East European studies

This study analyzes policies and public attitudes concerning the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) after the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine. The issue of the political rehabilitation of these nationalist organizations, which relied on terrorism and were involved in Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing of Poles during World War Two, became one of central political issues in this post-Soviet state. The question is which factors determine attitudes towards the OUN and the UPA in contemporary Ukraine. The hypothesis is that regional factors are the main determinants of the public opinion concerning these organizations. This paper uses analysis of historical studies and archival data to examine policies and controversies concerning the OUN and the UPA. It employs comparative and regression analyses of the 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey to determine effects of regional factors, compared to other factors, such as ethnicity, language, and age, on attitudes towards the Stepan Bandera faction of the OUN and the UPA. The paper shows that that regional factors and perceptions of the involvement of the Bandera faction of the OUN and the UPA in mass murder are strongest predictors of views concerning these nationalist organizations.

Have there been changes in political institutions, parties, leaders, and regional political orientations in Ukraine after the "Orange Revolution"? If so, are the changes revolutionary or evolutionary? Most previous studies refer to the 2004 presidential elections and mass protest actions as a revolution. To test this claim, this article analyzes political changes in Ukraine. Survey data are used to compare changes in pro-Russian and pro-Western orientation, support for major parties in the 2002, 2006, and 2007 parliamentary elections, and support for leading presidential candidates since the 2004 presidential elections. The implications of these changes for development of democracy in Ukraine are also considered.

Accessions of post-communist countries to the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) represent puzzles. While many such countries were granted a membership or a prospect of membership in these organizations, other European post-communist countries were not offered an accession or prospects of membership in the EU and NATO. The question is which factors account for such significant variation in the accession to the EU and NATO among European post-communist countries. This article uses statistical analysis to determine which factors affect the EU and NATO accession of 25 European post-communist states in 1997-2010. The study shows that the level of democracy is positively associated with NATO and EU accession, while conflicts have a negative impact on the NATO enlargement. The level of economic development has a positive effect on EU enlargement. Being a post-Soviet country has a negative effect on both NATO and EU accession.

This study examines the role of political factors in attitudes toward World War II in contemporary Ukraine. The question under examination is which factors determine public views of the principal warring sides and their leaders in Ukraine. This paper uses a representative national survey specifically designed for this research project and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2012. It analyzes the roles of regionalism, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, age, and sex in attitudes toward the Red Army, Soviet partisans, the German Army (Wehrmacht), and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the war, as well as toward the wartime leaders of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the UPA. The analysis of the survey data shows that regional values, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, and age have significant effects on views of the Soviet Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war and attitudes toward the wartime activities of Joseph Stalin and Roman Shukhevych. Public perceptions of the German Army and Adolf Hitler in Ukraine do not vary much across regions, political parties, and ethnic, language, age, and sex groups.

This paper analyzes the role of different forms of social capital in privatization in regions of Ukraine. Several recent studies linked regional government performance and economic development in Italy, Germany, Poland, and other countries to social capital, which is associated with different historical experiences. In post-communist Ukraine, regional political cleavages are also often traced to historical divisions. This paper examines whether different historical experiences in two groups of regions, those which were under Russian and then Soviet rule, and those which were under Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule until World War II, contributed to variations in the rate and quality of privatization. This study distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative aspects of social capital and privatization in industry and agriculture in Ukrainian regions. Statistical analysis of the 1995 World Values Survey data and aggregate data are used to analyze effects of historical experience and other direct and indirect measures of social capital, such as membership in voluntary organizations, interpersonal trust, importance of family and friends, and crime and divorce rates, on privatization in Ukraine. The role of social capital in privatization is compared to the role of other factors including economic policy, industrial structure, human capital, and ethnic cleavages.

""During the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, the second largest country in Europe came close to a violent break-up similar to that in neighboring Moldova, which witnessed a violent secession of the Transdniestria region. Numerous elections, including the hotly contested 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine, and surveys of public opinion showed significant regional divisions in these post-Soviet countries. Western parts of Ukraine and Moldova, as well as the Muslim Crimean Tatars, were vocal supporters of independence, nationalist, and pro-Western parties and politicians. In contrast, Eastern regions, as well as the Orthodox Turkic-speaking Gagauz, consistently expressed pro-Russian and pro-Communist political orientations. Which factors ? historical legacies, religion, economy, ethnicity, or political leadership ? could explain these divisions? Why was Ukraine able to avoid a violent break-up, in contrast to Moldova?
This is the first book to offer a systematic and comparative analysis of the regional political divisions in post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova. The study examines voting behavior and political attitudes in two groups of regions: those which were under Russian, Ottoman, and Soviet rule; and those which were under Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule until World War I or World War II. This book attributes the regional political divisions to the differences in historical experience. This study helps us to better understand regional cleavages and conflicts, not only in Ukraine and Moldova, but also in other cleft countries.""

