Dr. Andreas Umland
Papers and review essays in "European Political Science," "Political Studies Review," "Problems of Post-Communism," "The Russian Review," "Russian Politics and Law," "East European Jewish Affairs," "Demokratizatsiya," "The Journal of Slavic Military Studies," "Osteuropa," "Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft," "Jahrbuch für Ostrecht," "Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte," "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik," "Neue Politische Literatur," "Berliner Debatte," "Politicheskie issledovaniya," "Voprosy filosofii," "Pro et Contra," "Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost´," "Neprikosnovennyi zapas," "Novaia i noveishaia istoriia," "Ab Imperio," and other journals.
Articles in "The Washington Post," "The Wall Street Journal," "Harvard International Review," "Le Monde diplomatique," "The Globe and Mail," "The Jerusalem Post," "The Moscow Times," "Kyiv Post," "Prospect" (London), "Russia Profile," "Novaia gazeta," "Zerkalo nedeli," "The New Times" (Moscow), "Ukrainskaia pravda," "Kontinent," "Korrespondent" (Kyiv), "Novynar," "Ukrainskii tyzhden," "Glavred," and other periodicals.
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Address:
DAAD
German Embassy
vul. Bohdana Khmeltnitskoho, 25
UA-01901 Kyiv
UKRAINE
Contact Information
Articles by Dr. Andreas Umland
February 07, 2012
Without a broad coalition, effective pragmatism and collaboration with reformers in the ancien regime, the "White Revolution" will end as miserable as earlier Russian democratization attempts.
January 02, 2012
Russian imperial nationalism and anti-Westernism has been a distraction for Putin & Co who missed the emergence of a domestic challenge, and did not see the crisis of their regime coming. These same factors may also, however, subvert the currently growing pro-democratic protest movement in Moscow and beyond.
December 11, 2011
The creation of a new supranational formation spanning much of the territory of the former Tsarist and Soviet empires is hampered by structural and historical constraints.
September 14, 2011
Ukraine´s citizens have so far prevented the creation of a new dictatorship, as it has happened in Belarus or the Central Asian states. These and other achievements still make Ukraine a special country, in the post-Soviet context. The EU should duly acknowledge this fact, and finally grant Ukraine a membership perspective.
August 20, 2011
Ukraine remains an exceptional country, within the post-Soviet context.
July 01, 2011
Although the EU plays a crucial role for the future of Europe, the stability and development of Europe in the 21st century depend not only on the Union's internal affairs. The Union's relationship to its European Eastern neighbors in the next years, above all to Russia and Ukraine, may be even more ...
June 12, 2011
(Answers to questions posed by the organizers of the Valdai Discussion Group)
When evaluating the role of various Western organizations in current Western policies towards Eastern Europe, one should keep in mind that the 28 NATO and 27 EU member countries have 21 countries in common. These numb...
May 22, 2011
Western advice concerning the necessity of a democratization is often seen, by Russians, as being irrelevant to their country, if not subversive, in its intention. An EU-promoted re-democratization of Ukraine, in contrast, would be an argument more difficult to reject, by isolationist Russians. If Ukraine demonstrates that an Orthodox Eastern Slavic nation is able to create and sustain a democratic political system, this could trigger a new Russian democratization too. Ukraine could be the EU's instrument to bring Russia back into the European family.
May 15, 2011
Recent political developments in the three Eastern Slavic states, like the repression of opposition figures in Moscow, Minsk and Kyiv, have been frustrating. They illustrate once more that the EU's and, not the least, Germany's policies towards Eastern Europe during the last two decades were a failu...
January 04, 2011
Ukrainian politics has been divided between two camps: the pro-Western democrats (recently represented by the "Orange" parties) and the pro-Russian anti-liberals (recently dominated by the Party of Regions). Now radical nationalists are gaining political strength. Will they manage to get their so-called Freedom party into the national parliament?
December 19, 2010
Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has purposefully instrumentalized Russian imperial nostalgia, national pride and ethnocentric thinking for the legitimization of his authoritarian regime. The repercussions of this strategy are becoming a threat to the integrity of the Russian state, in the 21st century
November 17, 2010
The Union Leadership Needs to Find a Middle Road between More Effective Critique of, and Continuing Cooperation with, Kyiv's New Leadership
October 27, 2010
Two major recent studies of democracy in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union have, independently from each other and based on different methodologies, come to largely similar inferences concerning the question: Which political regimes are most conducive to sustainable democratization in post-communist transition states?
