Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
“Hillbillization” of the Eastern Ukrainians and Revolutionary Events in Ukraine
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
The large corpus of literature that addresses the social inequality of Appalachian “hillbillies” (see Billings, 2000) may help to analyze the events that took place during the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. The problem is that, when Western media report about Ukrainian revolutionary events, they focus, primarily, on the pro-Western-thinking Maidan activists, ignoring the importance of the opposing Anti-Maidan camp, which represents the interests of people from heavily industrialized Eastern Ukraine (see, for example, Netflix’s “Winter on Fire” (2015). There might be several reasons for this misguided focus. First of all, public discourse has portrayed Anti-Maidan supporters as rather problematic people who live in Eastern Ukraine and share a hillbilly-like, Soviet-era “vatnik” (Grytsenko, 2015) culture of poverty. Another problem is that, over the last two decades, industry workers have faced a dramatic degradation of the social prestige of their professions, which used to be elite in Soviet times and now rather is associated with unemployment and poverty (Vasyutinsky, 2015). Furthermore, numerous governmental subsidy programs (Zaharchenko, 2014) that aimed to revive heavy industry in Eastern Ukraine instead resulted in the economic and cultural isolation of the region from the rest of the country. Lastly, following the tradition of Soviet dissidents (Bergman, 1992), the majority of Anti-Maidan supporters prefer expressing their political concerns within their small social networks instead of through active street protesting, and therefore may appear politically inactive. Unfortunately, the lack of public interest in the aforementioned issues results in the continued “hilbillization” of Eastern Ukrainians and also deepens the social conflict in Ukrainian society.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Radion Svynarenko, doctoral student at Family Sciences Department of University of Kentucky
Antonina Rudska, lecturer at Department of Social Work, Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev, Ukraine
“Hillbillization” of the Eastern Ukrainians and Revolutionary Events in Ukraine
The large corpus of literature that addresses the social inequality of Appalachian “hillbillies” (see Billings, 2000) may help to analyze the events that took place during the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. The problem is that, when Western media report about Ukrainian revolutionary events, they focus, primarily, on the pro-Western-thinking Maidan activists, ignoring the importance of the opposing Anti-Maidan camp, which represents the interests of people from heavily industrialized Eastern Ukraine (see, for example, Netflix’s “Winter on Fire” (2015). There might be several reasons for this misguided focus. First of all, public discourse has portrayed Anti-Maidan supporters as rather problematic people who live in Eastern Ukraine and share a hillbilly-like, Soviet-era “vatnik” (Grytsenko, 2015) culture of poverty. Another problem is that, over the last two decades, industry workers have faced a dramatic degradation of the social prestige of their professions, which used to be elite in Soviet times and now rather is associated with unemployment and poverty (Vasyutinsky, 2015). Furthermore, numerous governmental subsidy programs (Zaharchenko, 2014) that aimed to revive heavy industry in Eastern Ukraine instead resulted in the economic and cultural isolation of the region from the rest of the country. Lastly, following the tradition of Soviet dissidents (Bergman, 1992), the majority of Anti-Maidan supporters prefer expressing their political concerns within their small social networks instead of through active street protesting, and therefore may appear politically inactive. Unfortunately, the lack of public interest in the aforementioned issues results in the continued “hilbillization” of Eastern Ukrainians and also deepens the social conflict in Ukrainian society.
