Syllabus
Week 1
Introduction: who tells Ukraine’s history?
Week 2
On the eve of independence. Chornobyl. Political pluralization. Rukh.
Week 3
The early 1990s. Miners’ protests. Snap presidential elections.
Week 4
The late 1990s. Consolidation of the presidential power and oligarchic system.
Week 5
Kuchmagate. Yuschenko’s economic reforms. Mass protests.
Week 6
The Orange Revolution and its bitter aftermath.
Week 7
Yanukovych’s revanche. The ‘family’ and patronal consolidation after 2010.
Week 8
The chronicles of the Maidan. Mid-term test.
Week 9
The annexation of Crimea. Failed Russian spring. The beginning of the Russian invasion.
Week 10
Poroshenko’s Presidency: partial reforms or national consolidation?
Week 11
The rise of ocular democracy: Zelensky.
Week 12
The big war of 2022: contexts and consequences.
Annotation
The course covers post-1991 developments in Ukraine with a twofold focus: on the one hand, exposing internal political and social transformations related to the post-Soviet transit, as well as their entanglements; and, on the other hand, highlighting points of divergence from the trajectories taken by neighbouring post-Soviet states, most importantly, Belarus and Russia. Given the recent salient shift in East European studies towards their re-centralization, or disentangling from the Russocentric perspective, outlining meaningful differences in Ukraine’s political makeup enables further elaborations towards the set goal.
The course is built in the chronological perspective by covering subsequent stages in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where certain turning points punctuate this development: elections, mass protests, and military tensions.