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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
For years, school textbooks imposed an image of a helpless nation that for centuries languished waiting for a strong hetman's hand or a charismatic leader on a white horse. Yet actual history shows something quite different: when one empire after another destroyed formal state institutions, a proven national mechanism kicked in — pooling money into a common fund, forming a circle, and creating a parallel reality.
The traditional focus exclusively on leaders and heroes distorts our understanding of historical processes and conceals the multiple mechanisms of social transformation. Meanwhile, it was networks of like-minded people that formed an alternative environment, especially during periods without their own national state and stable institutions.
In the magazine "Tyzhden" they tried to shift the emphasis from figures to unions of artists, circles of intellectuals, associations of patrons, and guilds of entrepreneurs that built civil society at various times in Ukrainian history.
The Middle Ages and early modern period, organized by estates and confessions
In Kievan Rus', the institution of "direct democracy" was the veche — an organ of popular self-government of free townspeople. The first chronicle mention of a veche is recorded under the year 997 and concerns Bilhorod on the right bank of the Irpin River (today's Bilohorodka in the Kyiv region). The Kyiv veche repeatedly deposed princes, monitored compliance with the social contract, and ensured a balance of power. The rural community is also documented, notably in the "Rus' Justice" (Rus'ka Pravda), under the name verva.
Craftsmen did not settle randomly but concentrated in "professional quarters" by trade: in Kyiv, for example, Honchari and Kozhum'yaky. Merchants also had shared rules of interaction to avoid competition and pooled resources to hire protection. The druzhynnyky had their own "corporation," forming a brotherhood with its own military culture. In certain periods (especially in the Galicia–Volhynia Principality) the boyar council played a significant role.
In the end, even princes, despite internecine conflicts, could unite for common resistance. As happened, for example, at the Council of Liubech in the year 1097, which Volodymyr Monomakh initiated to build a common strategy of defense against the Polovtsians.
Monastic communities held a special place in medieval history, in the Ukrainian case above all the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra as an institution with the longest continuous continuity.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Тисячоліття горизонтальних зв'язків: чому українські спільноти важать більше за культ вождів". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: argumentua.com.
