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 brought 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.
Yaroslav Hrytsak is a Ukrainian historian, public intellectual, and a professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv, Ukraine). Hrytsak has also taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Central European universities. He is the founding editor of Ukraina Moderna and the author of numerous publications, including the 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 received numerous Ukrainian and international awards.
Nataliya Kibita earned her bachelor's degree from the Ostroh Academy in Ukraine and her master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She has taught at the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Glasgow. Since September 2024, she has been a visiting academic at the University of Oxford, Russian and East European Studies. Kibita is the author of Soviet Economic Management under Khrushchev: The Sovnarkhoz Reform (Routledge, 2013), as well as The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, 2024), which received an honorable mention for the 2025 Ed A Hewett Book Prize.
The panel was moderated by Taras Fedirko, IWM Senior Research Fellow.
