Maidan and Self-Understanding (lecture)
Making of Modern Ukraine 20
We are nearing the end of my open course on Ukrainian history, “The Making of Modern Ukraine.” The 2013-2014 Ukrainian protest movement remembered as “Maidan” was one of the turning points, thus far, of the twenty-first century.
Obscured as it was (like so much in the 2010s!) by propaganda, the Maidan never received quite the attention it deserved. If it was noticed, this tended to be as some kind of exotic and spectacular event, worthy of splashy photographs but to be quickly forgotten.
The Maidan was a reckoning with digital and post-modern politics, a call to the corporeal politics of physical protest to defend basic ideas of truth and decency. It began as an attempt to protect Ukraine’s path to the European Union, and ended with Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine.
In my view, the Maidan and the Russian response are an integral part of a larger story that includes Russian encouragement of Brexit and support of Donald Trump in 2016 — I set out the connections in Road to Unfreedom.
Those wishing to understand both the moral and organizational bases of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022 should start with these events of 2013-2014— presented here in Professor Shore’s guest lecture in the class, as well as in her book, Ukrainian Night.
The video of the lecture is here and the podcast version is here or here. The links are the same for all of the lectures: feel free to bookmark or share.
Readings:
Shore, Ukrainian Night, entire.
Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, 208-238.
No term sheet for the guest lecture.
Thank-you for doing this work and sharing your lectures.
Tim, is there anything like Voice of America or Radio Free Europe getting across to the Russian people? And I also mean the internet, what used to be good Twitter, or others. Are they mostly cut off from non-Russian news? Thanks! I have learned so much. When I have questions, it’s like you read my mind and the are answers are in your lectures.