The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Institute of World Politics Graduate School had the pleasure of hosting a conversation with VOC Trustee, Ambassador Paula Dobriansky, about the book she edited for her late father, Dr. Lev E. Dobriansky, Unyielding Resolve: Captive Nations and the Path to Freedom. During this discussion, Ambassador Dobriansky was joined by Michael Sawkiw, Jr., President of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Dr. Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and John Suarez, Executive Director of the Center for a Free Cuba.
This book is the first to document the history of the Captive Nations movement and the passage of the US law designating Captive Nations Week. Dr. Lev E. Dobriansky provides a potent first-person account detailing the resistance to Moscow’s imperial domination over non-Russian peoples in the Soviet era and beyond. Dobriansky’s first-person perspective on Russian imperialist behavior in the twentieth century, argues that even in the Soviet era, Russian statecraft was heavily shaped by traditional imperialist ideology—led by Moscow’s self-image as the dominant Eurasian imperial power. This theory was at the heart of Dobriansky’s commitment to warning against global Soviet aggression and liberating peoples under Russian repression, culminating in the Captive Nations Resolution (PL 86-90), the US law designating Captive Nations Week and the issuance of a presidential proclamation every July.
Copies of Unyielding Resolve: Captive Nations and the Path to Freedom were complimentary on a first-come-first-serve basis.
