WHEN: Tuesday, 18 September 2018, 6:30pm
WHERE: TW1.G.01, Ground Floor of Tower 1, London School of Economics
ADMISSION: The event is free, but registration is essential. Please register here.
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.
The impulse of the Maidan unrising drove a host of transformational changes, as Ukraine has embarked on an overhaul of its weak state institutions. The annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Russia-backed war in the east of the country propelled an intense identity search, with a new value-based identity shared by most Ukrainians. What is the legacy of the Maidan Revolution, nearly 5 years on? Has it transformed Ukraine? the lives of its participants? What is the significance of smaller revolutions taking place in Ukraine in recent years?
This is a book talk followed by a discussion and a Q&A.
Speakers:
Marci Shore, author, Associate Professor of History, Yale University, USA
Marina Pesenti, Director, Ukrainian Institute London
Moderated by Peter Pomerantsev, Visiting Senior Fellow, Institute of Global Affairs, London School of Economics.
This event is organised by Ukrainian Institute London and the Institute of Global Affairs at LSE.
Speakers’ bios:
Marci Shore
Marci Shore teaches European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University, USA. Before joining Yale’s history department, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University‘s Harriman Institute; an assistant professor of history and Jewish studies at Indiana University; and Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Yale. She is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (Crown, 2013), Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (Yale University Press, 2006). Her articles in many academic journals and popular media.
Peter Pomerantsev
Peter Pomerantsev is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, an author and TV producer. He specialises on propaganda and media development, and has testified on the challenges of information war to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee.He writes for publications including the Financial Times, London Review of Books, Politico, Atlantic and many others. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. It i translated into over a dozen languages. He is working on his next book, which looks at developments in the ‘battle for hearts and minds’ across the world.
Peter Pomerantsev’s review of the book in “The American Interest” points out that “Marci Shore’s intimate account of Ukraine’s 2014 revolution probes the metaphysical meaning of revolution. In so doing, it illuminates the crisis of the West more broadly.”
Marina Pesenti
A native of Kyiv, Marina Pesenti spent 10 years with the BBC World Service in London, producing and presenting programmes. She was a winner of BBC WS Documentary Bursary Award and produced documentaries for the English and Ukrainian desks. Marina is Director of the Ukrainian Institute in London which promotes the country’s language and culture and encourages public debate around Ukraine-related issues. Marina gives interviews to the UK media. Her writing featured in OpenDemocracy, The World Today, The Odessa Review, Novoye Vremya.