Popular science material by O. A. Rakhmanov, Doctor of Sociological Sciences: “Ukraine: transformation through catastrophes”

The website of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine has published a popular science material by O. A. Rakhmanov, Doctor of Sociological Sciences, "Ukraine: transformation through catastrophes"

Present-day Ukraine is in a state of unprecedented historical acceleration. A process that took centuries in Western countries, Ukrainian society is covering in decades, passing through a series of existential crises. The Chornobyl disaster of 1986 became the starting point of the collective identity of contemporary Ukraine, laying the foundation of a “risk society” and of total distrust towards state hierarchies. On 26 April 2026 it will be forty years since that tragedy — one of the largest technological disasters of the 20th century, with fatal consequences for Ukraine and for the whole world. Yet the path that followed — the achievement of independence, the building of a market economy, the oligarchic capture of power, revolutionary upsurges, the pandemic and the full-scale war — has revealed a non-obvious regularity: the digitalisation of economic and political life became not merely a technical upgrade but a mechanism for escaping the post-traumatic and oligarchic impasse. This material is devoted to a sociological analysis of that transformation: from a passive “Chornobyl” object to an active digital nation.

The full material is here