I think this is a good supplement to other histories. I approached this book not assuming any narratives were representative, but moreso appreciating the insight into at least some people's thoughts and experiences. (intimate history, indeed)

There are many sections that I wanted to remember, poignant lines that speak to the specific experience of Maidan / the start of the war in 2014, that speak to the Ukrainian context generally, or that speak to the human experience generally. Here are some.

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"Jurko's mother, born in 1940 during the Red Army's occupation of Easter Galicia, had always been a Ukrainian patriot. As a girl growing up during late Stalinism she saw the disaster that Soviet rule was for her family: their property was expropriated; some relatives were shot; others lost their minds in prison. Even so, she wanted very much to sing the beautiful songs and believe that the Soviet Union wished for peace throughout the world. To Jurko she was deeply good, and deeply naive. He described her as 'an orchid, an orchid of catastrophe.'"

"Jurko had hoped that Ukraine would join Europe. Yet there were, as it turned out, more voiced on behalf of Soviet continuity. Jurko's was not an easy position: to reject continuity with communism; to reject the cult of Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. It was not easy to live ensconced in nostalgia for a world that had ceased to exist long before his own birth; to cling to a liberal nationalism whose moment had passed before it was ever realized; to insist on a gentle, anti-imperial patriotism, a vision of the Ukrainian nation realizing itself harmoniously with a cosmopolitan Ukrainian state."

The disillusionment with Yushchenko as a "cure for paternalism" -- "At the time we thought there was a bad father, and we had to replace the bad father with a good father. And now we no longer believe in a father at all."

The historic facebook post that brought largely student protestors to Maidan to protest Yanukovych's turn from the EU, ending with "likes don't count."

"On 30 November the novelist Yuri Andrukhovych was at the Lviv airport waiting for his flight to Vienna when he learned that the students in Kiev had been beaten. He did not get on the plane. Instead he left the airport and went to Kiev. Yanukovych had broken an unspoken social contract: in the two decades since independence, the government had never used this kind of violence against its own citizens."

"On 30 November Yanukovych was counting on parents to drag their children off the streets. He miscalculated."

On parents and others joining the student protestors -- "[parents] did not drag their sons and daughters off the streets. Instead they joined them there. [..] middle aged men with combat experience -- came to the Maidan to defend the students."

"'We will protect our children,' became the slogan -- even of those who did not have children themselves. 'It cannot be permitted,' Markiyan remembered two elderly women, one speaking Ukrainian and one speaking Russian, saying in Kiev. 'We cannot let them beat our children.'"

[here I think of how people joined the Maidan -- we won't let you beat our children. I think of the people on the streets in Iran now, of the video of two small children walking down the street yelling "we don't want a child-killing regime!"]

One slogan from Maidan that day -- "Let's bury the remains of Chernobyl in the Kremlin wall!"

The entire concept of parallel polis -- when protesting a regime, the idea that the protest movement itself must display the traits one wishes to see in the end result. The kitchens, the medics, any bit of infrastructure used to help the protest. And how this created a sense of safety there -- "'You're afraid before you go there. When you're there you're not afraid anymore.'" "Watching television [news reports of Maidan] made them too nervous. They felt safe only on the Maidan"

On everyone feeling brave and participating -- "Lena, 'the gentlest creature in the world,' as Ola described her, was a slightly plump woman less than five feet tall who walked with a limp. Ola had to pull her away from the riot policemen, because Lena felt compelled to tell each one of them how she felt about what he was doing." "[a young rabbi] broke the Sabbath for the first time in his adult life. He felt no ambivalence about this: he was protecting civilian lives."

Language on the Maidan -- "The division between Right and Left on the Maidan [...] had little if anything to do with language. Yanukovych repeatedly warned Ukrainians that the Maidan was full of Banderovtsy who would persecute Russian speakers and force them to speak only Ukrainian. Yet Russian, as much as Ukrainian, was the language of the Maidan. It was on the Maidan, the philosopher Taras Dobko told me, that Russian became for him a language of freedom." [resonates deeply for me -- I dream of a Russian language freed from the confines of empire. I want to practice a Russian language that does not signify allegiance to a state. A language that Putin cannot use to claim you, to kill in your name, to kill you in your name].

"'The value of personal freedom is not a fundamental law of physics' Slava told students in London, 'it's a choice.'"

after an activist in Kharkiv was stabbed, young historian Volodymyr Sklokin says "I think it was in those hours that I experienced what at one time or another every participant in a revolution experiences. My reason said that resistance made no sense, that it would make more sense to await a better moment to change the regime. I asked myself what we could possibly do against a regime that controlled the militia and was willing to behave criminally. [...] My reason said: better not to do anything [...] And then I asked myself how I would look in the eyes of [fellow activist] if I did not come to the meeting that day. How would we look to one another if we all gave up? And at that moment the most important argument became my realization that if I gave up then, I would no longer be myself, but someone else."

The body of Yuri Verbitsky was found in the woods, brutalized, after being kidnapped from the hospital, where he had gone after being injured by police on the Maidan. He "had never been a radical. He was a fifty-five year old geologist who researched tectonic movements of the earth."

