ARE YOU ALIVE, BROTHER?

Early on the morning of December 11, with the temperature down to nine degrees Fahrenheit, troops surrounded Maidan and tried to clear its periphery, though not its center. Protesters gathered to hold the square.

“That was the point of no return for me,” Vakhtang told me. “We all thought we could sleep that night—we’d been up for days. I went home and had some vodka, worked on a philosophy article, and went to bed. Then, just as I was falling asleep, a friend called and told me to turn on the TV. I saw that Berkut was trying to clear Maidan.... I was back there by one-thirty. People were unarmed, holding Berkut back with their bodies. Some people had their ribs broken by the pressure. At first there were only about three thousand people—up to Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street. And then suddenly there were twenty thousand people there. Taxis brought people to Maidan for free and the churches rang their bells, summoning everyone to Maidan. I understood that there would be a violent confrontation.”

“When we heard about the first clearing of Maidan—someone called—we ran down right away,” said Lena Grozovska, a calm, pleasant woman I knew from the Kiev art scene. “On the street we met people who told us to turn back. There were so many Berkut, but there were also so many others—hipsters, bon vivants, designers, all kinds of people you’d never have expected, locking arms and blocking Berkut. Berkut looked like black caviar, with their helmets. When you looked into their eyes you saw such hate—they were such frightening people. A horde.” Euromaidan protesters often called their enemies—first Berkut, then Russia—a “horde,” an oblique reference to the Mongol invaders who sacked Kiev in the thirteenth century.

I spent most of that night watching a live feed from the helmet camera of Mustafa Nayyem, the journalist who’d helped organize the first protests on Maidan.

In the end, the riot police were ordered not to attack. They cleared the barricades around the square, but the protesters rebuilt them the next day, passing sandbags full of snow along a human chain. “Now our greatest fear is cops with hair dryers,” my friend Sasha R. joked.

The police tried to raid occupied City Hall, but the protesters held them off with hoses, firecrackers, and smoke bombs, coating the steps of the building with ice and oil. Catherine Ashton, vice president of the European Commission, made a stern statement criticizing the police raid. Yanukovych kept hedging, promising a “nationwide dialogue” and making moves to punish some of those supposedly responsible for the violence on November 30. Then Putin offered to buy $15 billion of Ukrainian debt and provide a large discount on Russian gas. He called it “an act of brotherly love,” insisting that it had nothing to do with Maidan. There was no chance that the EU would match Russia’s offer.

IN THE BEGINNING, most of the protesters on Maidan had rejected political slogans or parties, preferring nonpartisan expressions of patriotism. After the disappointments of the Orange Revolution and the depredations of the Yanukovych administration, Ukrainians had little trust in politicians. This time they wanted power to remain in the hands of the people.

But somebody would have to run the country after Yanukovych was gone. Hoping to anoint themselves as potential replacements, three politicians emerged as “opposition leaders,” appearing regularly at rallies and meeting with foreign emissaries: Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a seasoned politician and ally of Yulia Tymoshenko; Vitaly Klitschko, a boxer turned liberal politician; and, alarmingly, Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the radical nationalist party Svoboda.

Svoboda, whose name means “freedom,” began as the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU) in the early 1990s. It had its roots in the western Ukrainian ultranationalist ideology of the interwar period and World War II, represented most prominently by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The SNPU used a modified Wolf’s Hook symbol, claiming that it stood for the initials of the phrase “Idea of the Nation.” (The Wolf’s Hook looks like an N with a vertical stroke through its center, and also like a truncated swastika; the Nazis used it, and it is popular among European radical right groups.) The SNPU was known for forming paramilitary groups and assaulting Communists and other enemies. Though the SNPU had very little popular support, Oleh Tyahnybok, its most charismatic member, was elected to the Ukrainian parliament in 1998.

In 2004 Tyahnybok attempted to bring the SNPU into the mainstream. The SNPU was renamed Svoboda, the Wolf’s Hook replaced by a logo evoking the traditional Ukrainian trident. In that same year, however, Tyahnybok was expelled from President Yushchenko’s parliamentary group for making a speech celebrating the Ukrainian Insurgent Army for fighting the Russians, Germans, Jews, “and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state,” and calling on Ukrainian youth to fight the “Russian-Jewish mafia” that was supposedly ruling Ukraine. The next year Tyahnybok signed a letter petitioning President Yushchenko “to stop the criminal activity of organized Jewry” that was supposedly trying to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty. Nevertheless, Svoboda won increasing support in western Ukraine over the next years, in part thanks to a deal Yulia Tymoshenko struck for Russian gas, and her perceived “friendship with the ‘Russian tsars’ Medvedev and Putin,” as Tyahnybok put it. In 2012 Svoboda won significant gains in parliament, thanks to economic anxiety and anger over the Yanukovych administration’s rampant corruption and pro-Russian leanings.