October 25, 2010
The rise of a Galician right-radical party will cause further Ukraine fatigue in the West
April 09, 2010
Largely unnoticed in the West, Ukraine´s new President, Viktor Yanukovych, has brought to power an illegitimate government, in March 2010. Though being installed via a seemingly orderly parliamentary procedure, the current Ukrainian cabinet headed by Prime-Minister Mykola Azarov has no proper popular mandate. Worse, according to Ukrainian press reports, Yanukovych´s actions received first hesitant, and later explicit support from official representatives of Western countries and organizations. How did that come about?
March 26, 2010
As a critical part of the people´s deputies do not any longer fulfill their popular mandate, the 2007 parliamentary elections have lost much of their initial political meaning. When elections are inconsequential for the distribution of power in the state, that state is not any longer a democracy.
February 07, 2010
EU membership is one of the few ideas which still unites almost all Ukrainian politicians, at a national level, as indeed it does large sectors of the population in the east and west of the country. Other salient issues like NATO membership, Russian as a second state language, or the interpretation of World War II deeply divide the country. But the goal of EU membership enjoys wide support, not only in western Ukraine, but in the east too (though less so, in the south, one has to admit).
February 07, 2010
Comparative research has amply demonstrated that such a semi-presidential form of government is problematic for societies transitioning to democracy. But the failure to trace Ukraine's problems and the nature of its political crisis to the semi-presidential system has distorted not only Ukrainian attitudes to their young democracy in recent years, but also the opinion of foreign commentators who are not familiar with recent political research. As a result, instead of questioning the suitability of a semi-presidential system for this post-totalitarian state, some have questioned the suitability of democracy for Ukraine -- or even of Ukrainians for democracy.
January 15, 2010
Tough a violent escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict remains unlikely, politicians on both sides better start thinking how to react in case it does happen.
December 03, 2009
The pro-Ukrainian Free Democratic Party of Germany is becoming a player in the EU´s foreign affairs
November 19, 2009
It might have been the experience of the Orange Revolution that motivated the Kremlin to abandon, three years later, its earlier dramaturgy of staged political competition by controlled parties, and go, in December 2007, for an almost complete, largely undisguised restoration of an, in essence, singly-party system.
August 21, 2009
As long as Russia and other post-Soviet republics will keep a national mythology that pays little attention to proto-democratic beginnings in their history, they will remain trapped in their authoritarian traditions. Ukraine provides an example of how a country can break with an unusable past, and create a pluralistic polity drawing on appropriate (if, sometimes, idealized) precedents in its national history.
August 13, 2009
The EU´s leaders should try to see the larger picture, remember the recent past of their own countries, and stop their unhistorical cognitive dissonance. They should try do understand Ukraine´s current issues against the background of the West and Central European states' experience of instability before their participation in European integration. In the interest of the entire continent and all its peoples, they should offer Ukraine a European perspective sooner rather than later.
July 01, 2009
After several years of impressive economic growth and encouraging political change, Ukraine has recently entered troubled waters. The democracies west of Ukraine are institutionally consolidated and internationally embedded enough to circumscribe the political repercussions of their so far relativel...
May 26, 2009
Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent advocate of fascist and anti-Western views, has risen from a fringe ideologue to penetrate into Russian governmental offices, mass media, civil society and academia. Prominent members of Russian society are affiliated with his International Eurasian Movement. Among Dugin´s most important collaborators are electronic and print media commentator Mikhail Leont´ev and the legendary TV producer and PR specialist Ivan Demidov. If Dugin´s views become more widely accepted, a new Cold War will be the least that the West should expect from Russia during the coming years.
May 04, 2009
In a worst case scenario, an escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian quarrel around the famous Black Sea peninsula destabilizes European security.
March 16, 2009
Debating polling numbers is, with regard to foreign policy issues, such as Russian-American relations, only of limited relevance. Foreign affairs are usually conducted by a country's elite, and constitute one of those policy fields least influenced by the broad public.
February 27, 2009
The main problem that I seem to have in communicating, in the West, the viciousness of anti-Westernism in today Russia is, apparently, that many Western international affairs analysts do not know Russian or/and do not watch Russian state-controlled TV. They, perhaps, watch only the English-language "Russia Today" channel the news reporting and analysis of which is different, in tone, style and substance, from the massive political propaganda transmitted around the clock by the major Russian TV channels ORT and RTR.
February 06, 2009
This meeting could one day be seen as a symbolic and consequential event, in post-Soviet Russia's history. When one of this meeting's participants, former CPSU Central Committee General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, more than twenty years earlier started a comparable rapprochement with Moscow's liberal intellectuals, this move ushered in the democratization of the Soviet Union, and end of the Cold War.
