Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity
Book review of Mychailo Wynnyckyj's, Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War.
If there were a single book that should be read by every commentator on Ukraine’s democratization, it would probably be Mychailo Wynnyckyj’s, Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War. Wynnyckyj is a Ukrainian professor who was active in the Euromaidan protests of 2014, so he is able to provide readers with an insider’s view of events as they unfolded on the ground. He is also a sociologist who is able to make sense of the way Ukrainian identity was transformed by its Revolution of Dignity, and the subsequent invasion by Russia. And he is political theorist who has characterized this social transformation as a world historical event, constituting the first postmodern revolution of the twenty-first century.
When Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt president abruptly broke off a soon-to-be-finalized association agreement and trade deal with the European Union and instead signed one with Putin in November 2013, people did not spontaneously take to the streets. Rather, they were called to the streets on social media by an Afghan journalist who was residing in the country at the time. And he did not call upon a network of neo-Nazis but rather, in the words of Wynnyckyj, "Kyiv’s creative class.”
It is these entrepreneurs and programmers, artists and designers, who fueled the protests and would later carry their ideals into government—hence the postmodern designation. But, of course, this was not the first major protest movement of the twenty-first century. In fact, similar protests had broken out around this same time in, among other places, Egypt and Syria, Turkey and Brazil, Russia and Hong Kong. The last decade actually exploded with global protests against corrupt elites in its beginning stages. But the Revolution of Dignity was one of the most successful, and its liberal character would only increase over time.
The multicultural character of the protests was present from the beginning. When police began firing on demonstrators, the first person killed was an ethnic Armenian, the second was a Belorussian, who was not a Ukrainian citizen. Yet, Russian propaganda would succeed in portraying Ukrainian aspirations to live in an open democracy, bound to a free European Union, while being led by a former entertainer in the creative class, who just happened to be Jewish, as the work of Nazis—even though the far right could not muster more than 2.3 percent of the vote at the twenty-first century’s high water mark of fascism in 2019.
Fascists routinely blame their opponents for their own crimes. Hence, when Putin invaded the Ukrainian Donbass later in 2014, starting a war that would kill 14,000 people, he blamed Ukrainians for attacking ethnic Russians. When he invaded Ukraine in 2022, he accused them of genocide—shortly before bombing a nuclear power and starving a major city of Russian speakers. In much the same way, Trump would blame Democrats for stealing the 2020 election as he was attempting to steal it himself; and he would routinely accuse Democrats of lying in spite of telling over 30,000 carefully documented untruths over the course of his presidency.
Wynnyckyj portrays the Euromaidan protests as both nationalist and postmodern. Yet, the kind of nationalism represented by the protests was that of a people forming their national identity in contradistinction to that of their former imperial master. Benedict Anderson noted in his classic work on nationalism, Imagined Communities, that anti-imperial nationalism is actually quite common and necessary to building the bonds needed to throw off invaders. And it largely preceded a more conservative and bigoted type of nationalism through its prevalence in the Haitian, Bolivarian, and American Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Wynnyckyj also portrays the protests as part of a tradition of world historical “great revolutions,” like those of centuries past in America, Russia, and France. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, that might have seemed the narcissism of a Ukrainian nationalist, but Ukraine is now leading a global fight against fascism in a war that has increasingly come to be seen as critical to the future of global democracy, and the war is already reshuffling the international order of states. Thus, his observation might be seen in hindsight as highly prescient.
In the end, police would kill 108 demonstrators while seeing 13 of their own officers killed in the protests. Amid his roundly condemned attacks on protesters, president Yanukovych would flee to Russia, and a full quorum of every voting member of ever party in parliament, including his own Party of Regions, would vote to relieve him of his duties. This is the supposed “coup” that is so talked about by leftist writers like Chris Hedges and Medea Benjamin, who echo Russian disinformation in their recent articles.
It should be little surprise that Hedges would do so given that he largely built his audience through his RT show over the course of the past eight years, but support on the left for the intensely corrupt Yanukovych is harder to fathom. As Wynnyckyj notes, it was Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort who built up his image, and Yanukovych would later be found to have maintained a “black book" of $12 billion in state funds used for payoffs. Ukraine’s governments have been generally corrupt, but as he observes, corruption of the post-Maidan governments is measured in the millions while that of Yanukovych was measured in the billions.
Ukraine’s ultranationalist Svoboda party did participate in the protests. Yet, according to Serhy Yekelchyk in his introduction to Ukraine, published with Oxford University Press, less than 4 percent of the original demonstrators were tied to any party, and every major opposition party was involved in the demonstrations. Several political scientists have also noted that Svoboda was moving to the center at the time. Yet, after police killed several dozen demonstrators in a single day, and Ukrainians took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, it was the fascist Right Sector that took to fighting the police, and it was images of their battles that would be spread across the world by RT.
In this way, a minor player in the coalition of protest groups was made to appear central. Meanwhile, the violence provoked by the pro-Moscow regime—with the help of Russian arms and equipment, recently shipped to the notorious Berkut, facilitating their murder of over a hundred demonstrators—was made to appear the catalyst for the regime’s ouster. In actuality, it was a defensive reaction to an increasingly desperate regime. In short, pro-Russian Yanukovych forces killed over a hundred demonstrators, provoking a violent and nationalistic reaction, which Putin used to tar the protesters as extremists.
He then used this pretext to quietly send Russian forces into the Crimea, where there was a Russian majority, but little interest in leaving Ukraine, as exhibited by numerous surveys. And he did the same in the Donbass, where Russian speakers were a minority, and there was even less interest in leaving. Nevertheless, Putin would manage to convey to the world a country broken by civil war as he tore it to pieces through the use of military force. In actuality, as Wynnyckyj points out, there were not two Ukraine’s but rather several, and the divide between Russians and Ukrainians had been exaggerated.
The revolution was actually in the process of dramatically transforming Ukrainian identity. Wynnyckyj points out that the bonhomie that saw people coming together in collective action during the protests on the Maidan continued after they were over. More people contributed to charity and volunteered, and more people with high ideals entered government service. Meanwhile, government itself became more responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens. There was also an upwelling of patriotism in response to the Russian invasion of the Donbass, and this led ever increasing numbers of people to identify themselves in surveys, first, as Ukrainian, and, second, as a member of this or that ethnicity.
In the end, Russia’s military reaction would only push them further away. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, only 9 percent of Ukrainians now identify themselves as Russian, and among those that do, only 18 percent “identify with Russian interests.” One can only imagine how much this number will shrink with each school and hospital that is obliterated, each woman that is gang raped, each city starved, and new shipment of Ukrainian children to the interior of Russia.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Fascism This Time: And the Global Future of Democracy