Civil Society

Even the most skeptical accepted that a new civil society had appeared, and that this phenomenon represented an enormous transformation that had been underestimated, especially by Western observers.

The most common example cited as evidence was the volunteer move­ment, which had gathered food, clothing, money, and medical supplies for the Euromaidan, and was now supporting the army, wounded, and displaced. This activity was described by some as a continuation of the “spirit of the Maidan” (Zabuzhko).⁴ All interviewees stressed that the new civil society included Ukrainian and Russian speakers, who served both in the volunteer battalions and in the regular army. However, the volunteer movement, it was said, also represents the awakening of a much broader sense of responsibility for minorities and the disadvan­taged, and a concern with social issues. In this regard, the struggle against corruption, concern with the LGBT community, the welfare of children and the elderly, the growth of NGOs, the existence of a free media, and even animal welfare, were cited by several interviewees (Zabuzhko, Shevchenko, Stiazhkina). A number of individuals felt that active and practical help for people displaced by the conflict in Eastern Ukraine represented a prime example of the volunteer movement’s massive scale (Finberh, Stiazhkina).

However, drawbacks to this wave of activism were also indicated. Direct action by people has also exposed a “lack of education” and “blinkered provincialism.” These had expressed themselves, for example, in a refusal to allow people to promote the Opposition Bloc (members of parliament who opposed the government in power), and physical attacks against or attempts to humiliate politicians with whom people disagreed (especially the tactic of throwing public officials into trash bins and parading them around streets).

In Kyiv a member of parliament was thrown into a bin because he came out against the law on lustration. The fact that the law itself is a stupid one and that people voted on it seven times without knowing exactly what they were voting for, that the text was never actually distributed to members of parliament, was not mentioned.

The Euromaidan, Revolution, and War With Russia 149 People burned tires, forced a vote, and thousands appeared in front of parliament with prepared trash bins. After voting for the law, ten days were spent rewriting it. Eventually it was signed by the presi­dent in quite a different form, but all the same it remains a badly designed law.

The law on decommunization belongs to the same category. It was accepted in a rush, without discussion, because unfortunately parlia­ment and the political forces within it were guided exclusively by political considerations and did not examine the law carefully. On that particular day it was convenient to pass the lustration law in order to simultaneously push through other laws that were important to members of parliament (some purely business-related), and so this was done. They voted for all four clauses of the decommunization law and attached the other law to the voting package. If there had been adequate discussion, the law could have been significantly improved.

Zakharov indicated that “the most frightening, brutal, foolish proposals for changes to the constitution came directly from the broader commu­nity, from the active young civil society.” In his view, these people often misunderstood the importance of legality and showed the greatest impa­tience with the slow process of change. They also failed to understand that former members of the Party of Regions may have changed and could be allies in the reform movement.

In spite of these drawbacks the importance of civil society’s revival was stressed by all interviewed figures. There was widespread agreement that mass mobilization and volunteer activism had saved the state from collapse in the first months of the war against Russian intervention in the Donbas (Kurkov, Stiazhkina, Finberh, Zakharov).