A path to know each others

The Day recently launched a high-profile series of publication, “What Kind of Russia Do We Love?” Within this series, The Day’s contributors, experts and readers speak on the people, culture, and intellect of Russia that are capable of a civilized dialogue with Ukraine and the world.

Kyiv hosted the other day some representatives of the Russia the Ukrainians respect, love, and heed. Yury Afanasiev, Mark Rozovsky, Igor Chubais, and Viktor Shenderovich are some of the Russian participants in the Moscow — Kyiv Civic Dialogue, for whom Myroslav Popovych, director of the Hryhorii Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy (Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences), hospitably opened the door. The idea of conducting the Civic Dialogue belongs to the Ukrainian freelance journalist Oleksandr Tertychny.

The agenda is somewhat unusual for this kind of a respectable assembly. The subjects to be discussed are: “Why have I decided to take part in this meeting?”, “Let us tell each other about our countries,” “The image of the neighboring country in my country’s mass media,” and, the principal one, “Can we improve our relations? Concrete proposals.” It is the historian and public figure Yury Afanasiev who spelled out the aim of the Russian intellectuals’ visit to Kyiv: “I have come to see the level of Ukrainian self-cognition, i.e., the ability to criticize their own historical experience. In today’s Russia it [this ability] is tragically infinitesimal.”

Afanasiev’s intellectual challenge was taken up by the Ukrainian party to the dialogue represented by no less prominent figures: Myroslav Popovych, Oleksii Haran, Volodymyr Panchenko, Volodymyr Kryzhanivsky, and others. As the Russian analyst and political scientist Fyodor Shelov-Kovediayev pointed out, “if there is at least some kind of a civil society in our countries, it must manifest itself.” Without exaggeration, this Civic Dialogue is just this kind of manifestation.