Century of Ukraine's diplomatic service

Author(s):  
Yuriy Makar

On December 22, 2017 the Ukrainian Diplomatic Service marked the 100thanniversary of its establishment and development. In dedication to such a momentous event, the Department of International Relations of Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University has published a book of IR Dept’s ardent activity since its establishment. It includes information both in Ukrainian and English on the backbone of the collective and their versatile activities, achievements and prospects for the future. The author delves into retracing the course of the history of Ukrainian Diplomacy formation and development. The author highlights the roots of its formation, reconsidering a long way of its development that coincided with the formation of basic elements of Ukrainian statehood that came into existence as a result of the war of national liberation – the Ukrainian Central Rada (the Central Council of Ukraine). Later, the Ukrainian or so-called State the Hetmanate was under study. The Directorat (Directory) of Ukraine, being a provisional collegiate revolutionary state committee of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, was given a thorough study. Of particular interest for the research are diplomatic activities of the West Ukrainian People`s Republic. Noteworthy, the author emphasizes on the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic’s foreign policy, forced by the Bolshevist Russia. A further important implication is both the challenges of the Ukrainian statehood establishing and Ukraine’s functioning as a state, first and foremost, stemmed from the immaturity and conscience-unawareness of the Ukrainian society, that, ultimately, has led to the fact, that throughout the twentieth century Ukraine as a statehood, being incorporated into the Soviet Union, could hardly be recognized as a sovereign state. Our research suggests that since the beginning of the Ukrainian Diplomacy establishment and its further evolution, it used to be unprecedentedly fabricated and forged. On a wider level, the research is devoted to centennial fight of Ukraine against Russian violence and aggression since the WWI, when in 1917 the Russian Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, started real Russian war against Ukraine. Apropos, in the about-a-year-negotiation run, Ukraine, eventually, failed to become sovereign. Remarkably, Ukraine finally gained its independence just in late twentieth century. Nowadays, Russia still regards Ukraine as a part of its own strategic orbit,waging out a carrot-and-stick battle. Keywords: The Ukrainian People’s Republic, the State of Ukraine, the Hetmanate, the Direcorat (Directory) of Ukraine, the West Ukrainian People`s Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, Ukraine, the Bolshevist Russia, the Russian Federation, Ukrainian diplomacy

Author(s):  
Levon Hakobian

This chapter deals with the history of Soviet music’s relations with the outside world from the mid-1920s until the end of the millennium. During all these decades the Soviet musical production of any coloration was perceived by the free Western world as something largely strange or alien, often exotic, almost ‘barbarian’. The inevitable spiritual distance between the Soviet world and the ‘non-Soviet’ one resulted in some significant misunderstandings. Though some important recent publications by Western musicologists display a well qualified view on the music and musical life in the Soviet Union, the traces of past naiveties and/or prejudices are still felt quite often even in the writings of major specialists.


1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
David Crowe

The Soviet absorption of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during World War II caused hundreds of thousands of Baltic immigrants to come to the West, where they established strong, viable ethnic communities, often in league with groups that had left the region earlier. At first, Baltic publishing and publications centered almost exclusively on nationalistic themes that decried the loss of Baltic independence and attacked the Soviet Union for its role in this matter. In time, however, serious scholarship began to replace some of the passionate outpourings, and a strong, academic field of Baltic scholarship emerged in the West that dealt with all aspects of Baltic history, politics, culture, language, and other matters, regardless of its political or nationalistic implications. Over the past sixteen years, these efforts have produced a new body of Baltic publishing that has revived a strong interest in Baltic studies and has insured that regardless of the continued Soviet-domination of the region, the study of the culture and history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will remain a set fixture in Western scholarship on Eastern Europe.


Author(s):  
Mart Kuldkepp

This article considers the history of Swedish attitudes towards Baltic independence during the short twentieth century (1914–91), focusing primarily on the years when Baltic independence was gained (1918–20) and regained (1989–91). The former was characterized by Swedish skepticism towards the ability of the Baltic states to retain their independence long-term, considering the inevitable revival of Russian power. Sweden became one of the very few Western countries to officially recognize the incorporation of the Baltic states in the Soviet Union in the Second World War. During the Cold War, Sweden gained a reputation for its policy of activist internationalism and support for democratization in the Third World, but for security-related reasons it ignored breaches of human rights and deficit of democracy in its immediate neighborhood, the Soviet Union and the Baltic republics. However, in 1989–91 the unprecedented decline in Soviet influence, the value-based approach in international relations, feelings of guilt over previous pragmatism, and changes in domestic politics encouraged Sweden to support Baltic independence, and to take on the role of an active manager of the Baltic post-soviet transition.


