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’.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.

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).