Reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 were first
controlled by the state party; but with the expansion of
publicity (“glasnost”) there remained even less people who could
find any harmony in relations between the State and society.
Communist ideology lost its authority, the society was quickly
politicized. These processes immediately found political
response in Ukraine. There began the actions of protest against
closing the schools with education in Ukrainian, against forcing
out the national language from the sphere of state management,
book-publishing and mass media. In November 1988, the first mass
meeting took place in Kyiv which was devoted to the problems of
ecology, where the republic’s leaders were blamed for concealing
information about the after-effects of the Chernobyl
catastrophe. In 1989, the political strikes burst out in Donbas,
and the People’s Movement of Ukraine appeared in Kyiv. In the
spring of 1989, the first free elections (after 1917) were held
in the USSR which lead to the app