Becoming an Agent of Change

This paper is about the life experiences of selected individuals who, five years after Ukrainian independence, had emerged as key leaders in post-Soviet Ukraine, a society undergoing deep social and political transformations. In this paper, I argue that under these circumstances, these individuals became both the “children” and “agents” of change. In exploring this idea, I will focus on the moment in their life stories when each narrator identifies the moment when he or she began to act as an “agent” of change. More specifically, I will examine circumstances that transformed these individuals into new leaders at this unique social and political juncture in Ukraine's history. My working hypothesis is that, in addition to direct factors and a certain element of chance, other factors in their earlier biographies, during the Soviet period, have had lasting importance on these leaders' development

Aesthetics · Element (criminal law · Independence (probability theory · Literature · Narrative · Period (music · Political change · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social change · Sociology · Ukrainian · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Law