Th e image of a dismantled statue of Lenin from Ukraine being transported up the Danube in Th eo Angelopoulos’s 1995 fi lm Ulysses’ Gaze is the starting point for a discussion of the fi lm’s urgent resonance with the questioning of “Europe” in the present day. Th is image foreshadows the destruction of Lenin statues in Ukraine during the ongoing civil war and is more than a fortuitous indicator of the historical context of the present Ukrainian crisis in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Exploring the territory of seven post-Cold War Eastern European states and ending amid the rubble and destruction of the besieged city of Sarajevo, Ulysses’ Gaze off ers a panoramic, yet highly subjective, depiction of a Europe undergoing a painful and as-yet-undecided transition. Th is article will show the strong connections between the understanding of Europe that emerges from the fi lm and that elucidated in the work of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. Both the fi lm and Patočka’s thought seek the European on a utopian level that transcends particular temporal and territorial borders, recalls Classical polity and philosophy, and consists primarily in introspective thinking. Th e recurrence, in today’s Europe, of questions from the immediate post-Cold War era indicates that the work of defi nition undertaken after 1989 is not yet completed and suggests that fi lms from that period may contain images that have the capacity to guide the process of understanding Europe in the present day.
Petro Shelest (1908–1997), the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was one of the strongest advocates of an armed invasion of Czechoslovakia among Soviet leaders in 1968. The Soviet leadership tasked him to maintain contacts with the so-called healthy forces in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; in the beginning of August, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Vasil Biľak (1917–2014) secretly handed over to him the notorious “letter of invitation” in public lavatories in Bratislava. The author asks a fundamental question whether it is possible to identify a specific Ukrainian factor which stepped into the Prague Spring process and contributed to its tragic end. He attempts to capture Shelest’s position in the decision-making process and describe information that Shelest was working with., To this end, he has made use of reports of the Committee for State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti – KGB) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on developments in Czechoslovakia and reactions thereto among Ukrainian citizens produced in the spring and summer of 1968, which were being sent to Shelest and other Ukrainian leaders. These documents have lately been made available in Ukrainian archives and partly published on the website of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Their analysis brings the author to a conclusion that they were offering a considerably distorted picture of the situation. Instead of relevant information and analyses, they only present various clichés, ideological rhetoric, inaccuracies, or downright nonsenses. Their source were often members of the Czechoslovak State Security who were often motivated by worries about their own careers and existence and were acting on their own., and The uncritical acceptance of the documents contributed to a situation in which in the leader of the Ukrainian Communists and other Soviet representatives were creating unrealistic pictures of the events taking place in Czechoslovakia, believing that anti-socialist forces were winning, anti-Soviet propaganda was prevailing, and Western intelligence agencies were strengthening their position in Czechoslovakia, and that there was a threat that the events that had taken place in Hungary in 1956 would repeat themselves again. As indicated by his published diary entries and other documents, Petro Shelest was using these allegations both in discussions inside his own party and during negotiations with Czechoslovak politicians. Just like in the case of the leaders of Polish and East German Communists, Władysław Gomułka and Walter Ulbricht, respectively, the principal reason why Shelest was promoting a solution of the Czechoslovak crisis by force was, in the author’s opinion, his fear of “contagion” of his own society by events taking place in Czechoslovakia which the Ukraine shared a border with.
This article deals with Ukrainian student migration and the convergence of integration and transnationalism. Its main focus is the self-identification of young Ukrainians studying in the Czech Republic. The authors explore and describe international students' different integration and transnational dispositions and also discuss whether these dispositions could be seen as part of antagonistic or synergetic processes. The interconnection between transnationalism and integration is widely discussed in both sociological and anthropological literature, and most scholars identify them as synergetic processes. In the case of Ukrainian students in the Czech Republic, however, the authors argue that these processes can be understood as both synergetic and antagonistic because what matters is the students' self-identification. Most of the analysis presented in this article is based on in-depth interviews with Ukrainian students conducted between 2012 and 2019. The results of qualitative research are also compared to and discussed in relation to the findings from an on-line survey conducted among 258 Ukrainian students in 2018. The article suggests that Ukrainian students themselves could incline in both directions, towards an antagonistic and a synergetic understanding of integration and transnationalism, because it depends on their self-expressed dispositions. However, most participants most of the participants in the research express the synergy.