Through February 23, we are marking the 11th anniversary of Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity. It started with a Facebook post summoning protesters to the Independence Monument on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) on November 21, 2013. It ended when disgraced, corrupt pro-russian president Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine for russia in the wee hours of February 22, 2014, and Verkhovna Rada officially removed him from the presidency.

Good trouble

By ВО Свобода – Народне віче на Майдані 9.02.2014, CC BY 3.0,

Following Viktor Yanukovyh's violent eviction of peaceful protesters from Maidan, thousands of ordinary Ukrainians built and moved into a tent city on the square. They surrounded it with barricades built of sandbags, snow, tires, and any other loose, sturdy material that came to hand, and manned by volunteers.

Within the barricades, they built something approaching the Ukraine they wanted to live in: free, egalitarian, self-sufficient. They had a food kitchen where volunteers cooked for the activists, an open university, a library, a medical clinic, press offices, and legal support for protesters. Self-defense units mounted patrols, keeping an eye out for hostile government forces, and provided defense training to the other Maidanivtsi.

Maidan became a defiant, determined, and, above all, hopeful city within a city.

\From the late US Rep John Lewis: "Get in good trouble, necessary trouble." Nobody does good trouble like Ukrainians.*