Uphill from the Maidan: centres of power in Kyiv’s symbolic geography

ABSTRACT

This paper explores long-term trends in Kyiv’s symbolic geography that ultimately led to the main battles of the Revolution of Dignity (2013–14), which occurred on two streets heading uphill from the Maidan into the government quarter: Hrushevskyi Street and Instytutska Street. The study delves into the historical development of the Pecherske and Lypky neighbourhoods as both real and symbolic centres of authority in modern Kyiv, demonstrating how the area between the city’s main avenue, Khreshchatyk, and Lypky became a significant space of interaction and conflict between the ruling authorities and society.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article explore les tendances à long terme de la géographie symbolique de Kyïv, qui ont constitué le cadre des principales batailles de la Révolution de la Dignité (2013–14), soit deux rues montant du Maïdan vers le quartier gouvernemental : la rue Hrouchevski et la rue Instytoutska. L’étude se penche sur l’évolution historique des quartiers Petchersk et Lypky en tant que centres d’autorité réels et symboliques dans la Kyïv moderne, démontrant comment la zone située entre l’avenue principale de la ville, Krechtchatyk, et Lypky est devenue un espace important d’interaction et de conflit entre les autorités dirigeantes et la société.

KEYWORDS:

• Kyiv
• Maidan
• Revolution of Dignity
• spatial history
• symbolic geography

Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity (2013–14) is most commonly associated with a specific location in Kyiv: the city’s central plaza, Independence Square, known as Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Ukrainian, or simply “the Maidan” (the Square). During the winter of 2013–14, protesters took to the Maidan to voice their opposition to President Viktor Ianukovych’s (Yanukovych’s) pro-Russian and authoritarian policies. The demonstrators continuously occupied the Maidan, and whenever the authorities attempted to disperse the protesters and clear the square, the response was overwhelming. Tens of thousands, at times up to a million of their supporters rallied at the Maidan to protect it as a space of freedom.¹

Yet most civilian casualties during the revolution were sustained, not on the Maidan itself, but on the two streets leading uphill (southeast) from the city centre. One of them, Instytutska Street, begins at the northeastern corner of the Maidan. The other, Hrushevskyi Street, runs parallel to it but begins from European Square, which is only 300 meters northeast of the Maidan. The question of why the bloodiest – and most decisive – battles of the revolution were fought on these two streets is deceptively simple. The obvious answer would be that the riot police were up there on the hill and the protesters were down below on the Maidan. The protesters tried to advance uphill, and the police repeatedly came downhill trying to dislodge them. A more complex question would be how and why the uphill neighbourhood of Lypky, which is part of the Pecherske District, became both a real and symbolic location of power in modern Kyiv, and how society’s fight for freedom involved the transformation of Kyiv’s symbolic landscape “from below.”

Answering this question requires the methodological instruments of spatial history, which studies the complex interactions among landscape, built environment, and social processes.² Kyiv, with its difficult terrain, presents a particularly interesting case study of how a historical interplay of landscape and human agency produced a type of modern urban development attuned to geographical challenges. As this article will show, because Kyiv became a contiguous modern city relatively late, the legacies of past accommodations between nature and the built environment persist in the city’s symbolic geography. Modern revolutionaries fought not just against their present-day adversaries; they also challenged the spatial orientation of power.

Historians of the medieval and early modern periods have studied the relationship between social and symbolic urban spaces since the 1980s; urban geographers embraced the semiotic analysis of urban landscapes at about the same time. Both fields subsequently undertook an analysis of how the urban built environment embodies power relations. In the twenty-first century, attention shifted to people’s mental images of cities and the performative aspect of social practices that establish and change the meaning of urban spaces.³

In recent years, the history of Kyiv in the nineteenth century and after 1991 has been examined in two excellent books attuned to the contemporary understanding of urban spatiality.⁴ Nevertheless, this article takes the innovative approach of tracing spatial power relations among the city’s neighbourhoods over a longer historical period, spanning several centuries. In so doing, it develops a longue durée view of Kyiv’s socio-spatial relations. This article posits that answering the question of why, in January and February of 2014, the revolutionaries fought and died on Hrushevskyi and Instytutska streets requires stepping into the past, reaching as far back as the late seventeenth century.

The road to Pecherske

When Kyiv became part of Muscovy – soon to reimagine itself as the Russian Empire – in 1654, and more definitively in 1686, it was essentially a frontier city. It stood right on the border with the unfriendly Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and a Crimean Tatar or Ottoman invasion from the south remained a very real possibility. Kyiv also remained essentially a medieval city consisting of three distinct towns: the Upper Town, Podil, and Pecherske. The first two were collectively called “Kyiv” but administered separately – the Upper Town by Russian governors and Podil by its elected magistrate. Pecherske was owned and governed by the Kyivan Cave Monastery (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Kyiv around 1700.

The Upper Town, from which the grand princes of Kyivan Rus′ once ruled, never quite recovered after the Mongol invasion of 1240 and the Tatar raid of 1482. Nevertheless, its location on a high hill and its artificial ramparts, which had already been built and periodically restored prior to 1667, made the Upper Town a logical seat for Russian administrators: first voivodes and then, beginning in the reign of Peter I, governors. The fortifications were significantly upgraded during the 1670s and 1680s, when the Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Hetman Ivan Samoilovych and under the guidance of two German engineers, restored them during a Russo-Ottoman war.⁵

Located by the Dnieper River just below the Upper Town was Podil (the “lower town”), then the most populous part of Kyiv and its economic centre, which since the late fifteenth century enjoyed self-government under Magdeburg Law. It, too, was encircled by ramparts, which were maintained in this case by the magistrate. In terms of distance, the Upper Town and Podil lay very close to each other, but getting from one to the other involved going up or down a steep hill via a road that corresponds closely to the present-day Andriivskyi Descent. It also involved leaving one fortress and entering the other through fortress gates.⁶

The third town, known as Pecherske (from pechery, meaning “caves”), stood three kilometres southeast of the first two, high above the Dnieper on the Pecherske plateau, separated from the Upper Town and Podil by a ravine and a forest. This town consisted of the Kyivan Cave Monastery, the most ancient hermitage in the land (and a very wealthy one) and the nearby settlement of its dependent artisans and peasants. The monastery, too, was protected by rudimentary ramparts and the remains of twelfth-century defensive walls; as was the case with the Upper Town, the ramparts were restored in 1679.⁷

Yet the three fortified towns remained physically separate. The 1695 map of Kyiv created by the Russian officer Colonel Ushakov shows no road from Podil to Pecherske. Indeed, as the nineteenth-century amateur historian Mykola Zakrevs′kyi confirms, before the eighteenth century a carriage travelling from Podil to Pecherske would first enter the Upper Town through its Kyiv Gates, cross it, then leave via the Pecherske Gates.⁸ (The ruins of these gates are now preserved beneath the Maidan, and their opulent, modern representation, with the crowning figure of the archangel Michael, the city’s patron saint, has stood on the Maidan since 2002.) In 1695 one could travel from there to Pecherske along the Ivanivskyi Trail, which had apparently existed since the days of Kyivan Rus′. As far as we can establish, present-day Instytutska Street largely follows the blueprint of this ancient thoroughfare. The trail turned east near what is now Kriposnyi Lane and from there followed along today’s Hrushevskyi Street and beyond, toward the Cave Monastery.⁹ The forested parts of the route had a reputation for robbery; few travellers risked venturing there after sunset (Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2. Historical parts of present-day Kyiv.

Figure 3. The present-day Maidan and Lypky.

This situation lasted only for as long as Pecherske was not crucial to the defence and administration of Kyiv, understood as the agglomeration of the Upper Town and Podil. As a separate settlement under the authority of the Cave Monastery’s abbot, it was relatively self-sufficient. Although the city’s main port was located in Podil, Pecherske had its own steep road down to the Dnieper, where the ferries from the river’s east bank arrived and small ships could moor.

