Book review. Abel Polese. “Limits of a Post-Soviet State,” Ibidem-Verlag, 2016. ISBN 978-3-8382-0845-9

Ukraine’s current fight against Russian aggression carries deep historic resonances which we ignore at our peril.

The research: (1) embraces peculiarities of the current EU foreign policy towards Ukraine; (2) enumerates and analyzes documents, agreements and treaties which establish the frameworks for this policy; (3) discovers the impact of human rights issues on shaping and conducting this policy. Based on the criminal trials against opposition leaders, the…[Read more]

Few people realise that the idea of establishing a Black Sea Union (BSU) – a regional bloc along the Black Sea littoral – was proposed in the immediate aftermath of WWII. This idea was primarily developed and advocated by Yuriy Lypa, a Ukrainian inter-war political thinker (1900-1944). In his books, Lypa described the dominant cultural, pol…[Read more]

Post-communist Ukraine is in the midst of implementing reforms which it missed for centuries. It gradually evolves into a unique geopolitical entity which, finally, acquires a fair chance to be consistent and self-sufficient. However, if the West takes a neutral stance today – as it frequently happened in history – a “decentralized” Ukraine…[Read more]

The article focuses on the Ukrainian geopolitical presence in the Black Sea littoral tracing its development since the beginning of the twentieth century. An attempt is made to predict the future regional policies of Ukraine taking into account ongoing irreversible processes: the recent Ukrainian democratic revolution, early presidential elections…[Read more]

The article outlines the geopolitical rationale behind contemporary Russian expansionism, as well as presents the asymmetric and “hybrid” mechanisms utilized by the Kremlin to solidify its authority in the post-communist space. To do this, the article refers to the findings of American, British, Polish and Ukrainian intellectuals on the nature of…[Read more]

This book highlights the quantitative methods of data mining and information visualization and explores their use in relation to the films and writings of the Russian director, Dziga Vertov. The theoretical basis of the work harkens back to the time when a group of Russian artists and scholars, known as the “formalists,” developed new concepts of…[Read more]

The annexation of Crimea is not an ordinary event in contemporary international relations. Since WWII, there has been no precedent in Europe when one state under dubious premises has forcefully annexed a part of another state. This article scrutinizes the Crimean case in the context of the ongoing Ukrainian crisis and uncovers the rationale behind…[Read more]

The article aims to uncover the nature and distinctive features of the contemporary messianic narrations in the Russian public discourse, as well as estimate their impact on the actual policy-making. For this reason, the article scrutinizes the political philosophy of Aleksandr Dugin, Nataliia Narochnitskaia, Egor Kholmogorov, and Vadim…[Read more]

This article seeks to explore into the impact of 9/11 tragedy on the private lives of ordinary people and individuals and into the associated theme of identity crisis, as reflected in four important post-9/11 poems – “Someone Says They Looked Like Cartwheeling Birds” by Lyn Lifshin, “Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone…[Read more]

This article traces the attempts by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries to devolve economic powers to the regions and the ultimate failure of this project, which was a contributing factor to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows h…[Read more]