Acknowledgements
Throughout the past twenty years, I have been contributing op-ed articles to various periodicals, considering this Kulturtrger job as important as academic writing and lecturing and other related activities. It was David Marples, however, who persuaded me to do this on a regular basis, contributing my monthly comments to the blog Current Politics in Ukraine that he edits through the Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. I was free to cover any topic I wished, from any angle, and even generously allowed to overstep the regular length for op-ed articles of 1,000 words.
The second person that deserves credit for the collection of articles presented here is my publisher Yuri Marchenko who has always supported all my publishing projects and often initiated them himself. The book that emerged is, in a way, a sequel to the previous one that he published back in 2009 under the title Mrs. Simpsons Favorite Gun. The Chronicles of the Orange Defeat. Those chronicles, however, had not been coherent enough, even though they reflected, as the subtitle suggested, both the general tendency of the orange dysfunctional governance and its anticipated end.
The new chronicles of the authoritarian consolidation remain open-ended since I feel it is just too early to predict the time and the way in which Yanukovychs kleptocratic regime might fall. The new chronicles cover the 2010-2012 developments in Ukraine more systematically, with due theoretical digressions and references to suitable explanatory models. At this point, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the American National Endowment for Democracy and Uppsala Centre of Russian and Eurasian Studies for the grants they provided in the past two years, and the excellent opportunity for both research and writing that I enjoyed in Uppsala and Washington, DC.
The chronicles are, in a way, a by-product of my scholarly research that has been focused primarily on attempts to conceptualize the postcommunist transitions in Eastern Europe and place the Ukrainian case within that framework. There were quite a few sources that influenced my understanding and interpretation of political processes in Ukraine. For obvious reasons, I could not refer to all of them properly in editorials. A couple of the most inspiring texts, however, should be mentioned.
First of all, there was the classic book by Robert Putnam Making Democracy Work (special thanks to Prof. Yaroslav Hrytsak who drew my attention to it). Additionally, there were seminal articles by Keith Darden on the blackmail state, Paul DAnieri on Ukraines flawed institutional design, the late Dmitri Furman on post-Soviet imitative democracies, and Thomas Carothers and Lucan Way on the various characteristics of hybrid regimes to which Ukraine definitely belongs.
I am obliged to many more colleagues and friends who shared with me their books, articles, ideas, opinions and, sometimes, bread and wine and living space. Needless to say, however, no persons or institutions share responsibility for the opinions expressed in this book or the possible mistakes made by the author.
I would like to dedicate this book to my mother in law, a Holodomor survivor, who died last year in Kyiv while I was in the United States. Throughout her life, she proved to be a person of exemplary integrity, diligence, purposefulness, and strong commitment to her patriotic principles. May her dream about a free and progressive Ukraine come true.
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The major part of this book (Chronicles) consists of the articles published monthly, from July 2010 to April 2012, in the site Current Politics in Ukraine , http://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com. I left them virtually unchanged, even though occasionally I felt a temptation to make some updates to explain, for example, that Valery Khoroshkovsky is no longer the head of Security Service of Ukraine (he is the first vice prime minister now and, ironically, is also in charge of Ukraines notorious European integration), that Hanna Herman is no longer a deputy head of the Presidential Administration (she is merely a Yanukovych adviser today), and Andriy Kliuyev is not the first vice prime minister since he replaced Raisa Bohatyriova (who got the Ministry of Health instead) in charge of the National Security and Defense Council. I refrained, however, from fixing the chronicles, after concluding that all the important changes are actually reflected in the follow-up stories, whereas minor reshufflings of Yanukovychs personnel change little, if anything, in the general flow of events.
The addendum to the main part of the book consists of six articles (Topicals) that were published in other periodicals but both topically and chronologically belong to the same collection of stories. Two of them were published before I began my cooperation with Current Politics in Ukraine. The first one reflects the authors feelings and expectations immediately after Yanukovychs victory (Whats Left of Orange Ukraine?), the second one discusses the old-new problems of the national politics of memory (Banderas Controversy and Beyond). The first piece was published in Eurozine on March 4, 2010; and the second one in Russkii vopros quarterly (no. 1, 2010).
The End of a Post-Soviet Pragmatism? was commissioned by the Neue Zuricher Zeitung , and published on July 15, 2010; whereas Tymoshenko: Wake-up call for the EU was written for Eurozine and published on October 28, 2011. The topics of these two articles seemingly overlap with those published at the time in Current Politics in Ukraine, but the aspects discussed in them are substantially different, so I decided to include them in the book as important supplements.
And finally, the Russian spring (or, perhaps, winter) the massive anti-government protests in Moscow and elsewhere in December 2011 prompted me to take a closer look at this awakening of Russian civil society and its possible consequences for both Russia and Ukraine. This resulted in two articles: Birds in the Bush ( Russkii vopros , no. 1, 2012) and Burden of Unity ( Open Democracy , March 12, 2012). At the time, I did not feel they were appropriate for the Current Politics in Ukraine blog. In the book context, however, I think they might contribute to a better understanding of the political processes and prospects in Ukraine as well.
My thanks to the various publishers for their permission to reprint the articles included in this book.
