How to Start a Ukraine-Style Revolution: The Marci Shore Interview
Hello Gaslit Nation listeners! This conversation was recorded before war criminal Putin and convicted felon Trump staged their grotesque spectacle on the blood-red carpet in Alaska. For our analysis of that hellscape—and what it means for Ukraine and democracy defenders everywhere—be sure to check out the recording of the August 18th salon, coming soon to Patreon.com/Gaslit. Thank you for listening and supporting the show!
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In Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, we find a roadmap for fighting oligarchy, injustice, and despair. Historian Marci Shore, author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, reminds us that revolutions rarely begin with grand plans.
The 2014 EuroMaidan uprising started with students protesting a classic bait-and-switch. President Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian Trump, ditched a long-promised agreement to move Ukraine closer to the European Union. Instead he took a massive bribe from Russia.
When peaceful protesters gathered, Yanukovych sent in his riot police to beat them, like in Russia. This backfired. Their parents showed up. Then their neighbors. Then thousands more across the country. Within days, Kyiv was packed with hundreds of thousands of furious, freezing citizens demanding dignity, decency, and an end to oligarch rule. Yanukovych has been in exile in Russia ever since, awaiting his American counterpart, Trump.
August 24 marks 34 years since Ukraine overwhelmingly voted to break free from Kremlin rule and declare its political independence. Ukraine’s Independence Day is a reminder to never bet against people who’ve had enough.
As historian Marci Shore shares urgent lessons for us today, saying, “The fact that it can happen at all means that somehow we human beings have that in us. We somehow have that capacity, and we have to cling to that hope.”
Marci also discusses the debate many are having in America today: Do we stay or do we go? She and her husband the historian Tim Snyder made headlines when news broke they had relocated to Toronto, for impotant opportunities, ringing an alarm that authoritarian experts had left America.
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Show Notes
Small Acts of Democratic Resistance https://democracyseminar.newschool.org/forum/
Counting Sheep: A Guerrilla Folk Opera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EccprVySrPQ
Gaslit Nation’s interview with Nataliya Gumenyuk https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/lessons-from-ukraine-five-years-after-the-revolution
New Yorker: Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/02/donald-trumps-politics-of-plunder
Andrea Chalupa (01:24):
What you heard was the trailer for Counting Sheep, the 2016 Interactive Folk Opera by Mark and Medica Marchek, the husband and wife, musical team behind the Lemon Bucket Orchestra. They met and fell in love in key of Ukraine on Maidan Square during the revolution of Dignity, also known as Euro Maan Counting Sheep tells their intimate story of Revolution in one of the most breathtaking live shows I've ever seen. We'll link to the trailer in the show notes for you to see what I mean. It's a powerful reminder that art is essential to our victory. If you have a song you'd like us to feature on Gaslit Nation, we want to hear from you. You'll find a link at the top of the show notes on how to submit your music. It's easy, it's fun, and we love showcasing the work of our listeners. The world needs its artists now more than ever, so keep creating and keep shining.
(02:21):
To introduce this week's guest, we're taking you back to one of the very first episodes of Gaslit Nation where we examined the 2016 election as a crime scene because that's exactly what it was. Anyone serious about defeating the oligarchy must understand that Ukraine is central to this fight. Ukrainian journalists and anti-corruption reformers are among our greatest allies. If you are not amplifying Ukraine's struggle for democracy, you're not serious about winning the battle for our own. Here's a montage from one of our earliest shows setting the stage for our conversation with this week's guest historian, Marcy Shore, author of the Ukrainian Night, an intimate history of revolution on how America can spark its own revolution of dignity.
(03:15):
To fully appreciate what happens in August, 2016. We have to go back to November, 2013 to Ukraine. Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine who came to power with Manafort's help, who was closely advised by Manafort rejects signing the EU Association agreement, which would help integrate Ukraine and Europe politically and economically. Instead, he accepts a $15 billion bailout from Russia. What happens next changes history. A young Afghani born investigative journalist by the name of Mustafa Nayyem launches a revolution through a Facebook post calling everyone out to the Maiden, the main square in Kiev over the next three months, December through February in the freezing cold protestors risk their lives facing off with riot police and government snipers all under the banner of not wanting to be a Russian proxy state. Dozens of protestors are killed. EU officials come in to broker a peace deal Vitali Klitschko, that vital Klitschko, the heavyweight champion of the world who has joined the revolution, is on stage to deliver the news that a peace deal has been reached. Yanukovych can stay in power and then there'll be an election at the end of the year.
(04:14):
A guy in his twenties comes up from the crowd, grabs the mic from the heavyweight champion of the world ...
(04:36):
... and says that his friend was killed in the protest leaving behind a wife and child. The president has until 10:00 AM to leave or they'll make him leave. The next morning, Yakovich is gone. He's fled to Russia. That spring there are new elections must stop. Mustafa Nayyem, the investigative journalist that launched the revolution, gets elected into parliament and so does his close friend, an investigative journalist he often works with by the name of Serhiy Leshchenko, who in August 2016 comes crashing into our election in a very big way.
(05:07):
Okay, so obvious something big happens, Serhiy Leshchenko alerted the New York Times of a book that was found with handwritten payments down to Yanukovych's people, including his image maker, his confidant, his hand of the King, Paul Manafort. And this became known as the secret ledger story. It ran in the New York Times in August 14, and this is what it had to say.
