Civic participation is the involvement of individual constituents or communities in local, state, and national government. In short, it is the participation of people in government and democratic processes. Civic activities are essential to good local governance because democracy needs it to function successfully. Civic participation can include voting, volunteering, creating local communities and working at community gardens, civil disobedience, demonstrations and many other things.
Societal involvement can be life-saving, as it is in Ukraine now, since crucial processes like finding money and buying ammunition, equipment, and cars for the army (and volunteer army in particular), tactical medicine, humanitarian supplies etc. rely a lot on volunteers. However, it is not the first time when civic participation played a huge role in shaping Ukrainian society and Ukrainian history. Following the article about the concept of difficult history itself, let’s dive deeper into some parts of the difficult history of Ukraine and the role of civic participation in it.
Zaporozhian Sich
This was one of the first examples that crossed my mind when I was thinking about writing this article. Zaporozhian Sich was first mentioned in the sixteenth century in central Ukraine. It was an independent military-political formation with the democratically chosen leader, the Hetman or Otaman.
The system of the Zaporozhian Sich was democratic. It was based on the following principles: there was no serfdom, everyone could use the land for their own economic needs, all Cossacks had the same voting rights, and all decisions were made by the principle of common consent.
As Philip Orlyk, one of the Hetmans, said, “the Cossack people have always spoken out against autocracy.” There was no division on ethnic grounds. The formation of such a system was not artificial, but natural. Laws were formed as a necessity in the face of constant threat in the middle of the sixteenth century. They remained virtually unchanged until the liquidation of the Sich in 1775 by order of the Russian Queen Catherine II.
Cultural resistance during the colonisation of Ukraine by Russia at the end of XVIII – beginning of XX century
Throughout the history of Ukraine’s subordination to other states a whole galaxy of artists has gathered who took a proactive stance and were an important part of civic participation. If you walk around Kyiv, you can’t help but notice the monument to Taras Shevchenko, the Shevchenko University, the street, the boulevard, and the metro station named after him. Who is he, a famous Ukrainian poet? Of course, it’s true, but he also united the whole nation with his cultural resistance.
Taras Shevchenko was born on March 8, 1814, a serf (almost a slave working in his master’s field) from a small Ukrainian village. Thanks to hard work and a little thanks to a miracle he obtained an education and was redeemed from serfdom by influential friends who noticed his talent. In the time of Shevchenko, the Ukrainian lands that belonged to Russia had already become a colonial “suburb” of the empire. This applied to the economic, social and cultural spheres. With his poems, Taras Shevchenko challenged the colonisation of Ukraine and the imperial machine of Russia, covered the real situation of serfs, and talked a lot about the fate of women in society at that time. He is very famous, but not the only one who defended Ukrainian independence on the cultural front of that time, for instance, there were cultural activists in the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (the first Ukrainian secret political organization that emerged in Kyiv at the end of 1845 and was based on the traditions of the Ukrainian liberation and independence movement) and Executed Renaissance (a cultural and literary-artistic generation of intellectual elites of the 20s and 30s of the XX century in the Ukrainian SSR, which was destroyed mostly during the Stalin’s Great Terror). And it was Taras Shevchenko’s words that Ukrainians quoted during the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014:
Keep fighting – you are sure to win! God helps you in your fight! For fame and freedom march with you and the right is on your side!
Hetmanate of 1918
On April 29, 1918, as a result of a coup d’etat, the Ukrainian State or the Second Hetmanate was formed. With the capital in Kyiv, the country included almost the entire territory of modern Ukraine, as well as adjacent Ukrainian ethnic lands, which covered most of the modern Brest and Gomel regions of Belarus, Transnistria and some areas in northern Moldova, the biggest parts of the modern Bryansk, Belgorod and Voronezh and the southern part of the Kursk regions of the Russian Federation, as well as Kholm and part of Podlasie within modern Poland. Domestic policy was based on the Cossack traditions of statehood.
This Ukrainian state existed only until December 14, 1918, but we are interested now in something else. During this very brief time of Ukraine’s independence (Hetmanat) in 1918, every village used to have their own leaders – hetmans -, and they defended the territory in which they lived. Respectively, they were fed, clothed and supported by some analogue of an “army of volunteers” of the territory that they defended. There was even an archival document published calling on “volunteers” of that time to support the military formations of their land. I actually learned this from Olena when interviewing her for our Face-to-Face series (Read the interview here). This Hetmanat is related to Zaporozhian Sich in the sense of relying on its hey values, however, the word hetman stands for the former highest governmental political position in Ukraine, which was the equivalent of the head of state.
Created by Margriet Osing (taken from CreativesforUkraine)
Holodomor in 1920-1933
Another thing that comes to mind is Holodomor, a period of big famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933. With the increasing pressure of collectivisation plans on the peasants and the growing hunger, the peasant resistance movement intensified. From February 20 to April 2 of 1930, about 1,716 mass demonstrations took place in Ukraine. 15 of them were described as “broad armed uprisings against Soviet rule.” They united up to two thousand people and took place under the slogans: “Give us back Petliura!” (one of the Ukrainian political leaders), “Give us another state!”, “Long live independent Ukraine!”, “Down with the USSR!”, “Let’s win another freedom, away from the collectivisation!” ». In those days, people organised as best they could, armed with pitchforks, shovels, axes, and even cavalry. Crowds of peasants chanting the song that is now the official anthem of Ukraine liquidated local collective authorities. Party members and Komsomol members fled.
After this period of Stalinistic repression and Executed Renaissance, Ukraine has had a long and tumultuous way to independence including the Second World War, the Orange Revolution (year), the Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity of 2013/14, the beginning of war in 2014 and now the full-scale invasion from February 24, 2022. At each of these events, citizens played a huge role by being proactive and united with one common goal, and maybe sometime I will write the continuation of this article about it. But most importantly throughout its history, the brave Ukrainian nation has taught all of us a very important lesson: people have the power to change the world they live in.
Written by Anna Proskurina.
Translated into Ukrainian by Anna Proskurina and into German by Nele Koenig.
Used Material:
- Holodomor Museum – History of Holodomor
- Interview with Olena Herasymyuk, conducted by Anna Proskurina from Ukrainian Vibes – Eu Public Sphere
- Zaporozhian Sich – Wikipedia
- Zaporozhian Sich, an article from myukraine (December 2016)
- Ukrainian Institute of National Memory – Hetmanat of Pavlo Skoropadsky
- Anti-imperial Taras Shevchenko – Radio Svoboda
