In early October 1990, about 200 Kyiv students pitched tents on October Revolution Square and stopped eating. Thousands more joined strikes and marches in the capital and other cities. Fewer than 11 months later, the parliament that had negotiated with them voted for Ukrainian independence.
That hunger strike, the Revolution on Granite, opens a story the Kyiv Post tells about how independence had to be won repeatedly after it was declared.
Declared in 1991, still being defined
Parliament approved independence on August 24, 1991, after a failed Soviet coup. A nationwide referendum confirmed it on December 1, by what the paper calls an overwhelming margin. Washington recognized the new state on December 25, as the Soviet Union dissolved.
The state that emerged kept many Soviet habits. It inherited borders, institutions, an industrial economy and one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, along with corruption, a centralized bureaucracy and regional economic clans. Britannica, the Kyiv Post notes, lists the early tasks as building parliamentary democracy, handling nuclear disarmament, managing relations with Russia and settling Crimea’s status, all amid severe economic trouble.
The deal that made independence possible paired national-democratic forces with the old elites of the Ukrainian Soviet republic. It also slowed reform and let Soviet-era power networks survive.
Three revolutions
The students’ demands in 1990 were openly defiant: multiparty parliamentary elections ahead of schedule, nationalization of Communist Party property, service for Ukrainian conscripts only on Ukrainian soil, and the resignation of Prime Minister Vitaliy Masol. It was the first time in Soviet Ukraine that street pressure removed a sitting head of government.
The second revolution followed a presidential election widely seen as fraudulent in 2004. Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovych was declared the winner over Viktor Yushchenko, who had survived a dioxin poisoning during the campaign that left his face permanently disfigured. After the November 21 runoff, hundreds of thousands occupied central Kyiv in freezing weather for weeks, with a tent city running down Khreshchatyk. On December 3 the Supreme Court ruled the vote invalid. Yushchenko won the December 26 rerun with about 52 percent. The paper argues the precedent mattered more than the result: a court had overturned a stolen election under public pressure, and no troops fired on the crowds.
The third, the Revolution of Dignity, began when Yanukovych dropped an association agreement with the EU under pressure from Moscow. A first crowd gathered on the night of November 21, 2013, after journalist Mustafa Nayyem posted a call on Facebook. Numbers stayed modest until riot police beat student demonstrators on November 30. Hundreds of thousands then filled the square. Anti-protest laws that January pushed the standoff into street fighting, and from February 18 to 20 snipers and security forces killed scores of protesters, remembered as the Heavenly Hundred. Yanukovych fled on February 22 and later surfaced in Russia. Within days, Russian forces without insignia appeared in Crimea.
War and the meaning of sovereignty
The paper says Russia’s full-scale invasion shattered Moscow’s assumption that Ukraine was divided and weak enough to collapse. It cites the LSE Public Policy Review, which argues the invasion destroyed what remained of the myth of “fraternal” ties and made Ukrainian identity politically and culturally separate from Russia. Ukrainians still argue, sometimes fiercely, over how the war should be fought, how long martial law should last and how much power a wartime president should hold.
Culture has carried the story abroad. Films such as Sergei Loznitsa’s “Maidan,” Valentyn Vasyanovych’s “Atlantis” and Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol” reached international audiences, and “20 Days in Mariupol” won the 2024 Academy Award for best documentary feature.
