The following article by Marci Shore, associate professor of history and a member of the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center, appeared in the October 26, 2017 issue of Foreign Policy. Shore is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.
On Dec. 1, 2013, at least half a million people gathered on the Maidan, the large public square in the center of Kiev. They came to express their outrage at Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who the day before had sent Berkut, his riot police, to bludgeon the students protesting his sudden refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union. For these young people, Yanukovych’s decision foreclosed the European future they had imagined for themselves. For the hundreds of thousands who joined them on the streets after they were beaten, Yanukovych’s violence against Ukrainian citizens broke an implicit social contract.
Among those who came to the Maidan that December day was 24-year-old Pawel Pieniazek, a journalist from neighboring Poland, who had studied Ukrainian at Warsaw University. The demonstrators were hurling bottles, flares, and cobblestones newly dug up from the pavement; the militia was using gas. Pieniazek bent down and tried to cover his face with a scarf. He saw people running, and he got up and turned around: On one side of him was a kiosk, on the other Berkut. He took out his press accreditation and shouted that he was a journalist.