Some express their “active” civil position in the public transport loudly criticizing inert politicians who cannot organize removing the snow from the roads; some complain in the evening in the kitchens about the authorities who do not repair heating main pipes; some spend their days in Facebook criticizing the language the president or ministers speak... Others take the initiative and resolve their community’s problems on their own. One does not have to be a deputy to check local supermarkets for expired foods and make business respect the law. It is enough to know one’s rights and have the courage to assume the responsibility… and do something. It does not matter what rights you protect or what problems you resolve since in Ukraine there are enough problems for everyone and for a long time. It is not the point. If you do not like something and if you feel robbed or cheated you should do something. No time?
But how do you manage to find numberless hours to consume political slops from the TV screens? No legal education? The information has never been as open as today – you should just spend a couple of hours surfing the Internet. Besides, the Ukrainian universities yearly train thousands of lawyers willing to grow professionally, why don’t you use this resource and don’t address a law student? You can find at least one of them in an apartment house. Afraid of acting alone? But hundreds of people share your problem: they are sick and tired of seeing tons of trash every morning; they complain about bad life and wait for somebody to start doing something. They are your potential army.
Young activists from the movement “Ukraina bez kholopiv” [Ukraine without serfs. – Ed.] refused to complain and whimper which is characteristic of a typical Ukrainian and assumed responsibility of resolving a very narrow social problem. They are different citizens who do not like the system and feel able to change it. Actually, in Ukraine there are a lot of similar social initiatives and, interestingly, most of them come from young people. For example, several students from Alushta developed the website ukryama.com where they presented the mechanism of solving the problem of holes on the Ukrainian roads. Everything is very easy: you just take a photo of a hole on the road, the website generates an application for you, you send it to the police and wait for the authorities to react to your request. If there is no reply within a month you print out a standard application to the public prosecutor’s office that supervises the fulfillment of their duties by the police. As a result, there are nearly a thousand photos of Ukrainian holes on this website; about a hundred of them have been repaired as a result of people’s activity. It is not the result of MPs’ or political leaders’ work, it is rather the display of the active civil position of a team of young inhabitants of a small town in Crimea.
Personally I take the movement “Ukraina bez kholopiv” and the project “UkrYama” as the additional evidence of the fact that the systematic changes in Ukraine will start in the east. For some reason people in the east speak less and do more. Practical thinking and acute feeling of responsibility is typical of them. They are used to surviving in tough conditions. It is easy to be a patriot in Lviv, however even speaking Ukrainian in Donetsk is a display of courage and daily challenge. It is easy to ask the open authorities in Ternopil or Vinnytsia to keep their promises, however, in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions similar “demands” are related to physical danger. Those who face the system in the east automatically become warriors on barricades and will have a good schooling for the rest of their life. At the same time their deed is difficult to see since it is lost in the permanent flow of stereotypes and cliches cultivated in western Ukraine.
