Role Models Taking on the World

Ukraine’s troubled history of foreign domination and colonization has led to the nation honoring heroic figures and role models that give it a sense of Ukrainian identity that links the past with the present. The emerging post-Independence generation gains in self-confidence and identity awareness young Ukrainians have a whole host of impressive modern-day icons to draw on. Together they are helping to foster a new, Ukrainian national identity for the 21st century.

The first big popular culture breakthrough for independent Ukraine came in the field of sports, an arena in which the country has always excelled. In Soviet times many of the top performers climbing the Olympic podium in their distinctive CCCP tops were actually Ukrainians (Serhiy Bubka being the most famous), while the Soviet football team was often an extension of the Dynamo Kyiv sides of the era. Following independence this has translated into a wide range of world-beating performers who have helped raise the country’s profile internationally, starting with a string of Olympic triumphs at the 1992 and 1996 games.
 

Packing a Patriotic Punch

The country’s most successful sporting ambassadors have been the heavyweight champion Klitschko boxing brothers, whose dominance of pugilism’s top division has been rivaled only by their outstanding intelligence and grace outside the ring >>

The Lyrical Ukrainian Language

Language has historically been one of the key indicators of a nation’s sovereignty. For over four centuries the Ukrainian language has been subject to outright bans and propaganda campaigns designed to relegate it to the level of mere dialect >>

Honouring Stalin’s Countless Victims

Every November Ukraine remembers the millions who starved to death during Stalin’s terror famine of the 1930s with moving memorial services featuring thousands of coloured candle-lit lamps. For decades during the Soviet era the famine was attributed to natural causes and airbrushed out of Ukrainian history, but the Ukrainian Parliament voted in 2006 to acknowledge the famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, paving the way for an honest evaluation of the atrocities of Soviet rule. For many Ukrainians raised on a diet of Soviet state propaganda, the scale of the historical revision this requires remains too painful to contemplate.

Another Ukraine

A prominent Ukrainian politician Viacheslav Chornovil once said, that Ukrainians could boast (or maybe grieve) almost the same dispersion all over the world as the biblical Jewish nation. The Ukrainian diaspora indeed stretches the globe >>

Feminine disposition of the Ukrainian character

A steel Lady standing on the green hills of the Dnipro River competes but the golden domes of the Kyivo-Pecherska Lavra (Caves Monastery). She is ready to protect her city any time, a sword in one hand, and a shield in another >>