Interview with Marci Shore, associate professor of history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
KATE LANGDON and JORDAN LUBER: Reading The Ukrainian Night, we see that the Maidan was a mass political project based on ideas. What was the Maidan for? What was it against? What made it a revolution?
MARCI SHORE: It began as “Euromaidan”, a protest against Yanukovych’s sudden decision on Nov. 21, 2013, not to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union. This changed after Nov. 30, when the young people on the Maidan were brutally beaten by a riot police force called Berkut. Until that day, there had been a few hundred-to-several hundred people there, mostly students. Suddenly on Dec. 1 there were close to a million people –now mobilised less by the association agreement and more by the violence against the students. In November the students had been declaring, “Ukraine is Europe”. Now in December those old enough to be their parents and grandparents were declaring: “We will not allow them to beat our children.” The Maidan grew into a revolution against what in Russian is called произвол (proizvol), arbitrariness tinged with tyranny, the sense that one is a helpless plaything of the powers-that-be. It was a revolt against rule by gangsters, against being treated as things and not as human beings.
