Fifty years ago, Warsaw Pact forces led by the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia. The socialist reforms of the Prague Spring were suppressed and Czechoslovakia was subjected to more than 20 years of stultifying ‘normalization’ under Soviet occupation. Revisiting his essay of 10 years ago, Ukrainian writer Mykola Riabchuk explains why his solidarity with the victims endures.
Mykola Riabchuk
6 July 2017
Defining censorship during a conflict
Western commentators have lambasted Ukraine’s decision to ban Russian media, TV and film. But Mykola Riabchuk argues that attacking the move as censorship ignores its context: namely, Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.
11 March 2015
Emancipation from the East Slavonic ummah
For both Russia and Ukraine, the conflict in eastern Ukraine marks the beginning of a painful process of emancipation from a pre-modern imagined community of eastern Slavs. A process, writes Mykola Riabchuk, from which modern civic national identities must emerge.
In a deeply personal reflection on identity, emigration and dispossession, writer Mykola Riabchuk surveys the recent history of his native Ukraine. He also describes the work of Vladimir Rafeenko, published in Eurozine for the first time in English on 21 August 2017.
As Walter Benjamin once remarked, “every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution”. A statement that events in Ukraine after the Orange revolution go some way toward confirming, writes Mykola Riabchuk; not that a sudden reversal of recent trends remains out of the question.