(05:45):
Handwritten ledgers show 12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych's pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012. According to Ukraine's newly formed national Anti-Corruption Bureau investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off the book system whose recipients also included election officials. In addition, criminal prosecutors are investigating a group of offshore shell companies that help members of Mr. Yanukovyc's , inner circle finance their lavish lifestyles, including a palatial presidential residence with a private zoo golf course and tennis court. Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, close ally of President Vladimir Putin.
(06:40):
Today's guest is Marcy Shore, a distinguished historian, writer and thinker who brings the past to life with profound humanity. Marcy holds the chair and European intellectual history at the University of Toronto and is a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She's also the acclaimed author of the must-read book, The Ukrainian Knight, An Intimate History of Revolution, a deeply moving chronicle of Ukraine's 2014 revolution of dignity, and the people who risked everything to reclaim their future. Her work bridges the worlds of philosophy, politics, and personal testimony reminding us how history is never just about the past, but about who we choose to be. Now, thank you so much for being here. Marcy, welcome to Gaslit Nation.
Marci Shore (07:30):
Thank you so much for the invitation, Andrea. I'm delighted to be here.
Andrea Chalupa (07:33):
Well, you're just back from Ukraine and you saw our dear friend Terrell Starr in Ukraine. How was your trip?
Marci Shore (07:39):
It was fantastic. It was wonderful. I was so happy Terrell came by the way, I was in Ukraine this time because the wonderful editor, publisher and translator/writer, Achana Faustina and I were the guest curators this year for the Kiev Book Arsenal, which is the largest literary festival in Ukraine. And we got to choose a theme and our theme was Everything is Translation. And Terrell was there in the context of a panel we had put together called Building Bridges, which was precisely about how, especially at moments of historical extremity and grotesque suffering, can you reach across borders to people from radically different cultural context, political context, and try to find moments of understanding and solidarity. So I was delighted.
Andrea Chalupa (08:29):
What did you guys discover? I'm like, tell us, how do we do that?
Marci Shore (08:33):
Well, we discovered that it involves a lot of self-reflection. One of the things Terrell was talking about is what does it mean for him to be a black American reporter in Ukraine and then going back to the states and trying to reach out to a black American audience, to his own people, to a community in Detroit that is undergoing a lot of their own suffering and get them to empathize with what Ukrainians are going through. What does it mean for him that Ukrainians who are undergoing a war in which they are being treated as colonial objects by Russia can come to his country and be privileged vis-a-vis black Americans because they're white? How do you negotiate all of these different layers? Nataliya Gumenyuk , who is really one of the great women of the 21st century, he's also a phenomenal war journalist and human rights activist. And when rights crime documenter.
Andrea Chalupa (09:30):
Yeah, we've had her on the show.
Marci Shore (09:31):
Oh, okay. So you all know
Andrea Chalupa (09:33):
Interview with her in the show notes.
Marci Shore (09:35):
Yes. So please do, because one of the things that she's been doing really remarkably too since the full scale invasion is going around to Asia, to Africa, to Latin America and trying to build these bridges and say, what does it mean to try to create a bridge of empathy to what Ukrainians are going to in the global south? When you're arriving in places where people there have been through extraordinary suffering that Ukrainians know nothing about or Americans know nothing about, what is the basis? And one of the arguments she was making is that these concepts and constructs that intellectuals like to use about colonialism and imperialism and post-colonialism and fascism and neo totalitarianism, that does not speak to real people. You have to start with the basis of experience. You have to start with having real people speak to one another about very empirical personal experience. What does it mean for one victim of torture, of electrocution to encounter another who went through some similar experience in radically different circumstances in a radically different political setting, but there was something irreducibly personal and torturous about that, that creates a bridge to understanding. So natal is like you put the concepts aside and you go to experience, you go to human experience, and that's our chance for connection.
Andrea Chalupa (10:55):
Wow. So one thing that all of us can relate to no matter where we're from around the world is the oligarchy. The New Yorker in early June has this damning piece looking at the breathtaking scope of corruption by our oligarch in chief. All of the illegal money grabs that are enriching him and his family, Don Jr., David Sachs, that whole crew, they're starting this private club that's members only need half a million dollars to join called the Executive Branch. The Executive Branch. They're literally selling membership into this White House and at their parties are cabinet officials and their staff. This is corruption that America has never seen. It dwarfs all other chapters of deeply corrupt crimes, and it's very reminiscent of the Trumpian Ukrainian Trump, Victor Yanukovich and his family and the wealth that was building up before Ukrainians took to the streets in a popular uprising known as EuroMaiden, the Revolution of Dignity, which you of course wrote an extraordinarily intimate, powerful book about the Ukrainian night and you updated it for today with the war and where we are now with the people that you followed for your book. One of the questions I get a lot from Gas Nation listeners is like, what do we do? The oligarchy is entrenched. They have us by the neck. How can we do an American might on? And I think there's some factors that really worked for Ukrainians that I don't see can be recreated here, but could you walk us through what Ukrainians did average everyday Ukrainians did with your Oh my Dawn, and give us some insight into what lessons we as Americans in this moment of crisis can take from that and learn from that.
