Ukraine’s Euromaidan: From Revolutionary Euphoria to the Madness of War

This book provides a critical survey of Ukraine’s 2013-14 Euromaidan Revolution – the ‘Revolution of Dignity’. Offering a considered analysis of the protest movement and the counter-protest movement, Ukraine’s Euromaidan explores both sides of a revolution that shaped not just Ukraine, but the world, as told by the participants themselves, including the author. Drawing on a varied and complex source base, including thousands of archived videos, articles, personal memoirs, and social media posts, as well as numerous interviews and the author’s own eyewitness observations of both sides of the barricades, the book examines the Euromaidan in Kyiv and Ukraine’s regions. It foregrounds the Euromaidan’s early marginalization of leftist voices, despite gaining international appeal and how activists and politicians failed to win concessions or mobilize broader masses of people. William Jay Risch shines a light on how escalating revolutionary violence badly weakened the state and pitted citizens against one another. Risch also reflects on the ‘Russian Spring’ counter-protests that swept through Ukraine’s south and east, revealing the counter-protesters’ agency and revolutionary aspirations, as well as Russia’s role in radicalizing them, in the process. With both sides dehumanizing each other and clashes between ‘pro-Russian’ and ‘pro-Ukrainian’ protesters often proving lethal, Risch compellingly contends that the Euromaidan Revolution ultimately exposed the limits of revolutionary change in today’s world of contentious politics.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. ‘No One Represents Us!’ 2. The Maidan Welcomes the World 3. Fortress Maidan 4. A Protest Adrift 5. I Go East 6. The Maidan Goes to War 7. A Maidan Under Siege 8. The February Uprising 9. People Power Runs Amok 10. Russian Spring 11. ‘Let’s Fry the Khokhly!’ 12. Burning Bugs in Grandpa’s Jar 13. Enter Madness Bibliography Index

About the Author :
William Jay Risch is Professor of Russian and Eastern European History at Georgia College & State University, USA. He is the author of The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (2011) and the editor of Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc (2014).

Review :
Few recent social movements have been as consequential and controversial as Ukraine’s Euromaidan. This sober and well-documented first-hand account by a Ukrainian historian not only retraces the protests’ origins, composition, and evolution in vivid detail. It also reveals how the movement can be read a microcosm of Ukraine’s turbulent present, and how aspirations for democracy which the movement initially managed to evoke soon collided with internal political fractures and the external geopolitical pressures that have become all-too-apparent in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion. This book is perhaps the most detailed account of Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in English. Risch’s attention to nuance and, at times, contradiction allows the reader to gain a more complete understanding of the significance of this protest movement for contemporary Ukraine, especially in the context of Russia’s full-scale war.