Overview

How did the Ukrainian oligarchy survive the institutional disruption of the Euromaidan revolt of 2013/2014? How did it manage to continue its extractive political and economic practices, amid deep changes in Ukraine's society and polity? To answer these questions, this book analyzes the evolution of the Ukrainian super-rich in 2006-2017, tracing the process of conversion of wealth into political influence through vote-buying in the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) and of the transformation of political influence back into wealth via elite rent-extraction schemes within the Ukrainian gas sector. A key argument is that continuity in informal practices between the Yanukovych and Poroshenko presidencies, and of the networks that conduct them, meant a prolongation of the dominant political economy regime. The study conceptualizes the processes of the recreation of Ukrainian oligarchy as a ""currency flow,"" or circuit, of wealth and power. It adds to the literature on the dynamics of informally dominated post-communist political economy regimes a detailed, integrated, and internally comparative case study of Ukraine.

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9783838217406

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Reviews

This book “is ambitious in its scope, seeking to tie together the perpetuation of the oligarchy to Ukraine’s sustained economic underperformance by way of a thoroughgoing empirical study of one of the defining features of politics in Ukraine”. —Dr Sarah Whitmore, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Oxford Brookes University. It is a “successful attempt to combine usage of theories of oligarchy and national prosperity, which also links with the author’s avowed normative focus on the problem of insufficient wealth generation”. —Dr Rasmus Nilsson, Lecturer in Russian Politics, SSEES, University College London.

A successful attempt to combine usage of theories of oligarchy and national prosperity.--Dr Rasmus Nilsson, Lecturer in Russian Politics, SSEES, University College London This book is ambitious in its scope ... a thoroughgoing empirical study of one of the defining features of politics in Ukraine.--Dr Sarah Whitmore, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Oxford Brookes University

Author Information

Dr David Dalton studied the political economy of modern Ukraine at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London. Before that, he was editor for Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Moldova at the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information wing of The Economist Group. Andreas Umland, M.Phil. (Oxford), Dr.Phil. (FU Berlin), Ph.D. (Cambridge), Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in Stockholm, Senior Expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv, and Associate Professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Andrew Wilson is Professor of Ukrainian Studies at SSEES, University College London.

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