The Daddy of the “Devil’s Dozen” and His Brainchild. Part 1 Anatoly Slobodyanuk
Kharkiv and the Kharkiv region as a whole have always been a very, very peculiar area, with its own not particularly articulated yet very much alive identity. And its plunge into the boiling melting cauldron of today’s Ukrainian Inferno is a story that is both tragic and, in its own way, extremely interesting. And, without a doubt, instructive. I remember how back in peaceful times (around 2012, if memory serves) at the sociology faculty of the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, where your humble servant was working at the time, the topic of “consolidation and integration of the Ukrainian nation” was suddenly being widely discussed. No, of course, not « really» suddenly—one of the chairs of the faculty, headed purely by coincidence by the university’s rector Vil Savbanovich Bakirov himself, had, just as “purely by coincidence”, received a state contract, a grant, or something of that sort on the matter. And so, they discussed—and kept trying to come up with anything at all b...