Ukraine’s Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity, ten years later

KEYWORDS:

• Ukraine
• Euromaidan
• Revolution of Dignity

Since November 2013, Ukrainians have been building Europe from below. The previous regime’s last-minute rejection of a long-awaited association agreement with the European Union prompted citizens to take matters into their own hands, and over the course of the next three months, a new Ukraine was born.¹ The Euromaidan, as the pro-Agreement demonstrations on maidans (squares) across Ukraine were initially called, metamorphosed into the Revolution of Dignity, in which citizens acquired a new sense of civic community and in which the Maidan became the seat of that community’s authority. Figuratively, in 2013–14 Ukrainians adopted a new social contract, in which they pledged adherence to such values as self-organization, democracy, transparency, respect for universally applicable rules, and respect for human dignity – values associated with “Europe,” which no external agreement was required to realize. Over the past decade, moreover, Ukrainians have been willing to defend these values in a long, drawn-out war of independence.

The Revolution of Dignity has had global ramifications, many of which are still being realized. When President Viktor Ianukovych (Yanukovych) and his government partners rejected the EU Association Agreement in November 2013, they implicitly signalled acceptance of deeper integration with Russia – in the immediate form of an aid package and in the longer-term form of the Eurasian Customs Union. Ever since coming to power in 1999, one of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s primary goals has been to reverse the decline his country suffered in the 1990s, and the means by which he has sought to do so have included the gradual restoration of dictatorship at home and efforts to contain or reverse the consequences of the revolutions of 1989–91 abroad, in hopes of restoring Russian imperial power. As Sydney Shiller points out in her contribution to this section, Putin has been engaged in an information war with the Baltic states since the eve of their accession to the EU in 2004, and it became a priority for Russian foreign policy to prevent Ukraine from pursuing a similar path after the Orange Revolution of that year. The fact that Ianukovych needed to fly to Sochi to consult with Putin during the Revolution of Dignity clearly indicated that, under his leadership, Ukraine was independent in name only. The war that Putin has been waging against Ukraine since 2014 is thus a counter-revolutionary war not just against the Revolution of Dignity, but – in a deeper sense – against the whole sequence of revolutions that have transformed the world and especially Europe since the revolution that Mikhail Gorbachev called perestroika.²

It is unfortunate that it took Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to make many observers realize what was at stake. Though there was alarm at Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and warmongering in the Donbas, and some Western sanctions were introduced that year, very quickly the West returned to business as usual and encouraged Ukraine to come to terms with Russia. It is now clear that Putin would never have been satisfied; he was simply testing the limits of his growing power. It has therefore been heartening to see unified and substantive Western support for Ukraine since February 2022, providing hope that the “European” values for which Ukrainians fought in 2013–14 may still matter across the rest of the continent and beyond. While it is understandable that the war should rivet our attention, however, it should not cause us to forget the Revolution of Dignity, against which that war is ultimately directed. The tenth anniversary of the Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity is a good opportunity to remember, and Canadian Slavonic Papers is pleased to present six papers that extend our understanding of the events of 2013–14 and their long-term consequences.

“Who is ready to come to the Maidan?”

The period from November 2013 to February 2014 can be divided into three phases, which cumulatively effected a unification of Ukrainian society around a set of values newly recognized as common. First was the Euromaidan itself, in late November 2013. The regime’s violent attempt to suppress the waning Euromaidan on 30 November inaugurated a second phase, in which Ukrainian society began to assert its sovereignty. Parliament’s approval of the so-called dictatorship laws on 16 January, at a time when the popular movement once more seemed to be weakening, served again only to strengthen it; the ensuing third phase lasted until 22 February, when Ianukovych fled and much of the associated power structure evaporated. From that point a fourth phase can be dated, one of reconstitution.³

Though the Association Agreement that President Ianukovych was supposed to sign at the EU summit in Vilnius had been years in the making, Ukraine’s governing Party of Regions gave signals as the summit neared that it might not approve the agreement after all. After EU officials warned on 13 November that time was running out, citizens – especially of the younger generations and particularly in the western city of Lviv – began publicly demonstrating in support of the agreement. On 21 November, however, came the official announcement that Ianukovych would not sign. Early that evening, the journalist Mustafa Naiiem issued his famous Facebook post: “Who is ready to come to the Maidan by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.”⁴ By midnight, perhaps 1500 people had gathered on Kyiv’s Maidan, with citizens from Lviv to Kharkiv and from Odesa to Zaporizhzhia also turning out on their maidans. It had actually been the previous day when a Fatherland (Bat′kivshchyna) Party activist had coined the term “Euromaidan” (on Twitter), but it caught on following the official volte face as a byword for the rapidly growing popular movement.

