The Uneventful Night That Started A Revolution In Ukraine
KYIV, Ukraine — It was well after midnight on a chilly, damp day last November, and the thousand or so people who came to Kyiv’s central square to protest Ukraine abruptly spurning Europe for Russia had dispersed.
Things didn’t look promising for the protesters. The protest hadn’t begun until 10 p.m., and had looked like it was fizzling out early. When a man with a megaphone proposed marching on the presidential administration, people laughed. Police hadn’t even bothered trying to control the demonstration. Opposition leaders, speaking into an improvised PA system in the back of a truck, had failed to energize the crowd. And anyway, all trailed behind the corrupt incumbent, pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, in polls for the next election, slated for 2015.
Across the street, a small group gathered around a table in a traditional beer hall, discussing their next steps over vodka and bowls of meaty soup. Some, like Afghan-born investigative reporter Mustafa Nayyem and opposition TV host Svyatoslav Tsygolko, were journalists who had campaigned against Yanukovych’s crackdown on the press. Others, like Pavlo Petrenko and Andriy Shevchenko, were up-and-coming pro-European lawmakers whose party leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, was languishing in prison on charges Yanukovych had concocted.
They knew they had their work cut out for them.
“Remember what they did on social media in Egypt? We need to be like that. Who’s going to write in English?” said Nayyem, who had called for the protest on Facebook earlier that day. Though the restaurant, a favorite of local students and Western sex tourists, was all but empty, he stood at the head of the table gesturing excitedly to be heard by his dozen or so colleagues, who were glumly discussing the tasks ahead.
It didn’t seem like much at the time — not to the activists, who failed to galvanize much more than a small Occupy-style tent encampment on the square for the next week, or, indeed, to this reporter, who didn’t so much as think to write it up.
A year later, seemingly everything is changed. Yanukovych is long gone since February, replaced by chocolate baron Petro Poroshenko, a prominent voice in the early days of the protests on Independence Square, known as Maidan. Petrenko has one of the most difficult briefs in the government, as acting justice minister. Tsygolko is Poroshenko’s spokesperson. Nayyem now leads a small group of reform-minded activists in parliament. And Nov. 21, the first anniversary of what came to be known as the “Euromaidan” protests, has now been designated a national “Day of Dignity and Freedom.”