage for the electoral TARAS KUZIO is a visiting professor at the Institute for European, Rus- struggles in 2002 and 2004.