Mark von Hagen
– Ph.D. in history and humanities, teaches history of Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia at Columbia University, serves on editorial boards of «Ab Imperio» and «Kritika», President of International Association of Ukrainian Studies, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, the Europe-Asia Steering Committee of Human Rights Watch. New York, USA
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Ukraine’s choice ought not to be posed as one between a soulless West and spiritual East. An idealized Slavic Orthodox culture, in particular, exists today neither in Russia or Ukraine, and it is still harder to find in the tsarist past. Rather, Ukraine ought to reconstruct its own democratic, independent modern culture based on its traditions of Cossack autonomy, Magdeburg Law, opposition to autocratic centralism, even its autocephalous Orthodox Church history and Christian and populist social ethics. The success of Ukraine and its survival will also make success for Russia’s transformation from despotic empire to democratic nation-state.
