Yesterday’s night at the Maidan revealed one simple thing: people who rose up against the ruling power over the course of last twenty-two years had learned to live and survive without the state. Actually, these people need not that much from the state—security, a taxation that is just, understandable rules of the game, rule of law, and—it goes without saying—liberty. They do not need state power. They can do very well without it. They feel better without any ruling power than with a ruling power that cannot provide an atmosphere in which they can actually do everything themselves.
But the ruling power that threatens them, levies unjust taxes, plays without rules, that has destroyed the judiciary system and encroaches against any and all liberties, can only provoke derision and anger in such people. Indeed, the ease with which this ruling power was de-sacralized, as shown by the example of the Kyiv City Hall, evidences the serious intentions of their protests persevering until the end. This slap in the face of Byzantinism and the power vertical, in the face of the fat cat “fathers” who had offered these people gangster-style paternalism that works well for the budget bureaucrats, the lumpenproletariat, and the siloviki, but not with these people. We do not need your handouts, the scraps and bones from your dinner tables. Each one among these people has left his or her place where he or she had learned to live and survive; now they invest on their own their money, time, nerves, energy, and passion into their freedom. They can do everything on their own.
There, at the Maidan, is where the Ukrainian society now lives, at an unseen before level of self-organization and solidarity, a society that is, on the one hand, extremely diverse and atomized—in terms of ideology, language, culture, religion, and class—yet on the other, it is united in the most elementary things: we do not need your sanctions; we are not going to ask you for anything, we are not afraid of you; we will set out and do everything on our own. The Maidan is our model. We breathe the smoke of freedom, which we have sanctioned ourselves. Only those politicians (present-day or potential) who come to understand that one needs to base things on these simple principles of life organization when building a new country and take this mood into account will have a future.
Unintentionally, a community of individualists is shaping up in this somehow macabre yet wondrous anarcho-liberal-nationalist atmosphere, of individualists who, I repeat, need not that much. They need liberty. And each of them puts something personal into the slogan “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!”
The Maidan today is a laboratory of social accord. Here one finds the main thing that the broad spectrum of Ukrainian society had lacked for years. Accord. We do not need a Father. We do not need a Leader. We need Freedom. Without freedom there will be neither reforms nor modernization here.
The Ukrainians pitch tents and erect barricades against the Berkut in order not to dig trenches. This is also their free will. This is what civilizational choice really is. This is what Ukraine’s European face really is. It is a union of an IT guy from Dnipropetrovsk and a Hutsul shepherd, a mathematician from Odessa and a businessman from Kyiv, a translator from Lviv and a Crimean Tatar farmer. A union of the self-sufficient.