Marci Shore (12:42):
Yes. Let me, there was so much in that question.
Andrea Chalupa (12:45):
Yes, it was a therapeutic question.
Marci Shore (12:48):
I was taking notes as you were talking.
Andrea Chalupa (12:50):
It was like that moment in Star Wars like help us Obe-Won Kenobi your only hope.
Marci Shore (12:55):
Yes, I fear I'm less competent at creating solutions than I am at historical analysis. But let me maybe step back and start with the first part of the question and give you some of my insights as a historian of Eastern Europe into the oligarchy problem. So one of the things that we've seen coming up out of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of this kind of oligarchy in Russia is that of course there have always been people with more money and people with less money we're transitioning to capitalism. And of course you can argue that inequities and differences in wealth is the price one pays for freedom. And when people try to level out everything and make us into a pure egalitarian society, then we got communist terror. Now, one of the things that Hagel tells us that I think is actually very relevant here is that changes in scale can become changes in kind that quantitative changes can become qualitative changes.
(13:48):
So it's one thing to say, okay, there are going to be differences in wealth. Now, differences in wealth is one thing. Somebody is making $50,000 a year, someone's making $75,000 a year, someone's making $80,000 a year. Now what happens when some huge percentage of a country's resources are concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of people? Now you've moved from quantity to quality, you've moved from a change in scale to a change in kind. It's not just like, well, we have a two room apartment, you have a three room apartment. It's like we can buy the whole country and you're not able to feed your children. And there's something when it becomes grotesque. Hegel's insight was it's not just a matter of scale. We're in a different kind of phenomenon. And that's something I think we were learning from places like Russia and Ukraine, that Americans didn't understand it first, what oligarchy was because like, okay, yes, there are rich people, there are poor people, there are middle class people, but what happens when you just have some grotesque percentage of the wealth in the hands of a very, very small number of people?
(14:50):
I don't think Americans had gotten, we hadn't gotten our minds around it. Also because of something that Yvonne [?] points out in a recent Financial Times piece, which I completely agree with, the amounts of money are too big to get our minds around. I'm not very good with money in general, but if you say, okay, this pizza costs $15. If you pay that $25, you can get much better pizza. I'm coming from New Haven. So pizza is a big thing. If you pay $25, you can really get the best pizza in the world. And so you have an intuitive sense of what that $10 is. Once you're in the realm of $10 billion, who has an intuitive sense of what $10 billion is, it's too much money. It's an abstraction for us. And so we can't really get our minds around it. And that also is a part of the vulnerability.
(15:36):
And then there are these people like Paul Manafort, our little boutique industry for gangsters with presidential ambitions, which of course was how Yanukovich got himself elected because he realizes that we have this boutique industry for gangsters with presidential ambitions, and he gets Paul Manafort to fly out to Ukraine, not speaking Ukrainian, not speaking Russian, but playing golf with him, giving him a new haircut, teaching him a couple of TV tricks. I personally didn't see a big difference, but this actually gets this gangster, Ukrainian previously discredited presidential candidate who had tried to poison his opponent with dioxin and cheated in the last election, gets him elected. And when Trump comes out on the scene in 2015, 2016, well, so to kind of back up at the end of Euromaidan, I'm doing the thing historians should never do, which is not going chronological order. I'll go back to what that revolution was about, but there was a sniper massacre.
(16:34):
There were over a hundred people who were killed, and there was a ceasefire negotiated largely by then Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorsky and Yanukovich, the gangster, brutal dictator, flees across the border to Russia at that point, Paul Manafort, his PR guy is out of a job and we know what he does next. He comes back to the states and he goes to work for Donald Trump and Frank Foyer, who I had met in Kiev in 2014, and who had been following this story of Yanukovich and Manafort and how Yanukovich could possibly have come back to power. He writes this piece, it was probably early 2000, 2016 if I'm remembering correctly, and he says, you all don't think Trump could win. You don't know Paul Manafort. This guy can get him elected. I read that and I had this chilling fear that Frank was right, that this was actually the case.
(17:32):
One thing I say is we're learning from one another. We're now in this very global environment. Frank understood the threat of Trump much earlier before most Americans were taking it seriously, including people in the opposition that just seemed too crazy to be real because he had been following was going on with Russian Ukraine. Now, the other thing that was happening in Russia that I think is relevant to this kleptocracy oligarchy we're finding ourselves in was an innovation of Putin spin doctors, people like Surkov and Glo, Pavlovsky, the postmodern spin doctors. And not only are they playing with what we now call post-truth, but they're also playing with what in Slavic languages you would call Obia, this kind of laying bare. So you don't try to hide the corruption anymore. You don't try to hide the lawlessness, you don't try to hide the violence, you don't try to hide the lies.
(18:25):
It's all right there on the surface. Surkov has this chilling line where he says that all of these in elegant parts of our system are right there, right on the surface, not hidden by any kind of architectural excesses. And that laying there, that failure to conceal, I think paradoxically disempowers, people like us in the opposition because you spend your time running around trying to find the thing that's hidden, that's been concealed from you. I think this was the problem with our hope in the Mueller report would really, everything that is grotesque is thrown right out there, right in front of your face. Trump tells us who he is every single day, the whole cryptocurrency. Let's have the private party, it's right there. It's right there. It doesn't need to be uncovered. And it's so obvious and so thrown in your face that paradoxically, we don't know what to do with that because it seems insane that that could be the case.