The initiative in creating a major fortress in Pecherske is often attributed to two Russian tsars, Peter I and Nicholas I. However, its story is more complex. While Hetman Ivan Samoilovych may have been following orders from Moscow, his successor, Hetman Ivan Mazepa (in office 1687–1708/09), appears to have been a more independent city planner. Scholars have suggested that Mazepa neglected the formal capital of the Hetmanate, Baturyn, investing instead in Kyiv as Ukraine’s cultural and political centre.¹⁰

With Kyiv consisting of three distinct townships, there was limited political space in the city for the Hetman’s administration. The Podil burghers fiercely guarded their autonomy, leading to frequent clashes with the Cossacks. In the Upper Town, where some Hetman offices and warehouses were located, power truly belonged to the Russian governors. It was in Pecherske where Mazepa saw an opportunity, partly because the abbots of the Cave Monastery refused to take responsibility for the upkeep of the expansive ramparts built in 1679. Even before becoming hetman in 1687, Mazepa had had a personal connection to Pecherske’s monastic community: in 1683 his mother began serving as the abbess of the Ascension Monastery, which stood in front of the main entrance to the Cave Monastery. The latter also had multiple connections to Mazepa’s circle and the Cossack elites. The abbot of the Cave Monastery since 1690, Archimandrite Meletii (Mykhailo Vuiakhevych-Vysochyns′kyi), had previously served under Mazepa as Judge General of the Hetmanate. His predecessor as abbot, Varlaam Iasyns′kyi, who went on to become the Metropolitan of Kyiv, had been Mazepa’s friend and an important political ally.¹¹

Following a successful fiscal reform, the administration of the Hetmanate was flush with money and Mazepa generously invested in prestigious construction projects in Kyiv.¹² Present-day Ukrainian historians sometimes mistakenly claim that Mazepa was spending his own money, but contemporaries probably did not make such a distinction either.¹³ Regardless, Mazepa came to the aid of the Cave Monastery, supporting the construction and reconstruction of churches, the outer walls of which he marked with his coat of arms. Between 1698 and 1702 he also allocated the enormous sum of one million gold rubles to build a tall, brick-and-stone defensive wall around the upper part of the monastery. (The caves, with their holy relics, were in the lower part, on the slope toward the Dnieper, and the walls in that section of the monastery date from the 1850s.) The wall, with an average height of seven meters, ranged in width from three meters at the foundation to one meter at the top. One of the four wall towers is still named after Saint John Calybite because Mazepa had originally planned to build a chapel in the tower named after that recluse (his patron saint), but he did not start this project until his change of political allegiances in 1708. With the wall completed, the Cave Monastery was protected, both physically and politically, with the best fortifications in the land as well as the hetman’s favour. Mazepa also carried out an architectural charm offensive in the Old Town and Podil by funding the reconstruction of historic churches and a new building of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, but he did not build new fortifications there.¹⁴

However, Russian imperial authorities soon took notice of the transformations in Pecherske. In 1706 Peter I visited Kyiv amid concerns about defending this valuable borderland city during the Great Northern War, and he was particularly impressed by the formidable wall of the Cave Monastery. As a result, he ordered the construction of Kyiv’s new main fortress around the monastery. In collaboration with two foreign engineers, Peter personally chose a typical European design of that period for what is now known as the Old Kyiv Fortress. The fortress was planned as a nine-pointed star with nine bastions at the corners of its gigantic wood-and-earth walls, complete with ravelins and a glacis.¹⁵

Symbolically breaking ground in June 1706, the tsar entrusted completion of the work to the Russian governor. Ukrainian religious leaders protested in vain against the forced relocation of their monasteries’ dependent peasants and artisans, while Mazepa attempted to limit the use of his Cossacks as free labour on the construction site. However, their efforts were futile, as the new fortress enclosing the Cave Monastery and its environs became a Russian imperial project. In the aftermath of Mazepa’s “treasonous” switch of allegiance to Charles XII of Sweden in 1708, his coat of arms and all references to his name were erased.¹⁶

The construction of the new, modern fortress also led to a spatial re-allocation of power relations in Kyiv. Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, the energetic Russian governor in office from 1707 to 1718, supervised the fortress’s construction and moved his office and residence there in 1711, along with other imperial administrative institutions.¹⁷ This move resulted in the decline of the Upper Town’s political importance. It would take almost a century for this part of the city to be “rediscovered” by imaginative imperial travellers, who saw it as a location of ancient ruins symbolizing Kyiv’s past glory.

Moreover, this re-allocation required the building of a direct road from the economic heart of the city, Podil, to the new seat of authority in Pecherske. In 1715 Golitsyn initiated the construction of such a thoroughfare, which established the contours of present-day Hrushevskyi, Mazepa, and Lavrska streets. However, this road descended to Podil near the place where the column commemorating both the baptism of Rus′ and the restoration of Magdeburg Law would be built in 1802.¹⁸ (The present-day Volodymyrskyi Descent, connecting Khreshchatyk with Podil, is the result of a big engineering project implemented during the 1830s and 1840s.)

The construction of the Old Fortress in the early eighteenth century also altered the spatial dimensions of Pecherske, laying the groundwork for the eventual amalgamation, a century later, of the three historic towns into a modern city. Artisans and peasants resettled in areas west of the fortress, forming a settlement known as the Pecherske vorstadt (“suburb” in German). In the 1830s their descendants would be displaced again because of the construction of the New Fortress. However, during the intervening period, the presence of the vorstadt contributed to the development of Moskovska Street (now Princes Ostrozkyi Street) and Pecherska Square, which has remained an important trading centre ever since.¹⁹

Pecherske also expanded to the north along the new road to Podil. Whereas Mazepa had funded the construction of the beautiful, stone, late-Baroque Saint Nicholas Military Cathedral on this route, Golitsyn followed up by sponsoring the wooden Little Saint Nicholas church farther down the road in 1715.²⁰ As the construction of the New Fortress around Pecherske began in the 1830s, the latter church came to mark the extent of the territory to be protected by its forts and walls. Eighteenth-century visitors still mentioned the fields and wineries they could see on the way to the Cave Monastery, but Pecherske was no longer a distant suburb of Kyiv; its claim to be Kyiv was just as valid as those of the Upper Town and Podil.

The road from Pecherske to Podil, eventually named the Khreshchatytskyi Descent because it passed through the historic Khreshchatyk Ravine, served the increasing number of pilgrims travelling from the port in Podil to the Cave Monastery. This traffic generated business opportunities that contributed to subsequent urban growth along the road.²¹ The road construction also “opened up” Khreshchatyk Ravine between the Upper Town and Pecherske, and it would one day become the city’s main avenue. In more than one way, the creation of the city’s principal fortress in Pecherske gave Kyiv the push it needed to enter the modern era. However, it also established the foundations of Kyiv as a Russian imperial administrative centre, where there was no place for Mazepa’s legacy.

The ascent to Lypky

By the mid-eighteenth century, neither the Ottoman Empire nor Poland–Lithuania posed a serious threat to Kyiv. In 1744 Empress Elizabeth, accompanied by her future successors, Peter III and Catherine II, arrived in Kyiv on a pilgrimage. Elizabeth stayed at the abbot’s residence in the Cave Monastery but took the opportunity to select a location for an imperial palace in Kyiv. Despite its location outside the fortress, she approved the construction of what is now known as Mariinskyi Palace, which stands at the opposite end of Pecherske from the Cave Monastery – in the north, near the slope to Khreshchatyk. This location allowed for a large, formal garden that eventually developed into a park. The long story of the Palace Garden’s transformation into a public place and, eventually, a modern political space reveals a complex interplay between the authorities and society.²²

The construction of the palace on the eastern side of Khreshchatytskyi Descent (later Oleksandrivska Street; this section is now Hrushevskyi Street – see Table 1) in 1750–55 served as a powerful impetus for the area’s development. The rich and famous sought to move into the part of town across the street from the palace – into the neighbourhood that became known as Lypky after the beautiful linden trees growing there until Governor-General Count Vasilii Levashov ordered them to be cut down in the 1830s.²³ At some point in the late eighteenth century, the government offices also moved from the Old Fortress to the location opposite the palace’s southern entrance. (The palace’s façade faces north, but the more convenient southern entrance came to be used as the main access point.) The city’s political centre, complete with parade grounds just south of the palace, was now established in Lypky.

Table 1. Historical names of the main streets and squares discussed in this article.

