The escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022 surprised the whole world, but perhaps the Ukrainians themselves were the least surprised. The experience of the last two decades has taught them to be flexible in responding to changing circumstances and to smoothly develop competences that are typically – that is, in times of peace – reserved for the state. Civic organizations and their activists joined the massive popular support in the defensive effort and the distribution of social services. In this country, 5% of people declare that they have volunteered and been socially involved in helping the armed forces, refugees, and people in need on a full-time basis; 35% declare that they have done so part-time as a side job.1 At the same time, the largest collection of material resources and money in the history of post-war Europe is taking place. The account of the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the National Bank of Ukraine alone received more than $600 million in the first year after the escalation. Sociologists are surprised by the efficiency of Ukrainian society and the ability of Ukrainians to put public interest above private interest, which, after all, is not the rule in capitalism. It is therefore worth asking where Ukrainian society’s adaptive skills come from.
I
From the European perspective, for two decades Ukraine has been seen as a country where civil society intermittently takes matters into its own hands. In 2004, several hundred thousand people came to Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) in defence of the fraudulent presidential elections, and that was just on the first evening of the protests. The inhabitants of Kyiv who lived nearby spontaneously brought tea and warm clothes to the protesters. Over the next few days, several hundred tents were pitched on the city’s main street, Khreshchatyk, in which several thousand people camped day and night. The protests were a show of solidarity with the opposition, but they were also a display of grassroots organization skills. During the several weeks of the protests, not a single window was broken, not a single shop was plundered. The Orange Revolution was the first mass uprising seeking to break the existing social contract in Ukraine. It was admirable also because it was bloodless. As Marcin Wojciechowski writes in his book Pomarańczowy Majdan (The Orange Maidan), “the Maidan became the highest – albeit informal – organ of the government, a power-wielding body in Ukraine, and from that moment on it was the power that every authority had to reckon with”.2
Unfortunately, the peaceful transition of power could not be repeated a decade later during the Revolution of Dignity. The events of February 2014 resulted in hundreds of casualties. However, before the Berkut troops stormed the Maidan, the Ukrainians again gave a perfect performance of self-organization. Kyiv’s Euromaidan had medical points, field kitchens, toilets, a press centre and even an improvised library. Despite the interruption in the provision of municipal services, garbage was systematically removed. The rhythm of the day was determined by the Ukrainian anthem, played by a trumpeter who remains anonymous to this day. Also, during the fighting there were paramedical units taking care of the wounded on an on-going basis. Despite the chaos, the protesters tried to prevent damage to property: while the statue of Lenin was toppled in the city centre, the monument to the legendary coach of the capital city’s football team, Valery Lobanovskyi, was carefully wrapped in blankets near the Dynamo Kyiv stadium.3
II
Last year’s escalation of war found Ukrainians in a process of social and national consolidation that had been on-going since the end of the Revolution of Dignity. During these eight years, the Ukrainians managed to build what Edwin Bendyk calls a “horizontal network state”, namely a well-connected civil society that is an active participant in public and political debate. The foundations for this structure were laid by the decentralization of the state, completed in 2020 with local elections. In the first days of the war, self-governing municipalities and their inhabitants not only organized supplies but also built self-defence structures, and in the occupied territories they were the cornerstone of social resistance. Ukrainian sociologist Yevhen Holovakha further argues that the full-scale Russian aggression nullified the pre-existing social tensions related to the linguistic and territorial division of the country. Indeed, today the inhabitants of western and eastern Ukraine see each other more plainly than ever before.
Mariia Varlygina, a curator from Kharkiv, says that most of her friends who decided to leave the city ended up in Lviv. In March 2022, she also boarded a train going to Kyiv, but it went only as far as Lviv. It is estimated that about 30% of Ukrainians have had to leave their homes because of the war. The mass relocation of the population from the eastern districts to safer regions in the centre and west of the country has resulted in a rapid cultural and linguistic consolidation. More has happened in this regard within the last year than in the over thirty years of independence. Ukrainians began to see themselves as a political nation, having their own agency and capable of creating history.
Ukrainians coming from other regions of the country to Lviv, despite their difficult financial situation, quickly joined in social work to support other refugees. After arriving in Lviv, Anastasiia Leliuk, a visual artist from Luhansk, slept on the floor of a flower shop for several days. “Never before have I seen such crowds in Lviv”, she recalls. “My friends and I immediately got involved in volunteering: cooking, sewing camouflage nets, or sorting humanitarian aid from Poland “.4Kharkiv artist Vladyslav Yudin was regularly on duty at the railway station, where he helped the arriving people find their bearings in the new linguistic and topographical reality.
