About me: John Lotherington

I’m John Lotherington, director of the  21^st Century Trust and one of the organizers of the study tour. My interest in Eastern Europe developed in the 1980s when I was teaching history. I found that any mental map of Europe seemed to fade away east of the Elbe. I tried to remedy that a little in a textbook I wrote on Renaissance and Reformation Europe. In 1988, I became involved in student links with countries then in the Warsaw Pact, so that these should not be ‘faraway countries of which we knew little’. All of that suddenly took off as the Wall came down, and my students took hammers and chisels with them to Berlin to help in the demolition and bring some souvenir rubble home. But we never made it as far as Ukraine.

Until the Orange Revolution, Ukraine was a country which remained only hazily on many people’s mental maps. Even now the complexities of this huge European country are paid little attention and there is a danger, since the European project has faltered after the failure of the Constitution, and even more with a growing sense of enlargement fatigue, that minds to the West may be closing. So that is one reason why we are here - to open up some new channels of communication and to embellish our mental maps of this part of Europe.

Key supporters of the tour have been Vladimir and Svetlana Granovski of Asquith & Granovski Associates. They are consultants and advisers at the interface of British and Ukrainian business, and more broadly of the two countries’ publics. (They recently produced a supplement about Ukraine for the British Sunday paper, ‘The Observer’.)

Comments

[coach suitcase]

the future can be anything we want to make it. We can take the mysterious, hazy future and carve out of it anything that we can imagine, just as a sculptor carves a statue from a shapeless stone.

[air jordan]

None of the turmoil that routinely attends film-star existence ever seemed to visit the Astaire household.