This article examines differing political orientations of Crimean Tatars and the Gagauz, two main Turkic minorities in Ukraine and Moldova. Crimean Tatars in Ukraine expressed anti-Communist and anti-Russian political preferences, while the Gagauz in Moldova showed strong support for pro-Communist and pro-Russian parties and politicians. This study analyses the role of cultural factors in political attitudes and behavior of Crimean Tatars and the Gagauz and uses data from surveys, elections and referendums. The analysis shows that distinct historical experiences of Crimean Tatars and the Gagauz in the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and Romania led to the emergence of distinct political cultures of these ethnic groups and affected their political behavior and attitudes in post-communist Ukraine and Moldova.

This study analyzes changes in regional electoral behavior and foreign policy attitudes in Ukraine after “Orange Revolution.” The research question is whether the public support for major groups of political parties and presidential candidates and attitudes towards principal foreign policy issues in regions of Ukraine have changed after the “Orange Revolution.” This article employs comparative and statistical analyses of voting results of the 2007, 2006, and 2002 parliamentary elections, the 2010 local elections, and the 2004 and 2010 presidential elections, and survey data to examine effects of regional political culture, compared to other factors, on support for pro-nationalist/pro-Western and pro-Russian/pro-communist political parties and presidential candidates. This study also uses survey data to analyze changes in attitudes towards NATO, the European Union, and a union with Russia in regions of Ukraine and a change in separatist preferences in Crimea. The analysis shows that Ukraine after the “Orange Revolution” remained divided along regional lines in terms of support for political parties and presidential candidates and attitudes towards foreign orientation.

This paper analyzes the involvement of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Nazi genocide during World War II in Ukraine. The issue of the political rehabilitation of these organizations became one of the central political issues in this post-Soviet state. The research question is whether leaders and members of the Bandera faction of the OUN (OUN-B) and the UPA were involved in the Nazi-led genocide. This article devotes particular attention to Volhynia where the UPA was established by the OUN-B in 1943. The study analyzes the biographies of 329 OUN-B and UPA leaders and documents concerning the OUN-B and the UPA, local police, and Nazi mass executions of Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles from the State Archive of the Volyn Region, the State Archive of the Rivne Region, the Archive of the State Security Service of Ukraine in the Volyn Region, the Archive of the State Security Service of Ukraine, the National Archives in the US, and other archives. This paper shows that large proportions of leaders and members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army served in various police and militia formations, collaborated with security and intelligence agencies of Nazi Germany, and took part in the Nazi genocide, primarily in assisting roles during mass executions of Jews in the first two years of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

This study examines democratic orientations and their determinants in post-Orange Ukraine from the perspective of a political culture theory. The research question is, to what extent is political culture in Ukraine supportive of democracy. This paper uses data from different waves of the Pew Global Attitudes surveys, the World Values Surveys, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems surveys to examine public views towards democracy in Ukraine. The paper compares democratic values in Ukraine with those in Poland and Russia, two similar post-communist countries with differing political cultures and divergent trajectories of democratization. It also examines changes in the levels of pro-democratic attitudes in post-Orange Ukraine compared to the Orange and pre-Orange periods. Finally, this study implements multiple regression analysis of the determinants of democratic attitudes. The analysis shows limited effects of historical democratic legacies and Catholicism on pro-democracy views. With some exceptions, adherents of major parties do not differ significantly in terms of their degree of support for democracy. This study suggests that partially democratic and partially authoritarian political culture impedes the future prospects for consolidated democracy in Ukraine.

The prisoner’ dilemma model applied to the Great Terror in the Soviet Union implies that political prisoners had an incentive to confess and implicate other prisoners. Since the other prisoners had similar incentives, they also confessed. As a result, all of the prisoners ended up worse off than if they all refused to confess. The analysis of Krawtchouk’s case and related cases, such as the Union of Liberation of Ukraine (SVU), the Jet Propulsion Institute, and UFTI cases, finds weak support for the prisoner’s dilemma model. Among 177 cases of individuals arrested on political charges in these cases, 13 percent gave voluntarily confessions and implicated other prisoners. The absolute majority of the prisoners who provided voluntary confessions and implicated others were Communist party members or secret informers of the NKVD. When this factor is held constant, the rates of voluntary confessions among Ukrainians, Jews and Russians do not differ significantly. The absolute majority of the political prisoners, 70 percent, did not confess voluntarily. Their interrogators had to resort to other methods in the form of physical and psychological torture, such as sleep deprivation, to extract confessions. Most of the political prisoners confessed as a result of the torture by the Soviet secret police. This result does not prove the effectiveness of torture, because these individuals admitted crimes they never committed.

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Recent years have seen the flourishing of research on Lithuanian Kabbalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the point that some scholars speak of a defined and delineated stream of Kabbalah, a school unto itself dubbed "Lithuanian Kabbalah." Such scholars include within this stream all those who saw the Vilna Gaon as their teacher in Kabbalah (parallel to the position of the Baal Shem Tov in Hasidism) and they ascribe to it such fixed categories as its "Articles of Faith." In their conception, this stream was part and parcel of the broader and well-known nationalist-messianic current that had its source, supposedly, in the Vilna Gaon himself; this current reached its full fruition in the twentieth century, and so too has the smaller stream within it, now a clearly defined "school," developed in various ways until the present. As if this were not enough, scholars have joined the later ideological trend which seeks to revise the history of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a decidedly messianic way, presenting it in a continuous line from the Vilna Gaon to the emergence of Zionism and then to the founding of the State of Israel. Again, the Vilna Gaon is not merely presented as a "herald" of Zionism but as one who encoded within his Torah the secret of redemption, the beginning of which, apparently, we are witnessing today. The article conducts a critical analysis of the concept of "Lithuanian Kabbalah," and uses as its case study the life and teachings of Rabbi Shimon Tsvi Horowitz.


