Part one of the Summer School was about to provide the participants with a general understanding of the peculiarities and complexity of Ukrainian politics since its gaining of independence in 1991.
Therefor, Mychailo Wynnyckyj, a Sociologist who was born and raised in Canada but has a Ukrainian background and moved to Ukraine in 2003, gave some insightful lecture in Ukrainian (regional) history, economic transformation, its impact on the social structure and finally his interpretation of the Revolution of Dignity. According to Wynnyckyj, the Revolution is a threefold. having a national, bourgeois (anti-neo-feudal), and post-modern dimension.
Wynnyckyj was an active participant and careful observer of the Revolution. The participants of the Summer School were able to benefit from that fact since he provided them with a guided tour around the sites of the Revolution in the very heart of Kyiv.
The first part of the Summer School ended with a meeting with Mariya Berlinska, who was not only a Maidan activist from the beginning to the very end, but also founded the Center of air reconnaissance in Kyiv. Her first-hand observations and front experience where highly valuable for the participants and shaped the abstract idea of a country being drawn into a war with the biggest country in the world and having to defend itself into something imaginable to some extend.
historicityandpostrevolution 