Present-day Instytutska Street

Ivanivska St. (ca. 1800–20), Begichevska St. (1820–42), Instytutska St. (1842–1919), 25 October St. (1919–42), Berliner St. (1942–43), 25 October St. (1943–44), October Revolution St. (1944–93), Instytutska St. (since 1993)

Present-day Hrushevskyi Street

Part of Khreshchatytskyi Descent (before the 1810s), part of Oleksandrivskyi Descent (1810s–1869), part of Oleksandrivska St. (1869–1919), part of Revolution St. (1919–34), Kirov St. (1934–42), Dr. Todt St. (1942–43), Kirov St. (1943–91), Hrushevskyi St. (since 1991)

Present-day Bankova Street

Bankova St. (1870s–1919), Komunistychna St. (1919–35), Ordzhonikidze St. (1936–42), Bismarck St. (1942–43), Ordzhonikidze St. (1943–92), Bankova St. (since 1992)

Present-day Architect Horodetskyi Street

Mykolaivska St. (1895–1919), Karl Marx St. (1919–42), Mykolaivska St. (1942–43), Karl Marx St. (1943–96), Architect Horodetskyi St. (since 1996)

Present-day Khreshchatyk Avenue (formally Street)

Khreshchatyk St. (ca. 1830s–1923), Vorovskyi St. (1923–37), Khreshchatyk St. (1937–42), Eichhorn St. (1942–43), Khreshchatyk St. (since 1943)

The Maidan (formally Maidan Nezalezhnosti, “Independence Square”)

Khreshchatytska Sq. (before 1876), Dumska Sq. (1876–1919), Radianska (Soviet) Sq. (1919–35), Kalinin Sq. (1935–77), October Revolution Sq. (1977–91), Independence Sq. (since 1991)

The governor’s palace in the Old Fortress was built at approximately the same time, around 1750, but the governors found it inconvenient to reside at such a distance from the royal palace and government offices. Even though members of the imperial family rarely stayed at Mariinskyi Palace, usually only on trips south, as Catherine II did for three months in 1787, the symbolic centre of authority was now there. The late eighteenth century marked a moment of transition, with some governors living at the palace in the fortress and others inhabiting Mariinskyi Palace. The former fell into disrepair by the turn of the century, whereas the latter’s upper, wooden floor was prone to fires.²⁴

When Alexander I visited Kyiv in 1816, the long road from the Old Fortress to Podil was renamed Alexander’s Descent in his honour (Oleksandrivskyi Descent, later Oleksandrivska Street). However, the tsar did not stay in the decaying royal palace, which served as the residence of Kyiv’s top-ranking general, Nikolai Raevskii, commander of the 4th Army Corps. Instead, the Russian ruler stayed in one of the elegant mansions in Lypky.²⁵ After the palace burned down in 1819, Raevskii, who acted as de facto military governor when this position remained unfilled for more than a decade after 1812, moved across the street to Lypky. He first lived in what is present-day Kriposnyi Lane, then, from 1821 to 1825, in a two-storey house owned by Colonel Andrei Ivanov, the former commandant of the Old Fortress.²⁶ Subsequent governors-general continued to use this building as their residence; on 23 November 1833 the state treasury purchased it from Ivanov.²⁷

The location of Ivanov’s house is of crucial importance for this article because it stood on the corner of present-day Instytutska and Shovkovychna streets. Just one block west of Mariinskyi Palace, the subsequent buildings on this site would serve as the governor-general’s residence, the seat of government under the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917–18 and 1919), and a royal palace under Hetman Pavlo Skoropads′kyi (1918). The retreating Polish army dynamited the building in 1920, but in the 1930s Soviet authorities constructed an apartment block there for the political leadership (today 20/8 Instytutska Street). Thus, when the head of Soviet Ukraine’s government, Dem’ian Korotchenko, moved into the building in 1938, he found himself in the same geographical location that for a century had housed the Russian governors of Kyiv and, later, the tsarist governors-general of Kyiv, Podillia, and Volyn. The party boss of Soviet Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, lived in a small mansion next door at 14 Shovkovychna Street between 1938 and 1941. Soviet planners even preserved a small park at the rear of the governor-general’s palace, accessible from both buildings, for the benefit of new dignitaries. This spatial continuity demonstrates how the historical engagement with the city’s topography created enduring structures invested with power and authority. The revolutionaries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would challenge these spatial embodiments of power by creating alternative loci of authority that they would then use to take over the traditional power grid.

The extension of political power into Lypky endowed with great significance the streets connecting this neighbourhood with the new economic centre that began forming in Khreshchatyk in the early nineteenth century. Whereas in 1715 the road from Podil to Pecherske established the general location of Russian imperial power in the distant southern part of Kyiv, Raevskii’s move to Lypky a century later identified political authority with polite society’s preferred location in the vicinity of Mariinskyi Palace. The aristocratic neighbourhood of Lypky developed simultaneously – and in competition – with the new business and professional elites that were gradually establishing themselves down below and just northwest of Lypky – on and around Khreshchatyk Avenue.

Yet before this tension became pronounced in the late nineteenth century, Kyiv underwent another forceful reshaping at the hands of imperial authorities. As Serhiy Bilenky has shown, in the early nineteenth century Kyiv’s native business elites, entrenched in Podil, where they cherished their “ancient rights” under Magdeburg Law, still had some influence over the decisions made by imperial administrators regarding the city’s development.²⁸ However, in the 1830s Emperor Nicholas I took it upon himself to transform Kyiv into a stronghold of Russian power in the empire’s troublesome “Southwestern Region.” No longer a frontier city on the Polish border, the partitions of Poland–Lithuania in the late eighteenth century turned Kyiv into the natural capital of Right-Bank Ukraine, with its restive Polish nobility and oppressed Ukrainian peasantry. The tsar’s response to this challenge included the construction of a massive new fortress in Pecherske, a university to promote Russification, and an attempt to evoke the imagined spirit of Rus′ through the establishment of new churches and archaeological digs in the Upper Town.

The construction of the New Fortress in Pecherske between 1830 and 1851 led to the forced relocation of numerous Kyivites, many of whom settled in the Nova Budova (New Buildings) neighbourhood to the west.²⁹ Along with the construction of the university near the southwestern edge of the Upper Town, these new developments helped join the city together west of its historic core. However, the development of the area along the shortest and most direct route between the Upper Town and Lypky – through Khreshchatyk Ravine – is of greater importance for this article.

It is unclear exactly when during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century the ancient Ivanivskyi Trail ascending from Khreshchatyk to Lypky was widened and reshaped into Ivanivska Street. Since the 1780s, the land between Khreshchatyk Ravine and Lypky was owned by the Begichev family. General Matvei Begichev, who managed the Kyiv Arsenal in the 1780s, passed the estate to his son, General Dmitrii Begichev. In 1834 the younger Begichev donated the land to the newly established University of Kyiv. The educational authorities of the region used this plot of land to construct the large neoclassical building of the Institute of Noble Maidens (a boarding school for girls from aristocratic families) between 1838 and 1842. During this period Ivanivska Street was renamed Instytutska Street. It ran parallel to Oleksandrivska Street, but, instead of leading to the royal palace, it headed uphill toward the governor-general’s residence. The connotation of Instytutska as the route to the world of officialdom became reinforced when the Kyiv branch of the State Bank moved there in the 1840s, on the same side of the street as the Institute. The current, ornate building dates from 1905, but it stands right next to where its predecessor used to be (Figure 4).³⁰

Figure 4. The Maidan (then Khreshchatytska Square) in the 1850s. Instytutska Street and the Institute’s building are in the upper left corner. Lithograph. Author’s collection.

If the Institute stood between Oleksandrivska and Instytutska with its façade toward the latter, the slope on the other side of Instytutska remained largely undeveloped until the 1890s. In the early nineteenth century this area contained a park known as Gendarmerie Garden and several private estates. By the 1870s, the popular city doctor and savvy investor Friedrich Mering consolidated almost the entire area south of Instytutska into his hands, but he kept its countryside appearance. He maintained a large park that was open to the paying public and included a lake that was turned into a skating rink during winter. Meanwhile, Khreshchatyk Avenue down below became Kyiv’s commercial centre, and the value of land there skyrocketed. After Mering’s death in 1887, his son began looking for investors capable of developing the entire estate, and he finally sold the land in 1896 for the huge sum of 1.6 million rubles. During the next decade, this choice location in central Kyiv underwent a dramatic transformation. Fashionable streets were lined with elegant six-floor rental apartment buildings, housing the city’s professionals and artistic elites. The site of the former lake was now home to a major theatre, situated on a square named after the tsar. The street connecting this square with the Maidan was also named Mykolaivska (Nikolaevskaia in Russian; now Architect Horodetskyi St.), but this labelling was misleading. Mykolaivska Street symbolized not the empire, but the newly established pre-eminence of the city’s affluent residents. Along this street one could find the most luxurious hotel in the city, the Continental, and a large circus building, which became Kyiv’s premier entertainment venue. The crown jewel of this thriving commercial neighbourhood was the sumptuous 12-story high-rise building known as Ginzburg House, completed in 1912. It faced Mykolaivska Street, occupying the entire block between Mykolaivska and Instytutska streets.³¹

By the early twentieth century, two major streets led up from the Maidan toward Lypky. The dignified Instytutska provided the most direct route to the government quarter, while the splendid but short Mykolaivska Street ended at Mykolaivska Square, where the Solovtsov Theatre stood. From there, one could take the steep ascent to Instytutska via Olhinska Street or even steeper narrow steps to Bankova Street, which stood high above the theatre, leading to the stunning modernist House with Chimeras, designed by the architect Vladyslav Horodets′kyi.

