Maidan and Beyond, Part I

See the original Facebook post (in Russian) here →.

Maidan’s official name is Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Ukrainian). However, the word “maidan” (square) acquired a special political meaning of its own, as described by Timothy Snyder: “Interestingly, the word maidan exists in Ukrainian but not in Russian, but even people speaking Russian use it because of its special implications. In origin it is just the Arabic word for “square,” a public place. But a maidan now means in Ukrainian what the Greek word agora means in English: not just a marketplace where people happen to meet, but a place where they deliberately meet, precisely in order to deliberate, to speak, and to create a political society.” See →.

In recent years, Europe Publishers, a publishing house with close ties to the Kremlin, has had a monopoly on translating Žižek’s books into Russian.

The presence at Maidan of the likes of John McCain and Victoria Nuland certainly contributed to this line of thinking in Russia and beyond—which doesn’t mean these guests were warmly greeted or even noticed by the majority of the protesters.

See →.

In the Guardian, Owen Hatherley had recently outlined the architectural implications of Kyiv’s revolts →.

On May 1, 2013, artist Volodymyr Kuznetsov decided to reenact the notorious Labor Day march of 1986 as a gesture of remembrance. This march took place amidst the politically charged atmosphere of pre-Maidan Kyiv, with numerous groups, from the far Left to the far Right, trying to claim the Labor Day tradition as their own.

In the autumn of 1990, a group of students organized a hunger strike and a tent occupation of Maidan square, demanding, among other things, the resignation of the Ukrainian cabinet and more autonomy from Moscow. The authorities didn’t crack down on the protesters, and after two weeks, their demands were met. The successful Occupy-style protest, which emerged victorious against the Soviet authorities twenty years before the actual Occupy movement was conceived, became a symbol of the Ukrainian transition from Soviet socialism to post-Soviet neocapitalism. But the blind spot of this transition was also exemplified in the hunger strike: the students starved voluntarily, while for many of their compatriots, hunger soon became a stark everyday reality.