Oxana Pachlowska

(Continued from the previous issue) Settling historical accounts and a guilt complex are Europe’s constant catharsis. In his Le Sanglot de l’Homme blanc (The Tears of the White Man, 1983), the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner says the feeling of guilt is one of the main features of Western...

The sign over the entrance gate to the Soviet Solovki concentration camp read: “We Shall Force Humankind into Happiness with an Iron Hand.” The sign over the main gate to a Nazi concentration camp read: “Arbeit macht frei” —“Work Makes You Free.” It is hard to say which of the two formulas is...

This article was already underway when I got to know, in different circumstances, students from several Ukrainian universities. My first impression was that of a breath of fresh air. What I saw was inspiring and inspired young people, brimming over with energy, curiosity, and plans for today and...

It is awful when you have to say about a close friend whose loss has left lifelong pain, “It is a good thing that he left this world without seeing this.” That is what I told myself on Nov. 28, 2006, after the Verkhovna Rada passed the law on the Holodomor. Yes, they passed the law but in a way...

You enter the park of an Italian Renaissance villa, and your heart suddenly stops beating: you see Chornobyl’s Way of the Cross along the alley — two rows of fourteen crosses with black and white mourning ribbons tied to them. The crosses bear the names of Chornobyl’s extinct villages: Poliske,...

Continued from the previous issueThe president of Ukraine is no Harry Potter, who can wave his magic wand to make corruption disappear. Corruption is merely the result of hopeless poverty and mean, ruthless bureaucracy — the two invariable paradigms of the “Russian space.” Centuries of beggarly...

I have always hated this famous saying by Rudyard Kipling. It exudes an inbred, colonialist idiosyncrasy. These words resound with a crack of a whip against leather jackboots. The East’s fatal lack of prospects peers through the sharp terseness of this poetic sentence, which leaves no hope...