Historian Marci Shore reflects on the promise of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and the nihilism of Russia’s war

When Ukrainians began protesting on Kyiv’s Independence Square in November 2013, historian Marci Shore was watching from Vienna. Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, had backtracked on signing an Association Agreement with the European Union, triggering massive demonstrations that stretched on for days and then weeks. Faced with tens of thousands of protesters who refused to budge, Yanukovych deployed riot police units and hired thugs to disperse the crowds by force. But the violence only mobilized more people.

A scholar of intellectual history with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, Shore had studied revolutions through archives and books, but she had never witnessed one like this firsthand. The protesters ultimately succeeded in overthrowing Yanukovych and his government, albeit at a terrible cost. By the time the disgraced president fled to Russia in February 2014, more than 100 protesters and about a dozen police officers had been killed on Independence Square. In the weeks that followed, Russia sent forces into Ukraine, annexing Crimea and starting a war in the eastern Donbas region that would kill more than 14,000 people.

Initially, Shore was hesitant to write about the events unfolding in Ukraine. But when she realized how poorly understood the Revolution of Dignity was in the West, she felt compelled to intervene in the public discussion. She wrote an essay, which then grew into her 2017 book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. The paperback edition, published in 2024, includes an updated preface reflecting on the years in between, from the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 to Aleksandr Lukashenko’s crackdown on opposition protests in Belarus in 2020 and Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

With Russia’s war against Ukraine approaching its 12th anniversary, Meduza deputy editor Eilish Hart spoke to historian Marci Shore about how Ukrainians turned a protest movement into a revolution, and why Russian society has failed to reach that tipping point.

The following interview took place in November 2025, and has been edited and abridged for length and clarity.

— As a scholar of European intellectual history, what made you want to document the lived experience of the Maidan Revolution? Did you set out to write an intellectual history?

— This is a book I never intended to write, in large part because I’m a historian, and all of the epistemological advantages historians have come from retrospect. I was very determined not to double as a political scientist or a journalist, all the more so because I wasn’t on the Maidan at the most dramatic moments. By the time I got to Ukraine, the protest encampment on the Maidan was still there, but the shooting had stopped.

I was in Vienna that year, at the Institute for Human Sciences, and I had several colleagues who were going back and forth to Ukraine, so there was an immediacy to it. I experienced the Maidan through them. It’s also the case that in some sense, I was watching the Maidan above all through Polish eyes. My friends in Poland who are veterans of Solidarity knew better than anyone else that this miraculous overcoming of divisions — between workers and intellectuals, parents and children, Jews and Christians, people on the right and people on the left — lasted 20 seconds after Communism fell. But they also knew it was a precious gift that most people never experience in their lifetimes, and that they had not counted on seeing a second time. So when they saw it happening on the Maidan, they were captivated. Not because they were foolishly idealistic, but because they understood what that meant.

I couldn’t turn away. In all the twenty years I had been coming to Eastern Europe, this was the first revolution I was watching in real time. I had been in Vienna during the Orange Revolution too, and I was supportive, in some sense excited, but not captivated by it. The Maidan was a real revolution in the sense that it was not only a political transformation, but also an existential transformation. Human beings were changing before my eyes. Even from a distance, in Vienna, I saw how my Ukrainian friends were discovering things in themselves they had never known were there. And that was utterly captivating and very inspiring. It was something I knew about as a historian, from having read about and studied, but I had never seen it in real time.

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My friend Ivan Krastev, a brilliant Bulgarian political commentator, was pushing me to write something about intellectuals and revolution. So I thought about choosing one intellectual and seeing whether, through one person, I could give a human face to this experience. I “strategically” decided to profile [Ukrainian writer and translator] Jurko Prochasko.While I didn’t know him well at the time, I knew some of his writing, and I connected with his voice, which was both determined and gentle. The advantage of writing about intellectuals is not that their lives are inherently more interesting or valuable than anyone else’s, but that they conveniently produce writing themselves, and the existence of these other texts creates a possibility for diachronic depth beyond what I could capture in an interview done at a single historical moment.

