ABSTRACT
The debate about Ukrainian culture’s orientation changed in regard to subject and discourse after Ukraine gained its independence in 1991. This significant shift occurred primarily between 1997 and 1999. At the turn of the twenty-first century the debate on orientation came to divide Ukrainian intellectuals. This was due to the political and social atmosphere in Ukraine after President Kuchma’s second term, according to my preliminary hypothesis. The diversity of cultural and intellectual life previously seen in the late 1980s to the early 1990s was replaced by a simpler picture. Intellectual circles became highly polarized. Some of them attempted to dominate the debate by making use of an old device of Soviet propaganda: a black-and-white picture allows the exclusion of “the ugly” and the search for an “internal enemy,” who is blamed for one’s lack of success. The old oppositions of modernizers vs. traditionalists and East vs. West proved applicable to this new situation.
