Honor and Human Rights: A Comparative Study of Russia and Ukraine

Abstract

This article discusses the relative importance attached to honor and human rights in two cultures, Russian and Ukrainian. These cultures have elements of honor cultures, both historically and in the present. There are also elements of a more universalistic interpretation of human dignity that are expressed through the concept of human rights, especially in the case of Ukraine. However, the movement towards the universalistic understanding of human dignity slows down or may even be reversed in the context of a protracted war. Two sources of data inform the analysis: primary (two surveys conducted on representative samples in Russia, N = 1602, and Ukraine, N = 2020) and secondary (the complete works of two poets considered representative of the two cultures, A. Pushkin and T. Shevchenko, as well as documents in the Russian-language and Ukrainian-language segments of the Google online databank). The data were processed using methods of descriptive statistics, binary statistic regression and quantitative content analysis.