'Ukraine: Starting Point'

The most recent work by celebrated documentary filmmaker Serhii Bukovs'kyi -- 'Ukraine: Starting Point' ('Україна. Точка відліку') -- can be watched online here. It features extended interviews with Leonid Kravchuk, first President of Ukraine, who is the keynote speaker of the Cambridge interdisciplinary workshop Independent Ukraine: Twenty Years On, on 8-9 December 2011.

'The Ukrainian Blues (and Yellows)'

Workshop co-organiser Marta Dyczok reflects on twenty years of independence in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal:

'Most Ukrainians remain far more free than they were 20 years ago, though many are still poor. The country is both wealthier and more socio-economically stratified than it was and the cost of living has soared, in some areas to European levels. But parts of Ukraine also look and feel European, with charming streets, nice cafes, bookstores, restored monuments, gleaming golden-domed churches and 24-hour supermarkets and gas stations.

A graduate student was late to meet me this week because she got stuck in traffic. Graduate students now own cars. A far cry from 1991, when even members of parliament took public transportation and all the flags were red.'

A beginning

We begin at a beginning — with an image of Ukraine’s independence referendum ballot.

Citing the Ukrainian declaration of independence, the ballot text reads in part: ‘Act of the Declaration of the Independence of Ukraine. In view of the mortal danger surrounding Ukraine in connection with the state coup in the USSR on 19 August 1991, and implementing the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly declares the independence of Ukraine and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state: Ukraine. This act takes effect at the moment of its approval.’