The original piece was a long essay that was largely a portrait of Jurko, filled in with some “minor characters.” It was translated into German and published by Lettre International, and I was happy with it. I thought the translators and editors did a good job, and I felt like I had intervened in the public discussion at a time when there was too little appreciation in the German media space for the magnitude of what Ukrainians had been doing. But when I was looking for an American publisher, no one wanted 15,000 words about a revolution they didn’t necessarily consider a revolution, and which was not especially big news in the United States. Then I showed it to one editor, Steve Wasserman, and he said, “Don’t cut it. Go back to Ukraine, do more interviews. It should be a short book.” And so that’s how the book came about. I’m indebted to Ivan and Steve for pushing me to do it.

— In The Ukrainian Night, you write that the Maidan Revolution was poorly understood in the West. However, the protests themselves grew out of a specific idea of “Europe.” What did Europe signify to Ukrainians back in 2013–2014?

— The E.U. Association Agreement was the trigger: the possibility that perhaps, someday, there would be a European future for Ukraine was something that Yanukovych had been dangling as a carrot to the opposition. I don’t think he thought this European future would come anytime soon, but it was something, even if in the distant horizon, that might appease the opposition. Of course, the issue of the doors to Europe being open was of all-consuming importance to some people and not at all important to others.

For a pensioner, say, in a small town in the Donbas who didn’t speak other languages and didn’t have any money, whether or not you could zip around to Vienna or Paris was not necessarily life-changing. But it potentially meant everything for an 18-year-old living in Lviv, Kyiv, or Ivano-Frankivsk — or really anywhere at all in Ukraine — who was thinking, Am I going to be able to learn languages, study abroad, or work for an international company? And then there were people from other generations and demographics saying, Are we going to have a chance to be part of a Europe that has human rights and anti-corruption standards? So how much it mattered to you was radically different depending on your subjective position. The fact that it was students who started protesting was not only because they were young and idealistic: it was an issue that was disproportionately important to them. Whether or not Europe was open to them was potentially going to change the arc of their whole lives.

The real turning point was when Yanukovych miscalculated and sent out Berkut [riot police] to brutalize the young people, and everyone else who was protesting on the Maidan that night of November 29–30. I think he was counting on the fact that parents would be shocked and terrified and pull their kids off the streets. That was when something extraordinary happened: instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents joined them there. And then the slogan became not just “Ukraine is Europe,” but also — and more significantly — “We will not let you beat our children.” That’s when the Maidan became about something else — and I think “Europe,” too, became about something else. It became less about the empirical, bureaucratic, highly imperfect, and often hypocritical European Union, and more about a Platonic ideal of Europe, a Europe that stands for human rights, the rule of law, and respect for human dignity. That was the Europe that was at stake on the Maidan. It was the opposite of the prodazhnost’ and the proizvol, [these notions that] everyone can be bought off, and those in power can do whatever they want with you at any moment.

— You identify several pivotal moments during the protests that seemed to hinge on the Yanukovych government escalating violence and repressive laws against protesters. What inadvertent role did this violent response play in turning a protest movement into a revolution?

— There was a critical, existential turning point when protesters on the Maidan became willing to use violence. This is something that has really made me, as a former young pacifist who wore peace-sign earrings to Abbie Hoffman’s memorial service in 1989, rethink my relationship with violence in recent years. This relates to Belarus as well. There was a moment in August 2020 when I was sure that the Belarusian opposition would win without using violence: they had huge numbers of people on the streets; the social contract had been broken; the workers were shouting at [President Aleksandr] Lukashenko, “Ukhodi!” (“Get out!”). I thought it was over for Lukashenko. And my husband, [historian Timothy Snyder,] said, “They’re going to have to use violence, or it’s not going to work.” They were so close, and so courageous. And they were defeated — hopefully, only temporarily — by sheer, naked violence.