In the days immediately following 21 November, the movement’s core aim was to persuade Ianukovych and the government to reconsider their decision and sign the Association Agreement before the end of the Vilnius summit on 29 November. Euromaidans spread across Ukraine, though police often intervened to break up impromptu encampments on the squares, as they did on Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) on 22 and 23 November, or in Chernihiv and Odesa on 25 November. Opposition politicians in Kyiv regrouped on Europe Square (Ievropeis′ka ploshcha) after the 22 November intervention, physically reinforcing a division that was already emerging between the “Political Maidan” and “Maidan without Politicians.” Though the politicians successfully convened a mass meeting of over 100,000 on Independence Square on Sunday, 24 November, it quickly became apparent that they were following, not leading the movement.⁵ Students in Lviv, who had formed strike committees on 22 November, ensured that that city’s Sunday demonstration took place under the banner “Maidan without Politicians,” and their colleagues in Kyiv, who – as Yevhenii Safarians explains in his contribution to this section – formed their strike committees a day later, likewise insisted that their political effort not be subordinated to party politics. After the EU summit closed without a deal, however, student leaders called off the strikes, and opposition politicians called for a final demonstration on Sunday, 1 December to refocus attention on the presidential elections scheduled for 2015 as the next opportunity to effect a change in official policy. It seemed that the Euromaidan might pass into history with little more significance than the “Ukraine without Kuchma” campaign of 2000–01.

Before dawn on 30 November, however, riot police brutally attacked the demonstrators who remained on Independence Square, severely injuring at least 79.⁶ That evening, 10,000 in Kyiv and 20,000 in Lviv defied a ban on demonstrations, and the planned rally of 1 December on Kyiv’s Independence Square turned into a demonstration of up to half a million citizens, who demanded Ianukovych’s resignation. The meaning of their action was changed. It was no longer just or even mainly about the Association Agreement, but about ending the system that had made the violence of 30 November possible. “I’m sure that we should be here to the end,” explained a pro-Maidan journalist, “otherwise we’ll lose Ukraine again like we did many times already.”⁷ The violence of 30 November gave rise to what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka had called “the solidarity of the shaken.”⁸ In the words of one protester, who spoke for all, “They have beaten not only those at Maidan, but every one of us.”⁹ The violence of 30 November established a radical and clear difference between the violence of the regime and the non-violent order in which citizens desired to live, and it became the founding difference of a new and rapidly expanding symbolic system that assembling citizens across Ukraine collectively enlarged to represent their community and its ideals.¹⁰

On 1 December, Ukrainian citizens began acting as an autonomous, self-governing community, independent of the powers that were. The Kyiv rally that Sunday began at St. Michael’s Square, adjacent to a monastery where citizens fleeing the violence of 30 November had taken refuge, but it turned into a successful march to retake the Maidan.¹¹ After several thousand protesters went further and tried to occupy the Presidential Office, skirmishes broke out, and citizens on the Maidan erected barricades to defend it, while citizens under the banner of the Freedom (Svoboda) Party seized City Hall and the Trade Unions Building, turning them into “revolutionary headquarters.” The Fatherland Party and the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (Ukraïns′kyi demokratichnyi al′ians za reformy, UDAR) called on citizens to establish “headquarters of national resistance” across the country. It is thus from 1 December that we can date what Charles Tilly called a “revolutionary situation,” in which rival powers within a polity lay incompatible claims to sovereignty.¹²

