Light and shadows of the Cultural – Civilizational Conflict – Stanislav Ovcharenko

One of the goals of Stanislav Ovcharenko’s work is to show that a direct and rapid transition from the long existence of a totalitarian society to democracy is practically impossible, due to the damaged cultural code of a free individual in conditions of unfreedom. The main arena of confrontation now, not only in the post-communist world, but throughout the rest of the world, is the irreconcilable conflict between culture and barbarism, organic to an aggressively ignorant person. Culture must learn to defend itself.
To do this, the author proposes to consider social processes as a type of natural development of both the society and the individual, and not as beautiful-hearted humanism, alien and incomprehensible to the bearers of non-Western culture and civilization. Moreover, similar events occur in similar circumstances, which allows us to make a correct prognosis.
The Russian “repentant intelligentsia” died after 1917, precisely because of groundless humanism. The author tried to comprehend and explain these turning-point events in the proposed book Light and Shadows of the Cultural-Civilization Conflict.

Stanislav Ovcharenko was born in 1950 in Zaporozhye, Ukraine. He graduated from Dnepropetrovsk University in 1977 with a degree in foreign languages, and from Kiev University in 1983 with a degree in philosophy. In recent years, he has been giving lectures on problems of world culture and ethnic psychology, focusing on intercultural dialogue. Since 2001, he has actively participated in the fight against the post-communist oligarchic regime, including involvement in the events on the Kiev Maidan, both as a journalist and as the head of the online publication “Light and Shadows”. Living in post-Soviet Ukraine, he found himself in the status of an included internal observer; akin to the field conditions of an experimental volcanologist. The experiment to exit the regime of a closed totalitarian society was carried out by life itself, and it was very convenient to observe inside. He lived in such a way as to understand and describe historical life at its turning point; this was facilitated by his personal disinterest in the ugly oligarchic forms of life, that emerged on the ruins of a closed social system. Stanislav is married and he has two sons and one granddaughter.