In the last 30 years, Ukraine has witnessed one revolution every decade.
Time and again, Ukrainian people had risen against the government — first to demand independence, and then to protect it from corrupt politicians and Russian influence.
“This is all one revolution — a long one, with breaks, the goal of which is the creation of an independent and democratic Ukraine,” Volodymyr Viatrovych, a historian and former head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, told the Kyiv Post.
The Kyiv Post revisited the events of the Revolution on Granite, the Orange Revolution, and the EuroMaidan Revolution to recollect Ukraine’s continuing journey to political and cultural independence.
1990: Granite
“It is better to die than to live in the Soviet Union,” said a poster, attached to a tent, located on Kyiv’s modern-day Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti, in October 1990.
At the time, Ukraine was witnessing its first Maidan, which became a synonym for revolution. Hundreds of university students launched a nonviolent protest campaign to fight for Ukraine’s independence. Having set up dozens of tents, students referred to their tent camp as “the territory free from communism.”
Five demands were made clear: the Ukrainian government must refuse to sign a new Union treaty with Moscow; call for a snap re-election of the parliament on a multiparty basis; nationalize the Communist Party property and ensure that Ukrainian conscripts could be sent for military service abroad only with their consent. The protesters also called for the resignation of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers Vitaliy Masol.
Students held a hunger strike on the square’s granite blocks for 16 days, and swayed history. The government voted to accept the strikers’ demands on Oct. 17.
It took dozens of tents, thousands of people and meticulous planning and discipline to pull it off. The movement was highly organized. Each participant was registered and had a special pass to the tent camp. There were groups performing different tasks, such as providing medical aid and ensuring that everyone adhered to the rules of the camp.
“We had a clear hierarchy, discipline, and an understanding that only joint efforts can achieve success,” said Oleksandr Doniy, the former head of the Ukrainian Student Association, who was one of the revolution’s masterminds along with the head of the Student Brotherhood in Lviv Markiian Ivashchyshyn.
Doniy and Ivashchyshyn spent six months planning the strike.
Over the course of 16 days, the two led negotiations with the government, spoke to the press and made TV appearances. Organized picketing groups overtook some of Kyiv’s university buildings. Hundreds of students fled to Kyiv from all over the country. Some joined the hunger strike for days, some for weeks.
“Yet we were just students, not heroes,” Natalia Klymovska, who was 19 while participating in the revolution, told the Kyiv Post.
Klymovska remembers that while growing up in the Soviet Union, parents were scared to openly discuss their values with children.
“Every family was afraid,” she said. “But we grew up with different values. We knew that we wanted to see Ukraine independent, and that many generations before us fought for this, and that we have to continue.”
Historian Viatrovych told the Kyiv Post that the main task of the Revolution on Granite was to actualize the issue of Ukraine’s independence. It was crucial that the youth took the lead, he said.
“When the youth stood up in 1990, it meant that independence had a future. This was probably the main achievement of the Revolution on Granite — independence now mattered to the young generation.”
Ukraine declared independence 10 months later, on Aug. 24, 1991.
2004: Orange
“Together we are strong, and we won’t be defeated,” was the popular chant of the Orange Revolution in 2004, when millions of Ukrainians took to the streets in late November to protect their right to free and fair elections.
On the night of the run-off presidential vote on Nov. 21, pro-Western candidate Viktor Yuschenko, believing that the election was rigged against him, called on his supporters to protest against electoral fraud.
Yushchenko’s supporters flooded Independence Square just hours after the official exit-polls showed that the Kremlin-backed sitting Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was leading by three percentage points.
Reports by local and international observers alleged that the vote was falsified.
Over the next few months, large-scale protests sparked all over the country. On some days, up to a million people gathered at the Independence Square in Kyiv, which again proved to be the heart of political resistance in Ukraine.
On Dec. 3, the Supreme Court declared that election results couldn’t be finalized because of the scale of falsifications and ordered a revote of the run-off.
As expected, Yuschenko secured the presidential seat, leading by over 2 million votes.
“I did not expect our people to rise up in this way,” Yushchenko’s wife Kateryna Yushchenko told the Kyiv Post.
The generosity of people from all walks of life stunned her the most during the revolution.
She recalled talking to a young man who was quietly sitting in his expensive Mercedes near the Independence Square.
“I’m just here in case somebody is cold, so they can come and sit here for a bit,” he told her.
Kateryna Yushchenko, born in a Ukrainian diaspora family in the U.S., said that “Ukrainian people have always been freedom-loving and strong.”
“But for too many years we weren’t allowed to express that strength,” she added.
Given the history, it was all the more powerful to see the nation rise up at times like the Orange Revolution.
“What we saw on the square in 2004 was extremely inspiring,” Kateryna Yushchenko said.
The success of the Orange Revolution made Ukraine stand out among other Soviet republics, some of which descended into autocracies.
“The best examples of that are Belarus and Russia, which now just imitate elections,” Viatrovych said. “Ukrainians fought for their right to choose in 2004, and this turned out to be extremely important.”
2013–2014: EuroMaidan
Overthrowing Kremlin-backed dictator Yanukovych and solidifying Ukraine’s Western geopolitical course, the EuroMaidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, was a profound transformation of Ukrainian society. One of its main slogans, “Ukraine is Europe,” reflected Ukraine’s fundamental goal — real independence from Russia.
Ukrainians first took to the streets en masse in November 2013 when Yanukovych refused to sign the long-awaited association agreement with the European Union.
The protest was relatively small until, on Nov. 30, riot police violently attacked several hundreds demonstrators that camped on Maidan, most of whom were university students. The next day, hundreds of thousands of people flooded central Kyiv with Ukrainian and European Union flags in defiance of the government’s tyranny.
Corruption, economic hardship and the government’s flirtation with imperialist Russia led to a massive political upheaval. For the next three months, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians wouldn’t leave Maidan. They stood for freedom, defying the riot police, paid mercenaries and government snipers.
Ninety-three days, at least 104 killed and over a thousand injured later, Yanukovych fled to Russia, where he still resides.
“I was afraid we were going to lose our independence,” said Tetyana Chornovol, a former journalist, lawmaker and active participant of the EuroMaidan Revolution.
One of the top investigative journalists at the time, she was attacked and severely beaten on the outskirts of Kyiv during the revolution. It was one of the first targeted attacks on key activists.
Viatrovych said that the EuroMaidan Revolution showed Ukrainians’ willingness to break away from Russia, geopolitically, culturally, and mentally.
“Clearly, it made some people concerned to the point of using military aggression to try and prevent this process,” he said.
Ukraine entered a new era marked by war, after Russia illegally annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas in 2014. But it also set out on a journey of long-awaited reforms.
The succeeding government swiftly reversed the course of its predecessors and signed the EU association agreement. This allowed for freer trade and deeper political cooperation, on condition that Ukraine will carry out political and economic reforms. In 2017, the EU granted Ukraine a visa-free regime.
The EuroMaidan also sparked a national awakening in all spheres of society — more people began speaking Ukrainian and supporting Ukrainian artists and businesses.
“For the first time in Ukraine’s modern history, patriotism became fashionable. Since then, the level of national identity has remained high regardless of trends or political events,” Chornovol said. “Ukrainians now have the strength to overcome anything.”
Viatrovych believes that the three revolutions were stages of the same process, of Ukraine evolving into a democratic and truly independent country.
And while all three were profound events in Ukrainian history, that process “is still not finished,” the historian said.
