House of Trade Unions

On the night of 18 February 2014 the clock tower on Kyiv’s central square was on fire. The House of Trade Unions — eight storeys of late-Soviet concrete facing Maidan Nezalezhnosti — had spent that winter as the headquarters of the Euromaidan protest — kitchen, field hospital, press centre. When police moved to clear the square, flames tore through it and two men died inside. The gutted shell stood over the Maidan for four years before its 2018 reconstruction.

The restored front faces the square again, and two floors inside now hold the exhibition centre of the Museum of the Revolution of Dignity. For some it’s an office block in the centre of the capital; for others it’s where, on a February night, people carried the wounded down stairwells as the floors gave way.

Built to face a crowd

The House of Trade Unions went up between 1975 and 1980, to a design by Oleksandr Malynovskyi and Oleksandr Komarovskyi — eight storeys and nearly 14,000 square metres of restrained Soviet monumentalism. It stood on what was then October Revolution Square, soon to be renamed Maidan Nezalezhnosti, and housed the country’s central trade-union apparatus. But the address did the talking: on the main square beside Khreshchatyk, it was always a landmark and a gathering point. During the Orange Revolution of 2004 it had already served as a protest headquarters, so its role in 2013–2014 read less as accident than sequel.

Headquarters of a revolution

When crowds filled the Maidan again in autumn 2013, the building turned from office block into the rear base of the protest almost overnight. From early December it housed the National Resistance Headquarters, and from then until February it barely slept. A kitchen fed thousands in the cold; the main medical point took in the injured; there were stores of food and warm clothing, a coordination centre and a press centre for the world’s journalists. Fighters of the Maidan Self-Defence bedded down on the upper floors.

The night of 18–19 February

The building’s hardest hours came on the night of 18–19 February 2014. As security forces pushed to clear the square, fire broke out while people, some of them wounded, were still inside. It spread fast: the floors between the fourth and fifth collapsed, and the blaze was not fully out until 06:55 on 20 February. Rescuers brought 41 people to safety, some carried across to St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery nearby. Two men are known to have died inside — Volodymyr Topiy, 58, and Oleksandr Klitynskyi, 25, both of whom had stayed to help others out. A parliamentary commission later concluded that the order to storm the building came from the leadership of the SBU, Ukraine’s security service — the finding of the investigation, not a closed case.

From black ruin to reopening

For years the building stood charred and empty, its blackened facade a monument in itself. One detail people often get wrong: the banner reading ‘Freedom is our religion’ that many tie to the building went up after the fire, not during the protest — draped over the ruined front around 2016–2017, when Kyiv hosted the Eurovision Song Contest, and taken down in early 2018. A private investor rebuilt it to a design by the architect Artem Bilyk, and the Soviet hammer and sickle came off the facade. The restored front was unveiled on 30 May 2018, and that November two floors opened as the exhibition centre of the Museum of the Revolution of Dignity. The rest is now offices and co-working space — check what’s open before a visit.

The clock on the tower

The clock is the building’s signature. It sits on a tower about 24 metres tall, its four faces — each roughly 4.3 by 7.2 metres — raised some 57 metres above the square and once lit by around 5,000 lamps. It showed the date and temperature as well as the time, and for years played the tune of How Can I Not Love You, My Kyiv. The hardware has moved on since — lamp clock to LED to multimedia screen — but the silhouette, tower over forecourt, is what fixed the building in the country’s memory of the Maidan.

Getting there, and what's nearby

You won’t lose it. The House of Trade Unions stands directly on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, and the metro station of the same name, on the blue line, surfaces almost at its foot, linked underground to Khreshchatyk on the red line. On weekends, when Khreshchatyk and part of the square close to traffic, take the metro. Come with a walk in mind rather than one stop: the square opens out in front with the Independence Monument on its tall column; up Instytutska lies the memory of the Heavenly Hundred, where many protesters were killed. St Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral and Sofiyska Square are a short walk on.