Becoming an agent of change: Analyzing narratives by leaders in post-Soviet Ukraine

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Notes

1. This research has been carried out under the supervision of University of Michigan Center for Russian and East European Studies. This project has been generously supported by both the Ford Foundation (Ford Foundation Grant No. 950-1163) and the National Council for Soviet and East European Research (NCSEER) (Research Contract 812-11).

2. See the introduction to this volume for a more complete description of the research design. For more detail on the focus group and oral history research conducted in Ukraine, see Victor Susak, “Ukraine: Oral History Interview: Background, Procedures, Expectations, And Preliminary Analysis,” paper presented at the Workshop on Identity Formation and Social Issues in Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, Kyiv, 1997.

3. This work was conducted in cooperation with the Donetsk Centre for Political Studies.

4. See the following works for key methodological and theoretical insights: D. Bertaux, ed., Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (London: Sage, 1981); N. Denzin, Interpretative Biography (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989); G. Gregg, Self-Representation: Life Narrative Studies in Identity and Ideology (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); L. L. Langness and G. Frank, Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography (Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharo, 1999); P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); V. Yadov and V. Semenova, Strategiia sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia: opisaniie, ob”iasneniie, ponimaniie sotsial'noj real'nosti (Moscow: Dobrosvet, 1998).

5. Other studies that utilize life histories in examining the effects of political and economic change in Eastern Europe include R. Breckner, D. Kalekin-Fishman and I. Miethe, eds, Biographies and the Division of Europe: Experience, Action, and Change on the “Eastern Side” (Opladen: Verlag Leske & Budrich, 2000); V. Voronkov and E. Zdravomyslova, eds, Biograficheskij metod v isuchenii postsotsialisticheskix obshchestv (St Petersburg: Sankt Piterburg, 1997).

6. The interview guide included the following main parts:

A.	Family and personal background.
B.	Choice of profession. Professional, public and political activity before the social and political changes in the late 1980s.
C.	The interviewee's life during the last ten years, his/her role in the recent and contemporary sociopolitical events, including: main stages in professional career from the late 1980s up to present; main stages of social and political activity (if any) from the late 1980s up to the present.
D.	Evaluation of the recent and present sociopolitical events.
E.	The interviewee's prediction of the future of Ukrainian society.
F.	Self-identity.

7. P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: University Press, 1992), pp. 198–203.

8. D. Bertaux, “From the Life-History Approach to the Transformation of Sociological Practice,” in D. Bertaux, ed., Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (London: Sage, 1981), pp. 39–40.

9. This is reflected in a common saying of the time: “If you want to have a quiet life, become an engineer.”

10. Interview with Irena Isakova. This quote, like all of the other quotes in this paper, is taken from the original interviews kept in the Archive of Living History at the Institute for Historical Research at Lviv State University.

11. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.

12. Interview with Yuri Zayats.

13. Interviews with Victor Pynzenyk and Yevgen Talipov.

14. Interview with Vasyl Kuibida.

15. Interviews with Andrii Tavpash, Oleg Rybakov and Yuri Zayats.

16. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.

17. Interview with Valentyna Protsenko.

18. Interview with Victor Pynzenyk.

19. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.

20. Interview with Yuri Zayats.

21. Interview with Irena Isakova

22. Interview with Olga Sadovska.

23. Interview with Valentyna Protsenko.

24. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.

25. Interview with Oleg Rybakov.

26. Interview with Yevgen Talipov.

27. Interview with Andrii Tavpash.

28. Interview with Oleksa Hudyma.

29. Interview with Victor Pynzenyk.

30. Interview with Vasyl Kuibida.

31. Interview with Irena Isakova.

32. Interview with Olga Sadovska.

33. Interview with Olga Sadovska.

34. Interview with Yuri Zayats.

35. Interview with Yevgen Talipov.

36. Interview with Oleg Rybakov.

37. Interview with Oleg Rybakov.

38. Here I have used Ricoeur's model which states that narration about the past is based on three overlapping mimetic events: prefiguration (living events experienced by our respondents in the past), configuration (presentation of these experiences by narrators in texts of their interviews) and refiguration (later intellectual interpretations of these texts of interviews). See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 52–87.