How people had to walk around the Maidan, because it was too cold to stand still. "Each person was a pixel, explained Yaroslav Hrytsak, and pixels always functioned together. People moved in groups, formed spontaneously. One night Yaroslav found himself pacing the Maidan with a philosopher friend, a businessman acquaintance, and the businessman's companion that evening, 'a tiny man with sad eyes' who worked as a professional clown for a charity benefitting children with cancer."

The concept of time getting distorted in the middle of a revolution. My mom reports similar feelings in Latvian protests as Latvia broke away from the Soviet Union. Marci Shore puts in here "when time was smashed."

That the hired or volunteering anti-Maidan movement "all looked sad." That a smile upon entering the Maidan was mark of shared identity.

"How to resist imperialism without succumbing to nationalism had long been a struggle, and not only for Ukrainians." --- an important tension, and something to think a lot about. What comes after the fall of empire. How to build something that resists other impulses of human control and exclusion. To at least one person, Yaroslav Hrytsak, "the Maidan was the place where a truly civic Ukrainian patriotism came in to being."

A dream of a revolution without violence, but "yet it turned out that not this time. Not this time."

"Nelia Vakhovska had never liked the slogan 'glory to Ukraine - glory to the heroes!' To her it stood for 'empty discourse about a nation, machismo, paramilitary discipline, the unruliness of radical right wing groups, the absence of a political or social programme.' Revolutions were populist by their nature; they strove for the reduction of complexity. Nelia did not like this either. She feared the glorification of victimhood, the cult of heroes and martyrs. Even so, she was continually drawn back to the Maidan."

In thinking about a point of fearlessness that is reached in protest and revolution... "On 18 February the Maidan reached the nonanalytical point. A critical mass had made a decision: they would die there if need be." (nonanalytical point: the point where all existing means of rational calculation break down)

"Where are you?" "I'm there."

After witnessing horrific murder at the hands of the riot police. Misha: "And it was as if, because of that, in me, too, there remained nothing human."

"Since they were still alive, they ordered tea."

"the solidarity of the shaken" - a phrase by Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, used in this book in the context of the Polish government lighting up a Stalin-era monument in the colors of the Ukrainian flag in 2014.

Jozef Tischner, philosopher: "Revolution is an event in the realm of the spirit. Each person has changed. In the new person, there is no trace of the clay from which were formed the former slave, vassal, work force. People cannot, even if they want to, regain their former shape. They now have different bones."

The Maidan as the return of metaphysics. "We've ceased posing questions to ourselves." "What kind of questions?" "Metaphysical questions. No one contemplates, for instance, where evil comes from."

"Misha, will you go there tomorrow?" "If there is a where to go to, then yes."

Misha suddenly feels fear that he might drop the box of explosives he is carrying, with the understanding that he was coming under sniper fire. "And he might have [dropped the box] had not a stranger just at that moment offered to help carry the box. And Misha's terror dissolved as quickly as it had appeared."

After the events of the Maidan, a feeling of not knowing what to do with oneself "They were unable to cease being revolutionaries."

Reflecting on the "revolutionary soul" -- "I had understood dedication. But I had not understood one thing - for me this was the limit of my own experience - I had not understood the moment when a person is ready to die. And there I understood it...it's a departure, a movement beyond the confines of the self, when you experience being with people who are ready to die for you, to make themselves vulnerable for you, to carry you if you're wounded... a willingness appears -- it's a kind of rapture, a wonder at the possibilities given to man, an enormous gratitude towards others [...] when a person is in such a state something appears that says that this experience of such enormous human solidarity is more important than the value of my individual life. And in such people the fear of death simply disappears, and there appears the conviction that because you are ready to die for me, I am ready to die for you. [not everyone experiences this] This is simply phenomenological [as opposed to good or bad], it has to be understood, because otherwise we will have understood nothing about revolution. Nothing."

"a moment when quantitative changes became so great as to become qualitative change" - technological revolution, using Hegel's words. Changes in scale become changes in kind.

"The Maidan set up its own cameras: the Ukrainian livestream live-streamed itself on YouTube. Around the world everyone could watch Ukrainians being shot to death in real time." -- thoughts on who controls the watching eye.

"A young paramedic, Olesia Zhukovska, blood pouring from her neck, typed on her phone, 'I am dying.' her Twitter message traveled around the globe in minutes. To strangers around the world, that message made [her] a real person. At once that message robbed death of its intimacy; and this self-violation of intimacy became the means for the assertion of selfhood."

In the events following Maidan, the annexation of Crimea, and war in the Donbas:

A message to Putin: "We highly value your concern about the safety and rights of Ukrainian national minorities. But we do not wish to be 'defended' by sundering Ukraine and annexing its territory."

Slava of the band Okean Elzy has a vision of "a country guided by civic patriotism" which "would be a truly national state, but a national state of a nation based not on a common language or ancestry, but rather on people who made a decision to see their future together."

On other European countries singling out Ukraine's right wing movements while sweeping their own under the rug "It was as if [...] Austria and France were gazing at Ukraine through the lens of projection, attributing to others what they could not accept in themselves."