The lack of a direct connection between Mykolaivska and Lypky was determined by the landscape, but it can also be seen as symbolizing the limited engagement between the imperial authorities and Kyiv’s multiethnic business elites. The more significant end of Mykolaivska for developers and residents was where the street joined the bustling Khreshchatyk Avenue at the southeastern corner of the Maidan. Since 1876 the City Duma (municipal assembly) building had stood on the Maidan, facing Instytutska and Mykolaivska. By the early twentieth century, municipal politics became more relevant to the business elites than the world of imperial power in Lypky. In fact, already by the 1890s both city residents and visitors perceived Khreshchatyk as the centre of Kyiv.³² Nevertheless, the symbolic location of power remained firmly associated with Lypky. Thus, even the gradual relocation of state institutions into the new, ever-expanding Government Offices building (1854–1909) in the Upper Town failed to shift the city’s symbolic geography.

Bankova, which runs parallel to Khreshchatyk southeast and uphill of it, intersected with Instytutska at the location where the State Bank used to stand before 1905; hence its name. On the upper border of the old Mering estate, Bankova saw active development in the 1900s and 1910s, but some construction projects there were cut short by World War I and the Revolution. Bankova, with its expensive rentals and commercial institutions, was envisioned as a part of the new commercial world. However, its physical separation from Mykolaivska (Bankova running along the steep cliff high above Mykolaivska Square) meant that the government world of Lypky could potentially reclaim it, as it did in the late 1930s and more decisively after World War II.

With Khreshchatyk below marking the space of society in contrast to imperial power, the emergence of “Ukrainian” elements in its public space became almost inevitable. Many prominent Ukrainian literary figures of the late nineteenth century resided in the New Buildings neighbourhood, and some were associated with the nearby university – both located southwest of Khreshchatyk and opposite Lypky. As a result, Ukrainian culture only gradually began to establish a presence on and around Khreshchatyk. However, during this period, Ukrainian publications and performances faced challenges owing to the oppressive Valuev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Decree of 1876, which outlawed the use of the Ukrainian language throughout the Russian Empire. The Ukrainian intelligentsia persistently sought ways to circumvent these draconian restrictions.

A minor concession was made in 1881, allowing for the performance of Ukrainian ethnographic plays that could be staged as a double bill alongside some Russian play, even if it were a short one. In the 1880s the Ukrainian theatre company of Mykola Sadovs′kyi frequently rented the stage of the summer theatre in the Merchant Garden, whose main entrance was at the intersection of Oleksandrivska and Khreshchatyk. From 1878 to 1882 the prominent Ukrainian composer and music teacher Mykola Lysenko lived at 41 Khreshchatyk, and his Ukrainian choir rehearsed there from time to time. From 1901 to 1905 the Kyiv Literary and Artistic Society held its meetings in a building at 15 Khreshchatyk, at the corner of Instytutska. Lysenko, along with other notable Ukrainian cultural figures of the time, such as Mykhailo Staryts′kyi, Olena Pchilka, and Lesia Ukraïnka, participated in the activities of this society. However, in 1905 the authorities closed down the society, largely because of its recognition and promotion of Ukrainian culture as legitimate in Kyiv.³³ These attempts to establish the presence of Ukrainian culture in the city centre foreshadowed the spatial challenge to Lypky that the revolutionary events of 1905, 1917–20, 1988–91, 2004–05, and 2013–14 presented. These efforts to recentre political life on Khreshchatyk and the Maidan also involved reclaiming authority in the name of the Ukrainian people – a multiethnic political community marked by the acceptance of Ukrainian culture as anti-imperial choice.

The part of Oleksandrivska Street running parallel to Instytutska and Mykolaivska, from Khreshchatyk uphill to Lypky, also demonstrated the spatial interaction between society and the authorities. This interaction was marked by the construction of the Public Library (1911) and the Art Museum (1904) on this street, very close to Khreshchatyk. The Public Library was initially established by the tsar in 1866 on the initiative of local cultural and political figures, but it acquired a solid financial foundation only in the 1890s, after being placed under the control of the municipal authorities and gaining widespread support from the residents of Kyiv. Similarly, the Art Museum was created by imperial decree during the reign of Nicholas II, but the construction of its building was co-sponsored by the Tereshchenkos, a family of Ukrainian sugar barons. Officially known as the Emperor Nicholas Kyiv Museum of Art, Crafts, and Sciences, its collection was built through the joint efforts of Ukrainian benefactors and art historians. In 1918 the authorities of the Ukrainian People’s Republic logically renamed it the National Museum.

The route to the parade

The revolutionary turmoil in Kyiv in 1917–20 challenged the status of Lypky as the symbolic seat of power. Despite the upheaval, there was no storming of Mariinskyi Palace, even though the tsar’s mother, the Empress Dowager Maria Feodorovna, resided there briefly just before and immediately after the fall of the monarchy in March 1917.³⁴ The Kyiv Soviet used the palace as its temporary headquarters in 1917, while the authority of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (Ukraïns′ka Narodnia Respublika, or UNR) was spatially associated with the Pedagogical Museum, located between the Upper Town and the university, where its revolutionary parliament, the Central Rada, had deliberated.³⁵

In the spring and summer of 1917, the City Duma building on the Maidan simultaneously served as an alternative centre of authority linked to the Russian Provisional Government. When the UNR returned to Kyiv with the German army on 1 March 1918, the governor-general’s palace served as the residence and office of its head of government. Hetman Pavlo Skoropads′kyi also lived and worked there during his brief reign between 29 April and 14 December 1918. However, the governor-general’s palace did not survive into the postwar period; Polish troops destroyed it when they were retreating from Kyiv, during the Polish–Soviet war, in June 1920.

After the Bolsheviks established themselves in Kyiv in 1920, they made the former City Duma the location of the city Soviet and the party committee. One could interpret this decision as the Bolsheviks’ acknowledgement that the Maidan, as the focal point of revolutionary battles in 1905 and 1917, had replaced Lypky as the locus of symbolic authority – much the way it would in 1990–91, 2004–05, and after 2013–14. However, Soviet power did not tolerate any political activity there other than its own scripted rituals. Moreover, the Maidan’s status as a locus of power was weakened by the fact that Kyiv was not the capital of Soviet Ukraine; that title belonged to the city of Kharkiv in the northeast, right on the administrative border with Soviet Russia. Kyiv’s status changed in 1934, when Stalin decided to return the capital there. After purging the Ukrainian political class and native intelligentsia and crushing the restive Ukrainian peasantry during the Holodomor, the Soviet dictator wanted to show the world that he had subdued Ukrainian nationalism. Furthermore, the threat of a new Polish invasion no longer appeared grave enough to keep Kyiv as a provincial city with undeveloped industry.

The leaders of the Ukrainian SSR embarked on a project to remake Kyiv as a Soviet Ukrainian capital. Socially, it was to become a “proletarian” city with a significant share of the working class. However, the Stalinist leaders of Soviet Ukraine, Stanislav Kosior and Pavel Postyshev, seemed indifferent to the need to provide housing for the workers who would be employed at planned factories. Instead, the archives reveal their preoccupation with constructing housing for the party, state, and military elites, with most of it eventually built in and around Lypky. In the words of a secret party memorandum, news of the capital’s transfer caused “panic” among Kyivites, who anticipated expulsions from the city.³⁶ Indeed, in 1934 the purge of “alien elements” in Kyiv resulted in the expulsion of 20,043 people, thus vacating some living space for Soviet functionaries.³⁷ The leaders of Soviet Ukraine did not address the issue of new housing stock for workers until October 1935, and none of the projected buildings were in Lypky.³⁸ Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Politburo’s secret folder from the mid-1930s contains numerous decisions regarding the countryside sanatorium that was built for the highest leadership in Mezhyhiria, north of Kyiv. This location was continuously used by the leaderships of Soviet and independent Ukraine, until citizens took it over during the Revolution of Dignity.