On November 21, 2013, when people went out [on Independence Square] to say, “Ukraine is Europe,” nobody was thinking, We’re going to die here. And by the second half of January, even just watching from a distance, you could feel it almost palpably: a critical mass of people had come to a decision that they were willing to die there if need be. That transformation happened before our eyes, and it was utterly mesmerizing. I hadn’t seen it in real time before: a critical mass of people had crossed to the other side of fear, and because I knew some of those people, I had a sense of how much it took to push them there, and what it meant for them.

These were not people who would casually engage in violence. Yanukovych is a gangster; he’s someone who would casually engage in violence, and there are people in every society for whom violence is not especially horrifying. But for the people I knew there, for my Ukrainian friends and colleagues, violence had been something generally horrifying. Being pushed into a space that one previously could not have imagined, crossing an existential border, this was part of what made it a revolution. Even watching from a distance, watching the streaming — and the Maidan live-streamed itself — it was terrifying. You knew that Yanukovych’s thugs, the siloviki who worked for the regime as well as the titushki who were, let’s say, “casual hires,” were about to descend upon the Maidan, and you knew that those people protesting were not going to leave. And you knew that you were about to watch people being killed.

— You describe post-independence Ukraine as a country in “post-Soviet purgatory.” Do you see the Maidan Revolution as the moment when Ukraine broke free of that?

— It definitely struck me as a temporal rupture, as a turning point. This was a collective coming-of-age story. Ukrainian society after Maidan was not the same country as it was before, and from a historian’s point of view, that’s fascinating. I had very anecdotal, impressionistic feelings about this, but [political scientists] Olga Onuch and Henry Hale recently wrote a book based on large-scale sociological research about changes in attitudes in Ukrainian society, The Zelensky Effect. And it turns out that attitudes about things like democratic participation, civic duty, civil society, and elections did change tremendously — which is a reminder that people and societies can change.

I’m very skeptical about claims that, since time immemorial, Ukrainians have been good and freedom-loving and Russians have been evil and despotic, and that these traits are passed along genetically and go back more generations than we can count. Think of all the families split on different sides of the Ukrainian–Russian border. Think of all the people calling their families in Russia — adult children calling their parents — in February and March 2022, pleading with them to believe them that Russian soldiers were bombing cities and slaughtering people in Ukraine. The difference is not genetic. People have experiences, they encounter other people, they make choices, and they change and grow, and that’s something that should give us all hope. Being able to watch that change in real time was a privilege. To me, the Maidan testified to the fact that we, human beings, are capable of something better.

— Quoting philosopher Hannah Arendt, you write that the Maidan Revolution occurred “against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability.” How do you think this unusual experience of revolution shapes how Ukrainians see Russian opposition (or lack thereof) to the full-scale war and Putin’s regime?

— I think it raises the bar. Enough Ukrainians decided they were willing to risk their lives to overthrow tyranny, and that’s what they expect from the Russians. And the disappointment and resentment and really fury come from the fact that not enough Russians are willing to take the risk. Some are — and many of them are in prison — but it’s not enough people to reach the tipping point. I think more than a few members of the Russian opposition feel the same way. Arguably, M. Gessen’s entire book, The Future is History, was an attempt to answer the angst-laden question of why Russians were not able to do on Bolotnaya in 2011—2012 what Ukrainians did on the Maidan two years later. The author was there and willing to take the risk, but not enough of their fellow citizens were willing to do the same. (I say this with no sense of moral superiority at all: I’m a physical coward myself and have never believed that I would be brave in a situation where I might be beaten or imprisoned or killed.)

In 2020, the Ukrainians watching Belarus understood what was happening and saw the potential. And Belarusians were incredibly brave and suffered a lot. They should have won; they deserved to have won.