III
According to the information provided by the press office of the mayor of Kyiv, by mid-March 2022 more than half of the capital’s inhabitants had left temporarily. At the same time, Dnipro received about 320,000 people from the east of the country. A total of about 6.5 million people in Ukraine moved westwards. Some internally displaced people have returned to their homes over time, but others simply have nowhere to go back to. This is best seen on the example of Bakhmut, which had 70,000 residents before the war, and today no more than 10% of its inhabitants remain. Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk military administration, estimates that more than 60% of buildings in the city have been either turned to rubble or rendered uninhabitable. In Mariupol, this might be as much as 90% of the buildings. In this situation, the problem of permanent accommodation for refugees is urgent.
In March 2022, the non-governmental organization MetaLab, which is based in Ivano-Frankivsk, launched the Co-Haty pilot project, which consisted in adapting an uninhabited student dormitory to new functions. In just 6 weeks, 24 apartments, 4 kitchens, a children’s playroom, a laundry room, and a co-working space were set up, covering over 2,000 square meters. Over 150 volunteers took part in this work, most of whom were internally displaced persons themselves from various regions of Ukraine. 170 new residents moved into the building in May 2022. Since then, MetaLab has adapted three more buildings with a total capacity of 650 people.5
Parallel to these bottom-up ad hoc actions, there is a discussion about systemic solutions for rebuilding the country. One participant of this debate is the Kharkiv architect Oleh Drozdov, who moved to Lviv together with the Kharkiv School of Architecture, which he runs. Drozdov calls for the inclusion of society in the processes of planning and rebuilding the country on the largest possible scale: entire housing estates, districts, or even cities. It is estimated that the reconstruction process may cost up to USD 750 billion, so it is hardly surprising that developers are also salivating over this money. Fortunately, the authorities also see the historic opportunity that Ukraine is facing today. President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks openly about it: “We can change the conditions of our lives, introduce high-quality city planning where there was none before”.6
Drozdov draws attention to the threat of intellectual colonization associated with reconstruction. This is how Norman Foster’s studio’s declaration of involvement in the reconstruction of Kharkiv was perceived in Ukraine. An architect from Luhansk, Petro Vladimirov, who lives in Poland, believes that post-colonial narratives should not be employed during the decolonization war with Russia.7 Meanwhile, this proposal from a well-known British architect is an excellent argument for municipal authorities not to ask people for their opinion and to settle the matter of reconstruction without consulting them. Drozdov stresses that as part of the reconstruction it is necessary to create generally accessible places that would maintain the existing social ties and build new ones.
IV
Two days before the escalation of the war, on February 22, 2022, the Enfant Terrible exhibition by Kharkiv artist Oleh Kalashnik opened at the Yermilov Centre for Contemporary Art in Kharkiv. Two days later, a group of Kharkiv artists with their families and pets were in a panic, looking for a place to hide from Russian bombs. Their choice fell on the Yermilov Centre due to the location of the gallery, which is in the basement of the constructivist building belonging to the Vasyl Karazin University of Kharkiv. For ten days, the artists lived in the exhibition space, transforming it into their temporary home. One of Kalashnik’s works became a sandbox for the group’s children, while a projector which was part of another work was used for evening film screenings. It is ironic that the works presented at the exhibition dealt mostly with military and war themes. In the photos documenting the artists’ stay in the gallery, children can be seen playing among Kalashnik sculptures depicting Soviet soldiers. On the anniversary of these events, the material recorded in the gallery was shown as a full-fledged art project entitled How are you doing.
While Kharkiv’s artists were testing a new form of relationship between an art institution and the artistic community, the rest of the city’s residents took refuge in metro stations. Underground railway systems in all countries of the former Soviet Union were specifically designed in such a way that they might be easily converted into shelters in the case of war. This idea was developed in literature two decades ago by the Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky – incidentally, a firm critic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the turn of March 2022, life in the subway – on the platforms and in the carriages – became fact, not fiction. Kharkivites put cots, stools, and other everyday items into the stationary trains. This “domestication” of the metro was accompanied by attempts to give the space an individual, almost intimate character, so it was decorated with fresh flowers, or pictures were glued to the walls. Paradoxically, as many people report, life in the subway was not so different from life in a communal block, where you also have to make neighbourly compromises.
About 1,500 children found shelter among the crowds of adults at the twenty-nine stations of the Kharkiv metro. With the financial support of UNICEF, Ukrainian volunteers created special zones for them to play and learn: playgrounds and common rooms with art materials, where lessons and physical activities with teachers and psychologists were held. In one of these zones, even a theatre play was rehearsed and staged. Art exhibitions were organized regularly. As a result of the counter-offensive and the pushing of the Russian troops to the border of the oblast, the Kharkiv metro resumed its operation at the end of May. This meant that people who had spent almost three months there now had to leave the station. Many people had nowhere to go back to or were simply afraid to leave the tunnels. Some of them received temporary accommodation in a sanatorium hospital on the outskirts of the city.
