Steven Taylor  is Professor of Political Science and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Troy University, Alabama. He specialises in political parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. We discussed an article he wrote for Outside the Beltway.

We’ve been hearing a lot about Ukraine in the past week, and

I can promise you’ll be hearing a lot more about it the coming weeks and

months, and maybe even years. I’m not going to try to keep you up to date with

what’s going on in the White House, that’s not really the job of a podcast, certainly

not this podcast.

But, since we’re going to be hearing a lot

about Ukraine, it’s worth knowing something about that country. Ukraine is big,

40 million people and about the size of Texas, it was the second-largest

republic of the USSR – of course it’s vastly smaller than the largest, Russia.

And they’re poor. They’re not third-world

poor, but they are poor, the GDP per capita is about $3,200 a year, but that’s

the average, a few billionaires hog most of it, I’ve seen fleets of Porches and

Maseratis run red lights and speed through the centre of Kiev. The typical

Ukrainian is much poorer than the $3,200 a year figure.

In the Soviet era Ukraine suffered

unspeakably; it took the brunt of the Nazi invasion and the Holocaust, although

some Ukrainians collaborated because they saw the Nazis as opposition to the Soviets.

A decade earlier the Soviets – Stalin specifically – had caused the Holmodor, a genocide the

Ukrainians view as on a par with the Holocaust, and not without reason, because

a roughly equal number of people died when almost all the harvest was

confiscated,