The Birth of Ukrainian Dissent (original) (raw)
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in the struggle for democracy (1980's -1991) In a generally sociological sense, the youth is the most capable part of the population. It differs from other demographic groups by the greater obsession, cohesion, mobility, and release from the dogma of totalitarian consciousness, faster learns everything new, perspective 1 , its consciousness and the lifestyle is less weighed by the negative traditions, stereotypes of mentality and psychology.
Learning to Be Free: Freedom and its Counterfeits in Post-Soviet Ukraine
This presentation seeks to carefully analyze the cultural and social context of contemporary Ukraine as to its impact on the understanding and exercise of the human person’s freedom. Having this in mind, we conceive of freedom as the properly personal, fully autonomous and dignified exercise of the person’s power for self-transcendence in his response to values and embodied in his self-determination that eminently manifests itself in his personal gesture of self-giving. We also attempt to draw the profile of human freedom by contrasting its genuine manifestations with its counterfeits that tend to substitute for it in the lived experience of Ukrainian fellow-citizens. Three major cultural mechanisms are brought to the fore in this respect, namely, post-colonial, post-Soviet and neo-liberal capitalist conditions of the human persons’ shaping of their individual and collective life-projects. Thus we are going to expose some of the critical factors which can jeopardize the understanding and corrupt the exercise of personal freedom to which our fellow Ukrainians prove to be most susceptible because of their particular social and cultural history and its legacy in the present. We invoke the idea of the project of building a nation-state as a response to the long post-colonial status of Ukraine, which at its extreme commands an unwarranted allegiance to collective organism and its inherited or imagined traditions at the expense of the responsible exercise of freedom and can lead to the exclusion of constructed strangers from participation in social and cultural exchange. We bring up for discussion the Soviet remnants of the present socio-cultural reality that continue to exert their power over the minds of many people or are half-consciously revitalized as an allegedly viable strategy for coping with the exigencies of present life-conditions dominated by ruthless neo-liberal capitalist market forces. In the wake of such a life-strategy, people tend to sacrifice their freedom and their personal cultural and social creativity to the collective whole of state power charged with the authority to substitute for individual life choices. And, finally we denounce neo-liberal consumerism in its extreme alienation of the human person from his community and selfless commitment with others as indispensable conditions and manifestations of genuine human freedom. Last but not least, we try to identify those factors that might prove conducive to the proper awakening and exercise of the human person’s genuine freedom as it is practiced in the particular social and cultural circumstances of present-day Ukraine.
SHS Web of Conferences
The article deals with the social and cultural activities of Volodymyr Naumenko (1852–1919), a prominent representative of the Ukrainian progressive intellectuals of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, teacher and methodologist, editor and publisher, scholar and politician, educator and active public figure. Some aspects of V. Naumenko’s creative activity aimed at reviving the national consciousness of the Ukrainian people through the construction of an educational system on a democratic, national basis, the preparation and publishing of textbooks in the native language, the training of teaching staff for public schools are highlighted. The results of the active participation of a figure in such educational societies of the specified period as “Hromada”, “Prosvita”, “Society for promotion of primary education”, “Kyiv Literacy Society” are presented. V. Naumenko’s views on the process and features of teacher training for public schools are characterized.
Dobko T. Learning to be free: Freedom and its Counterfeits in Post-Soviet Ukraine / Taras Dobko
2015
Contemporary Ukraine is undergoing a dramatic social and cultural change that affects the lives of the majority of its citizens and residents. Like everything that happens in human affairs, this change could be conceived of as a genuinely philosophical event. This fact urges intellectuals and scholars from all fields of study, striving to interpret the data of social life and understand the whole picture, to look for the philosophical categories and arguments suitable for the task.
Young Radicals and Independent Statehood: The Idea of a Ukrainian Nation-State, 1890-1895
Slavic Review, 1982
An assumption common to many modern political theorists is that the nation-state is the natural goal of national movements. But for the submerged peoples of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the formulation of the goal of independent statehood required a leap in ideological development from essentially cultural and social to overtly political nationalism. In this article, I am interested in the ideological leap taken by the Ukrainians, particularly in the role played by the young intelligentsia in the formulation of the goal of a nation-state. My argument has three stages: a narrative account of events, designed to correct misconceptions in the existing historiography and to show that the goal of independence was put forward in the context of a generational conflict within the radical intelligentsia; an examination of the opposing ideas advanced by young and old radicals; and an explanation of why the young radicals could formulate the demand for Ukrainian statehood while their sen...
АВSТRАСТ. The article higWights the general trends and features of the formation of the opposition movement in Ukraine from the late 1950s through the 1980s, and examines the forms and methods of the protest movement as well as the specifics of the information and communication activities of Ukrainian dissidents. The study focuses on the mechanism of political repression, the use of criminal legislation in the Ukrainian SSR to punish dissent, and the approximate number of citizens of the republic who were repressed for "anti-Soviet propaganda and activities" from the 1950s through the 1980s.