(19:27):
And I think if I understood how much of a threat that could be with Trump earlier than most Americans, and I was terrified by the end of 2015, I think before most people were really taking that seriously. It was not because I was any smarter than my fellow Americans, but because I was watching what was happening in Russia and Ukraine. So the post-truth, the laying bare, what oligarchy means in terms of grotesque, unimaginable differences in wealth, the role of people like Manafort, I had a headstart because I was watching what was going on over there. And Americans tend to think that we're the avant-garde. So Eastern Europe is always going to try to be catching up with us. But in this case, alas, it was rather that things were coming from east to west. The whole innovation of you can have a troll factory to create alternative realities and influence elections that's coming from Petersburg.
(20:29):
They try it out in Ukraine, and then we get Pizzagate with Hillary Clinton. And so I was following from that direction, watching from afar that revolution Ukraine in 2013, 2014 was extraordinary. I mean, it is a moment I continue to cling to. It was such a moment of hope and a moment of human, a revelation of the human capacity to do something good. And of the various lessons that we learned there, first of all, when people first come out in November, 2013 to protest Yanukovich 11th hour refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU, nobody is thinking we're going to die here. Nobody is thinking we're going to lay down our lives. This is it. It's all or nothing. You have a whole bunch of students, mostly young people for whom, whether or not Europe is open to Ukraine had huge significance. And it had disproportionate significance depending on how old you were, right?
(21:30):
If you were already on a pension and you didn't really have much money, whether or not the borders of Europe were going to be open to you, whether or not you could go on educational exchanges or do internships in Brussels probably was not going to affect your life very much. But if you were an ambitious, energetic, enthusiastic 15, 18, 20, 20 5-year-old, was everything, was the world going to be open to you? And so it was disproportionately young people who were young, probably idealistic, they were nonviolent, they were holding hands, they were singing, they were saying, Ukraine is Europe. Nobody was thinking, we're going to die here. And one of the lessons of that revolution was how unexpected things can happen and people can change and they can change really quickly. And I think that for me, the moment that blew my mind away as a historian where these were young people, revolution, protest movements belong to young people.
(22:25):
You are supposed to be out there protesting when you're 18 or 22. If you're already cynical by that time something has gone wrong, you should be out there. You should be out there with your friends. You should be holding hands and singing. That's what you should be doing. And Yanukovich gets his goons barko, these riot police thugs to brutally beat up the people on the square, on the Maan, which is the huge square in the center of Kiev after about 10 days. And he really used large scale violets, not quite enough to kill anyone, although it was borderline, but enough to terrify people because that kind of large scale violence by the government towards its own population had not happened since 1991. And presumably he was thinking that, okay, now the parents are going to freak out and they're going to pull their kids off the streets, which was a reasonable thing to think.
(23:15):
I mean, rationally, it was reasonable to think, I say this as a parent, I would probably pull my kid off the street, but that was when something really extraordinary happens because instead of pulling their kids off the streets, the parents join them there. And you go from having several hundred or a couple thousand people on the square to a day, a day and a half later, you have between half a million and a million people in the streets of Kia. No one has ever seen that many people on the streets of Kia. And now they're not just shouting, Ukraine is Europe now, it's, we will not permit you to beat our children. And that was what Vacheron and says that was when Euro Myan becomes just Myan and it's no longer just about the eu, and it's no longer just about the students. It's this impassioned revolt against being treated as an object and not a subject against this assault on human life and human dignity.
(24:05):
I mean, as a historian who knows how many revolutions have been applauded as edible revolts, like each generation rising up against the fathers in their turn to see this kind of overcoming of edible revolts. I mean, Hagel would call it Alf, this kind of dialectical ablation when the parents come out and they join their kids. I did an interview with the writer, TAs Proco, whose son was there, and he talks about how he was hysterically trying to find him. He wasn't answering the phone. And when he finally finds his son and realizes he's okay, he gets in his car and drives hours and hours from Ivano Frank Toia, but not to pull Mark on off the street and bring him home, but to join him there. And that was an amazing moment. I was in Vien at the time. I wasn't there, but I was like, wow, something historically has turned, and the violence then increased.
(24:57):
It increased gradually throughout the winter. And the amazing thing too was that I would say by the second half of January, even from a distance, you could feel almost palpably that something had turned and a critical mass of people had made a decision that they were willing to die there if need be. And that was not true in November, and it was true by the end of January. And that was to have that number of people undergoing that kind of transformation. One, it's testimony to the fact that people can change, societies can change, people can find in themselves things they would not have expected of themselves, which is a source of hope for all of us. Ukraine, after the Madan was not the same country as it was beforehand, and that plays out to the present day. I mean, for me, that was incredibly inspiring.
