On 2 October 1990 the students announced a hunger strike and occupied Kyiv's October Revolution Square (now named Maidan Nezalezhnosti [Independence Square]).[4][5] They had decided against using the originally intended protest site Mariinskyi Park since that place was filled with Militsiya (the Soviet police force).[4][5] The day had started with a rally which was attended by 100,000 people and initiated by the People's Movement of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Republican Party, and other smaller patriotic organisations.[4] During the protest various other marches, whose participants numbered in the tens of thousands, were held in solidarity with the students.[10] Also workers' organisations rallied to the cause by calling for nationwide strikes.[10] During the protest, prominent cultural figures, opposition politicians and Soviet dissidents visited the students to show their support.[10] On one of the first days of protests, chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR Leonid Kravchuk visited the protestors.[11]
On the first day of the protest, only a few dozen students from Kyiv, Lviv, Dneprodzerzhinsk (now Kamianske), Ivano-Frankivsk, and several other cities gathered at the square. In a few days, there were several hundreds of them, along with around tens of thousands of Ukrainians who supported them.[12] The students set up shelter-half tents on the square.[13] The protest acquired its name from the setup of the tents on the granite of the square.[13] Of all protesters, about 200 were on hunger strike (all of them survived their action).[11][10] Eventually another camp was set up in front of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR.[10] During the protest and because deputies had sided with the students,[10] student Oles Doniy from the T. H. Shevchenko Kyiv State University (now Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv) stated the students' demands in a speech to the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament).[12][10]
On 17 October 1990, Masol was forced to resign and was replaced by Vitold Fokin.[8] The four other student demands were not initially met.[4] But soon military conscription was to be limited to the territory of Ukraine; the planned New Union Treaty was not to be taken into consideration and multi-party elections were set to be held in the 1994 Ukrainian parliamentary election.[14]
The Revolution on Granite is viewed as the first major political protest centred on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the others being the 2004 Orange Revolution, and the 2013–14 Euromaidan.[9][13][14][15] These protest largely mimicked the style of protest of the Revolution on Granite: occupation of a large square and building a stage there where artists would perform.[10]
