Lecture 45: The Gorbachev era and the road to independence
Professor Paul Robert Magocsi — Ukraine: A History Course.
The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter is pleased to present a lecture series by Paul Robert Magocsi titled Ukraine: A History Course. Magocsi recorded 45 lectures in 2023 at the University of Toronto, where he holds the professorial Chair of Ukrainian Studies and is a history and political science professor. He is also a Board Member of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.
Magocsi, one of the world’s leading experts on Ukraine, explores this fascinating country in all its complexity, from its history, culture, geography, politics, and multi-ethnic composition. The lectures are an important counterweight to Russian propaganda and explain Ukraine’s importance to global security today.
Time stamps are available for each lecture. Auto-translate is available in Ukrainian, major European, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish.
Recordings of the lecture series were made possible with the support of the Temerty Foundation.
All the lectures are available on YouTube here.
0:24 Leonid Brezhnev
1:22 Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko
2:20 Mikhail Gorbachev
10:04 Last Soviet troop column crosses a bridge on the border between Afghanistan and then Soviet Uzbekistan, February 1989
12:07 Hungarian-Austrian border
19:10 Leon Trotsky
20:19 A human chain stretching 900 kms from L'viv to Kyiv organized by Rukh, 21 January 1990
22:52 Confession administered clandestinely in a forest by an underground Greek Catholic priest near the Galician village of Urochyshche, 1987
27:16 Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi
29:49 Leonid Kravchuk
31:40 Declaration of Ukraine's independence, Kyiv, Ukraine 24 August 1991
33:46 The results of the Ukrainian independence referendum of 1 December 1991
For further information, you may wish to consult: A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2010)
Robert Paul Magocsi
Chair of Ukrainian Studies University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada, September 2023.