"Europeans preferred to put Crimea out of their minds."

"Better that you enslave us, but feed us" (Dostoevsky) vs the comments of a Russian colleague "I think that social stability is more important than metaphysical freedom"

On right wing presence on Maidan "The context is somehow beyond the Western imagination. Yes, the far right was there, but it was a real revolution, and in a real revolution, all the oppositional forces are present." (Vasyl Mischenko, husband of a German translator)

In Dniprpetrovsk "Elsewhere in the city huge billboards declared Ukrainian patriotism in the Russian language: 'We take pride in living in Dniprpetrovsk! We are Ukrainian!' Russian speaking Dnipropetrovsk, on the Dnipro River deep in southeastern Ukraine, some 12o miles from the war in the Donbas, had become a bastion of Ukrainian patriotism."

"Democracy, he believed, could not be built using undemocratic methods" (--Pavlo, physicist)

"That Ukraine exists, that it has not disappeared, is not thanks to the government but in spite of the government" - Serhiy Zhadan.

Maidan as the "moment of truth" (Serhiy Zhadan) and "end of ambivalence" (Tatiana Zhurzhenko)

"If war did come to Dnipropetrovsk, [Oleg - local businessman] was certain that people would fight. The mood at the moment was very patriotic: everyone would defend his own street, his own home. 'I don't know if Putin understand this or not, but if they come here, we will likely slaughter them.' [...] 'Every second person sitting here [at the cafe] will take up arms.';"

"Precisely those Russian speaking regions of eastern Ukraine Putin had assumed would start flying Russian flags had produced the most volunteer battalions to fight the separatists."

"These Ukrainian values in any case had nothing to do with ethnicity or language, and Iurii (local businessman) insisted that the language issue was imaginary, a creation of Russian television. In Dnipropetrovsk, Russian was the dominant language of most of the population."

"For Valerii and Elena the Maidan meant the end of vassalship to Russia." .... Valerii: "This was my personal motivation for the fight on the Maidan: the complete break with Russia and the former Soviet Union. The Maidan was like a period, the end."

"Valerii and Elena regretted that they had to speak Russian to me -- let it be any language other than the language of their enemy, who lied and stole and murdered."

"'We are civilized people,' Elena said to me as she shook my hand in parting. 'We understand you, but you don't understand us.'"

"Mutual trust is also about mutual responsibility."

"'Sometimes I think that I'm the only one who believes that everything will turn out well. It's necessary to believe and it's necessary to act. Today, it seems to me, is a time of responsibility for every person, every person concretely. Every person is responsible for our future. Every one! Every person needs to decide.' Yet everyone was also very tired, and sometimes Anastasiia began to cry for no reason."

"The time was out of joint. In the Donbas, separatists were guarding the Lenin monuments, they were guarding the sanctity of the Soviet past. They were also guarding the sanctity of the tsarist past. All of it had gotten mixed together."

Some people being sad at statues being taken down, this was their "personal Lenin, it's where they used to kiss, where they stole roses from the flower beds." And, a response, "It's very difficult for the older generation to accept the changes. [...] It will seem strange to you, but we don't feel sorry for these people at all, and we do not even want to understand them."

The Russian Orthodox Army invading, but only being able to recite one prayer. "So which one of us is Orthodox?"

"Daddy, tomorrow will you still be here?"

"He was killed during a 'ceasefire.'"

On the propaganda that the Maidan was militarized coup. "And the military didn't take power here, the people rose up."

Interviews with members of a right wing group, it "is the only structure that has not sold out and will not sell out. With these people, I'm not afraid to go to war." The theme of prodazhnost' - corruption, saleability, The other ones all sell out. We cannot be bought.

"In a world where everyone could be bought, there was no trust among people."

(Some people reporting that they did not feel they could pay bribes after their experience on the Maidan)

On the Russian attack "This war is different because there were no reasons for it, They are all fictional. They are built on lies, spread by Russian television. There was no reason for people to kill each other. It is a theater of the absurd."

"Who wanted to revive the Soviet Union -- and who wanted to revive the tsarist empire?"

"'I was angry,' he said of how he reacted to the separatists that spring. 'I wanted to see the earth burn under their feet.'"

"you understand everything and you understand that the city is on your side, that the city is your ally" (fighting on home turf)

On reciting poetry as a means of maintaining sanity while imprisoned, Zhadan's lines: We have come here fatigued, resigned, and mute / Tell your people: there is no one left to shoot. "He believed that poetry had saved him" "When you're twenty-tree, poetry can save you."

"Later he understood: the moment he had desired [his enemy's death] was in some sense the moment of his own death as well." [thinking a lot that one of the terrors of war is this change in those attacked, the destruction of a peaceful people]

"He still held his cigarette not between two fingers, but rather in a fist, as had done on the Maidan, concealing the light and smoke."

"It was the 'I want' that affirmed our selfhood."

"I can die happy, having experienced a true democracy [maidan], something many people never see in their life."

"It's not important who you are, it's important that you're here, that you haven't run away."