(25:50):
And the other thing that you saw, so you saw it involved for revolution to work, which is it's extraordinary. It ever works. Hana RN speaks about the lost treasure of revolution. You need a critical mass of people crossing to the other side of fear in solidarity with one another at the same time overcoming all possible collective action problems. And it's a miracle that ever happens, but it occasionally does. It occasionally does. And the fact that it does shows that we human beings are capable of it. And it shows the miracle of solidarity as the antidote to atomization. Tyrannical regimes feed on atomization, they create situations of arbitrariness. This is another one of these Slavic words in Russian arbitrariness, which is always tinged with tyranny and a bit of terror. You don't know who will be next. And you see the Trump administration using this already, right?
(26:45):
Guys in balaclavas come to take away a student off the street. Why this person in particular? Well, you don't know. You don't know who's going to be next. There are no rules. There's no necessarily a pattern. There's no more rule of law. And the fact the arbitrary, the very arbitrariness, atomizes people, because nobody knows where on which side of the line, it's actually safe. And people retreat into themselves and they put their heads down and they try not to be noticed. So that atomization is a tool of all tyrannical regimes. And the only possible antidote for that is a really extraordinary kind of solidarity, that it's a miracle when it ever happens because it involves this kind of transcendent moment of a critical mass of people going beyond what they possibly could have thought they were capable of doing. And when I saw that in Ukraine, I thought, wow, that is just a reminder that even if that kind of solidarity happens very, very rarely in history, even if it has only ever happened for a flicker of a second, the fact that it can happen at all means that somehow we human beings have that in us.
(27:48):
We somehow have that capacity and we have to cling to that hope
Andrea Chalupa (27:51):
Completely, all of that. And so with Ukrainians, and I think if people think, oh, Ukrainians are just so good at uniting, no, there's a saying in the Ukrainian diaspora that if you want to start two clubs among Ukrainians, you start one. And the thing that united them all was Russia. They were all united in Russia. I interviewed people on this square that were like, Kovich was aligned with Russia, backed by Russia. And even if it was like a wealthy Ukrainian, they would still say what they did to my grandmother under Stalin, the Soviet. So there was this united Ukrainians in this collective show of force was Russia. And in America today, Americans are split on Russia. You have an alarming number of conservatives, Republicans who see Russia as a partner. And then we can't even get united on the oligarchy. So I don't know what it would take toe Americans other than Trump, the oligarch in chief convicted felon 47, if he just destroyed so many lives that he becomes the new Russia. And that's what we all unite on.
Marci Shore (29:04):
It's an excellent question. I would say that my, I mean now it's definitely Russia. My friend Jacob Proco, who's a protagonist in that book, he uses a German phrase. He's like, it's not hatred I have for the Russians. It's contempt. It's something worse than hatred. It's this kind of disdain that people for no reason have just come to kill us. I think that was less true during the Maidan. I think it was less Russia in general, which it hasn't become now that the country is filled with Russian soldiers carrying out mass atrocity. But at the time, it was the particular kind of tyranny represented by the Putin regime who was supporting Yanukovich.
Andrea Chalupa (29:42):
Exactly. That's another word of Russia...
Marci Shore (29:46):
Like that version. There was a sense that we're going to be united against rule by gangsters, which is what this was. I mean, oligarchy is essentially ruled by gangsters. And that was tremendously unifying because it wasn't just corruption. And there's another word I like to use that in Ukrainian it's prodavanist, in Russian it's prodavaemost the saleability, this quality that anyone can be bought or sold, everyone has a price. Are you saleable? Can you be bought off? And there was a sense that oligarchy was connected to, it's another word for corruption, but it's larger than corruption because it's also a kind of existential character trait. Can you be purchased? Do you have a price? And there was really a revolt against this, people being considered as things that can be bought or sold. So not just individual acts of corruption like this. Corruption has resulted in this oligarch stealing all this wealth from the country, but also this idea that the dehumanizing and demeaning and humiliation of being in a world in which people are treated as not having dignity, as not being responsible actors, but just being commodities or pawns that can be bought or sold.
(31:05):
I think there was a real existential element to that kind of revolt. And when the Ukrainians called the Euromaidan, the revolution of dignity, they really meant dignity in that Kantian sense. When Kant says anything that can be exchanged for something of equivalent value has a price, anything that is beyond all exchange and in midst of no equivalent has dignity, human beings are distinguished in that we have dignity. It was the dignity of being a subject and not an object of being a person and not a thing. And that was tremendously, that was tremendously inspiring.
Andrea Chalupa (31:40):
Oh, absolutely. And in terms of where they are now, because I know you updated your book, the Ukrainian Night for today's war. Tell Us because what people have to understand that after these young people fought back against government snipers, a Kiev Maidan Square was on fire. Many of them then joined volunteer battalions to defend their nation against Russia's invasion of Donbas, Eastern Ukraine. That so Russia sees Crimea invades Donbas to punish Ukraine for its popular uprising that overthrew their Ukrainian Trump sending him running to Russia where he remains to this day waiting for the American Trump to join him. So tell us what happened to some of the people that you followed in your book in terms of today's war?
Marci Shore (32:32):
Well, different things happened to different characters. I try in the introduction, in the new preface that I wrote for the paperback edition, to follow some of these characters through into the war, like the Misha Martino who I opened the book with, who was a young student at the time, who was fighting on the Maan in the bloodiest days during the Sniper massacre, he didn't think he was going to survive. He did survive. There's a scene that I tell in the beginning of the book where this girl he had just met in Lviv, calls him during these battles and says goodbye to him. And he thinks this is goodbye, but he survives. He goes to Lviv, he marries her. It's that part of the story is very beautiful. There's very beautiful pictures. Heck, now they have a baby, which is also very exciting. But Misha is back in the army, and he volunteered immediately in 2022 with a sense of obligation.
