The Foreign Service Journal, April 2017

44 APRIL 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL I t was civilized, and that’s something that I don’t think came through very easily in the pictures and the news stories. It was very civilized in the face of a lot of violence, in the face of a lot of [what] the government threw at them, in the face of horrible weather—I mean, how many nights was it snowing down there and freezing? People were universally polite. The only time I saw people get upset was if the Maidan self-defense force—basically the self-appointed police of Maidan—would bounce someone from the barricades who looked like they might have been drinking, or looked like they might be an agitator. … [T]here was a high degree of civility, and almost gentleness, associated with it, so you’d see art out there on Maidan. Maidan artists would come and do things; there’d be people playing a piano. It was an atmosphere that people wanted to be a part of. But what was interesting was that the folks who were there, contrary to pro-government press, were generally not unemployed. They were regular people who believed in it strongly enough to go. And at the very end of this sort of movement, after the politicians had been elected and moved into office, sure, a lot of people trickled out of the square, and a fraction of the folks remaining might not have had anywhere else to go. But especially in the beginning, we’re talking about well-dressed grandmas and middle-class folks [there on the square]. ... The people that stick out in my mind were contacts. You’d call them up to ask a question related to their busi- ness or field, and they’d say, “Sorry, I’m not in the office; I let half of my company go down to Maidan because we’re all supporting this.” So my point is that it was civil, it was gentle in a lot of respects in the beginning, and it involved people in a really organic manner that I don’t think came across in the inter- national media, because the pictures that people remem- ber are burning tires, bands of people moving back and forth with maybe a cleric holding up a cross. … I mean, these are really iconic images that will probably win photo contests for years, but it certainly wasn’t the whole thing. It wasn’t how it all began. —Entry-Level Economic Officer Christopher Greller The Start of the Protest Movement and Its Media Portrayal ADSTmentoredme on interviewing techniques, and off we went! I wrote a position description for a summer hire employee and subsequently hiredMaria Turner, the daughter of our public affairs counselor, to be my assistant for the project. We then secured space in the embassy’s media studio, where the ambas- sador sometimes gave television interviews, and started signing up interested colleagues. During the summer we completedmore than 20 interviews, each lasting about an hour, with employees from across the mission, including State Department and other agency officers, family members and Locally Employed staff (see excepts from them in the accompanying boxes). While I had a basic list of questions to ask every participant, I tried to keep the conversation as broad as possible. As I antici- pated, everyone had a preferred way of framing their experience. Some talked about the political and economic underpinnings of the revolution; others focused on their roles as supervisors andmanagers making sure their employees, both American and Ukrainian, were resilient in the face of an evolving political climate. And still others focused on their families and how they helped their children to understand what they were seeing on the streets through their apartment windows. DIXOND/WIKIMEDIACOMMONS Euromaidan, Dec. 15, 2013.