Ten years ago, on Dec. 6 and 8, 2013, tens of thousands of workers and other Ukrainians from all over the country rallied in Kyiv, the country’s capital, joining the battle to oust the pro-Moscow government of Viktor Yanukovych. The powerful mobilizations came in response to bloody riot police assaults on student demonstrators a week earlier, setting off two months of mass mobilizations and battles in the streets.
By early 2014 that became hundreds of thousands of working people across Ukraine as the fight deepened. Tents and barricades sprang up near the Trade Union House building in Kyiv’s Independence Square, giving the “Revolution of Dignity” its popular name, the Maidan.
Behind the depth of these mobilizations lay the national aspirations of the Ukrainian people, who — with the exception of the early years of the Russian Revolution under V.I. Lenin when the Ukrainian language and culture flourished — have chafed under, and resisted, centuries of Russian domination. This stretched from the czars’ “prison house of nations” to the counterrevolutionary Stalin years to Vladimir Putin’s war today....
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