(33:30):
Yurko Prohascov, who is one of the protagonists in the book, whose son at the time, his older son was 11 during the Euromaiden and after the first death had pleaded with his father not to go back, and he is now old enough to be drafted himself. Markian is also serving in the army. His nephew, who the father Tarris Prohascov, who went from Ivano Fran to Kia to find Markon to join him on the streets. Markon is now serving in the army, although he wasn't assigned to the front. One of the things I was very interested in this book as a historian who who's worked a lot with the category of generations, generations of very interesting character for historians, because philosophers tend to move from the level of the individual to the universal. Whereas historians like to move on these middle mediating layers, be they class, ethnicity, nation, religion.
(34:25):
I like the lens of generation for various reasons. It cuts across class, nation, ethnicity, all sorts of other things, but also has a kind of biological irr, reducibility to it. And the time which you were born cannot be altered. It's not a question of choice. And the age you were when at the moment of a dramatic historical event really is formative. There's bit of a Freudian thing here too, whether you were 10 or 15 or 25 or 85 in 1989, that really made a difference. So I was very interested in this book also in different generations of the same family who went to the Maan together. And two of the people I interviewed were Roman, and Roman was 16 at the time of the my, he wasn't even a university student. He was a high school student. He was a kid living with his mother, who was also very well-known writer. And he was one of the kids who was brutally beaten up that first night when at the end of November when Yanukovich sent out Berkut.
Andrea Chalupa (35:24):
The riot police, that was the very start of what would become the revolution.
Marci Shore (35:28):
Exactly, yes. So he was there that night, his shoulder gets battered in. So I was interviewing him together with his father, Tara, who was also there the whole time and doing a lot of reporting. He's a journalist. And I said to Roman, and I said, your mother must have been very upset, but she let you go back. And he said, my mother? My mother was making Molotov cocktails on Esva Street. That whole family was very involved. And in February, 2022, Roman, who, he was 16 at that time, so he was 24 in 2022, he immediately volunteered. He went to the front. He was in the middle of some very complex operation in late Spring 2022, and he was killed. And he was the first of the people I knew who was killed in the war. And Katya Chenko, who was the person who had originally introduced us, sent me a message and she said, unfortunately, and he was really among the best of his generation, he had become an environmentalist activist.
(36:35):
In the interim, he was campaigning to save a park in his neighborhood. He was very socially engaged. He was very brave. He was very smart. He had a wonderful family, brother, father and mother, like everybody loved him. He was all really impressive people. He was killed very early. More recently, his brother was also killed. And I can't imagine, I think about his mother, who I don't know personally, who I've read a lot about all the time. I think I would lose my mind. The mother was also a friend of Victoria Amena, so you can read about her in Viveka's posthumously published book about writing, about women, writing about war. Viko was a novelist in her late thirties with a son who was doing war crimes research and documentation from the very beginning of the full scale invasion. And she was killed in the summer of 2023 in Chroma when the Russian sent a missile to the pizza place where she was with two Latin American colleagues whom she was taking close to the front to see the war. It's completely grotesque to see how the country is bleeding. So many of its best people and just so many of its people, and all for, for some kind of sick fantasy in the mind of an aging dictator.
Andrea Chalupa (37:56):
Oligarchy. It's all the oligarchy, the global oligarchy. So I wanted to ask you also, so you mentioned Paul Manafort, who made all of this grotesque mass murderer possible.
(38:06):
And my sister, along of course with Frank Foyer, who she connected with, my sister, was very early in warning whoever would listen, democratic leadership, Republicans, the media about Trump and Russia, that if Paul Manafort was managing Trump's campaign, that meant the Kremlin was managing Trump's campaign. And she stuck her neck out and she paid a horrible price. She was harassed by MAGA disinformation, including Fox News, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and then the Kremlin versions of that on Kremlin State TV went after her. Her home was broken into car, broken into phone computers, hacked her child's phone, hacked, horrible, horrible stuff. And then she was put under all these bogus investigations under Trump, and she testified for nine hours in a skiff for the bipartisan Senate intelligence report, which turned out to be a very good report. So she paid a very horrible price. And your husband, Tim Snyder, who we've had on the show three times, wrote a very sweet email to me during that nightmare, very kind message from Tim. And so one tension in my family towards when we finally got Biden in and you think things are going to clear up for us.
(39:13):
My sister then decides to move abroad. She relocated with her family abroad. I ruined Christmas before she left by getting very mad at everyone at the dinner table that my sister is leaving. Granted, I was also very pregnant and hormonal, so I so forgive myself, whether my sister does, I'm not sure. It was a very tense time because our family was separating. I have little girls and I wanted them to grow up with their cousins, but now they can't. And it just felt like such a painful separation of our two families. But she had to make that decision for herself and what was best for her and her family. And it turned out to be the best thing ever.
