ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how identity could be affected by its everyday performance and reproduction. It examines language attitudes, political activism and perception of the other to show how their change affects the self-perception of Ukrainians at the daily and then national level. The chapter looks at the Orange Revolution as a crucial moment of identity construction in post-independence Ukraine. It proposes it as a new moment of consciousness of being Ukrainian and an historical moment in the creation, identification or invention of identity markers. Most pre-2004 reports on political activism in Ukraine, and in general in the post-socialist region, claimed a low level of civic and political activism in the region. The chapter illustrates that the way identity is reproduced and renegotiated at the everyday level. It also illustrates to what extent identity construction originated in people self perception can eventually influence mass-scale perceptions of identity at the regional or national level.
