Bogodar Kovaliv is a soft spoken and well-mannered guy of 23. With his thin tie and a tidy beard, he looks nothing like a street revolution leader. But he is.
Yaroslav Hrytsak, a prominent historian from Lviv, says this is because he is a representative of the precariat – a new generation of young people across the globe with a particular set of characteristics.
They’re highly educated young people, digitalized and globalized – yet they have less of a chance for a good career than their grandmothers and grandfathers.
“Middle class by values, but they have every chance to become the new intellectual proletariat,” says Hrytsak.
Perhaps, it’s no wonder that Kovaliv, a native of Ivano-Frankivsk, and many of his friends are leading the new Ukrainian revolution. Students and young people across the nation took to the streets en masse after the government announced on Nov. 21 that it was no longer to sign an association deal with the European Union. It was mostly the students who got ruthlessly beaten by riot police in the middle of the night on Nov. 30.
Their beating angered hundreds of thousands of people and forced then out in the streets on Dec. 1. They were saying: “Our kids got beaten.”
“They struck kids in their heads and they (police) had such a strong strike back in their balls that they don’t understand what is happening,” says Oleh Rybachuk, a former deputy prime minister and now a civic leader.
The student strikes have no single leader, and this is its major distinction from the Orange Revolution, when people came out to the streets chanting the name of Viktor Yushchenko. This time, they’re chanting value-based slogans.
“The role of Yanukovych is that he helped us define our values, through the contrast,” says Rybachuk. “He specifically helped students. It’s only him who after the Orange Revolution got students out in the streets en masse.”
“His actions, his ways of managements helped us identify ourselves as a European nation… where Constitution must be respected,” says Rybachuk.
Polls in Ukraine have consistently shown that the youth across Ukraine is overwhelmingly pro-European. Clear rules of the game, akin to those offered by a European association, are on the very top of student strikers’ list of demands.
Asked to deliver his message in a tweet, Kovaliv, Master of Law from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, immediately says: “full change of authorities and full change of rules of the game.”
Asked to deliver it in a Facebook post, he smiles, says “that’s more difficult,” and immediately starts to talk. He says number one is to impeach the president and get rid of the government, followed by early election to parliament, then consecutive chance of legislation in close cooperation with the civil society.
In the short-term, he says the demand is to publish lists of those directly responsible for dispersals of peaceful demonstrations; resignation and a ban on taking public posts of incumbent Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk.
“The main specific short-term demand is to introduce personal identification of every law enforcer – so that people at least know who is beating you,” Kovaliv says. “In this case people would see who bears personal responsibility for violating the law.”
Students also want repressions in universities to stop. Kovaliv says students are pressured immensely by their deans and the authorities to not take part in strikes.
Yes, he knows that most of their political demands are unrealistic. And yes, he understand that there needs to be negotiation to reach any sort of compromise.
“But nobody listens to us,” he complains.
He says opposition leaders, who are expected to be the leaders of the strikes, instead just show up and give orders to the students. They pick up the phone, ask to call them in five minutes – and then switch off the phone.
Kovaliv’s complaint is not unique. Many journalists, including Western reporters in Ukraine, are telling the same story.
Students have demands for the opposition, too. They’re tired of the split within the ranks of the opposition, and want an immediate decision about which one of the many opposition leaders are prepared to become president, the prime minister and the speaker.
They have a hard time figuring out how to achieve this goal. In fact, even personal goals are a bit of a problem.
“Of course, I would like to have a wife, three kids, a house and a dog and live in Ukraine, which is a part of Europe. This is the image that we associate with Europe,” he says.
But for now, it remains a dream, not even a plan. Kovaliv says planning is not something typical of him and his friends. “How can you plan if you don’t know if Maidan is going to stand or disappear tomorrow, if we will be in the EU or Customs Union?
