UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION OF XX–XXI CENTURIES: HISTORICAL AND LEGAL COMPARATIVE STUDY
In: Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Legal Studies, Issue 112, p. 32-35
The paper analyses the revolutionary events of XX–XXI centuries in Ukraine, in particular, the prerequisites, causes, and consequences of social, political and economic nature, the historical, political and legal experience of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921, the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Dignity Revolution of 2014. By carrying out a comparative legal analysis the author comes to the conclusion that the above mentioned processes are characterized not only by the same goal, the basis of which is the idea of social and national liberation, but also by such concepts as human centrism, their anti-imperial, national, and state orientations. On the other hand, attention is also focused on the distinctive features of the revolutions mentioned, such as different external and internal political circumstances behind them and the international legal reaction to the revolutionary events that took place in our country.
Thus, the article outlines the challenges of today's Ukrainian humanities through the prism of an average human being's role in the revolutionary process in Soviet times, identifies the impact of these phenomena on the individual, makes an attempt to find common features of political and legal reaction to such events from both Ukrainian society and the ruling circles of some neighboring states.
The paper proves the complete scientific inability of a number of Russian imperial myths, namely the desire to present Russian-Ukrainian conflicts as "civil wars", the attempts of Russian historiography to "incorporate" the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 into the all-Russian revolutionary process, the desire to characterize the 2014 Revolution of Dignity as a "coup d'etat", etc.
On the basis of the comparative analysis, the author explains why the Ukrainian state as a geopolitical reality could not happen during the revolution in the beginning of twentieth century, in contrast to the events of presence, when modern post-revolutionary Ukraine managed to withstand the struggle against the Russian occupation forces and once again avoided the tragic consequences that came to our land after the occupation.