The Ukrainian Night
An Intimate History of Revolution
Marci Shore
Having read it
★★★★☆
A decent read and certainly interesting in its contemporary parallels with the 2021 (and onwards) happenings, difficulties and issues in Ukraine along with its past, present and future.
Its first part had a little more interest in its subject and people for me than its second part but that, in its way, was a more direct and honest appraisal of the personal and political changes many have and are going through to assist, counter and fight for their beliefs and values against big state history and expectations.
A good passage
The technology of social media had made possible a transparency that was unimaginable when Jurko and Taras Prochasko’s and Taras Ratushnyy’s generation took to the streets during the Gorbachev era. The technological revolution brought forth a situation Hegel described as a moment when quantitative changes became so great as to become qualitative changes, when changes in scale became changes in kind. The Maidan set up its own cameras; the Ukrainian revolution live-streamed itself on You Tube. Around the world everyone could watch Ukrainians being shot to death in real time.
A second good passage
Yevhenii Monastyrskyi, a graduate student from Luhansk writing his master’s thesis about Soviet propaganda in the 19205, objected to Pavlo’s use of the word ‘propaganda’ for the reason that Peter Pomerantsev gave in Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: propaganda belonged to the pre-postmodern world.
It assumed a grand narrative. There no longer was such a thing. Now everything was PR. Reality had become a reality television show.The power of the reality conjured up on television came not only from its quality, but also from its quantity. Tetiana and Anastasiia tried to explain that the Donbas was a place where people watched a lot of television; in many homes the television was simply on all the time, as a steadying background noise, speaking to one’s subconscious.
‘People don’t believe their eyes,’ Iuri said. Instead they believed what they saw on Russian television.
After all, as Maksim Gorky wrote in The Story of a Novel, ‘What is reality?’