“Стихія” (stykhiya): it’s a wonderful Ukrainian word conveying an overwhelming elemental force of nature: a hurricane, drought, famine, locust infestation, forest fire, flood, plague. But it also has a social/political connotation characterizing as “стихія” a population erupting in massive, seemingly spontaneous actions: a national uprising, a revolution.
Ukrainian history is rife with these kinds of “стихії” (plural). For generations, peasants endured serfdom and national oppression until Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648 was moved to right a personal wrong and, to his astonishment, channeled pent-up rage to establish the first Ukrainian state since Kyivan Rus’. His statue dominates St. Sophia Square in Kyiv. More recently, we had the Orange Revolution in 2004-2005 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014 – both spontaneous, both transformative.