Serhiy Nigoyan — First victim of the Ukrainian revolution

A small stone tablet on a grassy bank in Hrushevskoho Street in Kyiv city centre marks the spot where police shot dead the first victim of the largest "colour revolution" of the 21st century — the Euromaidan. 

Serhiy Nigoyan’s name is hardly known outside Ukraine, but the 20-year-old is also celebrated in a mural in Kyiv and in Ukrainian songs, while Ukrainian leaders used to lay flowers at the Hrushevskoho Street memorial on the anniversary of his killing on 20 January 2014. 

Two other protesters were also shot dead later the same day, and 108 demonstrators were killed in total before the pro-Russian regime fell on 22 February 2014. They are known as the “Heavenly Hundred” by Ukrainians, even if that number now looks small compared to the hundreds of thousands of people killed by Russia’s subsequent full-scale invasion. 

Meanwhile, the Euromaidan was just the end of a decade-long fight for freedom inside Ukraine, which began with the 2004 Orange Revolution. 

Ukraine was also part of a wider wave of non-violent protests which toppled corrupt and authoritarian regimes in former communist countries in the past 25 years, alongside Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Kyrgyzstan (2005), Moldova (2009), and Armenia (2018).

And the European events were echoed by the Arab Spring on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, where regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria also fell after initially non-violent uprisings starting in 2010. 

There are, of course, many little-known or forgotten victims. 

In Ukraine, for instance, the rapes of two ordinary women by regime-linked thugs in separate incidents in 2012 and 2013 — Iryna Krashkova and Oksana Makar (who was also murdered) — led to mass protests, which acted as a precursor to the 2014 climax.

In Tunisia, the self-immolation in 2010 of a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in Sidi Bouzid, unable to bear local corruption, was a catalyst for wider outrage. 

"To be a hero, you have to fight, not only to suffer” 

Names such as Krashkova, Makar, and Bouazizi are also important to remember because they show that the colour revolutions and Arab springs had specific, local causes, linked to abuse of basic human rights, instead of being geopolitical chess moves orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies — as the dictators have tried to claim. 

But for one of those Ukrainians who stood in the freezing winter cold of the Euromaidan in 2014, Nobel Peace Prize winner and human-rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk: “To be a hero, you have to fight, not only to suffer”. 

And for Matviichuk, Nigoyan, the first of the Heavenly Hundred, also embodies the story of a broader fight for basic values, while giving the lie to the Russian narrative of a geopolitical “putsch”. 

“Serhiy Nigoyan was Ukrainian, but it’s important to know that he came from an Armenian family, and he went to the maidan out of simple solidarity for his friends, because of the violence being used by riot police to try to disperse us,” Matviichuk says. 

And his symbolic death gave an insight into how several of the other revolutions unfolded — starting with peaceful protests, which prompted escalating regime violence, and sometimes ended in war. 

“The Syria war started with children’s graffiti,” Matviichuk says. The police in Dara’a in southern Syria arrested and brutalised a small group of teenage boys on 22 February 2011, who had written anti-regime graffiti on a high-school wall. 

The police attacked and killed older relatives who protested at the boys’ mistreatment, then they killed people at the funerals of the protesters, prompting even wider anger, and by April the Syrian army laid siege to Dara’a, killing 244 locals and starting a civil war which lasted until December 2024, when Syrian president Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia.

“There are new victims and new heroes almost every day, most of whom are completely unknown, even to human-rights organisations”

Turning back to Europe, Belarus and Russia stand out as two former Soviet states who still remain in the grip of Soviet-type dictatorships in 2025. 

But for Matviichuk, they should both be added to the list of colour-revolution states, even if protesters there have failed to bring about change — so far. 

Belarus also saw mass protests against bogus elections, first in Minsk in 2006, then on a national scale in 2020, leading to a violent crackdown after which 1,190 political prisoners remain in jail today. “Many people in Belarus and in Russia are still quietly fighting for the same values [as the Euromaidan],” Matviichuk says. 

“There are new victims and new heroes almost every day, most of whom are completely unknown, even to human-rights organisations”, she adds. 

One of the most recent martyrs was a Russian called Pavel Kushnir, a 39-year-old pianist, who died after a hunger strike in prison on 27 July 2024 in Birobidzhan, in Russia’s far east, after protesting against the Ukraine war. Russia also has some 1,500 political prisoners. 

“Even the human rights defenders didn’t know that Kushnir existed until after he had died. So he received no help. He died all alone. And there are many others like him both in Russia and in Belarus today,” Matviichuk warns. 

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