In the weeks that followed, Ukrainians developed a new, revolutionary political culture, inventing collective rituals, symbols, and language to express their new sense of community. General strikes spread across Ukraine on 2 December. A permanent encampment was established on Independence Square, now recognized as the seat of popular authority, and defenders of the Maidan successfully resisted regime attempts to clear the space. Extensive networks developed to supply the Maidan and hinder the movement of forces that might threaten it. A march of 500,000 in Kyiv on 8 December culminated in the toppling of a statue of Lenin (later replaced with a golden toilet) in a process of symbolic reconfiguration. Sunday rallies became a weekly opportunity to reinforce the new sense of civic community and expand its symbolic vocabulary. The three opposition parties announced the formation of “the Maidan People’s Union” on 22 December, in conscious imitation of Solidarity in Poland. On New Year’s Eve, 200,000 people joined in singing the national anthem, marking the beginning of a new era for Ukraine. Significantly, in no part of Ukraine were there sizeable pro-regime rallies; the Maidan enjoyed majority support.

As the days lengthened, however, the crowds grew smaller. There was no sign that powerholders were going to budge. On 20 December, the General Prosecutor accused protesters of having provoked violence on 30 November, effectively declaring the government’s intention to rely on force to maintain its power.¹³ In subsequent weeks, it continued to mobilize media and legal resources against the popular movement. Without a clear path forward, public resolve began to wane, and just 10,000 attended the Sunday rally on 12 January. The regime felt powerful enough then to introduce what became known as the “dictatorship laws” of 16 January, severely curtailing freedoms of speech and assembly.

The result, once again, was reinvigoration of the civic movement. Again, it was accompanied by a shift in meaning. The new society became more fully conscious of itself as an independent actor, not requiring the mediation of politicians. Illustrating this new state of affairs, when clashes broke out between demonstrators and police after the 19 January rally, the UDAR leader Vitalii Klychko tried to intervene, but a young protester discharged the contents of a fire extinguisher on him. A violent struggle ensued from 20 to 22 January, centred on Hrushevskyi Street (with the symbolically loaded past that Serhy Yekelchyk unpacks in his contribution to this section). The fight culminated in the first three deaths of the revolution, with the fallen immediately revered as martyrs for a sacred cause. Ianukovych thereupon attempted a compromise, even offering Arsenii Iatseniuk (Yatsenyuk), leader of the Fatherland Party, the prime ministership, but the opposition declined. As Iatseniuk tweeted to Ianukovych: “We’re finishing what we started. The people decide our leaders, not you.”¹⁴ A group of radical Maidan defenders seized the Agriculture, Energy, and Justice Ministry buildings on 27 January.

On 28 January, Ianukovych revoked the dictatorship laws and accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who fled the country. Moscow imposed sanctions on Ukraine in response. The next day the opposition parties proposed an amnesty bill, which Ianukovych signed on 31 January – but only after stipulating that citizens must leave occupied buildings by 17 February. Opposition leaders declared that they would have to consult a people’s assembly to decide how to respond. Ianukovych, for his part, flew to Sochi to consult with Putin. A bomb disguised as a medical package crippled two young people in the Trade Unions Building on 7 February, and at the Sunday rally two days later, opposition politicians called on the 50,000 participants to join Maidan self-defence units. Thousands did so. Iatseniuk spoke for them when he said, “Our victory is through Maidan only. The real power is here at Maidan.”¹⁵

Nonetheless, when the 17 February deadline arrived, protesters surrendered Kyiv’s city hall and the three ministry buildings they had occupied on 27 January. Rather than reciprocate with a conciliatory gesture of his own, however, Ianukovych demanded that citizens vacate Independence Square by 6 p.m. the next day. Moscow intimated that it would resume aid to Ukraine if a prime minister sympathetic to the Russian government were appointed in Kyiv.¹⁶ The stage was set for a decisive showdown. Following clashes on 18 February, the Security Service of Ukraine announced on 19 February an “anti-terrorist operation,” with police effectively authorized to use live ammunition against citizens. President Ianukovych threatened to deploy the army. Meanwhile, some 15,000 citizens remained ready for battle on the Maidan. Between 18 and 21 February, at least 88 people were killed.¹⁷ On 21 February, Ianukovych gave in to most of the Maidan’s demands, including a coalition government, restoration of the 2004 constitution (notably its clauses limiting presidential power), presidential elections before December, and an amnesty for all involved in anti-government protest since 21 November. He did not resign, however, and when opposition politicians announced the proposal at Independence Square that evening, they were booed off the stage.¹⁸ “The people’s revolution continues!” came the response from the Maidan.¹⁹ The commander of one of the Maidan’s self-defence units, Volodymyr Parasiuk, climbed the stage and issued his own ultimatum on behalf of the assembly: either Ianukovych resigns by 10 a.m. the next day or “we will go on the assault.”²⁰ As night fell, the assembled citizens lit candles or held other lights aloft in honour of the nebesna sotnia – “Heaven’s Battalion” or the “Heavenly Hundred,” meaning all those who had lost their lives since January – asserting their resolve to join them if necessary.