January 29, 2009
Many Russian opinion makers seem to think that the more unpleasant an international (and, sometimes, even national) event is for Russia, the more likely it is that the US is somehow behind it. Scores of Russian intellectuals and politicians appear to actually "need" America for the definition of their homeland: Russia is what the US not is, and the US is what Russia is not.
January 16, 2009
Unless something fundamentally changes in Russian-Western relations, we will – as the Russian-Georgian war illustrated – continue to live on the brink of an armed confrontation between two nuclear super-powers.
January 15, 2009
It appears that in the near future, the European Union monitors will systematically observe the flow of Russian gas to Europe at the Russian-Ukrainian border. Thus, the EU seems to be helping to ease the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation. Or is it? Instead of alleviating the tension, the presence of neutral observers may open a new Pandora´s Box in the Russian-Ukrainian power struggle.
January 15, 2009
As president Victor Yushchenko's rating plummets further there Is a chance that Kiev's political elite may agree to form a parliamentary republic.
January 15, 2009
President Medvedev's recent changes to Russia's constitution leave power beyond public scrutiny and suggest uncertainty and struggle among the elites as to where Russia should head now.
October 10, 2008
While the Russian nation looses from being again driven into the position of an international pariah, many influential people in Moscow, especially the constituency of radically anti-American politicians and pundits, win.
September 23, 2008
Like numerous times before, the Russian leadership is becoming a prisoner to its own propaganda. Outside the Kremlin´s propagandistic bubble, Moscow, however, looks increasingly isolated – a perception that, sooner or later, will also find its way into the Russian public.
August 22, 2008
A justification for Russia´s recent invasion of Georgia was that it had to protect its citizens in South Ossetia. There is, however, a subtle difference between a state´s protection of its citizens living abroad, and a government's defence of its citizens engaged in creating their own state within the internationally recognized borders of another country.
August 09, 2008
In the unlikely case that Russia becomes a truly democratic country, much of what Tsygankov laments in his article would simply disappear.
June 26, 2008
Ex post judgments are not always the purpose of academic or journalistic investigations. We get our money not only for assessing what happened, in the past (many people could do that). One reason that modern societies afford themselves professors, pundits or other analysts is that people want to know what may happen, in the future.
June 26, 2008
Some observers do not hesitate to speak of a "Weimar Russia" comparing post-Soviet conditions to those in inter-war Germany. Though it is not likely (yet) that Russia will turn fascist, it seems even less probable that Russian society will become more tolerant soon.
May 10, 2008
The rise of Dmitry Medvedev will mobilize the large anti-Western constituency in various sectors of the Russian elite. We may soon observe the emergence of another, different "tower" in the Russian state apparatus around which Moscow´s various nationalist politicians and publicists will unite.
May 02, 2008
Should the Russian presidential administration retain its prerogatives, and come under the lasting, full control of Medvedev, the Kremlin will become a focal point of pro-democratic tendencies in Moscow. This development could lead to a situation reminiscent of an earlier period of transition that gained fame under its Russian name "perestroika."
April 20, 2008
Germany´s current stand on Ukraine´s participation NATO's Membership Action Plan is less related to any particular pro-Russianness. Instead, it is driven by a more rational assessment of the implications that a NATO offer for Ukrainian participation in MAP would have. The majority of Ukraine´s population is still against NATO membership. Therefere, a NATO offer now would have had the immediate effect of mobilizing Ukrainian anti-NATO forces, and their utilization of widely spread anti-Western stereotypes - with unknown consequences.
April 13, 2008
In December 2007, Russian political journalist and researcher Grigory Belonuchkin told a court that the results of that month's federal parliamentary elections in two electoral precincts of his home town Dolgoprudnyi near Moscow were tainted. Working as an official observer during the voting for the Russian State Duma, Belonuchkin collected documentation of electoral fraud in favor of Vladimir Putin's party United Russia. In early April 2008, Belonuchkin was beaten so severely that he had to be hospitalized. One fears that Belonuchkin is a case small enough for the Kremlin to let the Dolgoprudnyi gang make the journalist an example for others who may have illusions similar to Belonuchkin´s.
April 09, 2008
Post-Soviet Russia's position in the international arena is becoming increasingly endangered by the progressive spread, in all sectors of society, of bizarre conspiracy theories, irrational anti-Americanism, and fantastic explanations of world politics – interpretations that, in a number of ways, follow patterns of German political writing, speeches and journalism in 1918-1933.
Articles by Dr. Andreas Umland From Other Sources
January 17, 2008
published in Zeithistorische Streitfragen
January 01, 2003
published in WCFIA Working Paper