So was Right Sector, a coalition of nationalist groups that got its name on the night of November 24, when a speaker onstage tried to prevent a police attack from the right side of Maidan by urging the “nationalist boys” to “hold down” the “right sector.” Right Sector was relatively diverse, including neo-Nazi groups as well as more moderate nationalists who rejected xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism, though they were still homophobic, sexist, and antileftist. (Ultranationalists, who rejected the idea of EU membership, attacked LGBT, feminist, and leftist protesters during the early days of Maidan.) Unlike Svoboda, which pushed for the exclusive use of Ukrainian in official settings, Right Sector had many Russian-speaking members.

Despite their tiny numbers—from several dozen, at the beginning of Maidan, to about five hundred at its conclusion—Right Sector members played a key role in Maidan and its aftermath. One Right Sector group, Tryzub, or “Trident,” was a radical nationalist scout group whose emphasis on “military sports” left them exceptionally well prepared for a physical confrontation with law enforcement. The leader of Tryzub and then of Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, became a sort of opposition-opposition leader, a gadfly to the Yatsenyuk-Klitschko-Tyahnybok trifecta.

The ultranationalist presence on Maidan provided ready fuel for Russian claims that Maidan protesters were fascists eager to persecute Ukraine’s Russian speakers. Western politicians, on the other hand, were overjoyed to see Ukrainians revolting against Russian influence; they had little trouble suppressing concerns about extreme nationalism. Victoria Nuland, a U.S.

Maidan certainly wasn’t a fascist movement, but the wide-spread use of old Ukrainian nationalist symbols, chants, and heroes such as Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, was disconcerting. (The Russians revived the term Banderite, which the Soviets had used as a slur against Ukrainian nationalists.) When two hundred thousand people on Maidan shouted “Glory to heroes! Glory to Ukraine!” I felt uneasy. The anxiety became acute when the occasional person shouted “Death to enemies!” as if he thought he was taking part in a bloodier kind of revolution. (One student activist told me that she and her fellow students hated this cry, countering it with chants like “Freedom for the innocent.”) Equally disconcerting, the Maidaners started calling their movement “the Birth of a Nation.”

I was surprised at how many of my friends and acquaintances defended Svoboda and Right Sector. Laima Geidar, a Russian-speaking lesbian feminist activist, the last person you’d expect to make excuses for Svoboda, later told me, “Even though they’re homophobes and fascists and racists and often very unpleasant in their values, Svoboda did some good work and impressed a lot of people.”

Vakhtang told me that my anxieties about ultranationalism on Maidan were misplaced. “For Yanukovych,” he said, “power was the same as violence. That was the greatest weakness of his administration. It’s not true, as some people say, that the base ideology of Maidan was far right—it was essentially liberal, even if it wasn’t consciously liberal.

Mitya, my Russian-Jewish clarinet player friend, insisted that Maidan was not anti-Semitic, at least not particularly, no more than the rest of Ukraine. He told me that Right Sector had organized protection for Kiev’s synagogues and that Ukraine’s main rabbis had supported the protests. One Right Sector member was an Orthodox Jew from Dnipropetrovsk. Mitya embraced the ironic label “Yid-Banderite,” whose humor derived from the fact that Bandera was no friend of the Jews. He believed that chants like “Glory to heroes” had become new when they were resurrected; they stood for something different now, something he was glad to defend.

Mitya’s Yiddish teacher, Tanya Batanova, had been writing a dissertation about the Jewish party in the 1918 Ukrainian government, during the brief moment when Yiddish was an official language of Ukraine. Tanya stopped working on her dissertation when Maidan started. As Mitya put it, “The theme of her dissertation became the theme of her life.” Tanya wasn’t Jewish; she’d learned Yiddish because she liked languages and believed that Yiddish was important for Ukrainian history. “I’m a little idealistic—a bit of a nationalist,” she told me, “but I believe that it’s good to be able to speak to someone in their own language.”

The musicians in Mitya’s Pushkin Klezmer Band were all from southern or eastern Ukraine and spoke Russian. When Maidan started, they had been fairly pro-Russian in their political views. The first time Mitya came to rehearsal wearing a blue and gold Ukraine ribbon, they laughed at him, saying that the Maidan demonstrators were paid (the standard line on Russian television) and that Mitya was an idiot. Though they refused to play on Maidan, he persuaded them to learn a Ukrainian song, as well as the Yiddish revolutionary song “Daloy Politsey,” which has lyrics like:

Hey, hey, down with the police!

Down with the Russian ruling class!

Brothers and sisters, all gather round

Together we are strong enough

To bring this tsar down!

Cossacks and gendarmes,

Get down off your horses!

The Russian tsar is already dead and buried!

The band went to play a show in Moscow, where people kept asking if the “Kiev fascists” assaulted them when they heard them speaking Russian. Mitya’s bandmates started arguing with the audience members; they couldn’t believe that these Russians were so brainwashed by government propaganda. After that experience, the whole band started wearing Ukrainian ribbons.

