The Economist April 16th 2022 17
BriefingThe war in UkraineA
llmainroadsinKyivleadtoMaidan,
theopenspaceattheheartofthecity—
evenif,atthemoment,someofthemare
blocked by concrete barriers and tank
traps. The central space is, most of the
time, a busy urban miscellany. The metro
station and a labyrinthine shopping centre
wrestle for space below ground; the Stalin
ist buildings on the perimeter boast fran
chises like McDonald’s and oneoffs like
the jellyfish museum. And sometimes it is
the heart of the nation.
It has had many names over the years:
Dumskaya Ploshchad (Parliament Square),
Sovetskaya Ploshchad (Soviet Square),
Ploshchad Kalinina (Kalinin Square).
When student protests demanding inde
pendencewere first held there in 1990 it
was stillPloshchad Oktyabrskoi Revolutsyi
(October Revolution Square). It was only
the year after,in the postSoviet age, that it
took its current name. No longer a Russian
ploshchad, or a Ukrainian ploscha, it be
came a maidan—a Persian term introduced
by way of the Tatars of Crimea which en
riches the architectural notion of a square
with the connotations of a communal
meetingplace.Specifically,itbecameMai
danNezalezhnosti:IndependenceSquare.
ButnobodyinUkrainebotherswiththe
qualifier. Since becoming the focal site of
the Orange revolution, in 2004, and the
revolution of dignity, in 2014, Maidan has
not needed it. In the winter of 201314 it be
came a city within the city as diverse as the
country itself, a place where tens of thou
sands of people cooked together on open
fires, lived in tents, built barricades, pried
loose cobblestones and died when fired on
from the surrounding buildings. Today the
name Maidan stands for independence in
and of itself.
The identification of independence
with a place for coming together gets to the
heart of something very Ukrainian. Being
Ukrainian is not rooted in a particular ter
ritorial claim, or a certain ethnic back
ground, or an allegiance to a particular
state and its institutions, or the professionofa givenfaith.Itisinsteadabout an abil
itytocometogetherwhenyou feel that you
needtoandtogetthingsdone. It is a way of
dependingoneachother,rather than on
institutionsorhierarchies,whether over
coldnightsofwinterprotest or when pelt
ingtankswithMolotovcocktails.
WhenRomanRomaniuk, a journalist
forUkrainskaPravda, declared that “This
waragainstPutinisourfinal Maidan,” he
wassayingthat,aftertwoprevious Mai
dansagainstMrPutin’splaceman, Viktor
Yanukovych,a battleagainst Mr Putin him
self provided a fitting bosslevel conclu
sion to the country’s struggle for sover
eignty and democracy. But he was also say
ing that the selforganising spirit of those
revolutions is animating Ukraine’s de
fence of itself. It goes a long way to explain
ing why a country which, when invaded,
was widely expected to fold like a cheap
suit has instead fought the aggressors to a
temporary standstill.
Ukraine’s gift for rising to challenges in
its own way is not without downsides. On
neither of the occasions when the people
got rid of Mr Yanukovych did they put in
place the sort of reform needed to curb the
politically powerful oligarchs and perva
sively corrupt bureaucracy that made such
rulers possible. Coming together only
when needs must means letting a lot of
other things slide with the oft repeated
phrase to sia zrobyt: “it will have to sort it
self out”. A flare for selforganisation may,
remarkably, allow Ukraine to survive the
Russian invasion in something like its curK YIVANDLONDON
TheUkrainiannationisbasednotonborders,institutionsorethnicity,buton
bottom-upself-reliance
A countrythatcomestogether
→Alsointhissection
20 The cost of rebuilding