“When I saw a ballet on TV in August of 1991 I thought that something went wrong. Because in that period of the day actually there were news or whatever else but not a ballet! And than these four guys came on stage and started speaking that there was a kind of rebellion or some sort of revolution and changing power. And I saw that we are on a refresh of a new era! So things will change. But how and what will happen, I had no idea. I think it was the first time that I started thinking that things might change. But about what would happen we were afraid. All the soviet society I’ve learnd in school and than in post soviet, early Ukrainian… I can tell you: It is still much soviet in formal education!  So we all knew we have another government, we have all the secretaries and all this stuff. And they are to decide on our problems. And at that moment I saw the ballet and these four guys I saw that maybe it could change the way of decision-making. And of course we were afraid, because we had no idea what will happen!”

Andrii Chernousov, NGO Kharkiv Institute for Socail Researches, Ukraine

At a conference in Thessaloniki in October 2015, we asked participants from Eastern and South-eastern Europe about their “Transition Moment”. Could they tell us a little story of a moment, when they realised that something was changing fundamentally in the early 90s.