Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 20, 2025 to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Mykola Riabchuk. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
The 2022 unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine evoked nearly universal international condemnation but got much less unanimous response in more practical terms of political, economic and other sanctions. Many countries, especially in the so called “Global South” refused to introduce any measures against the aggressor state for various reasons and under different pretexts. Culture appeared to be the most controversial field, where even the Western democracies, rather unanimous in their response to the Russian assault, failed to achieve any consensus on suitable measures and policies vis-à-vis the rogue state. While virtually nobody questions the need of sanctions against the specific persons and institutions that support the war, the wholesale rejection of Russian culture and cancelling of its iconic figures is often vehemently opposed. The talk delves into the essence of these debates, trying to represent different rationales and opposite arguments but also to answer a more fundamental question: to what degree and in which way a seemingly innocent, apolitical cultural ‘soft power’ contributes to the militant ‘hard power’ of the aggressor state during the war.
Mykola Riabchuk (1953) is a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies in Kyiv and, currently, a visiting researcher at the George Washington University. He penned dozen books translated into Polish, French, German, Serbian and Hungarian, and was distinguished with several awards, most notably the Antonovych Prize (2003), the “Bene merito” medal of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs (2009), and the Taras Shevchenko National Prize in Arts and Literature (2022). In 2014-2018, he headed the Ukrainian PEN Center and chaired the jury of the “Angelus” international literary award. His latest books (in English) are Eastern Europe since 1989: Between the Loosened Authoritarianism and Unconsolidated Democracy (Warsaw, 2020), and At the Fence of Metternich’s Garden. Essays on Europe, Ukraine, and Europeanization (Stuttgart, 2021).
