jewkraine

What follows are the rough notes which were prepared and employed for this presentation. They are of course incomplete, and not all of the notes were used. I thought I should post them here nevertheless. There may be a Saxon Messenger editorial which follows. These notes were made prior to the development of certain events discussed in the program.

BRIEF Discussion of Ukranian National politics, Ukranian Presidents:

1st — Leonid Kravchuk (1991–1994): A Communist Party politician all his life, he declared Ukraine independent from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviet bureaucratic infrastructure was retained. Kravchuk was not a freedom-lover or an innovator, but was rather a compromise between Soviet traditionalists (conservatives) and reformers.

After leaving office, Kravchuk joined a business and political group known as Kiev Holding or the Dynamo Group. This group, led by oligarchs Viktor Medvedchuk (pro-Soviet Ukranian lawyer) and Hryhoriy Surkis (Ukranian Jew businessman and politician), is formally organized as the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (marginalized since Orange Revolution). Despite its formal centrist/social-democratic slogans, the party is widely associated with big business, organized crime, corruption, and media bias.