Youth Transitions in East and West Ukraine

Abstract

This paper is based mainly on evidence from 600 interviews during 2002 with 25- to 29-year olds, drawn in equal numbers from coalmining villages in East Ukraine and rural villages in the country's west. The analysis explains how basically the same 'reforms' have impacted differently on young (and older) people in these contrasting regions. The evidence also reveals how young people's responses to the changes have differed from place to place. This has been partly due to geography: proximity to or distance from richer countries has been important. However, in rural west Ukraine even economically unsuccessful young people usually become socially integrated via religion and village life, and, in some parts of the western regions, they usually become politically integrated via identification with the region's dominant nationalist politics. In the east the situation is in some ways more quiescent and, at the same time, potentially more volatile. Young people in the country's east are less satisfied than their west Ukraine counterparts about the general course of the reforms, and they can envisage no acceptable futures for themselves in their own region. Yet there are no accessible and attractive routes out. At present these young people are less likely to be politically active than youth in the country's western regions, but this could easily change. In the east they are as yet inactive, but they are more likely to be organised in trade unions and to belong to political parties