When morning dawned, however, Ianukovych was gone. The general prosecutor, the interior minister, and several other cabinet ministers had likewise vanished. Maidan self-defence units peacefully took control of Kyiv and stood guard while Parliament voted unanimously to impeach Ianukovych. By the next day, Parliament had appointed Oleksandr Turchynov of the Fatherland Party as acting president and Iatseniuk as interim prime minister. It restored the 2004 constitution and set parliamentary elections for 25 May 2014. Prime Minister Iatseniuk announced that Ukraine would sign the EU Association Agreement as soon as possible. A crowd of 1,000 gathered at Mezhyhyria, the multi-million-dollar estate Ianukovych had abandoned, announcing that the complex now belonged to the people.

The revolutionary process did not end on 22–23 February, however. As Hannah Arendt argued, revolutions are not primarily about the collapse of old regimes, but about the constitution of a new order.²¹ In Ukraine, the dramatic events of 22–23 February marked the beginning of a lengthy process of translating the ideals of the Maidan into stable institutions.²² Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea, followed by its war against Ukraine in the Donbas and most recently its 2022 invasion, have complicated these efforts, but they have also strengthened Ukrainians’ resolve to see them through. As Mariia Shynkarenko shows in her contribution to this section, the new Ukraine is characterized by a civic national identity, in which citizens are committed to realizing revolutionary ideals in their daily lives. The Revolution of Dignity remains the sacred reference point from which public institutions derive legitimacy, with those who lost their lives honoured as “the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred.”

New research on the Revolution of Dignity

This special section showcases new research on the Revolution of Dignity in its long-term context. It begins with translations of three recent pieces by Ukrainian historians, which collectively illuminate social and cultural features of the Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity as well as the memorialization of these events. The section concludes with three articles by scholars based outside Ukraine, who examine some of the revolution’s historical antecedents and consequences, reflect on the political cultural transformations it achieved, and probe the logic of the counter-revolutionary war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine since 2014.

The translated papers illustrate the diversity of approaches that characterize domestic Ukrainian studies of the Revolution of Dignity. Yevhenii Safarians applies classic methods of historical research, informed by sociological theories of generations, to reconstruct the origins and development of the Euromaidan’s student strikes, focusing on Kyiv but reminding us that the Euromaidan took place across Ukraine. He presents important information about the organization of the strikes that is little known even among its participants, of which he was one. Kateryna Romanova takes us into the Revolution of Dignity proper, showing how the frame of an artificial Christmas tree on Kyiv’s Independence Square became a platform for the symbolic articulation of the revolutionary community’s values. She employs semiotic analysis to show how these values and their language developed from December 2013 to the summer of 2014, again reminding us that the process of reconstitution that began in the winter of 2013–14 did not end with Ianukovych’s fall. Lesia Onyshko underscores this point with her discussion of evolving plans to memorialize the Heavenly Hundred at the site where their greatest number fell. Despite universal agreement on the need to revere those who sacrificed their lives for the values on which contemporary Ukraine is founded, the question of how to memorialize them remains unresolved.