If Kosior and Postyshev did not spend much time worrying about housing for ordinary Kyivites, they were very much concerned about creating a space where citizens could demonstrate their loyalty to the state. Their thoughts about the spatial arrangement of the future rallying area were innovative, even if influenced by contemporary ideas in Soviet architecture and the design of Kharkiv’s Dzerzhynskyi Square (under construction since the mid-1920s). Prewar architectural competitions for the redesign of central Kyiv were based on the idea of government buildings and the parade ground constituting a single architectural ensemble.³⁹ This involved designating “feeder” streets leading to the symbolic location of power, which would also be the real, physical location of the republican authorities.

There was no established tradition in Kyiv of marching to sites of power – either to demonstrate loyalty or to protest. In late imperial Russia, religious ceremonies served as venues for symbolic interactions between the people and higher authority, but they did not include the component of “reviewing” a march from some platform. Rather, the people would see the representatives of power marching through the streets or emerging from a cathedral. The UNR and the Hetman State (1918) therefore used Saint Sophia Square for major political occasions, as initially did the Bolsheviks.

Once the tradition of annual parades on Soviet holidays was established in Kyiv in the early 1920s, Khreshchatyk Avenue, renamed Vorovskyi Street between 1923 and 1937, became a natural location for them, with the columns marching southward. However, the small balcony of the City Duma building could not accommodate all the Soviet dignitaries entitled to review the parades. Therefore, special, temporary reviewing stands were constructed on the western side of Vorovskyi, close to where the Central Department Store was built in 1939; after its opening, a reviewing platform was installed in front of it.⁴⁰

Thus, the streets leading to the parade’s starting point, Stalin (Tsarska and now Ievropeiska) Square, served as feeder routes for marchers participating in parades, but they did not lead to any permanent site of authority. In fact, marchers from Pecherske went down rather than up Oleksandrivska (this section of the street was renamed Revolution Street in 1919 and Kirov Street in 1934). That is, they passed Lypky on their way to Vorovskyi. Instytutska (renamed 25 October Street in 1919) was not such a convenient feeder avenue because it joined Vorovskyi closer to the middle rather than at its eastern end. (As Serhiy Bilenky points out, modern Kyiv has no central cross-axis, because no street actually crosses Khreshchatyk.)⁴¹

Breaking with this tradition of parades on Vorovskyi, the assignment for participants in the architectural competition for the new government centre in Kyiv called for parade grounds to be incorporated within the government quarter. The party bosses of Soviet Ukraine soon settled on a location in the Upper Town, where the buildings of the tsarist-era Government Offices and Saint Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral were seen as disposable, their removal potentially creating a large square for parades and rallies. The winning design, by the Leningrad architect Iosif Langbard, featured two large, neoclassical, arciform buildings facing west (toward Saint Sophia), with a giant Lenin statue between them.⁴² If that project had been completed, the spatial dynamic of protests in late-Soviet and post-Soviet Kyiv would have been very different. However, unfavourable soil composition on the cliff over the Dnieper, constant budget overruns, and the example of Moscow, where a similar reconstruction of the city centre had to be scaled down radically, convinced the Ukrainian party leaders to abandon this ambitious plan.⁴³

Instead, they adopted a piecemeal approach that envisaged completing some government buildings in the Old Town and in Lypky, while keeping Vorovskyi as the parade route. Their work also entailed the reassignment of buildings already under construction. As a result, only one arciform building of the two was completed in the Upper Town, on the misleadingly named Uriadova (Government, now Mykhailivska) Square. Although intended for the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, upon its completion in 1939, this building, which is architecturally too massive for the landscape, housed the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, including the office of the First Secretary. However, this way the party leadership in the Upper Town ended up on the other side of Khreshchatyk (its original name restored in 1937), away from other government buildings in Lypky, which resulted in logistical and security issues.

Without a clear decision on this matter, the government quarter developed in the traditional elite neighbourhood of Lypky in the mid-to-late 1930s, once again making Kirov and 25 October streets (currently Oleksandrivska and Instytutska, respectively) the arteries leading from the city centre to the location of power. In this connection, the cobblestone Kirov Street underwent extensive repaving in 1935.⁴⁴ Upon its completion in 1938, the immense NKVD building, occupying a long block between these two streets, was reassigned to the Council of People’s Commissars, while the republican NKVD remained in the Institute building, where it had been since the move to Kyiv in 1934. With the construction of the architecturally remarkable parliament building next to Mariinskyi Park in 1939, the government quarter in Lypky was missing only one – but the most important – component: a building for the Central Committee.⁴⁵ Soviet Ukrainian authorities completed the transition to the Lypky location after World War II, with the Central Committee’s relocation to the large building on Ordzhonikidze Street (formerly and currently Bankova), which was originally built between 1936 and 1939 for the headquarters of the Kyiv Military District. After the war, the republican leadership consolidated the government quarter by merging the backyards of three buildings: the Council of People’s Commissars on Kirov Street, this institution’s club on 25 October Street (historically and currently Instytutska), and the State Bank next to it. Reportedly, they also built a major bomb shelter underneath, connected by underground passages to the parliament building and the Central Committee, as well as to a rumoured secret subway station (Figure 5).⁴⁶

Figure 5. Hrushevskyi (then Kirov) Street in the 1950s. The Oblast (formerly Public) Library is on the left, the Museum of Ukrainian Art centre-right, and the Council of Ministers’ building upper centre. Photographer unknown. Author’s collection.

After the war, the symbolic geography of central Kyiv returned somewhat to the pre-revolutionary configuration; the idea of incorporating parade grounds with the physical location of authority was abandoned. The only direct way from the Maidan to the Central Committee building involved climbing several flights of steep stairs – not the easiest route for storming the building. Thus, Karl Marx Street (the former Mykolaivska, today Architect Horodetskyi Street) did not actually lead to the Central Committee – an ideological misstep that was never corrected. One could get there via Instytutska by turning right on Bankova, but that involved first navigating the steep ascent from the Maidan. The construction in the 1960s of the upper entrance to the Khreshchatyk subway station at no. 6, October Revolution Street (renamed in 1944 from 25 October Street) had an ambiguous effect on the site. It provided easy access to the upper part of Instytutska, but in a way that was fully controlled by Soviet authorities: they closed this exit on parade days, and the governments of independent Ukraine closed it (together with the main station) during revolutionary events in the city centre in 2004–05 and 2013–14.

With the monument to the October Revolution under construction on the Maidan, in 1976 the Soviet leadership of Ukraine reversed the direction of parades on Khreshchatyk. From that year to the Soviet collapse, marchers went north and greeted the bosses standing on the reviewing stand under the monument, which was now to their right.⁴⁷ In those years, police cordoned off Instytutska and allowed only people with invitations to the special parade-viewing area to walk down to the Maidan. In contrast, the part of Oleksandrivska that was renamed Kirov Street in 1934 served as the route from the city centre for those marchers leaving after the parade. They filed past the Council of Ministers and Parliament Buildings, both decorated with flags and slogans, but in a relaxed mood rather than a solemn one. By that point, many marchers had already started consuming alcohol.⁴⁸

The road to revolution

If the spatial reassignment of authority during the Soviet period restored some major patterns from tsarist times, it also allowed for more and different public incursions into the space of power. After Stalin’s death, the assertive Ukrainian intelligentsia claimed for itself the public spaces on the border of Khreshchatyk and Lypky. The stylish 1879 Renaissance-Revival mansion on the corner of Instytutska and Bankova, which had housed the Writers’ Union since 1953, provided a platform for many ideologically unorthodox events and speeches in defence of Ukrainian culture. Just a stone’s throw from the Central Committee, this island of Ukrainian patriotism challenged the stale Soviet image of Ordzhonikidze Street (Bankova before 1919 and after 1992). In 1967, when the authorities arrested several young patriots giving speeches near the Taras Shevchenko monument in front of the university, some 200 of their comrades walked to the Central Committee building in the evening and demanded their release. The party bosses obliged, but the organizers of both the rally and the march lost their jobs and came under KGB surveillance. The exact route of this daring protest march is unclear, but the police dropped off the arrested activists on the Maidan, where their comrades awaited them.⁴⁹

