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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
This paper is about the life experiences of selected individuals who, five years after Ukrainian independence, had emerged as key leaders in post-Soviet Ukraine, a society undergoing deep social and political transformations. In this paper, I argue that under these circumstances, these individuals became both the “children” and “agents” of change. In exploring this idea, I will focus on the moment in their life stories when each narrator identifies the moment when he or she began to act as an “agent” of change. More specifically, I will examine circumstances that transformed these individuals into new leaders at this unique social and political juncture in Ukraine's history. My working hypothesis is that, in addition to direct factors and a certain element of chance, other factors in their earlier biographies, during the Soviet period, have had lasting importance on these leaders' development.
1. This research has been carried out under the supervision of University of Michigan Center for Russian and East European Studies. This project has been generously supported by both the Ford Foundation (Ford Foundation Grant No. 950-1163) and the National Council for Soviet and East European Research (NCSEER) (Research Contract 812-11).Google Scholar
2. See the introduction to this volume for a more complete description of the research design. For more detail on the focus group and oral history research conducted in Ukraine, see Victor Susak, “Ukraine: Oral History Interview: Background, Procedures, Expectations, And Preliminary Analysis,” paper presented at the Workshop on Identity Formation and Social Issues in Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, Kyiv, 1997.Google Scholar
3. This work was conducted in cooperation with the Donetsk Centre for Political Studies.Google Scholar
4. See the following works for key methodological and theoretical insights: D. Bertaux, ed. Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (London: Sage, 1981); N. Denzin, Interpretative Biography (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989); G. Gregg, Self-Representation: Life Narrative Studies in Identity and Ideology (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); L. L. Langness and G. Frank, Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography (Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharo, 1999); P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); V. Yadov and V. Semenova, Strategiia sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia: opisaniie, ob“iasneniie, ponimaniie sotsial'noj real'nosti (Moscow: Dobrosvet, 1998).Google Scholar
5. Other studies that utilize life histories in examining the effects of political and economic change in Eastern Europe include R. Breckner, D. Kalekin-Fishman and I. Miethe, eds, Biographies and the Division of Europe: Experience, Action, and Change on the “Eastern Side” (Opladen: Verlag Leske & Budrich, 2000); V. Voronkov and E. Zdravomyslova, eds, Biograficheskij metod v isuchenii postsotsialisticheskix obshchestv (St Petersburg: Sankt Piterburg, 1997).Google Scholar
6. The interview guide included the following main parts:Google Scholar
A. Family and personal background.Google Scholar
B. Choice of profession. Professional, public and political activity before the social and political changes in the late 1980s.Google Scholar
C. The interviewee's life during the last ten years, his/her role in the recent and contemporary sociopolitical events, including: main stages in professional career from the late 1980s up to present; main stages of social and political activity (if any) from the late 1980s up to the present.Google Scholar
D. Evaluation of the recent and present sociopolitical events.Google Scholar
E. The interviewee's prediction of the future of Ukrainian society.Google Scholar
F. Self-identity.Google Scholar
7. P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: University Press, 1992), pp. 198–203.Google Scholar
8. D. Bertaux, “From the Life-History Approach to the Transformation of Sociological Practice,” in D. Bertaux, ed. Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (London: Sage, 1981), pp. 39–40.Google Scholar
9. This is reflected in a common saying of the time: “If you want to have a quiet life, become an engineer.”Google Scholar
10. Interview with Irena Isakova. This quote, like all of the other quotes in this paper, is taken from the original interviews kept in the Archive of Living History at the Institute for Historical Research at Lviv State University.Google Scholar
11. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.Google Scholar
12. Interview with Yuri Zayats.Google Scholar
13. Interviews with Victor Pynzenyk and Yevgen Talipov.Google Scholar
14. Interview with Vasyl Kuibida.Google Scholar
15. Interviews with Andrii Tavpash, Oleg Rybakov and Yuri Zayats.Google Scholar
16. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.Google Scholar
17. Interview with Valentyna Protsenko.Google Scholar
18. Interview with Victor Pynzenyk.Google Scholar
19. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.Google Scholar
20. Interview with Yuri Zayats.Google Scholar
21. Interview with Irena IsakovaGoogle Scholar
22. Interview with Olga Sadovska.Google Scholar
23. Interview with Valentyna Protsenko.Google Scholar
24. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.Google Scholar
25. Interview with Oleg Rybakov.Google Scholar
26. Interview with Yevgen Talipov.Google Scholar
27. Interview with Andrii Tavpash.Google Scholar
28. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.Google Scholar
29. Interview with Victor Pynzenyk.Google Scholar
30. Interview with Vasyl Kuibida.Google Scholar
31. Interview with Irena Isakova.Google Scholar
32. Interview with Olga Sadovska.Google Scholar
33. Interview with Olga Sadovska.Google Scholar
34. Interview with Yuri Zayats.Google Scholar
35. Interview with Yevgen Talipov.Google Scholar
36. Interview with Oleg Rybakov.Google Scholar
37. Interview with Oleg Rybakov.Google Scholar
38. Here I have used Ricoeur's model which states that narration about the past is based on three overlapping mimetic events: prefiguration (living events experienced by our respondents in the past), configuration (presentation of these experiences by narrators in texts of their interviews) and refiguration (later intellectual interpretations of these texts of interviews). See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 52–87.Google Scholar