The UCU faculty includes internationally recognised scholars, some of whom did hard time in the Gulag during the Soviet period. And thus it was no surprise to find the university's founding rector and current president, Bishop Gudziak, and many of the faculty colleagues he had recruited in the intellectual and spiritual leadership of the Maidan movement. That movement, in turn, may represent the beginning of a new moment in the history of Eastern Christianity's relationship with state power — a moment that could be crucial for the future of free societies in Eastern Europe.

Orthodoxy, and especially Russian Orthodoxy, has typically imagined the relationship of spiritual and political power in terms of a church-state dyad, which often led to situations in which the Russian Orthodox Church became a department of the Russian state. That pattern reached a nadir of corruption in the Cold War. After the German invasion of June 1941, Stalin recruited Russian Orthodoxy, which he had previously persecuted, into his campaign to rebrand the death-struggle with Hitler, his former partner, as the "Great Patriotic War". After the Second World War, the Russian Orthodox Church leadership became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soviet state security services, its leaders often being senior KGB officers. These were obviously not the circumstances in which Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union could evolve a more pluralistic theory of religious and political power that would encompass civil society as well as the Church and the state, and that would imagine the Church as one of the intellectual and moral tutors of civil society.

As heir to both Latin-rite Catholic thought as well as Byzantine liturgy, spirituality, and Church polity, however, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has always taken civil society seriously. Thus at UCU, Catholic social thought is explored with an emphasis on the relationship of the Church to civil society, and only secondarily to state power. Now, as the three competing Orthodox jurisdictions in Ukraine try to navigate through a post-authoritarian situation created by a civil society revolution that proved itself stronger than state power, a serious conversation about an evolved Orthodox theory of Orthodoxy and public life can be imagined. That turn towards a different future is already being embodied by the support given to the Maidan movement by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kievan Patriarchate, and by the modest beginnings of ecumenical cooperation visible on Independence Square in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Ancient grievances and deeply-set patterns of thought are not, of course, easy to supplant. But if Russian Orthodoxy is ever to move beyond the supine position that an exasperated Vatican official once described for me in striking terms —"They only know how to be chaplain to the Tsar, whoever he is" — the impetus may just come from Kiev. And there would be a certain sense of the historically apposite in any such development, for Christianity among the eastern Slavs was born in what is now Ukraine. Over the past few months, the first glimmers of an ecumenical dialogue on Church and civil society could be seen amid the tempest of Maidan. If that conversation develops, and eventually yields a form of Orthodoxy that is disentangled from its historic subordination to state power, then the Maidan movement could have a world-historical importance far beyond the borders of the borderlands.

The meaning of the Ukrainian revolution extends beyond Eastern Europe, however. Americans drifting back into isolationist habits of mind, and Europeans who view the EU as a corruption-riddled gravy train, have been confronted with a sight not easy to imagine in the comfortable capitals of the West. As Kiev-Mohyla Academy scholar Mychailo Wynnyckyj put it in a blog-post in late March:

Over multiple weeks in sub-zero temperatures, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in Kyiv [Kiev] and other cities demonstrated amazing levels of civic activism, restraint, self-organisation, and spontaneous cooperation while demonstrating their individual and collective displeasure with their ruler . . . The changes that have occurred . . . have come at enormous cost. Over one hundred civilians have been killed and many more seriously injured as a result of violence (including sniper fire) in the centre of Kyiv. One month after the worst violence . . . fresh flowers are still brought to the barricades and to the spots where the Heaven's Hundred lost their lives. No one has forgotten the dead . . .