On Jan. 16, 2013, almost two months since the start of the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine’s parliament passed a set of laws that were quickly dubbed the “dictatorship laws” and following this, on Sunday, Jan. 19, the area around the Lobonovsky stadium became a battle ground.
The aim of the laws was to legislate an end to not only Maidan, but also to legislate an end to democracy. Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and noted historian, wrote at the time “On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship.”
Ukrainians were seething about not only the provisions of the laws, but also the manner in which they had been adopted, there were nothing like the 235 votes declared as the result of a quick count of raised hands. Later analysis of an image from Parliament during the voting on Jan. 16 demonstrated that there were maybe half of that number of members of parliament voting. That was the version of democracy that Yanukovych and his cronies believed Ukrainians should put up with so that they could get back to the business of plundering the state.
It was in these days that I learnt the word “lustration.” Ukraine now has a lustration law, sort of. After the collapse of the communist system and the subsequent freeing of central Europe from Moscow’s commands, many countries that are now developed democracies rushed to implement lustration. In those cases lustration was pretty simple, if you were party to the engine of the old system, you’re not part of the new system. The people who had exercised Moscow’s power in central Europe were shunned, not a witch hunt, but just a tool in the sensible determination to immediately make a break from the past.
Sunday, Jan. 19, 2014 was no ordinary Sunday on Maidan.
On eight previous Sundays many thousands of people had gathered in Maidan. They stood on those occasions in peace, and with dignity.
The Sunday that came after the passing of the dictatorship laws was different. The crowd was angry, their two-month long peaceful protest had been responded to with a group of measures that would further deny them their rights.
The politicians took to the stage one by one, and one by one they were booed and hissed. Vitali Klitschko, demonstrating his anger, spoke in Russian. Oleh Tiahnynbok must be remembered for being a brilliant orator during the EuroMaidan Revolution, even though the electorate soundly rejected his politics when given the democratic chance to do so, that day he said that the dictatorship laws were a sign that we had the Yanukovych regime worried, the tactics of Maidan had forced them to do this, rationally, therefore the tactics of Maidan should remain unchanged. Arseniy Yatsenyuk was not memorable. All were booed.
When the weekly viche ended a large part of the crowd made their way to the Hrushevskoho roadblock. Within hours, there were physical clashes and vehicles were set alight. The hysterical reaction to this had many trolls from Russia immediately shouting “you call these peaceful protests?” The volume of such tweets suggested that this was coordinated. We now know that, yes, it was. Of course, no rational person would say that the protests, at that time, were peaceful. But this was the first gift to people who wanted to ignore two months of peaceful protest to build a narrative of a “violent coup” being underway in Kyiv, that line of anti-Maidan argument is still used today by the uninformed.
There are two issues that have to be examined to give context to the events of Jan. 19 until January 25, the date when fighting stopped on this street and by which time three men had been killed. Those two issues are the dictatorship laws that were the catalyst for the clashes and the second is the actions of the police, who fought with a level of brutality that was nothing short of illegal.
At the time I wrote that while I didn’t condone the violence on Hrushevskoho Street, I fully understood why it was happening. The people knew that they were being robbed of essential freedoms and they fought against that, rightly. The story of the Hrushevskoho Street clashes, which took place during some of the coldest days of the revolution, needs to be told.
The people who fought for Ukraine on Hrushevskoho Street repeatedly shouted a small number of slogans. By far the most common was “bandits out” and the second most common was “we stand” – the latter would be deployed in the frequent pauses from the din. The soundtrack on Hrushevskoho was one of metal rocks and sticks being used to bash just about anything, railings, lamp posts, oil drums that burned with wood to warm up on. That soundtrack, by and large, was provided by babushki. The ladies who stood out there and made that noise were not directed by anyone, but every 30 to 45 minutes the noise would briefly cease, and the crowd would chant, “we stand!” and “bandits out!”
The boys who fought were just that, boys. Poorly prepared kids with little more than random pieces of padding attached to their arms by gaffer tape for protection. While the battles on Hrushevskoho raged people of all ages ferried supplies of tea and sandwiches and wood and tyres to the location, some ingenious (and fairly well educated) people even built a trebuchet, and then the trebuchet even had its own Twitter account. There was, at that time, not even the slightest mention (in Kyiv at least) of the “Praviy Sector” or anything of the kind.
As the Yanukovych camp prepared their feeble and tenuous attempt at pretending the dictatorship laws were legitimate they needed to find enough names to officially register as the 235 votes for that had been announced in parliament on Jan. 16, and so as well as the 130 or so members of Parliament who had put their hands in the air, roughly another 100 individuals agreed or were coerced into placing their votes on the parliamentary records. Of those 235 recorded names, today, 64 of those people are still members of parliament in Ukraine.
After the flight of Victor Yanukovych, in a helicopter almost too overloaded with loot to take off, parliament passed a law on lustration. To this day, it has not been applied with anything like the ferocity, or seriousness, as the exact same laws were applied in central Europe over 20 years ago. Ukraine today suffers as a consequence.
A clean-up is required in Ukraine’s political system.
It is dishonest and dysfunctional.
Those 64 supporters of the dictatorship laws who remain in parliament are a symbol of a dark and dangerous time in Ukraine’s history, they literally attempted to end democracy in Ukraine, so why are they part of the “democratic” system we are trying to build?
The reasoning for subjecting them to lustration is obvious, the mechanism exists, these individuals were significant parties to the engine of the old system, on Jan. 16, 2014 they forfeited any right to participate in the new system.
Removing these people from parliament is just one element of where the application of the lustration law should be extended, at the same time the offices of the prosecutor general and also the judiciary need to be cleaned up with that same tool, because it is the corruption there that enables the kind of corruption some in positions of high authority are still guilty of.
