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For several years now, Russia has been trying to justify her neo-imperialist policies towards Ukraine, promoting the vision of a common “Orthodox civilization,” in reference to the religious and cultural spheres. The Russian Orthodox Church is an important element of “soft power,” whose help the Kremlin authorities are seeking in conducting their policies towards the so-called “near-abroad.” Ukraine comprises an exceptionally important place in this sphere. This book analyzes the role of religion and Eastern Christian communities in Ukrainian social and political life, and the political, social, cultural and civilizational conditions for the development of religious life in Ukrai...
This guide charts national histories and policies, relevant statistics and chronologies, and the identities, programmes, and activities of the full spectrum of ethnically-based parties and organizations in Central and Eastern Europe.
This book contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion about how the diverging experiences of generations and their historical memories play a role in the process of national identity formation. Drawing from narratives gathered within the Ukrainian minority in northern Poland and centered on the collective trauma of Action Vistula, where in 1947 about 140,000 Ukrainians were resettled from south-eastern Poland and relocated to the north-western areas, this study shows that three generations vary considerably with regard to their understandings of home, integration, history and religion. Thus, generational differences are an essential element in the analysis and understanding of social and political change. The findings of this study provide a contribution to debates about the process based nature of national identity, the role of trauma in creating generational consciousness and how generations should be conceptualized.
Yet he begins with the principles of toleration that prevailed in much of early modern eastern Europe and concludes with the peaceful resolution of national tensions in the region since 1989.".
In 1938, on the eve of what would mark the beginning of the Second World War during the international crisis, Eastern Europe was divided – in every sense of the word. New governments, which were generally regarded as national states, rose from the ashes of the old pre-modern Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. However, civic nations were not formed within them; the titular ethnic groups were far from being the only representing populations in these states. The new states in Eastern Europe were the offspring of wars and revolutions. Their borders were initially determined by the rights of the powerful. New borders divided entire peoples, having created the very foundation for inter-state ...
On a February night in Kyiv in 2013, former president of Poland Aleksander Kwaśniewski turned to his friend Pat Cox, the former president of the European Parliament, and joked, "They've got a lot of empty space on this square--an ideal location to put up statues of you and me." Over a year and a half, the two visited Ukraine 27 times, negotiating the release of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, which would allow Ukraine to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union. The Cox-Kwaśniewski mission was part of the EU's final effort to save the Agreement and give millions of Ukrainians the hope of a European future. All the while, Russia was using a trade embargo to draw Ukraine into the Eurasian Union. After an intricate game of lies, bluffing and blackmail, Viktor Yanukovych backed out of closer relations with Europe. Feeling betrayed, Ukrainians took to the streets and a wave of civil unrest was born.
Galicia was created at the first partition of Poland in 1772 and disappeared in 1918. Yet, in slightly over a century, the idea of Galicia came to have meaning for both the peoples who lived there and the Habsburg government that ruled it. Indeed, its memory continues to exercise a powerful fascination for those who live in its former territories and for the descendants of those who emigrated out of Galicia. The idea of Galicia was largely produced by the cultures of two cities, Lviv and Cracow. Making use of travelers' accounts, newspaper reports, and literary works, Wolff engages such figures as Emperor Joseph II, Metternich, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Ivan Franko, Stanisław Wyspiański, Tadeusz "Boy" Żeleński, Isaac Babel, Martin Buber, and Bruno Schulz. He shows the exceptional importance of provincial space as a site for the evolution of cultural meanings and identities, and analyzes the province as the framework for non-national and multi-national understandings of empire in European history.
The Treaty of Riga of March 1921 did not signify real peace. It was soon followed by the outbreak of a Polish-Soviet cold war, which in the early 1920s threatened to reach a boiling point. One of the salient fronts on which it was fought was Ukraine and the Ukrainian question. The means by which it was waged – first by Poland, and subsequently, more successfully, by the Soviets – was by attempts to stir up centrifugal tendencies on enemy territory, leading eventually to the splitting up of the neighboring state along its national seams. Polish-Soviet rivalry over Ukraine had flared up at the Riga peace conference. In the following years both antagonists struggled to win over the sympathies of Ukrainians living on either side of the frontier River Zbrucz (Zbruch) and dispersed in various émigré centers, and the weapons employed were propaganda, diplomacy, nationalities policy, economic projects, political subterfuge, and armed irredentism. Jan Jacek Bruski's book addresses the first, very important phase of this Polish-Soviet tussle.