(39:50):
It was exactly what they needed. And I know that now, and I see that now, but it was very hard. And so obviously when I got the news from a mutual friend that you and Tim had left to Toronto, my first reaction was, good. We need them in Toronto because Toronto is one of the most Ukrainian cities outside of Ukraine. It makes perfect sense that you're there, given how much you and Tim devote to in ringing the alarm for Ukraine especially. And so it makes sense. But then when the news broke internationally, people treated it like screaming fire in a crowded theater, and then suddenly everyone's packing up and leaving. So one of the questions I get from our listeners, do we stay or do we go? And one listener pointed out that the optimist stayed in Germany. And so it is a big tension because not everyone can leave, obviously.
(40:43):
And then you have the phenomenon of all the Russians who have been leaving ever since Putin has really been tightening the screws on them, but they don't really do much when they get abroad. They just hide. And you see that when you go to Razom's, events Razom for Ukraine, a big humanitarian organization. You see a lot of Ukrainians, a lot of Georgians, a lot of polls, some Russians. Yes, but you don't see Russians organizing abroad in the level that we know are there. Right? And so I guess I'm on the side of after a lot of reflection, do what's best from what I've seen with my sister's story, of course, do what you need to do for yourself, but whatever you go, don't stop fighting. So for my listeners who are very anxious, some are anxious, some can't go because maybe they have dependents, aging family members that can't go, there's all sorts of reasons why people can't go. So want to, just for you to comment on that, just what advice do you have for people when they should finally personally make that decision for themselves?
Marci Shore (41:41):
I'm probably completely unqualified to give advice. I mean, Tim and I vacillated for years about the Monk School offers at Toronto. I was a bit baffled and kind of blown away. This became an international news story.
Andrea Chalupa (41:54):
I blame Jason Stanley, but go on.
Marci Shore (41:57):
It's totally Jason's fault. It's totally Jason's fault. I love him dearly. But yes, when Jason decided that when Jason decided to take this offer and join us, then Jason's whole way of being in the world created this. But Jason actually did decide quite suddenly after the inauguration, after Columbia's capitulation. So I mean, it really was a different story for him. I mean, for me and Tim, we had been contemplating amusing over these offers from the Monk School for a couple years. It was not a sudden thing after the elections or after the inauguration. We had already come to Toronto on sabbatical to check out the situation in August. We were here for the elections. It's very likely we would've stayed even if Kamala Harris had won. We were thinking about things like schools for the kids, and there's a wider range of options in Toronto than there is in New Haven. I mean, it was a big thing for our family, but it wasn't necessarily completely politically connected. I mean, it was in the sense that I for years wanted to get my kids out of the states before high school, in part because I was so anxious about the gun violence.
Andrea Chalupa (43:06):
Of course.
Marci Shore (43:08):
Yale is half an hour, 45 minutes from Sandy Hook. My kids were really small at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre. I'm a neurotic Jew. I have a lot of
Andrea Chalupa (43:17):
Trauma in your DNA.
Marci Shore (43:18):
Yes, I have trauma in my DNA. I'm terrified of guns or a lot of shootings in New Haven, so independently of the political situation. I had studied in Toronto in the nineties, I really liked it. We contemplated going to Europe permanently, but there was also a sense Toronto would be closer to the States and to parents and family. And so it was not very dramatic in that sense. It was not a political drama in our lives in the same way. But of course, the timing created a sense of it being a great political drama, which I then felt very guilty about because after Trump won the election, I definitely did not want to go back to the States, and I definitely did not want my kids back there.
(43:59):
I felt like I've thrown everything I have to give at this since the 2016 elections. My first impulse was to leave the day after the 2016 elections. I'm a neurotic Jew. I felt like that Wednesday, I'm like, lesson of 33, you get out sooner rather than later. I knew it was not going to be okay. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I knew it was not going to be okay. And my strong intuition was we leave. But at that time, we really were feeling more and more of a kind of moral obligation to stay and help mobilize the resistance. And the students were very clingy, and I felt like there were things we could do with the students and for the students, but I really did feel worn out. And I'm also a physically very cowardly person. I would not hold up in prison.
(44:39):
I've never thought I would hold up in prison all year. When I would go back and forth to New Haven and see some of my advisees and my students. I thought, what am I going to do if ICE comes into this coffee shop and tries to take this person away? When I'm talking to her about her thesis, would I fight? I want to think I would, but I don't trust myself. Would I try to pull the mask off? Would I be brave or would I be a coward? Tim is very different. Tim would have gone back after the elections, not despite, but because of them, because he would go back to fight if he had been alone, but he didn't want to do that to the kids either. And so I take full responsibility for any cowardice also. We had a really, really, I mean, we were in a very privileged situation.
(45:18):
I mean, the Monk School offers were really, really, the monk is a really appealing place unto itself. Of course. Yeah. I mean, it was founded by this extraordinary woman, Janice Stein, who you should also have on your podcast, who is a force of nature and a feminist model for her generation. She's now in her eighties and she has not slowed down. She's a political scientist. She works on global security. She flits around the world every other Tuesday. She's incredibly sharp. And she created this institute as an interdisciplinary place at the university that would do very intensive scholarship that could simultaneously be public facing. So it was a very good match and a very tempting group of colleagues. So I mean, it's not that I would say everyone should just give up everything and flee no matter what. That would not be reasonable of me. And of course, one doesn't know what's going to happen.
