Analysis Ukraine

 

JV Koshiw
author

 

Workers Against the Gulag (Pluto Press, London 1978) was my first book. It contained documents on a group of Donetsk coal miners who attempted to organize an independent trade union and were punished for their efforts with imprisonments and psychiatric hospitals. Amnesty International provided the documents. I co-operated with Amnesty on a campaign aimed at British trade unions to help free the arrested workers. Along with Olga Semyonova, I co-authored the book under the pseudonym of Viktor Haynes, . 

 

The Chernobyl Disaster (Hogarth Press, London 1988) was the next book. It agains was co-authored under my pseudonym Viktor Haynes, but with Marco Bojcun. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone on three occasions to make documentaries for HTV Wales.

 

Beheaded, the killing of a journalist (Artemia Press, Reading 2003) was about the September 16, 2000 disappearance of the journalist Georgi Gongadze, whose headless body was soon discovered outside the capital.  The idea of the book came while I was living in Ukraine. Between 1998 and 2001, I worked as a journalist in Ukraine, first with the Kyiv Post, and then with Ukrainian News.

 

Obezholovlenyi, ubyvstvo zhurnalista (Artemia Press -Sobor, 2004), was an updated version of the book in Ukrainian. On May 20, 2004,the book was launched at a press conference inside Ukraine’s parliament building organized by the MP and head of the Sobor Party, Anatoli Matviyenko. Six thousand copies were sold throughout Ukraine.

 

Gongadze, ubiystvo kotoroye izmenilo Ukrayinu, (Moscow 2005), a further updated version,was published in 2005. Gongadze’s wife, Myroslava, presented the book at a press conference in Moscow.

 

Abuse of Power – corruption in the office of the president (Artemia Press, Bristol 2013) is my recent publication. It came about from further research of the more than 150 hours of recordings of President Kuchma's office conversations available to me. The research was carried out in 2007-8, while I was a visiting scholar in Washington DC at theWoodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and George Washington University. The Kuchma recordings presented a wealth of new information on corruption, which became the impetus for this book. Due to events that under my control the book was not published earlier.