Bachmann, Klaus and Lyubashenko, Igor (eds) The Maidan Uprising, Separatism and Foreign Intervention: Ukraine's Complex Transition Sakwa, Richard Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 790 the traumatic collapse of Yugoslavia. She strongly implies that the continuing appeal of an epistemological approach which enshrines universal doubt and the impossibility of establishing accurate knowledge of past events not only promotes superficiality and obfuscation but may lead to the loss of historicity itself. A set of often insightful chapters show how particular disciplines, such as sociology and cultural anthropology, are struggling to develop critical scholarship against the background of funding and societal constraints. These constraints emerge in sharp relief in a chapter on post-Miloşević Serbia in which Hilde Katrine Haug focuses on the hostility encountered by the Serbian Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it sought unsuccessfully to come to terms with the controversial recent past. She quotes the baleful verdict of the Serbian historian Nikola Samardžić that ‘the local humanities are not able to openly and competently discuss the most important issues of the past and future, leaving insteadopenmanycontroversiesrelatedtotheprocessofYugoslavdisintegration’ (p. 113). Local power-holders, often beneficiaries of the war, who Armina Galijaš argues, are managing the lives of citizens with new bureaucratic orders, have no wish to see the past re-opened. There is a battle to find neutral space for research focusing on civic, anti-nationalist and conflict related themes and this wellproduced volume on the current state of scholarship about the ‘Yugospshere’ shedsawelcomelightoncurrentdebatesaswellasrevealingtherangeandquality of the scholarship that is seeking to overcome various post-war constraints. University of Bradford Tom Gallagher Bachmann,KlausandLyubashenko,Igor(eds).TheMaidanUprising,Separatism and Foreign Intervention: Ukraine’s Complex Transition. Studies in Political Transition, 4. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2014. 523 pp. Figure. Tables. Notes. Timeline. Bibliography. List of geographic names. £49.00. Sakwa, Richard. Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2015. xx + 297 pp. Maps. Tables. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £18.99. After a year of turbulence, with more undoubtedly to come, there will be many books on all aspects of the crisis surrounding Ukraine. Bachmann’s and Lyubashenko’s volumne, mainly consisting of contributions from German and Polish specialists, is more academic; Sakwa’s is also for the general market. The Maidan Uprising has useful chapters of pre-2014 political narrative by Andrzej Szeptycki and Maciej Wapiński. Lyubashenko provides a more up-todate analysis of the changing character of the Maidan protestors. Paweł Kowal REVIEWS 791 looks at the rise of the Ukrainian oligarchy and argues that its level of wealth and influence is unusual even in the post-Soviet world. Bachmann and Lyubashenko analyse the role of media and ‘digital communication tools’, and are particularly interesting on the exact mechanisms of Russian internet propaganda; though they are more circumspect about the actual effect of such efforts, especially in the key German media market. The Maidan was in large part a protest against the shortcomings and perversions of Ukrainian democracy. Bachmann talks about the paradoxes of ‘façade’ institutions (p. 414), but the chapter on Svoboda and Right Sector is marred by the failure to include any discussion of the role of political technology — or just exposure on oligarch TV — in their rise. The factor is also underplayed in the chapter on the mainstream political parties Batkivshchyna and UDAR — the reader needs to know more about the covert oligarch sponsors that led many of the Maidan protestors to dismiss the two as simply satellites of the Yanukovych ‘system’ — which was also a big part of the reason why the two failed in the 2014 election campaigns. Bachmann’s claim that the protestors ‘decided to launch an attack on the parliamentbuilding inorder to coercethemembersofparliament toreinstate the 2004constitution’(p.405)onthekeydayofbloodshed,18February2014,ishighly questionable. On the other hand, his statement that political ‘dysfunctionalities were the result of processes on the highest level of political decision making between the Rada , the government and the president and — behind the curtain of domestic politics — key actors of the oligarch system. They were not the result of dysfunctional interest aggregation or unsurmountable social, ideological, regional or ethnic divisions’ (p. 410) is much more persuasive and an important counter to arguments that Ukraine is somehow simply an unviable nation or state. Adam Balcer goes beyond the usual stereotypical discussion of...