The Maidan brought four forms of politics:
- the civil society,
- the economy of gift,
- the voluntary welfare state,
- and the Maidan friendship.
Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States.
Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. “Ethnic Ukrainians” must be a group that acts in one way, and “ethnic Russians” in another. This is about as true as to say that “ethnic Americans” vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future. In Ukraine, language is a spectrum rather than a line. Or, if it is a line, it is one that runs inside of people rather than between them. Ukrainian citizens on the Maidan spoke as they did in everyday life, using Ukrainian and Russian as it suited them.
The revolution was begun by a journalist who used Russian to tell people where to put the camera, and Ukrainian when he spoke in front of it. His famous Facebook post (“Likes don’t count”) was in Russian. On the Maidan, the question of who spoke what language was irrelevant. As the protestor Ivan Surenko remembered, writing in Russian: “The Maidan crowd is tolerant on the language question. I never heard any discussions about the matter.”
— The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder), Loc. 1813–24
Comment on Oct 23, 2026:
Well, since 2022 this started to be a thing, I believe. Speaking Russian started being a sign of a very low intellect. Plus, being on the agressor side. It’s a thing with a huge number of various manipulations now, and pro-Russian forces (in other words: Russian agents) manipulate this thing, as they did back then when the author had been writing the book. It’s not an issue in general, people still tolerate Russian-speakers, but in my view, that’s actually the issue now. The less the Ukrainians are tolerant to the language of the aggressor, the better for Ukraine.
Timothy Snyder forgets one minute detail in all this: Russian was forced upon Ukrainians. They speak it not because of some wonderful reason, they were slaughtered— or rather genocided with hunger) or simply executed.
So, yes. Ukrainians are bilingual, but most of us (at least on the west of the country) aren’t happy about it. I’d prefer us to speak both Ukrainian and English, rather than Ukrainian and Russian.
Don’t people in once-occupied-by-the-British-Empire states speak both languages too? Their own, plus English. At least British Empire is very different now.