What is the Maidan, and what made it top news around the world?
“Maidan” is how the residents of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, usually abbreviate the name of their city's main plaza, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). In recent times this name has also come to connote a space of popular protests and people power in general.
“Maidan" is a Turkic word for a square, and Ukrainians likely borrowed it from the Crimean Tatars or other Turkic-speaking people. The Maidan is centrally located in downtown Kyiv, straddling the city's main thoroughfare, Khreshchatyk Boulevard. There are no government buildings in the vicinity, with the exception of City Hall, where no major political decisions are made. However, in Soviet times Khreshchatyk Boulevard served as a parade ground and the Maidan, then named after the (Bolshevik) October Revolution, as a place for political rallies. Because of this, Kyivites came to perceive it not just as the capital's central plaza, but also as a space for political expression. The square acquired this reputation after hosting three rounds of mass political protests: in 1990, 2004-2005, and 2013-2014.During the late Soviet period, the Maidan was dominated at its eastern end by an impressive October Revolution monument depicting Lenin leading revolutionary workers and soldiers. It was on the granite steps under this sculpture that several dozen students declared a hunger strike in October 1990, demanding the government's resignation and other reforms. Ukraine was then a republic within the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had initiated political liberalization, which led to an increased push for democracy and national assertiveness in the union republics. In Ukraine, the party leadership remained conservative, and it took a student hunger strike in the center of the capital to remove the unpopular head of the Cabinet of Ministers. In the process, the students achieved something even more important.
By setting up their small pup tents on the granite steps in what was subsequently dubbed the “Revolution on the Granite,” they asserted the public's right to political protest and established the capital's central square as a protest venue.1 The authorities did not dare to crack down on the students' peaceful protest, which had widespread public sympathy among Kyivites. By then, the Soviet Union was on its last legs; it would be dissolved the following year.Some of the student participants of the Revolution on the Granite went on to organize the Orange Revolution in the winter of 2004-2005. Once again, the Maidan served as a focal point of popular protests, with a greater number of much larger surplus army tents set up on the square itself and along Khreshchatyk Boulevard, which obstructed traffic on this normally busy central avenue. Unlike in 1990, however, the revolution's main action was not a hunger strike, but a nonstop mass protest rally on the Maidan and the peaceful occupation of the square and the adjacent area. The cause was also different. Instead of targeting diehard communist apparatchiks, the protesters (many of them Kyivites who demonstrated for several hours every day, as well as people arriving from the provinces, who camped out on the Maidan or stayed elsewhere in Kyiv) took up the battle against the corrupt and manipulative post-communist elites. The rigged presidential election and the poisoning of the oppositional candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, served as catalysts, but the protesters' demands were broader: true democracy, political transparency, the rule of law, and the reining in of corruption. Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president, did not use force against the Maidan protesters, and the West condemned the rigged elections, offering mediation. In the end, the regime agreed to repeat the run-off, which the official candidate went on to lose. The Maidan thus not only affirmed its reputation as a premier Ukrainian protest space but also became known worldwide as a symbol of popular democracy.
However, the victors of the Orange Revolution (named after the opposition's campaign colors) quarreled among themselves instead of pursuing much-needed reforms. The intended beneficiary of the rigged election that prompted the revolution, Viktor Yanukovych, remained in control of the Party of Regions with an electoral base in the eastern, predominantly Russian-speaking regions, where the Maidan was portrayed as a Western intrigue. Taking advantage of the divisions in the Orange camp, Yanukovych was able to return to the government, first as prime minister and, in 2010, as president. However, the return to pre-Orange kleptocracy did not last long. In November 2013 mass protests on the Maidan erupted again after the government suddenly backed out of the Association Agreement with the European Union. In addition to the tents, makeshift barricades went up on and around the Maidan. This time the authorities ordered the deployment of riot police and, eventually and covertly, the use of firepower. The protesters threw Molotov cocktails at the police. Facing escalating casualties, smaller “maidans” in other cities, and expressions of concern from the West, in February 2014 President Yanukovych escaped to Russia and the parliament formed an interim government. The Maidan had won, but it became marked with crosses and makeshift memorials erected in honor of those who had been killed in the clashes. With the appearance of these memorials, its name acquired a new and tragic connotation—that of an urban battlefield, where protesters lost their lives during what is now called the EuroMaidan Revolution or the Revolution of Dignity.