Just down the hill from the Central Committee building, the former Mykolaivska Square was named in 1944 after the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko, whose monument stands in the square’s southwestern corner. The theatre on the square housed the Ivan Franko State Drama Company, which staged works in Ukrainian only and attracted the same not fully “reliable” Ukrainian intelligentsia audience. Farther down the street from Franko Square, the impressive new Ukraine Cinema on Karl Marx Street was not an impeccably Soviet institution, either. In 1965, a leading Ukrainian dissident, Ivan Dziuba, used the national premiere of Sergei Paradzhanov’s now-iconic film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors to speak publicly about the ongoing arrests of the patriotic intelligentsia.⁵⁰

In the 1960s the former NKVD building on Instytutska also became a space for Ukrainian cultural and political reassertion. The Club of Creative Youth, which became a springboard for cultural revival and political dissent in the post-Stalin era, held its meetings there. It was in the Institute building – known at the time as the October Palace of Culture – that patriotic youths in 1962 disrupted a talk by Mykola Bazhan, a major poet but also an establishment figure who had been involved in Stalinist ideological campaigns in the field of Ukrainian culture. Bazhan spoke about the executed playwright Mykola Kulish, whose memory that event honoured, without openly condemning Stalinist terror. Club members responded by ironically chanting lines from Bazhan’s 1932 poem glorifying Stalin, “He who stands in the luminous Kremlin,” until Bazhan switched to speaking about the Ukrainian writers who had been tortured and murdered in the Institute building.⁵¹ At the same time, the Moscow (now Ukraine) Hotel, on the opposite side of the Institute, introduced foreign tourists to the area and attracted classy, if officially non-existent, local sex workers, who often doubled as KGB informers.

On Kirov (formerly Oleksandrivska, today Hrushevskyi) Street, the sometimes unruly, occasionally drunk, and often foul-mouthed soccer fans descending on Dynamo Stadium in the evening presented a different type of challenge to the sacred world of authority – that of mass culture. Right across the street from the stadium, the State Museum of Ukrainian Art underwent expansion between 1967 and 1972, becoming associated with the unorthodox art of the Ukrainian “sixtiers.” Next door, several research institutes under the Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Literature in particular, also acquired a reputation for hosting patriotic young scholars. In the years after 1972, there were purges at all these intellectual institutions, but they remained, by their very nature, sites of Ukrainian cultural presence in central Kyiv.⁵² Yet their presence did not challenge the central ceremonial space of Soviet Ukrainian officialdom, which was Kyiv’s main plaza, October Revolution Square. When the imposing monument to the Bolshevik Revolution was unveiled on the Maidan in 1977, this plaza was renamed from Kalinin Square to October Revolution Square. This decision marked a departure from the provincializing Stalinist practice of having Kyiv’s central square and the main avenue leading to the government quarter named after Stalin-era Soviet Russian politicians (Mikhail Kalinin and Sergei Kirov, respectively).

The function and meaning of the two streets leading upwards from the Maidan to Lypky became redefined with the first open challenge to the main plaza as the site dominated by officialdom – both in the form of the large Lenin statue that constituted the main element of the October Revolution monument, and because the steps leading to the monument served as a foundation for temporary review stands during parades. Even if party functionaries were physically there only a few times during the year, symbolically they remained present for as long as the space could not be used for any competing forms of political expression.

An open challenge came in the fall of 1990, when students occupied the steps to hold a hunger strike featuring political demands. The leaders of the protest deliberately chose the Maidan as the capital’s “main parade square” (holovnyi paradnyi maidan), that is, Soviet Ukraine’s main political space.⁵³ There were practical considerations as well. The city council, now housed in a postwar building at 36 Khreshchatyk Street, was just a stone’s throw away, and, following the first free municipal elections in March 1990, it was dominated by democrats and members of the Communist Party’s reformist wing. The students were hoping for political support from City Hall, but also for permission to hold a rally on the main square. In order to facilitate the latter scenario, they occupied the granite steps leading to the monument rather than busy Khreshchatyk just below; they needed to demonstrate that their political actions would not disrupt public transit. (After permission was granted, the students and their supporters did stop traffic on Khreshchatyk on some days.)

Named after these granite steps, the “Revolution on Granite” marked the transition from the Soviet organization of space to a new one, characteristic of political battles in independent Ukraine. Instytutska Street, which served as a secure access route from the government quarter to the government platform on the square during Soviet times, continued its role as a staging ground for the police during the Revolution on Granite, with police buses parked in its upper part behind the Moscow Hotel.⁵⁴ The protesters also organized marches and other actions on Khreshchatyk as a symbolic response to Soviet parades. In contrast, Kirov Street underwent redefinition on 15 October 1990, when students, accompanied by some democratic parliamentarians, organized a protest march up Kirov Street. Police cordons had to be set up at short notice, in order to secure the main entrance to the Council of Ministers building, but the marchers passed it on their way to the Parliament building. There, a group of students managed to break through the police line and sit down in the small pedestrian space between the parliament and the park. Eventually, tents were brought in, and some students continued their hunger strike there, adding political pressure to the heated debates between Parliament’s ruling Communist majority and the outspoken democratic opposition.⁵⁵ When some of their demands were granted, the students peacefully disassembled both tent cities, but a precedent had been established. Revolutions started on the Maidan; they triumphed by claiming Lypky, but the Maidan remained their symbolic heart and source of authority.

Whether the revolutionaries of 1990 knew this or not, they were conforming to a cyclical change in Kyiv’s symbolic topography. Although the 1917 revolution began on the Maidan, the Bolsheviks soon suppressed its perception as the city’s political heart, or agora. With the relocation of Soviet government institutions to Lypky, the Maidan and Khreshchatyk remained the site of ritualized politics. The students who went on a hunger strike there in 1990 wanted to reclaim this Soviet political space, but in reality they revived the earlier spatial challenge to the authority of Lypky.

This symbolic reorientation to the Maidan as the locus of popular power was confirmed during subsequent protest events in Kyiv, including the two revolutions in 2004–05 and 2013–14. The authorities used Instytutska Street as the preferred route for bringing riot police units to the Maidan, but they also needed to defend the lower part of Hrushevskyi Street (formerly Kirov Street, renamed in September 1991) lest the protesters advance to the Cabinet of Ministers and Parliament. The revolutionaries, too, followed the political topography of their predecessors and built upon it. (Quite a few student participants of the 1990 hunger strike went on to become leaders of the Orange Revolution in 2004–05, representing continuity in spatial choice and a living memory of past protest events. Some of them, as established political figures, also participated in the Revolution of Dignity.)⁵⁶

Each of the revolutions included some element of reclaiming an established political space, even when it was the same physical site. During the Revolution of Dignity the initial gathering of some 2,000 activists protesting President Ianukovych’s reorientation from the EU to Russia took place on 21 November 2013 near the Independence Monument (also known as the Independence Column and at the time widely seen as a tasteless symbol of corruption under President Leonid Kuchma), in the exact same place where the Revolution on Granite began in 1990.⁵⁷ The participants did not close down traffic on Khreshchatyk, and those few who stayed overnight congregated around the column. Around 4 am on 30 November, hundreds of riot police came down Instytutska, while troops under the Ministry of the Interior cordoned off Khreshchatyk.⁵⁸ The police brutally cleared the Maidan, but nobody was prepared for the public’s response the next day, 1 December, when some 500,000 demonstrators, most of them from Kyiv, arrived at the Maidan to reclaim the square as the locus of protest. They also occupied City Hall nearby and the trade unions’ headquarters on the Maidan. A tent city was set up in the Maidan’s central part, as had been done during the Orange Revolution in 2004–05. That same day a smaller group of radicals, whose motives and funding have since been questioned by the leaders of the revolution, went up Instytutska and, via Bankova, to the building of the Presidential Administration, where they clashed with riot police. The police used tear gas and the activists threw stones at them.⁵⁹

