Leadership Selection and Patron-Client Relations in the USSR and Yugoslavia (1983) examines the system of nomenklatura, the semi-secret network of quasi-bureaucratic rules and personal relationships through which careers in Soviet politics were managed. Other Communist countries took the USSR as their prototype and their patronage relationship systems are included in this study.

In Ukraine's presidential elections of 2004, the establishment candidate Viktor Yanukovych had the advantages of a solid regional base, access to administrative resources, dominance in the media, help by Russian spin-doctors, and support of Moscow. Yet the winner was the pro-Western challenger, Viktor Yushchenko. How did Ukrainian voters break through the barrage of propaganda so as to deliver their ultimate verdict? Was the divide between Eastern and Western Ukraine fact or PR fiction? In this volume, scholars from two continents examine various aspects of the elections that turned into the Orange Revolution focusing on electoral campaigns and attempts to manipulate results. Following the editor's scene-setting chapter which looks at the electoral laws and their consequences in the previous decade's elections, presidential and parliamentary, the contributors take up specific features of the 2004 contest. The critical part played by a single independent television channel is analyzed by Marta Dyczok. Ilya Khineyko reviews the coverage of the elections in the Russian press, favorable to Yanukovych and always looking for parallels between Russia and Ukraine as well as keeping in mind Moscow's interests. The myths and stereotypes of the campaign are taken up in two contributions by Lyudmyla Pavlyuk and Olena Yatsunska. Clearly, constructed images often overshadowed real issues. Valerii Polkonsky's essay exposes the linguistic innovations of the campaign, including the irony and humour unleashed by such incidents as the "egg attack" on Yanukovych. In Kerstin Zimmer's final paper, the machine politics, administrative resources and fraud which had worked so well in Donets'k are shown to have been less than successful on the national level for reasons of scale and impersonality.

What are the reasons behind, and trajectories of, the rapid cultural changes in Ukraine since 2013? This volume highlights: the role of the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian-Ukrainian war in the formation of Ukrainian civil society; the forms of warfare waged by Moscow against Kyiv, including information and religious wars; Ukrainian and Russian identities and cultural realignment; sources of destabilisation in Ukraine and beyond; memory politics and Russian foreign policies; the Kremlins geopolitical goals in its 'near abroad'; and factors determining Ukraines future and survival in a state of war. The studies included in this collection illuminate the growing gap between the political and social systems of Ukraine and Russia. The anthology illustrates how the Ukrainian revolution of 20132014, Russias annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and its invasion of eastern Ukraine have altered the post-Cold War political landscape and, with it, the regional and global power and security dynamics.

Ukraine is a misfit among post-communist states, being neither a respectable, stable democracy nor an autocracy. Nor does it sit well as a patronal political system, like other post-Soviet regimes, since the Euromaidan Revolution. This study examines the presidencies of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy focusing on their common tendency to subordinate the legal system and use it as a political instrument. It finds that this pattern of power struggle concentrated in the president's office was, contrary to the theory of patronal politics, more dominant than clientelism. The second theme of this book is each president's handling of relations--largely meaning the war--with Russia, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and culminating in the invasion of 2022, as the key challenge to the nation's survival. One way or another, unable to reform itself or to withstand the Russian assault, post-Euromaidan Ukraine will have come to an end.