Maidan

How it started

“Maidan” was started on Internet on Dec 20th 2000 as a reaction to government's efforts to block information distribution about the political opposition activities and to spread the misinformation about the civil protest actions, caused by the disappearance of the journalist Georgiy Gongadze.

The site “Maidan” has been initially created by Georgiy Gongadze's friends, journalists, programmers and the activists of "tents protest action" that had been held at central maidan ("the Square" in Ukrainian) of Ukrainian's capital city Kyiv. “Maidan” was an official information site of "Ukraine without Kuchma" protest action.

At that time the Ukrainian officials had tried to obstruct the free information flow of other Ukrainian internet publications. That helped the decision to move the site “Maidan” to a server outside of Ukraine. In cases of other sites downtime, information about the protests was distributed exclusively by “Maidan” which made it impossible for authorities to hide the facts about the protests completely.

When the protests faded out, “Maidan” had evolved into a new quality becoming a kind of collective mind that gathers information, produces and discusses new political and civil ideas as well as provides the feedback from the politicians.

At present “Maidan” has live exclusive news feed, a library, the most popular discussion forums in Ukraine devoted to the politics, the legislation and the human rights, religion, culture, Ukrainian language, etc.