Meanwhile, the mass protest on the Maidan remained peaceful. Beginning on 6 December, its participants began building barricades around the square, where the tent city was growing. Subsequent attempts to clear the square at night failed; each of them resulted in many thousands of supporters rushing to the Maidan to help guard it. On New Year’s Eve some half a million people gathered on and around the Maidan, where soon after midnight they sang the Ukrainian anthem. After the Ianukovych administration rushed through Parliament the draconian laws of 16 January 2014 severely limiting avenues of political mobilization in public spaces, on 19 January – a bitterly cold day – the protesters tried to march up Hrushevskyi Street to the Cabinet of Ministers and Parliament Buildings. They were stopped by riot police using water cannons. Both sides built barricades on the lower part of Hrushevskyi Street – in the exact same area where Dynamo Stadium, the Public Library, and the National Art Museum had long marked society’s meeting place with the power entrenched in Lypky. The revolutionaries used Molotov cocktails to torch the police buses blocking the street; the police fired rubber bullets, injuring many in the crowd. On 22 January, the Day of National Unity, presumed police snipers stationed on Hrushevskyi Street killed the first two of the Heavenly Hundred (fallen heroes of the revolution): the ethnic Armenian Serhii Nihoian and the Belarusian Mykhailo Zhyznevs′kyi. The many wounded were treated in an improvised first-aid centre located at the premises of research institutes in the humanities. During the night of 22–23 January, the riot police broke through the barricades on Hrushevskyi Street and pushed the revolutionaries back to the Maidan.⁶⁰

On 18 February 2014, a day when a temporary truce between the two sides was supposedly in effect, a peaceful mass protest march heading toward Parliament, which the leaders of the revolution had announced in advance, resulted in violent clashes with the police and pro-Ianukovych thugs-for-hire known as titushky. The marchers went up Instytutska rather than Hrushevskyi Street, and the police used extreme violence when they stopped them at the intersections with Sadova and Shovkovychna streets – the block where the house of Colonel Ivanov had once stood. The clashes on the corner of Instytutska and Sadova began at 10:00 am. with the police firing rubber bullets and throwing tear-gas grenades, the latter sometimes with nails taped to them for deadly impact. Soon after 11 am the riot police counter-attacked at the corner of Instytutska and Shovkovychna, but the protesters retaliated by throwing rocks. Violent clashes with the titushky began at Mariinskyi Park. Between 1:00 and 2:00 pm the police, firing water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear-gas grenades, went on a massive counter-offensive on Instytutska, forcing some marchers to retreat downhill to the Maidan and pushing others in the opposite direction, to Kriposnyi Lane. There, at least three of the Heavenly Hundred were killed by the police using canister shots of hunting ammunition for their Fort rifles, designed for rubber bullets. More people were wounded and killed in the chaotic clashes that broke out at the southern exit of Mariinskyi Park.⁶¹

The revolutionaries still controlled one side of the intersection of Instytutska and Sadova, but elsewhere they were in retreat, with police reclaiming the streets leading down to the Maidan. To the south, the police managed to push the Maidan activists down Hrushevskyi Street, past Arsenal Square, to where it becomes Ivan Mazepa Street – another section of historic Oleksandrivska Street. There on Arsenal Square, just inside the gates of the Kyiv Fortress, the revolutionaries tried to build a barricade at around 3:00 pm, but it failed to stop the police, who pushed them even farther away from Lypky to the Park of Eternal Glory, with its monument to the Unknown Soldier. By 4:00 pm police officers and titushky stormed the last pockets of resistance on Instytutska, the titushky finishing off some elderly revolutionaries with steel pipes and clubs. At the upper barricade on Instytutska, near the entrance to the Khreshchatyk subway station, the protesters’ own fortifications – made with bags filled with snow – caused a stampede as they retreated to the Maidan because the passage was narrow. By 6:00 pm the revolutionaries were once again holed up on the Maidan, while the riot police gathered on Instytutska for a decisive storming of this protest square. Dozens of Maidan activists were wounded and some killed on the spot by the police using lead bullets in their rubber-bullet rifles and by other means. That afternoon Interior Troops (conscripted soldiers) sustained the first five casualties inflicted by actual firearms: a handgun and hunting rifles. During the night several riot police officers were also killed by bullets on Instytutska.⁶²

On 19 February, the main events unfolded on the Maidan. The Trade Unions Building was set on fire, apparently by the police, and the revolutionaries torched their barricades on the square to make them impassable. The streets leading uphill to Lypky remained blockaded by the police, who tried advancing on the Maidan from Instytutska. The revolutionaries could retreat and evacuate the wounded only via Mykhailivska Street, which joined the Maidan on the opposite side. It led uphill to Saint Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, which served as a sanctuary and first-aid centre for the revolutionaries. They also moved some services, previously located in the Trade Unions Building, to the Conservatory, at the corner of the Maidan and Architect Horodetskyi Street.⁶³

The early morning of 20 February was marked with gunfire from both sides and Molotov cocktails flying in both directions. The police attacked the Conservatory as its defenders fired back and shot at other, unsuspecting police officers nearby. With casualties mounting, just before 9:00 am the riot police and other government troops suddenly began retreating from the Maidan up Instytutska. Unbeknownst to the revolutionaries, the policemen were also exhausted. Some of them had not slept for three days, and most of them were increasingly frightened by the prospect of getting either killed or prosecuted in the event that the revolution proved victorious. At some point, the senior police commander on the ground ordered a withdrawal on his own authority.

A few dozen unarmed revolutionaries started advancing up Instytutska in hot pursuit of the retreating policemen and Ministry of Interior soldiers, but two water cannons targeted them. At the same time, a small unit of black-clad special-forces personnel, with no insignia and armed with AK-74 assault rifles, exited their bus, which was parked uphill on Instytutska. Whereas the riot police killed revolutionaries by substituting hunting ammunition for rubber bullets and taping nails to the shock grenades – methods ostensibly bypassing the lack of a clear order to shoot and kill – this new unit immediately opened fire with army assault rifles loaded with 7.62 mm “tumbling” cartridges, which cause more damage once they penetrate a body. On 20 February this type of ammunition killed dozens of revolutionaries and injured hundreds more. After the revolution, some of these AK-74 assault rifles were matched to the collected bullets and identified as belonging to the special-operations company of the Berkut riot police regiment. As the police and Interior Troops retreated to the government quarter, the black-clad shooters continued to cover their repositioning by firing at the revolutionaries, even as the latter were withdrawing downhill toward the Maidan. They also shot at the revolutionaries trying to evacuate their wounded. Seven people were killed on the short, lower section of Instytutska between the Maidan and the Ukraine Hotel with single shots from AK-74 rifles in just one minute, between 9:28 and 9:29 am; 19 more were shot dead by 11:32 am.⁶⁴

As the revolutionaries attended their dead and wounded, the remaining police forces withdrew to Lypky. Most of them apparently boarded buses waiting on Instytutska near the intersection with Olhinska Street. A riot-police unit from Crimea marched all the way to Mariinskyi Park. All over the government quarter, witnesses saw police withdrawing and boarding their buses. At the Verkhovna Rada, a political realignment was in progress, beginning with a statement condemning police brutality. The opposition politicians who were working on a compromise solution in the form of a snap presidential election and constitutional reform did not realize that the revolution had already been won. Maidan Self-Defence units patrolled the Maidan and adjacent street blocks, the police nowhere to be seen. The next day, 21 February, the police cordons disappeared from around Parliament and all government buildings in Lypky. As parliamentarians were voting on the constitutional reform, the transfer of power on the streets had already taken place.⁶⁵ That night Ianukovych fled from his countryside residence in Mezhyhiria and left Ukraine; the next day he was ousted from power. The revolution had triumphed, and the unarmed revolutionaries killed when they were storming the uphill section of Instytutska became its martyrs. That part of Instytutska became the revolution’s principal memory site.

The memorial sites of the Revolution of Dignity were initially marked by makeshift shrines in several locations on both Instytutska and Hrushevskyi streets. Instytutska eventually became the main memorial space, distinguished by two now-permanent shrines in its lower and upper parts, featuring portraits of the Heavenly Hundred – the fallen revolutionaries.⁶⁶ Instytutska experienced the greatest loss of life from police fire during the revolution’s violent climax on 18–21 February 2014, but it was also much more suitable than Hrushevskyi Street – a busy transportation artery connecting the once-separate parts of Kyiv – for being converted into a pedestrian zone and memorial space. The part of Instytutska between the two shrines is now named the Alley of the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred (Figure 6).

Figure 6. A “commemorative” barricade on the upper part of Instytutska Street as it existed in the summer of 2014. The sign reads “Changing this country. Apologies for the inconvenience.” Author’s photo.

Conclusion

The history of Instytutska and Hrushevskyi streets, which played such a prominent role in the democratic revolutions on the Maidan, demonstrates how the intertwined factors of environment and human agency have influenced Kyiv’s symbolic geography. In the early eighteenth century, security considerations led to the relocation of secular authorities to Pecherske and the eventual establishment of a symbolic royal presence, government authority, and an elite district in Lypky. This posh neighbourhood became connected to the other parts of the city during the period of transition from the prescriptive urban planning of Tsar Nicholas I to the power of money and the middle class at the turn of the century. Instytutska and Hrushevskyi streets emerged as connectors between the worlds of authority and society.

