How do past revolutions live on institutionally and culturally: in political thought, state institutions, literature traditions, and popular culture? In Ukraine, a country whose culture and institutions were repeatedly transformed through political upheaval, what did these revolutions mean throughout the long 20th century, and how do their legacies matter today?
In collaboration with the Ukrainian History Global Initiative (UHGI), this panel discussion brings together historians Yaroslav Hrytsak and Nataliya Kibita to discuss Ukraine’s contested inheritance of radical social change. Situating Ukrainian revolutions in the long twentieth century within broader comparative debates, the discussion treats Ukraine as a starting point for thinking the relationship between modernity, violence, and social transformation—questions that return with urgent force in the context of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.
The panel will be moderated by Taras Fedirko, IWM Senior Research Fellow.
Yaroslav Hrytsak is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. He is professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv, Ukraine). Hrytsak taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Central European Universities. He is the founding editor of Ukraina Moderna and author of numerous publications, including his recent bestseller History of Ukraine (Portal, 2021) which has been translated into several languages. Hrytsak has been listed several times among the top 100 most influential Ukrainians and has various Ukrainian and foreign awards.
Nataliya Kibita holds a bachelor's degree from the Ostroh Academy (Ukraine) and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Geneva (Switzerland). She taught at LSE, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Glasgow. Since September 2024, she is a Visiting Academic at Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford. Kibita is the author of Soviet Economic Management under Khrushchev: The Sovnarkhoz Reform (Routledge, 2013) and The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism (OUP, 2024), which received an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Ed A Hewett Book Prize.