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 3-41
Author(s):  
Séamus Séamus Mac Mathúna ◽  

In recent years there has been a remarkable burgeoning of interest in Celtic scholarship in the Slavic countries. Much of the work carried out by Slavic scholars, however, is written in the Slavic languages and is not readily accessible to Western scholars. The result is that the scope and achievement of Celtic scholars in these countries is not widely known and appreciated. The aim of this paper is to give a short history of this tradition and of some of the major scholarly landmarks. While the emphasis will be primarily on Celtic Studies in Russia, reference will also be made to the work of scholars in other Slavic countries. Several centuries before Christ, the Proto-Slavic dialect area appears to be north of the Carpathian mountains between the Rivers Oder and Vistula in Poland and the River Dnepr in the Ukraine. It is in a kind of intermediate zone which includes other language areas, including Illyrian, Thracian and Phrygian, and is bordered to the west by Germanic, Celtic and Italic, and to the east by Scythian and Tocharian. The paper will examine briefly the history and contribution of Celtic Slavic scholars to the question of the links between Proto-Slavic and Celtic in this region. The writings of the famous academicians A.A. Schachmatov (1864–1920) and A.N. Veselovsky (1838–1906) are taken as points of departure in outlining the history of Celtic linguistic and literary scholarship in Russia, and both their work and methodologies, and the work of other scholars, such as V. Propp, E. Meletinsky, Yu. Lotman, V.N. Toporov and A.Ya. Gourevitch, are considered in light of their influence on modern Celtic scholarship in the Slavic countries. Consideration is also given to the work and influence of deceased Celtic scholars A.A. Smirnov, V.N. Yartseva, A.A. Koroljov and V.P. Kalygin, the work of scholars such as T.A. Mikhailova and S.V Schkunayev, and the development of a new generation of very able and productive younger scholars.


Globus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2(59)) ◽  
pp. 15-18
Author(s):  
Yuri Serov

The article is devoted to the history of the creation and music score of the ballet Twelve based on the poem by A. Blok by the outstanding Russian composer of the second half of the twentieth century Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko. The ballet was staged by the famous Soviet choreographer Leonid Jacobson back in 1964 and became, in fact, the first avant-garde ballet in the Soviet Union. Critics noted Tishchenko’s bright modern symphonic music and Jacobson’s free plastics, which “became a breath of clean air in the rarefied atmosphere of classical epigonism”.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Elena Kochetkova

This article examines the nature of Soviet consumption and technological development through the history of milk and milk packaging between the 1950s and 1970s. Based on published and archival materials, the paper focuses on the role that milk played in Soviet nutrition and the role that packaging played in Soviet consumption. The article also examines the modernization of technology for making packaging as well as technology transfer from the West. It concludes that, as in many Western countries, both the Soviet state and Soviet specialists saw it as important to increase the consumption of milk after the war, but the meaning of milk changed. Milk, a basic staple for nutrition, became a matter of science and specialists sought to explain its positive effects. In addition, due to the development of the paper and chemical industries, new forms of milk packaging, more practical in their uses, were introduced in the West. Soviet leaders and specialists saw the new packaging as a desirable feature of modernity, but were unsuccessful in launching domestic technologies for manufacturing such packaging. While experimenting with domestic technology, Soviet producers also received foreign equipment for making milk packaging. Nevertheless, the capacity of such foreign equipment was not enough to satisfy growing demand and the consumption of “modern packaging” remained lower than in the West until the introduction of capitalism and, with it, foreign companies into the Russian market in the 1990s.


Author(s):  
Sören Urbansky

This chapter explores impacts of the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929 and the 1931 Japanese occupation of Manchuria that affected the Argun borderland, compelling the regimes to considerably increase their peripheral power. Strictly speaking, the fourteen subsequent years of Japanese rule in Manchuria might be regarded as an interlude in the borderlands' development since, in a political sense, the Soviet Union did not encounter China at its borders. This rupture notwithstanding, that decade and a half might also be regarded as extending or perhaps even accelerating the process of border formation and the alteration of the borderland because many of the changes inscribed by the Japanese remained after their defeat in 1945. The history of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo was not a repetition of seemingly similar developments of the imperial expansion of Russia or the West but something that can be called “new imperialism.” Therefore, the chapter shifts the perspective away from borderlanders' lives to policies imposed by the metropoles.


More than sixty-five years after the composer’s death and almost thirty years since the demise of the Soviet Union, it is high time not only to take a fresh, balanced look at the output of Sergei Prokofiev, but also to probe some of the important but less studied aspects of his music. Many of his works are twentieth-century classics, but some are less familiar; others still, because of the times in which he lived, are controversial, or misunderstood, or simply unexplored. Commissioned from both established experts and younger researchers in the field, Rethinking Prokofiev is a new compendium of essays that examine the background and context of Prokofiev’s music: his relationship to nineteenth-century Russian traditions; to the Silver Age and Symbolist composers and poets; to the culture of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s; and to his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. It investigates his reception in the West and his return to Russia, and analyzes the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture. His early, experimental piano and vocal works are explored, as well as his piano concertos, his operas, the film scores, the early ballets, and the late symphonies. The main focus of the book is the nature of the music itself. Prokofiev’s work is utterly distinctive, yet it defies easy analysis. By uncovering the contents of his sketchbooks, however, and through an empirical examination of his characteristic harmonies, melodies, cadences, and musical gestures, these chapters reveal much of what makes Prokofiev an idiosyncratic genius, his music intriguing, often dramatic, and almost always beguiling.


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