All three authors have been affiliated with the main institution entrusted with cultivating the memory of the Revolution of Dignity: the National Memorial Complex of the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred, otherwise known as “the Maidan Museum.” The complex is an inventive institution influenced by the Western concept of an engaged, interactive museum. As Onyshko points out, it still lacks a permanent building, but its staff has turned this problem into an advantage: together with the NGOs representing the revolution’s fallen and veterans, they act as custodians of the revolution’s physical space. Much of the work they do is outside, such as exhibits on movable stands and discussions in a temporary “cube” structure (made of scaffolding and fabric) on the part of Instytutska Street now renamed after the Heavenly Hundred. Reflecting the fact that the slain patriots were a diverse, multiethnic group, the museum focuses on the civic values that united them rather than merely celebrating them as individuals. By privileging interactive, discursive, and historical approaches to the symbolically charged recent past, the museum actively participates in the responsible articulation of the revolution’s democratic legacy.

Both Romanova’s and Safarians’ pieces originally appeared in the proceedings of the Maidan Museum’s annual Research Forum – an important international conference run in a hybrid format (with the museum’s computers backed up by a portable generator to prevent loss of power due to the Russian military targeting Ukraine’s electrical grid). This interdisciplinary symposium is one of the most important venues for memory studies in Ukraine, encouraging theoretically informed interpretations of contemporary history and innovative approaches from spatial history, oral history, and digital history. Onyshko prepared her report, available in Ukrainian on the museum’s website, to provide a public account of the museum’s history and an explanation for its continuing provisionality. CSP/RCS is very pleased with these pieces to reinvigorate a practice that the journal pioneered in the 1960s of publishing English or French translations of important work originally composed in the languages of our area.

Just as the Revolution of Dignity incarnated new notions of Ukraine as a site of civic political mobilization, the development of research on the Maidan has introduced innovative approaches to urban studies in Ukraine. Serhy Yekelchyk’s article on the longue durée history of Kyiv’s symbolic geography is a case in point. Yekelchyk explains how relationships of power came to be spatially embedded in particular ways in modern Kyiv, with the city’s natural topography presenting constraints with which successive regimes and dissident movements have creatively engaged. He shows how, during the Revolution of Dignity, citizens established the relatively low-lying Maidan as a rival to the centre of state power situated uphill, in an area originally defined by its proximity to imperial authority. The symbolic reconfiguration that the Revolution of Dignity effected thus had a spatial component, as society democratized authority that had previously remained hierarchical.

One of the most important outcomes of the Revolution of Dignity was the widespread acceptance of a new definition of Ukraine as a political community rather than an ethnic one. Mariia Shynkarenko illustrates this shift with the example of the Crimean Tatars, who overwhelmingly supported the revolution and opposed Russia’s occupation and annexation of their homeland in the revolution’s aftermath.²³ Shynkarenko chronicles the development of Crimean Tatars’ identification with the Ukrainian state since the late Soviet period, when they began to return from forced exile, and she surveys the political debate that divided Crimean Tatar representatives, if not so much the bulk of the Crimean Tatar population, in the spring of 2014. She further examines the efforts of Crimean Tatars in mainland Ukraine, following Russia’s invasion of Crimea, to articulate their Ukrainianness while seeking official recognition as Crimea’s indigenous people.

Sydney Shiller, finally, addresses Russia’s efforts to contain and, to the extent possible, reverse the consequences of Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity. Specifically, she shows how the Putin regime has manipulated cleavages in Western memory politics regarding the Second World War to win a hearing for its misrepresentation of democratic Ukraine as a fascist state. She demonstrates how Russian invocation of the Second World War in international fora promotes a return to the world order established at the war’s end, and she argues that Russian memory politics thus comprise part of a counter-revolutionary program reacting not just to the revolution of 2013–14, but to those of 1989–91 as well. One of reasons why outside observers were surprised by the strength of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s February 2022 invasion was that they had not sufficiently appreciated the revolutionary nature of the events that transformed Ukraine in 2013–14; it is therefore prudent to consider how profoundly counter-revolutionary the forces currently arrayed against Ukraine are.