When Kyiv became the capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1934, Bolshevik functionaries initially entertained radical plans for demolition and reconstruction, but these ideas were scrubbed owing to the soil quality and cost. Eventually, they settled on following the pre-revolutionary trend of consolidating the government centre in Lypky. Instytutska and Hrushevskyi streets connected the Soviet government quarter to Khreshchatyk, which became a parade ground. However, it was precisely from there that challenges to the late-Soviet and corrupt post-independence authorities would emerge. Marchers demonstrating their loyalty evolved into a movement reclaiming “people power,” and the two streets became a battleground in their fight against the higher-ups “up there” in Lypky.

After 2014, the Maidan and the adjacent part of Instytutska Street became locations imbued with people power. Political leaders and foreign dignitaries visited these sites to acknowledge Ukrainian society’s victory and sacrifice. Lypky is now symbolically subordinated to the Maidan, where Ukrainian leaders go on the anniversaries of the Revolution of Dignity – both its start on 21 November and its victory on 21 February – to acknowledge the source of their legitimacy. Foreign dignitaries also lay flowers at the two shrines on Instytutska, where the new Ukraine was born. This shift in the city’s symbolic geography has challenged the trend that formed over the previous three centuries. Yet important continuity remains. Following President Volodymyr Zelens′kyi’s (Zelensky’s/Zelenskyy’s) abandoned electoral promise in 2019 to move the presidential administration to Khreshchatyk – to Ukrainian House on Ievropeiska Square – it became clear that Lypky remains, for better or worse, the seat of government authority. However, Lypky can govern only if the ultimate symbolic authority of the Maidan is recognized. The streets connecting these two loci remain as important as ever.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers, whose constructive suggestions greatly improved the article. He is also grateful to Dr. James Krapfl, Dr. Guillaume Sauvé, and Marta D. Olynyk for their help with copy-editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This article stems from the research project “Meet You on the Maidan: A Spatial History of Social Protest in Kyiv, Ukraine, 1905–2015,” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC grant no. 435-2016-0061).

Notes on contributors

Serhy Yekelchyk

Born and educated in Ukraine, Serhy Yekelchyk received a PhD from the University of Alberta. He is the author of eight books on modern Ukrainian history and Russo-Ukrainian relations, including the award-winning Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (Oxford University Press, 2014). A professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Yekelchyk is the current president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies.

Notes

1. See Shore, Ukrainian Night; Marples and Mills, Ukraine’s Euromaidan; and Yekelchyk, Ukraine.

2. Lawson, Bavaj, and Struck, Guide to Spatial History.

3. See Lees, “Rematerializing Geography”; and Thrift, Spatial Formations.

4. Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism; Cybriwsky, Kyiv, Ukraine. See also Betlii, Dysa, and Martyniuk, Zhyvuchi v modernomu misti; Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis; and Coleman, “From Kiev across All.” There also exists an excellent older work: Hamm, Kiev.

5. See Karger, Drevnii Kiev, 247–52; and Mal′chenko, “Vplyv artyleriiskoï praktyky.”

6. Klymovs′kyi, Sotsial′na topohrafiia Kyieva, 13–21; Alferova and Kharlamov, Kiev vo vtoroi polovine, 73–86.

7. Alferova and Kharlamov, Kiev vo vtoroi polovine, 31–36, 62–63.

8. Plan Kieva; Zakrevskii, Opisanie Kieva, vol. 2, 583.

9. Zakrevskii, Opisaniie Kiieva, vol. 1, 328; “Staraia Ivanovskaia doroga.”

10. Pavlenko, Ivan Mazepa, 126, 133.

11. Ibid., 127; “Vuiakhevych-Vysochynsky, Mykhailo”; Ohloblyn, Het′man Ivan Mazepa, 131.

12. Tairova-Iakovleva, Ivan Mazepa, 79, 82–99, 198–99, 204–05.

13. See, for example, the entry on Mazepa on the site of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory: “1639 – narodyvsia Ivan Mazepa.”

14. Tairova-Iakovleva, Ivan Mazepa, 203–05; Chobitko, “Urban Features.”

15. Sitkareva, Kievskaia krepost′, 33.

16. Khvedchenia, “Rozbudova kyïvs′kykh khramiv,” 410.

17. Ikonnikov, “Kiev v 1654–1855 gg.,” 229.

18. Ibid. The Grand Duke Alexander of Lithuania (later the King of Poland, known as Alexander Jagiellon) granted the Magdeburg privileges to Kyiv in the 1490s. They were abrogated with the establishment of the Kyiv viceroyalty by Catherine II in 1781, restored by Alexander I in 1802, and finally abolished by Nicholas I in 1835 – four years later than elsewhere in the Russian Empire – upon the creation of a municipal council.

19. Zakrevskii, Opisanie Kieva, vol. 2, 584–85.

20. Ernst, Kyiv, 472.

21. Druh, Vulytsiamy staroho Kyieva, 304.

22. Yekelchyk, “Ideological Park.”

23. Rybakov, Nevidomi ta malovidomi storinky, 118.

24. Chuchman, “Kazennyi hubernators′kyi budynok.”

25. Zakrevskii, Opisanie Kieva, vol. 1, 119.

26. Druh, Vulytsiamy staroho Kyieva, 228.

27. Malakov and Druh, Osobniaky Kyieva, 114.

28. Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism, 138.

29. Ibid., 174–75.

30. Ernst, Kyiv, 435.

31. Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism, 215–18; Boguslavskii and Margolin, Sputnik po g. Kievu, 22.

32. Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism, 330; Kondel′-Perminova, Khreshchatyk, 22–25.

33. Kal′nyts′kyi, Malakov, and Iurkova, Narysy z istoriï Kyieva, 198–200; Kal′nyts′kyi, “Budynok 2-oï pol. XIX st.”

34. “Vozvrashchenie Tsaritsy Marii Feodorovny”; “Mariia Feodorovna.”

35. Kucheruk, “Budynok Tsentral′noï Rady.”

36. Tsentral′nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads′kykh ob’iednan′ Ukraïny (TsDAHO), fond 1, opys 20, sprava 6419, fol. 76.

37. Ibid., opys 6, sprava 376, fol. 5.

38. Ibid., opys 20, sprava 6420, fols. 52–53.

39. Shirochin, Arkhitektura mezhvoennogo Kieva.

40. Kondel′-Perminova, Khreshchatyk, 56; Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Citizens, 55.

41. Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism, 228.

42. TsDAHO, fond 1, opys 6, sprava 407, ark. 10.

43. Kostiuchok, “Uriadovyi tsentr u Kyievi,” 106–08; Shirochin, Arkhitektura mezhvoennogo Kieva.

44. TsDAHO, fond 1, opys 6, sprava 374, fols. 26–27.

45. Ostapiuk, “Heneral′nyi plan,” 240–41.

46. Televiziina sluzhba novyn, “Zhurnalistam pokazaly taiemni khody.”

47. Kondel′-Perminova, Khreshchatyk, 57.

48. Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Citizens, 53.

49. Bazhan, “Ushanuvannia pam’iati”; Ovsiienko, “Mohyl′nyi Viktor Mykolovych.”

50. Dziuba, Spohady i rozdumy, 509–10.

51. Bilokin′, Klub tvorchoi molodi, 48.

52. Zakharov, “Sorok rokiv.”

53. Donii, Students′ka revoliutsiia na graniti, 14.

54. Ibid.

55. Donii and Synel′nykov, Istoriia USS, 98–99.

56. See Yevhenii Safarians’ contribution to this section.

57. Trybushna and Solomko, Nebesna sotnia, 9; Shore, Ukrainian Night, 35.

58. Trybushna and Solomko, Nebesna sotnia, 11.

59. Televiziina sluzhba novyn, “Iatseniuk rozpoviv.”

60. Strazhnyi, Maidan, 68–197.

61. Solod′ko et al., “Try dni pered vesnoiu.”

62. Ibid.

63. Trybushyna and Solomko, Nebesna sotnia, 18–19; Strazhnyi, Maidan, 286–98.

64. See note 61 above.

65. Strazhnyi, Maidan, 299–320.

66. Wanner, “Commemoration”; Yekelchyk, “Heavenly Hundred.”