The Ukrainian Night provides an insightful account of the 2013–14 revolution and the ensuing violence in eastern Ukraine from the perspective of participants in these tumultuous events. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with nearly three dozen Ukrainian intellectuals and civic activists, Marci Shore sketches an intimate portrait of a twenty-first century revolution as “a lived experience given to individuals” (xiv). Specifically, she explores how individuals faced with a critical choice opted to engage in high-risk activism and these revolutionary experiences produced a profound impact on their lives. More broadly, the book raises “universal questions about the nature of selfhood, the plasticity of temporality, and the fate of truth” (xv).
The book was conceived as a reaction to a sharp disjuncture between western media coverage of the revolution and eyewitness accounts of the revolutionary situation. Shore felt that the western media's neglect of human experiences and journalists’ focus on geostrategic interests, North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership, and energy policies generated a limited understanding of what was actually happening in Ukraine (xiii). In addition, the book's title, inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii's 1926 poem Dolg Ukraine (Debt to Ukraine, www.segodnya.ua/ukraine/vladimir-mayakovskiy-ob-ukraine-tovarishch-moskal-na-ukrainu-shutok-ne-skal-503782.html), alludes to the fact that the Maidan has been misunderstood in contemporary Russia. “What do we know about the face of Ukraine? A load of Russians’ knowledge is rather scanty,” wrote Maiakovskii at the height of the Soviet policy of Ukrainization (http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CU%5CK%5CUkrainization.htm). As noted in the book (237), the poem's message resonated with a native of Donetsk whose recital of the poem was filmed by a Babylon'13 (www.you-tube.com/watch?v=yR1F8Mb7CMQ&feature=youtu.be) crew shortly before he was killed by the Russia-backed separatists. Using an excerpt from the Debt to Ukraine as an epigraph, Shore urges readers to develop a more nuanced understanding of Ukrainian politics and society.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part unravels the logic of citizens’ engagement in the revolution that began with a peaceful protest against the incumbent president Viktor Yanukovych's abrupt refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union on November 21, 2013 and culminated in the police shooting of civilians and Yanukovych's political asylum in the Russian Federation in February 2014. The second part focuses on war experiences in the Donbas, a gruesome site of human suffering and perseverance under precarious conditions. Shore's interlocutors unveil the self-organization of protesters, the incompetence of Ukrainian politicians, Russia's imperial ambitions, and the absurdities of war.
A central theme in the book is the transcendence of boundaries in a revolutionary situation. People of different generations revolted against proizvol, a Russian-language term for the arbitrary rule of a tyrant (41). Furthermore, the Maidan brought together people of different ethnic backgrounds, language preferences, and political orientations. One of the chapters, for example, features Natan Khazin (https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/religious-jew-aids-ukrainian-army/), an émigré from Odessa who served in the Israel Defense Forces and became a “commander of operations” on Kyiv's Maidan (51–52). Concurrently, Shore acknowledges palpable tensions between right-wing groups and leftist activists inside the encampment (54–55). She also mentions a gender-based division of labor: “men were building barricades, women were making Molotov cocktails” (111). Beyond making Molotov cocktails and slicing sandwiches, the interviewed women performed such critical tasks as the coordination of transportation from L΄viv to Kyiv (43), and the management of a hotline for protesters (45). In a remarkable feat of solidarity, a diverse body of protesters pulled their efforts together to sustain “a parallel polis” on the Maidan (44).
The book is written in Hemingway-esque style, making judicious choice of vignettes and swiftly moving from one topic to another. However, the book lacks such common features of a scholarly publication as footnotes and an index. The citation of several academic sources would have been especially helpful to the reader when the book touches upon some controversy-ridden issues in Ukrainian historiography.
Taken as a whole, The Ukrainian Night contributes to the bourgeoning literature on Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity by capturing the essence of the revolution through the lens of Ukrainian intellectuals. The book will be of interest to students of east European history, political sociology, and comparative politics. Moreover, the book is well positioned to reach a wide audience outside academia.