Insofar as previous English-language scholarship on the Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity has focused on citizens, rather than institutional politics and international relations, it has tended to privilege the trope of “protest” and to restrict itself chronologically to the period from November 2013 to February 2014. In this collection, we have sought to show that the civic mobilization of 2013–14 involved far more than protest. While that may be how it began, it quickly developed into a far more fundamental reconfiguration of the sacred foundations of civic community, generating new symbols to represent this community and facilitating the collective articulation of its values. Recognizing this phenomenon requires seeing the Revolution of Dignity as the beginning of a long-term process, in which citizens have sought to realize the values of the revolution in stable institutions, from anti-corruption laws and government institutions to Crimea House and the Maidan Museum. Arguably, this process will continue until the war ends and Ukraine is integrated into the European Union. Significantly, it is a process in which a critical number of Ukrainians have chosen to participate actively, authoring their own destiny.

Acknowledgments

This special section is a collaborative product. Thanks are due in particular to our translators, Larysa Bilous, Jan Surer, and Lidia Wolanskij, for their careful yet swift work. Serhy Yekelchyk is to be credited for putting us in touch with the Maidan Museum’s staff and recommending pieces for translation. Piotr H. Kosicki and Guillaume Sauvé provided thoughtful and ever-gracious editorial assistance, while Sophie Clark, our production manager at Taylor & Francis, cheerfully minimized the impact of repeated delays. As always, deep gratitude is due to our anonymous reviewers, without whose selfless and hidden work this enterprise would have been impossible. The authors of this introduction would also like to thank Guillaume Sauvé and Serhy Yekelchyk for their comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Krapfl

James Krapfl teaches modern European history at McGill University and is the editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes. He is the author of the prize-winning book Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992 and other works on central and eastern European cultural and intellectual history. Krapfl has served as a consultant for Global Affairs Canada and the US State Department, and recently he has been a regular speaker at workshops for EU managers on challenges facing the Union.

Elias Kühn von Burgsdorff

Elias Kühn von Burgsdorff serves as a speechwriter to President Ursula von der Leyen and has been a strategic foresight analyst for the European Commission since 2019. He earned his BA from McGill University, where in spring 2014 he authored “The Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine: Stages of the Maidan Movement and Why They Constitute a Revolution.” His MA is from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he developed his expertise in economic history.

Notes

^1. For details of the agreement and a summary of other sources of popular discontent in 2013, see Yekelchyk, Ukraine, 93–94.

^2. Krapfl, “Discursive Constitution.”

^3. This periodization is inspired by, though it does not exactly duplicate, that of Kühn von Burgsdorff in “Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine.”

^4. Shore, Ukrainian Night, 32.

^5. On the contrast with the Orange Revolution of 2004, see Yekelchyk, Ukraine, 79–80.

^6. Interfax-Ukraine, “75 [sic] Were Injured.”

^7. Lesya Lepetun, quoted in Shevchenko, “Vox populi.”

^8. Patočka, Heretical Essays. Marci Shore makes the same point in Ukrainian Night, 107. The solidarity of the shaken had been a defining force in the revolutions of 1989 as well; see Krapfl, Revolution, 48–51, 83, 109.

^9. Olga Yermak, quoted in Shevchenko, “Vox populi.”

^10. On the semiotics of violence and revolution, see Krapfl, Revolution, 35–73.

^11. Grytsenko and Shevchenko, “Victims Describe Excessive”; Ukraïnska pravda, “Iatseniuk vvazhaie.”

^12. Tilly, European Revolutions, 10.

^13. Shevchenko and Goncharova, “Chief Prosecutor Pshonka.”

^14. Gorchinskaya and Grytsenko, “Opposition Rejects Yanukovych Offer.”

^15. Kyiv Post, “Opposition Leaders Call.”

^16. Gorchinskaya, “Government Threatens Force.”

^17. British Broadcasting Corporation, ”Ukraine Crisis: Timeline.”

^18. Wynnyckyj, Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War, 129.

^19. Gorchinskaya et al., “Parliament Votes 328–0.”

^20. Gazeta.ua, ”Tsei den′.”

^21. Arendt, On Revolution.

^22. Compare Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class; and Krapfl, Revolution.

^23. Another example, which Alex Averbuch has discussed in a recent contribution to this journal, is Russophone writers in Ukraine. Averbuch, “Russophone Literature of Ukraine.”