The last time I went to Russia was in 2016. It was already a risk, even for me, and difficult to get the visa, but it was important to me to go back before I finished the book. I needed to sit in the same room as my Russian colleagues, look them in the eye, and really try to understand what was happening and what they were thinking. One of my Russian colleagues said during a discussion largely between Germans and Russians there, “We were all watching the Maidan ecstatically.” And he was absolutely sincere. But I also thought, who is “we all”? My friend and his friends? In a country of more than 140 million people, that’s about three dozen people, probably the same couple of dozen people who were at his apartment in Petersburg the last time I visited some ten years earlier. People I like and admire, people I learn from, and whose company I enjoy. That is his world. But unfortunately, that’s not all of Russia. That’s not even vaguely representative of Russia, which is the tragic thing.

I think that for Ukrainians, there’s a real sense that the Russian population has been crushed, that they are zombies and slaves, devoid of a sense of their own agency and responsibility, and Ukrainians can no longer respect them. Even if Russians are not excited about killing Ukrainians, they are going along with it. When asked for their opinion, they tend to respond, “I’m not interested in politics.”

What would it take for there to be a revolution in Russia? It’s not as if Russian society overall is enjoying decadent benefits from this war. Putin is destroying his own country: he’s burning through Russia’s resources and bleeding through his population, sending Russian soldiers out like cannon fodder. In whose interest is this exactly? [Ukrainian philosopher] Constantin Sigov described it as “nihilism made systemic.” Somebody’s family gets some money because their son or husband was killed at the front. But profiting by sending your sons to be killed — and I say this as a mother — just doesn’t seem like such a good deal. Something has clearly gone very wrong.

And then there are these 20-year-old Russian soldiers taking over places like Kherson and torturing middle-aged women in basements who speak their language and could be their mothers. For what? What are they thinking? I can’t get my mind around the sadistic cruelty for nothing. I can understand the contempt Ukrainians feel towards Russians. It’s an epistemological problem as well. How did this happen? Putin is not offering the same kind of grand narrative that Stalinism offered, or that Hitler offered, for that matter. There’s no utopian vision at the end of it, where sacrifices in the present will bring a future where everyone will live happily ever after. It feels more as if this is a society that has simply been crushed and has no sense of its own subjectivity.

— The paperback edition of The Ukrainian Night includes a new preface written in 2023. If you were to write an updated preface in 2025, what would you say?

— The point of the updated preface was to allow the reader to follow the stories of some of the protagonists into the full-scale invasion. So I would be tempted to add things about what has happened to the protagonists since then. I don’t feel like I have a fundamentally different “conclusion,” per se; it would be more a temptation to continue, as a historian, to follow the empirical narrative.

In terms of my own state of mind, I continue to watch this war from afar in a state of despair — although I have made several trips to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, and I’m grateful for having been able to do so. Ukrainians continue to fight; Europeans continue to sleepwalk.

There were three moments in my life when I felt absolutely paralyzed by something that had happened on a world-historical scale. The first was when I was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, the second was when I was in New Haven on the night Trump won the 2016 presidential elections, and the third was when I was in New Haven on February 24, 2022 — actually February 23, because four a.m. in Kyiv is 9:00 p.m. on the east coast, so I was all too awake. I couldn’t even take it in. And it’s not as if I hadn’t been expecting it. I’d been following very, very closely. I was very moved by Zelensky’s address to the Russians, asking them not to do this. But something that is not a surprise can nonetheless be a shock. In some ways, I still feel in shock.

I suppose what has fundamentally changed in the past year is that my total despair about the United States is more of a through-line in my writing. And my pleading with the Europeans to mobilize on behalf of Ukraine is now inflected by my pleading with the Ukrainians to shake themselves out of any delusion that they can somehow finesse this American administration. No one should trust us. This administration has no values and no first principles. This has to be it: the end of the affair with America. Europeans have to mobilize on their own. When I was in Kyiv late last spring, I had the feeling as if it were the only place in Europe where people were not sleepwalking.

Interview by Eilish Hart