According to the deputy mayor of Kharkiv, Svitlana Gorbunova-Ruban, around 5,000 people found shelter from Russian shelling in the Kharkiv metro in spring. As recently as December, fifty-three people who refused to leave the underground were permanently accommodated at the Heroiv Pratsi (Heroes of Labour) station. During the Christmas period, the city authorities decided to move the Christmas tree and the annual Christmas village, both of which are usually on the main square of the city, to the University station so as not to expose visiting residents to shelling. An additional reason was to save electricity. A letterbox was placed next to the Christmas tree, where children could write requests for gifts (and often also pleas for peace in Ukraine) addressed to Ded Moroz (“Grandfather Frost”, or Saint Nicholas). The press conference of President Volodymyr Zelensky, organized in April at the Independence Square metro station in Kyiv, also went down in history.
V
We know from research conducted by Ukrainian social scientists that trust in public institutions before the escalation of the war was very low. In 2019, Zelensky won 73% of the votes in the second round of the presidential election, but a year later the level of trust in him had decreased to only 31.3%. Today, support for the president is around 91%, and only 6% of the population have a negative opinion of him.8 Citizens’ rate of linking their personal identity to political entities also skyrocketed: identifying with the state increased from 33% in 2020 to 69% in 2022; identifying with the region increased from 31% to 60%, and identifying with the city increased from 49% to 75%. At the same time, trust in social organizations (pro-bono), women’s rights organizations, pro-environmental organizations, and volunteers also increased. Trust in charity or pro-bono organizations increased from less than 50% in 2020 to 77.6% in 2022, in women’s organizations from 34.8% to 59.5%, and in pro-environmental organizations from 45.1% to 54.1%. In other words, the character of social consolidation is civic, not populist. The war has also increased the appreciation of democracy as the best form of political system, and this appreciation is the highest among Ukrainians under the age of thirty (72%)9.
As recently as February 2022, many citizens felt that they were on their own. Information chaos prevailed, fuelled by Russian propaganda. There was no consensus among the inhabitants of the eastern districts as to whether to flee, and if so, to where. Anastasiia Leliuk, whom the escalation of the war found on a train from Lviv to Kyiv – that is, in the opposite direction to most other people – says that she felt better prepared for this situation than others. “My friends didn’t really know how to behave. It was the second time for me. I was seventeen when Russia set my house on fire. At that time, I literally left Luhansk on the last train”, she says. The flight from Donbas in mid-2014 was a formative experience for Anastasia. Her war route led from Luhansk, through Dnipro, to Kyiv, where she had already packed her suitcase and prepared the necessary documents to be able to move on at any time.
VI
In response to the mass emigration of Ukrainians to the countries of the European Union, spontaneous chains of humanitarian aid sprang up, created, among others, in Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. In the absence of systemic solutions, volunteers formed micro-task groups, which turned out to be surprisingly effective. I know this first hand because I myself co-created a group that organized transport and temporary homes for refugees in the first month of the migration crisis. Over time, some of these grassroots initiatives have grown to impressive proportions. A good example is Kraków’s Soup for Ukraine, a spontaneous action, initiated by Katarzyna Pilitowska at the railway station, which turned into a long-term program to feed refugees. At its peak, the volunteers of Soup for Ukraine served up to a thousand meals a day.
According to data published at the end of October 2022 by the Central Statistical Office, seven out of ten Polish households provided assistance to Ukrainians in the first four months after the escalation of the war. At the same time, non-governmental organizations in cooperation with entrepreneurs launched language courses, vocational training courses, and private brick-and-mortar Ukrainian schools in the largest Polish cities. We turned out to be as efficient as the Ukrainians themselves in organizing the lives of refugees and replacing the state in this respect. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians themselves have developed a specific war-life balance. During my January visit to Lviv, I had the impression that life in the city continued pretty much as usual – quite “normally”. It was still interrupted by increasingly rare bomb alerts; it was hooked up to power generators standing on the sidewalks in front of every shop. This “new normal” is an attempt to sustain life in a biological as well as a cultural dimension. Taras Voznyak, director of the Lviv Art Gallery, says: “working theatres, libraries, cinemas and concert halls are as important an element of resistance as military action”.10 Civic society turned out to be an extremely important component of the Ukrainian struggle for independence and agency. Drozdov calls it a “temporary civic society” and fears its rapid disappearance, but for now it is the basis of the survival of the state.
