Indendence Square buzzed with activity on the wet night on Nov. 22-23.
By 10 p.m., most protesters went home, promising to reconvene again on Nov. 25 if President Viktor Yanukovych signs the new tax code into law.
“If he signs it, we don’t need such a president,” many said, promising to fight to the end.
After the music was turned low, tired protest organizers – the heads of the entrepreneur associations and trade unions – went home to sleep, while the others put up a couple of tents for the protesters who stayed behind. The police circled the tent city. A few special services teams were waiting in the buses on Bankova Street near the Presidential Administration. Camp guards made sure no provocations took place.
Around 2 a.m. different supplies, such as plastic chairs and foam plastic mats, were delivered to Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti).
For those who took part in the Orange Revolution, this night reminded of Maidan in 2004. This time there were fewer party flags and the action plan was conceived more by entrepreneurs than politicians. The protesters are fighting for economic freedom and to keep from slipping to a lower economic class.
After dinner, lively conversations started in tents. The entrepreneurs shared their hardships, making them ready to fight for a brighter future.
Three women entrepreneurs came from Pavlohrad, a small city in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, just for a day, but decided to remain in Kyiv. Having settled on the styrofoam mats that served as beds and putting purses under their heads, the women were not in the mood to sleep.
Lubov Mykhaolova, 47, sent her husband home to work at the street market while she remained on Maidan to fight for the wellbeing of her family. In order to get cash for her business in the street market, she mortgaged her flat. Now the family is at risk of losing their home.
“I buy the goods for my business at the wholesale street market, they don’t give invoices there [that are required by the new tax code]. Even if the tax code comes into force on April 1, 2011, I still have packs of summer clothes that I won’t be able to sell off-season,” she said.
Lubov Mykhaolova
Mykhaolova remembered how her work as an entrepreneur helped her family to survive.
“I used to work at the military plant as a technologist on metalwork. In the mid-’90s our salaries were paid with sacks of sugar. In order to get some cash, I went to the street market to sell my sugar. Then I saw that I might be able to make some money there and started selling clothes. Now I have a stand in the shopping mall and my husband has a stand at the street market,” she said.
Mykhaolova’s neighbor, Tetyana Panchokha, 52, interrupted. The story that her fellow city resident told sounded painfully familiar to her.
“I sold everything and invested into the stalls on the street market for me and my daughter. Now we are on the verge of losing everything, because the payment to the pension fund are going to be raised from the new year, the tax police will have way too many rights and I won’t have any place to buy the goods because I won’t be able to buy from the wholesales markets,” she complained.
“Do you think I can find a job at my age? Or do you think I like to stand on the street market in the snow and in the sun?” she said indignantly, adding she would keep protesting on the square.
The Party of Regions won the local elections in Pavlohrad. The entrepreneurs said they hadn’t seen such fraudulent elections since Ukraine’s independence. Many residents of Pavlohrad voted for Viktor Yanukovych. “Now people regret,” Panchokha said.
Oleksandr, 42, who didn’t tell his surname because he was afraid of being persecuted by tax police, has a few stalls on the market where he sells carpets. An engineer of food technologies by training, he said, he was ashamed at first to work at the street market. But with time he got used to it.
Wrapped in a blue and white blanket on Maidan at night, Oleksandr stretched his legs that he said hurt from standing in the street market in the cold.
Oleksandr
After being hassled for bribes by the tax police, he complained that tax collectors would just start asking for bigger bribes if the new tax code is implemented. The code foresees higher fines for the entrepreneurs.
“It would be just like with the road police. When the fines got bigger, they started asking for more money in bribes,” he said.
When Kyiv Post asked how long would he stay in Maidan, Oleksandr responded: “As long as it takes to change the tax code. My business can wait for a couple of weeks.”
