Ярина Скуратівська Yaryna Skyrativska

“The management here, at the radio station, didn't really facilitate talking about all these events and what was happening there. I remember there was a funny moment for me when we invited someone from the activists of the 2004 Maidan. I was sitting with my interlocutor in the studio. Maidan had already won. In fact, it was a moment when everyone was congratulating each other, and there were triumphant reports. I'm hosting the live broadcast, and then the director of “Promen” comes in and says: “That's it, get out of here. What are you doing? How can you even talk about Maidan?”He says this to me through my headphones while the guest is telling me something. And he's standing there, this manager. He can't come into the live broadcast, because it's live. And I realized that I needed to keep the show going as long as this manager was standing there in the studio. My interlocutor and I talked for a long time. I don't remember who the invited guest was. It was a small revolution”.

“I liked the freedom that the university gave me: there was free learning, free attendance. I managed to go through it all somehow. It was also interesting that part of the teaching staff was still quite Soviet, and it was very non-conceptual. Because there were teachers who talked about comparative literature, and there were teachers who talked to us about socialist realism. It was a very strange education. I studied political economy, and I studied, for example, the topic of “Franko studies and psychoanalysis”. These were unrelated things. How they all fit into this course... We also had Ukrainian language, which was taught to us by a very cool teacher, but the textbook was written in Russian and published in Moscow. And it was a difficult experience for me. Because there were parts of speech, and all of it was in Russian - it had to be translated into Ukrainian. It was a real struggle”.

“I worked simultaneously at two news agencies: UNIAR, which was an information agency that didn't last long, and the Ukrainian Independent Information Agency “Respublika”. I worked night shifts. They also produced digests and sent them to embassies, as a rule. It was already the 1990s, and UNIAR was not only producing news but also making money. Embassies subscribed to their daily information selections. In particular, there was a story about what they listened... My task was to listen to the news on “Ukrainian Radio” at 7 p.m. because it was considered the most complete news broadcast. It was recorded, and I deciphered it, and part of the information provided by “Ukrainian Radio” went into the digest, which UNIAR then sent to embassies. But there were really many good journalists there who are now monsters: managers and maybe not even working in journalism as journalists but more as leaders... But it was a very good thing. The second news agency was small and intimate. It was called “MIAU-Culture”, a music information agency plus culture. I already had more journalistic work there. I went to concerts, wrote reviews. In a word, I spent my time interestingly, culturally. Then I wrote materials”.

“I personally only interacted, if I may say so, with those who approached the area of the tent city. Many older people approached us. I remember being exhausted. We talked... mostly grandmothers and grandfathers approached us, very respectful. We talked with them. They were interested. It was different, but it was a friendly conversation. They asked: what do you want, why are you standing here, maybe stop hunger striking, maybe you don't need all this. I felt more sympathy, perhaps a lack of understanding of the ideals and ideas that were on the Maidan at the time, but there was a lot of sympathy. Although there was an incident when we were marching along Khreshchatyk and some woman shouted at me that I was a Bandera supporter. On the one hand, I understood that I should be offended, because she was shouting as if she wanted to insult me, but on the other hand, I was so pleased. It was dissonant - she insulted me, and I was proud of it. She tried to insult me, but I was proud of it. At that time, I had more contact with my parents. My parents understood what it was and why it was happening, but they didn't want me to actively engage in the socio-political sphere. There were huge arguments at home. We had fights. My father was very unhappy that I was on Maidan. He was afraid that he would be harassed even more because of it. My contacts were limited to such contacts with adults. But it's certain that the whole of Kyiv was on strike. It wasn't just students. There were factories and plants because from time to time they announced strikes. It was packed with people there, the whole Maidan, Khreshchatyk, all those streets nearby. Transport no longer ran, everything was blocked off. I remember that everything was full of people, especially on weekends. And those who reached the microphone said that we were representatives of such-and-such a plant or institute, and we were joining the strike. It wasn't just a student thing... The hunger strike may have been student-led, but the activity... I think Kyiv... and then the miners began to actively join as well. There was a fairly active period of the miners' movement. They were somehow parallel to us”.