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

Ukraine’s Euromaidan offers a critical account of the Euromaidan Revolution and its opponents, including those who took part in counterprotests known as the Russian Spring. Drawing on interviews and thousands of archived videos, articles, personal memoirs, and social media posts from both sides of the barricades, the book 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. The so-called Russian Spring then swept through Ukraine’s south and east. Ukraine’s Euromaidan stresses these participants’ 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, Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution 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 and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, in the United States. He is the author of The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Harvard University Press, 2011) and editor of Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe (Lexington Books, 2015). Dr. Risch was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University in 2014 and 2015.