בשנים האחרונות צומח ועולה מחקר סביב למקובלים בני ליטא במאות התשע עשרה והעשרים, עד שיש כאלו המדברים על זרם מוגדר ומובחן, אסכולה בפני עצמה, המכונה 'קבלה ליטאית'. בתוך זרם זה כוללים את כל אלו שראו בגר"א את מורם בקבלה, כמעין בעש"ט לחסידות, ומונים קטגוריות מקובעות של 'עיקרי אמונה' של אותו זרם הרוכב על מהלך משיחי ולאומי ידוע שמקורו כביכול בגר"א עצמו והגיע לגמר בישולו במאה העשרים. עד שנוצר בעיני כמה חוקרים מעין 'חוג' ברור ומוגדר שמתגלגל באופנים שונים עד לימינו. אם לא די בכך, הרי שהמדברים על אותו זרם קבלי רוכבים למעשה על קו אידיאולוגי מאוחר שבא לפרש מחדש את ההיסטוריה של היישוב היהודי בארץ ישראל במאה התשע עשרה ברוח משיחית וליצור מעין המשכיות מימי הגר"א עד להופעתה של הציונות ולמאורעות שהתרחשו עם הקמת מדינת ישראל. שוב אין הגר"א מצטייר רק כ'מבשר' הציונות אלא כמי שצפן בתורתו את סוד הגאולה שאנו עומדים לכאורה בפתחה. המאמר עוסק בניתוח ביקורתי של המשוג "קבלת ליטאית" וכמקרה מבחן יש כאן דיון בדרכו של ר' שמעון צבי הורביץ"

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Throughout the nineteenth century, Maskilic journals increased their publication of anti-Hasidic satires. From the eighteen-sixties onward, this literature came primarily as a response to the revival in the publishing of Hasidic hagiography and to the spread of Hasidism into new territory. To this point, no complete review or even general survey has been performed on this extensive polemical literature, despite the fact that it has much to teach us about Hasidism and the Haskalah in those years. We are not speaking of an insignificant bibliographical lacuna, but of a disregard for an entire field of research which would shed light not only on a forgotten chapter of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature but also on an important chapter in the relationships between Maskilim and Hasidim in that period and the genesis and development of the different streams of Hasidism. This Maskilic literature intended to do more than eradicate Hasidism; it aimed to strengthen the self-consciousness of the individual Maskilim who found themselves alone in Hasidic territory. Paradoxically, the literature documented the very movement it intended to eradicate from the world. The distorted reflection displayed in the anti-Hasidic literature does more than present a caricature of its subject -- it conceals hitherto unknown elements about the nature and development of the Hasidic movement. The present article deals with one such case, a satire on Bratslav Hasidism from 1863, which has at its core a Maskilic satirical text written by Yehiel Meller on pilgrimage to the grave of R. Nahman of Bratslav in Uman.





כתבי עת של משכילים לאורך המאה התשע עשרה הרבו לפרסם סאטירות בגנותה של החסידות. משנות הששים ואילך באה ספרות זו בעיקר כתגובה להתעוררות הדפסת ספרות השבחים החסידית ולהתפשטות החסידות במרחבים חדשים. לא קיימת עד עתה סקירה שלימה, ואף לא מיפוי כללי, של אותה ספרות פולמוסית ענפה, על אף שיש בה ללמד הרבה על דרכי החסידות וההשכלה באותן שנים.  לא מדובר רק בחסרון ביבליוגרפי שאין לו משמעות, אלא בהתעלמות משדה מחקר רב עניין שעשוי להאיר לא רק על פרק נשכח בספרות עברית ויידיש החדשה אלא גם על פרק חשוב ביחסים בין משכילים לחסידים באותה תקופה, ועל דרכי צמיחתם, פיצולם והתפתחותם של זרמים שונים בחסידות. הייתה זו ספרות שיותר מאשר נועדה לבער את החסידות נועדה לחזק את תודעתם העצמית של המשכילים הבודדים במרחבים החסידיים; ספרות שבאופן פרדוקסלי תיעדה תנועה אותה חפצו לבער מן העולם. הבבואה המעוותת בה התהדרה הסאטירה האנטי חסידית לא רק הציגה דימוי – אלא טומנת בחובה הצבעה על אלמנטים חדשים ועל התפתחויות בחסידות. במקרה אחד ממין זה הנוגע לחסידות ברסלב בשנות השישים של המאה התשע עשרה עוסק המאמר. שלפנינו - שעיקרו מהדורה של טקסט משכילי שכתב יחיאל מלר - בשנת 1863 - על העלייה לקבר ר' נחמן מברסלב באומן
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