Navigation and useful materials
The 2014 events on Maidan are a revolution of a new type, when people fight for something that cannot be measured with money.
This was stated by historian Yaroslav Hrytsak during the discussion “How Has Maidan Changed Ukraine?” by the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security.
“When we talk about the Revolution of Dignity, we are dealing with an entirely new type of revolution. And this gives us great hope, because this revolution has not ended, it is permanent. And it also gives us hope that Ukrainian reforms will not stop,” he explained.
According to the historian, we are used to thinking about the French Revolution or the Russian one of 1917 as the template revolutions — but what happened on Maidan in 2014 was different.
“Obviously, these revolutions were accompanied by violence, sometimes on a level of terror. These events indeed started with a sharp impoverishment of the population, which actually was one of the drivers of those outbursts. We do not have all this in the case of new revolutions,” said the expert.
Yaroslav Hrytsak added that what makes the new revolutionary wave interesting is that it concerns not only third world countries with authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes, but everyone — from the West to the East and from the North to the South. And the people who are protesting are mostly young people who grew up in different conditions than their parents had.
“What does Euromaidan look like in this context? Like an event that fits perfectly into this scheme. On the other hand, it looks like an extraordinary event. Out of all these revolutions, Euromaidan is one of the few victorious revolutions, if not the only one,” the historian emphasized.