The euromaidan was not a rupture in the sense of a social revolution. As my colleague Oleg Zhuravlev and I have written, it shared features with other post-Soviet uprisings and also with those of the Arab Spring in 2011.footnote¹ These were not upheavals that led to fundamental social changes in the class structure—nor even in the political structure of the state. Instead they were mobilizations that helped to replace the elites, but where the new elites were actually factions of the same class. The Maidan revolutions in Ukraine—the 2014 Euromaidan was the last of the three—were similar. These are, in a sense, deficient revolutions: they create a revolutionary legitimacy that can then be hijacked by agents who are not actually representative of the interests of the revolutionary participants. The Euromaidan was captured by several agents, all of whom participated in the uprising and contributed to its success, but who were very far from representing the whole range of forces involved or the motivations that drove ordinary Ukrainians to support Euromaidan. In this sense, while responding to the post-Soviet crisis of political representation, the Euromaidan also reproduced and intensified it.

Predominant among these agents were the traditional parties of the opposition, represented by, among others, Petro Poroshenko who became President of Ukraine in 2014. These oligarchic parties were structured around a ‘big man’, on patron-client relations: lacking any other model, they reproduced the worst features of the cpsu—heavy-handed paternalism, popular passivity—voided of its legitimating ‘modernity project’. Another smaller but very important agent was the bloc of West-facing ngos and media organizations, which operated more like professional firms than community mobilizers, with the lion’s share of their budgets usually coming from Western donors. During the uprising, they were the people who created the image of the Euromaidan that was disseminated to international audiences; they were primarily responsible for the narrative about a democratic revolution that represented the civic identity and diversity of the Ukrainian people against an authoritarian government. They gained strength in relation to the weakening Ukrainian state, which was first disrupted by the uprising, then thrown into further disarray by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and by the separatist revolt in Donbas, backed by Moscow—and by Ukraine itself becoming more dependent on the West.

Then there were the far-right groups—Svoboda, Right Sector, the Azov movement—which, unlike the ngos, were organized as political militants, with a well-articulated ideology based on radical interpretations of Ukrainian nationalism, with relatively strong local party cells and mobilizations on the streets. Thanks to the violent radicalization of Euromaidan, and then to the war in Donbas, these far-right parties were armed and could pose a violent threat to the government.footnote² When the Ukrainian state weakened and lost its monopoly over violence, the right-wing groups entered this space. Western states and international organizations also gained increasing influence, both indirectly—through their funding of civil-society ngos—and directly, because they provided credit and military help against Russia, as well as political support. These were the four major agents that grew stronger after the Euromaidan—the oligarchic opposition, the ngos, the far right and Washington–Brussels.

Those who lost power were, first, the sections of the Ukrainian elite—let’s call them political capitalists, in the Weberian sense: exploiting the political opportunities their offices provided for profit-seeking—organized in the Party of Regions, which backed Viktor Yanukovych. After the Euromaidan, the party collapsed. These oligarchs, as they are usually called, were politically reorganized; but they retained control over some of the crucial sectors of the Ukrainian economy, so the Forbes list of the richest people in Ukraine was amazingly stable. Before and after the Euromaidan revolution, the only person on the Top Ten list who made a career change was Poroshenko—a sign of how little change there was in the way the economy was working.

The other significant actor that lost out was the Communist Party of Ukraine—and the left in general. But the Communists specifically were banned in 2015, under the laws on decommunization. These were the legal grounds for suspending the activities of the cpu, and also some of the marginal communist parties. In 2012, the cpu won 13 per cent of the vote, so it was a considerable part of Ukrainian politics. In 2014, they didn’t get into parliament, thanks to the loss of Crimea and the Donbas, which were their electoral strongholds. And the next year, they were suspended.

After 2014, they rolled back to the more parliamentary-presidential model that worked after the ‘Orange revolution’, and which Yanukovych cancelled in 2010 soon after he was elected the president. On the formal level, in 2014, the president was weakened and parliament was supposedly stronger. The figure of the prime minister, who was chosen by the parliamentary deputies, became more important. But what did not change was the ‘neopatrimonial’ regime, as it is often called in the literature of post-Soviet studies: the informal patron-client relations that dominate politics. It is quite normal to speak of clans in this regard—to say someone is in the ‘clan of Poroshenko’, or ‘clan of Yanukovych’. These informally structured groups, whose relations are hidden from the public, have more influence on how real politics works in our country than the formal clauses of the constitution. So despite the fact that the position of the presidency was formally weakened, Poroshenko was still the most influential politician in the country, able to push more or less what he wanted through parliament.

There was a major change with the October 2014 parliamentary elections. Five pro-Maidan parties formed the ruling coalition—Poroshenko’s party, Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front, Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland and two others. It had a constitutional majority to begin with; but then, very quickly the coalition started to crumble. Poroshenko did not want to recognise the collapse of the coalition because that would mean having to hold new elections in which his party would perform worse than in 2014. And so, for several years, it was more like a conjunctural coalition, where his people had to manage the problem of getting majority votes.