Ukraine's Euromaidan - by William Jay Risch (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

This book provides a critical survey of Ukraine's 2013-14 Euromaidan Revolution - the 'Revolution of Dignity'. 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 interviews and thousands of archived videos, articles, personal memoirs, and social media postsfrom both sides of the barricades, Risch shows how events in Kyiv and Ukraine's regions were intimately entangled. Protest and counter-protest participation shifted and evolved. Escalating revolutionary violence weakened the state and pitted citizens against one another. Risch also reflects on the 'Russian Spring' 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. With both sides dehumanizing each other and clashes between 'pro-Russian' and 'pro-Ukrainian' protesters becoming lethal, Risch compellingly contends that the Euromaidan Revolution ultimately exposed the limits of revolutionary change in today's world of contentious politics.

Review Quotes

"The book is an exemplary study of the revolutionary dynamics in Ukraine in winter of 2014 written from within the movement by an academic out- sider who managed to show himself both as its admirer and a critic." --H-Soz-Kult

"Few recent social movements have been as consequential and controversial as Ukraine's Euromaidan. This sober and well-documented first-hand account by a historian of Ukraine not only retraces the protests' origins, composition, and evolution in vivid detail. It also reveals how the movement can be read as 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." --Paulo Gerbaudo, Senior Research Fellow in Social Sciences, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

"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." --Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Harvard University, USA

About the Author