(46:05):
You never know what's going to happen. And people are more or less vulnerable depending on who they are and what they're doing. And I mean, I've seen in Ukraine too, what it meant for people to stay or to go, whether you were older, whether you were younger, where you're taking care of elderly parents, did you have children for whom else you were responsible? There are incredibly complicated decisions that people are making and agonizing circumstances. I have a friend in Toronto whose daughter is married to an American and living in the States. And one of the moving things she said to me was that her grown daughter came to her and said, oh, after the inauguration said, mom, I'm just trusting you that you're going to tell me when it's time to leave.
Andrea Chalupa (46:49):
Wow. I mean, the war they're declaring on universities, especially, I don't think people understand the full extent of what is happening across all universities right now in America. It's a total purge of intellectual freedom.
Marci Shore (47:03):
And European journalists keep saying, well, why is he going after the universities? Is he really got, of course, these tyrants are going to go after universities. Masha Gassen gave what I thought was one of the best answers very early after the full scale invasion to the question of what are the Russians really thinking? And they said, it's very difficult to determine what people are really thinking in a totalitarian regime because the whole point of a totalitarian regime is to prevent people from thinking as such. And universities are places in which we are supposed to teach people how to think and cultivate thinking. So naturally there's a conflict of interest there. Of course, a regime like the Trump regime is not going to be on the side of the universities. That's just overdetermined.
Andrea Chalupa (47:44):
And plus they just tyrants hate go-getters in general. That's why Stalin had to mass murder so many millions of people. It was just anybody that feels that they can take matters in their own hands and improve a park is going to roll up their sleeves and volunteer to fight off a dictatorship that's invading their homeland. It's just there's a connection there between people that are community organizers because they operate with the spirit of agency and service, public service, which is extremely dangerous to tyrants. I do think this conversation ultimately made me more hopeful because you reminded me of the fact that Yanukovich tried to become president in 2004 in a fraudulent election, and the people stood up, lived in the Arctic, cold in protest camps for many, many weeks. The election was overturned and they got their Western facing candidate. But then Paul Manafort gave him a makeover and he successfully ran, became president, and started enriching himself and his family, and then unleashing all of this violence on the protestors and was overthrown ultimately. So Trump came in. We had round one of Trump. Now, just like with the Kovich, we have round two of Trump, and it doesn't mean that what we have now is inevitable. Like you said, people can change. And as history shows, anything can happen.
Marci Shore (49:05):
If I can just put in a little plug for those community organizers. So one of the things I have just started with my fantastic colleagues, Jeff Goldfarb, a sociologist at the New School, and Jeff Isaac, who is a political scientist at Indiana University, and this was Jeff Goldfarb's idea. We have just launched a publishing project website called Small Acts of Democratic Resistance. And the idea is to document, just put it out there, the ways in which people are doing different things, even if on a small scale, even if at the level of their local park or their local library or their local school, to resist the fascist inclinations of this regime. And I really want it to be a space where a lot of these acts of resistance that would not rise to the level normally of international media attention or are done by a small number of people at a local level or in a small town, or people who don't necessarily have public profile, that they get some recognition. Well, it's hard to take risk. Anyone acting individually has a reason not to take a risk because it rationally and reasonably seems that the personal cost to you of this risk is greater than the overall social benefit. One of the things we can do to eat away at this collective action problem is to increase the social benefit and the solidarity building effects by just having a central place to gather some of these stories. So please, listeners, if you have, I can send you the website link.
Andrea Chalupa (50:39):
Please do. I'll link to it. Is there any risk to people? Are they exposing themselves? Is this a list that Trump Schoon squad could get and be like, we're going to target these people?
Marci Shore (50:50):
That's a good question. I mean, I think anybody could be targeted in any way. People would also have a choice not to use their names that we could craft because we're curating and mediating these stories, so we could also craft in such a way that people weren't using their names. But the problem of risk is huge. It's huge. And I wrestle with it all the time. I just got emailed this morning from the Belarusian publisher of the Ukrainian Night telling me that the Belarusian translation of Ukrainian Night has been declared extremist by Lu KO's regime. And that now the publishing house, which is a publishing house based in Poland, Belarusian Publishing house in Poland in immigration is particularly under scrutiny. And I thought, oh, no, I hope my translator is okay. I don't know the name of my translator, which was done specifically so as not to put that person more at risk. But yes, anything like the moral dilemma of the risk that people take in order to resist is I tear my hair about this every day, and it's a classic collective action problem.
Andrea Chalupa (51:54):
But we're going to overcome it. We have no choice.
Marci Shore (51:57):
Yes, yes. That's what I want to believe too. And I am holding onto hope. I brought children into the world, as did you. So I feel like we have to hope because that was a leap of faith that the world is going to go on.
Andrea Chalupa (52:13):
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up at the Truth Teller level or higher on Patreon. Discounted annual memberships are available, and you can also give the gift of membership all summer long. Gaslit Nation created with Love and Anger has been presenting a special series featuring leading experts on how to smash the patriarchy and the oligarchy to make the world safer for everyone. Trump didn't happen overnight. Let's plant Seeds of Hope together for the hottest of hot takes.
(52:49):
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(53:30):
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(54:13):
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(54:28):
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