Church Without Walls: Post-Soviet Baptists after the Ukrainian Revolution, 2013-14, Joshua T. Searle, 2016

literally freezing to death during the severe Ukrainian winters, Yanukovych was adorning his vast estate with Lebanese cedar doors at a cost of $64,000 each and spending $328,000 on wall panelling for his winter garden. According to local press reports, other documents included a “$12 million hand-written cheque to an undisclosed beneficiary” and “a €39 * Andrey Piontkovsky provides a helpful definition of “kleptocracy” as the “merging of money and political power; the institutionalization of corruption; and the domination of the economy by major corporations, chiefly trading in commodities, which flourish thanks to public resources.” Quoted in Karen Dawisha, Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 355. ”> Under Yanukovych’s regime, the structures and social million chandelier supply contract. values that support civil society were fatally assaulted as the corrupt system of organised kleptocracy was fed by an abyss of moral and legal nihilism. After the grotesque regime of the discredited tyrant, Yanukovych, Ukrainian society required not just constitutional reform, but a wholesale social reformation, involving a transformation of values that would signify a clear break from the state-authorised crime, corruption and indignity of the post-Independence era. In this regard, the “Revolution of Dignity” (Peeomoyia 2idvocmi) — as it came to be known — came to symbolize the awakening of civil society in Ukraine as a whole and the reinstitution of the values of dignity and respect throughout the country after the shameful debacle of Yanukovych’s criminal regime. Therefore, contrary to the Russian propaganda about “Ukrainian fascists in Kyiv” and the fabricated threats to Russian citizens in Ukraine, the main aims of the revolution were social justice, democracy and the rule of law.° Although certain extremist elements took advantage of the protests at a later stage, the revolution in Kyiv was a people’s revolution that built on the spontaneous outpouring of discontent and even disgust of millions of ordinary ”7 The Revolution of Dignity was instigated Ukrainians at Yanukovych’s “sociopathic state. and sustained by ordinary people, such as students and young professionals, together with workers, the elderly and retired, who rose up against a corrupt regime that had attempted to turn the organs of state power into instruments for the repression of all civil and political opposition.§ There had been other episodes of revolutionary ferment in post-Soviet Ukraine. In 1991 Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union. In 2004-5 hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets in a mass rally that became known as the “Orange Revolution”. The protestors were demonstrating against the corrupt presidential election, which was rigged to give the impression that Viktor Yanukovych had gained the most votes. The Orange Revolution succeeded in overturning this r