SUMMARY:

Yaroslav Hrytsak begins by confirming that within Russian academia, Ukrainian Studies is not an entirely legitimate scholarly field. The explanation is a widespread belief that Ukraine as a “failed/nationalized state” has no future and no modern subjectivity. He summarizes the views of historians and politicians in the following sequence: (1) Ukrainian events in general and Euromaidan in particular are based on Ukrainian nationalism; (2) Ukrainian nationalism aims to assert its dominance over a symbolic space delineated by language and historical memory; and (3) The Ukrainian project is “a minority faith” in Ukraine, so it would not have prevailed had it not been for the support of some third party − the West, or to be exact, the United States. Hrytsak then analyzes the experience of Euromaidan, the elections of June 25, 2014, which revealed the actual low popularity of the nationalist parties, and the changing and narrowing internal dividing lines within Ukrainian society in the light of these false stereotypes. His own understanding of the situation is based on the results of two waves of the World Values Survey (under the academic supervision of Ronald Inglehart), which show that Russia was stuck in “survival values” during the aughts, while in Ukraine there was a noticeable shift toward “values of self-expression.” Therein lies, in Hrytsak’s opinion, the major drama of the contemporary Russian–Ukrainian relationship: the Ukrainians of Euromaidan are preoccupied with modernization and values, whereas Putin’s Russia worries about security and identities. It is this difference that affects the dominant academic discourse in Russia regarding Ukraine – a discourse that strives to prove that Ukraine, incapable of modernizing itself, is bound to become mired in historical legacies such as the national question, internal partitions, and so on.