Bohdan Krawchenko

Krawchenko was born in a displaced persons camp in Günzburg, Germany. His parents moved to France in 1947 before emigrating to Montreal, Canada, in 1951. His family subsequently moved to a farm in Ormstown, Quebec, where he attended high school.^[3] His father, originally from the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, was a survivor of Soviet dekulakization and a former deportee who escaped back to Ukraine before the war; his stories of the Holodomor and state-building influenced Krawchenko's intellectual formation.^[3]

He received a Bachelor of Arts from Bishop's University, a Master of Arts from the University of Toronto, and a Post-Graduate Diploma from the University of Glasgow. He earned a D.Phil in Social Sciences from the University of Oxford. In the late 1960s, Krawchenko was a voice of the Ukrainian "New Left" and a founder of the journal Critique: A Journal of Socialist Theory in 1973.^[4]

From 1986 to 1991, Krawchenko served as the second Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta.^[2] During this tenure, he expanded areas of research and publications, and established relations with scholars in Ukraine. He served on the editorial board of the institute's project, the five-volume Encyclopedia of Ukraine published by the University of Toronto Press. In Edmonton, he was involved in the effort to erect the monument to the Holodomor in front of City Hall, which was the first such monument in a public space.^[2]

In 1991, Krawchenko moved to Kyiv at the invitation of George Soros to work with the Council of Advisors to the Verkhovna Rada.^[5] In 1992, he became the founding director of the Institute of Public Administration and Local Government (which became the National Academy for Public Administration in 1995), modeled after the French École nationale d'administration. At the National Academy, he served as Vice-Rector.

Krawchenko was a co-author of the 1993 Law on the Civil Service, making Ukraine the first in the former USSR to adopt such legislation.^[6] He was a member of government working groups, including those on monetary reform, administrative reform, and anti-crisis programming.^[2] Alongside his wife, the literary critic Solomiia Pavlychko, he co-founded the Osnovy publishing house, which translated foundational social science textbooks into Ukrainian and has published over 400 titles.^[7]

From 1992 to 1999, he held leadership positions in the International Renaissance Foundation in Ukraine. Between 1997 and 2004, he chaired the Steering Committee of the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative for the Open Society Institute in Budapest.^[8]

Since 2004, Krawchenko has been with the University of Central Asia (UCA). He served as Director General from 2007 to 2014 and as Dean of the Graduate School of Development from 2014 to 2022.^[9] He is currently a Principal Research Fellow and Director of the Afghanistan Research Initiative.^[1] Between 2017 and 2020, he worked with the Kyrgyz Cabinet of Ministers on administrative reform. His recent research, published in 2024, focuses on governance and public administration under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.^[10]