The Ukrainian Night

An Intimate History of Revolution

De: Marci Shore

Narrado por: Callie Beaulieu

A vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential

What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013-14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices.

In this lyrical and intimate book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true stories of activists and soldiers, parents, and children, Shore's book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian's reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.

©2017 Marci Shore (P)2022 Tantor

Engaging narrative for events significant to Russian war in Ukraine

Narration can make or break an audiobook so I’ll start by saying this narration was pleasant and varied enough to keep my attention.

The book itself was really good also. The story behind the build-up to the Maidan protests was engaging. It gives a new perspective on the Ukrainian struggle for freedom from Russian hegemony. I liked the fact that it was told from the perspective of significant actors in the revolution in addition to people who were just caught up the changes and in the military conflict that followed.

This book didn't age well

This book belongs to history now and is meant to be read with footnotes and analytical commentary. It is narrated through a caleidoscope of unrepresentative stories. Ukraine is still viewed as 'the Ukraine' in a broad sense: no Ukrainian story is told without Russian commentary. This viewpoint of Ukraine as a post-colonial country rather than an independent country was common among Ukrainian regional elites (largely quoted in the book) that are hardly representative. 'Nationalist' organizations are called that way without a commentary that they are, in fact, more of patriot organizations (if you asked at any point in time the members of Svoboda if they think Ukrainians are superior to all the other nations - you would hear: 'No. Ukrainians are simply a nation different from Russians'. It truly pains me every time that Western scholars assume that words that sound similar in different languages mean something entirely different (and those words would be hard to pinpoint for Ukrainian regional elites as they, being as enlightened as they are, have a blind spot for this particular one). Anti-Semitism is an unfortunate fact that exists within many organizations. I will not pretend it doesn't. However, I see a difference between structural Anti-Semitism and structural nationalism. Here's a hot take: at no point in the history of Ukraine would an American citizen (of any background) be unwelcomed in any house within Ukrainian borders based on the fact that being 'not Ukrainian.'

All Ukrainian and Russian names and words... sound not what they are supposed to.