Tanya translated “Daloy Politsey” into Ukrainian and sang it with Mitya on Maidan, with Svoboda members serving as security guards for the stage. Then Mitya and Seryozha the Gypsy played some klezmer songs together. A Ukrainian and a Jew and a Rom together on the main stage, the crowd applauding—this couldn’t be a fascist revolution. I allowed myself to be reassured.

THE GOVERNMENT SET UP an anti-Maidan camp with paid protesters, and acts of violence against Maidan activists proliferated. An anticorruption activist was shot in Kiev, his car set on fire. On December 25 Tetiana Chornovol, a well-known investigative journalist, was chased down in her car, beaten, and left for dead. Her dashcam video was soon online. It was terrifying to watch the road as she tried to outrace her pursuers, and as she was cornered on the dark roadside. You couldn’t see her, only hear her gasping; the video ended before the beatings started.

On January 16, after yet another huge protest, the Yanukovych administration passed laws making it illegal to blockade government buildings, wear masks or helmets, install tents and stages without permission, or slander government officials. Suddenly everyone on Maidan was a criminal. These “dictatorship laws” prompted yet another enormous protest, which included an appearance by Tetiana Chornovol, her face still battered.

“After Yanukovych passed the dictatorship laws, we knew that even if he cleared Maidan, there would be repressions, arrests, disappearances—we had no choice but to get him out,” Tanya Batanova told me.

Full-blown riots erupted outside the government buildings on Hrushevsky Street, near Maidan. Two protesters were shot dead—it was unclear by whom. The first, Serhiy Nigoyan, was a twenty-year-old Armenian-Ukrainian from a village south of Dnipropetrovsk. With his thick black beard, long face, and fine features, he looked like he’d stepped out of an Orthodox icon. Thousands of people wept over his photo and over a YouTube clip of him reading a Taras Shevchenko poem. The second person shot was Belarusian. The fact that the first casualties were not full-blooded Ukrainians was taken as proof of the revolution’s ability to transcend ethnicity or nationality.

Activists who went to hospitals for treatment started vanishing. Two kidnapped activists, Igor Lutsenko and Yury Verbitsky, were found in the woods a day after their disappearance. Verbitsky, a seismologist and mountain climber who had just completed a PhD in physics, had frozen to death after being tortured. I spent a long time looking at his picture; he had a kind, bearded face. The revolution had its first clutch of martyrs.

PartKom, a gallery owned by Lena Grozovska and her husband, where I’d often hung out with musician friends, turned into an underground infirmary. Alik started carrying a guidebook on wartime field surgery—he was following in his grandmother’s footsteps, sort of. At one point he stitched up a nationalist with a swastika tattoo on his back.

“You know I’m a Jew, brother?” he asked his patient.

“Oh, I don’t hate Jews,” the wounded man replied. “Only niggers.”

Alik’s war surgeon grandmother wouldn’t have been impressed by Maidan’s gender politics, either. The front line was a world of men, with women appearing only occasionally, to help the wounded or offer food or drink. When fighting started, women were asked to leave or simply hustled off, even if they were journalists. One sign on Maidan announced, “Men are needed for the night guard on the barricades. Women are needed to keep watch by the mobilization tent, to keep order, to make tea and food for the guards and to spread information, leaflets and perform other mobilization work.” Another sign put it less politely: “Dear women! If you notice any mess, tidy it up. It will be nice for the revolutionaries.”

Some of the Maidan protesters had formed sotni—literally, “hundreds”—and these units had combined to form Maidan’s self-defense force. In medieval times, Kiev’s population had been divided into sotni (singular: sotnya) that provided a basis for raising a militia, collecting taxes, and completing public works. But Maidan’s sotni were more like the Cossack squadrons, also called sotni, which survived until the Russian Revolution.

In many ways, Maidan looked like a premodern rebellion, the past rising up to conquer the unhappy present. People built a wooden catapult meant to hurl flames at the police, and fought in suits of armor that made them look like medieval knights. But these technologies were more romantic than effective. The catapult didn’t work, and one young rail worker who reenacted medieval battles in his free time arrived at Maidan in a suit of armor, only to be shot dead by a sniper.

Other parts of Maidan resembled a postindustrial dystopia. Protesters piled tires into barricades many feet high; these were later burned, producing clouds of thick, stinking smoke, so the police couldn’t see what was going on. The square was guarded by a ring of fire. Eventually the tire-barricades were reduced to tangles of singed wire.

FROM THE FIRST WEEKS of Maidan, it had been clear that not all the protesters were content with the peaceful methods of the Orange Revolution. On the night of November 29, Right Sector members in masks were spotted carrying truncheons, ready for a fight. The next day they organized a training on how to counter police attacks using impromptu weapons; Dmytro Yarosh later said that this was when Right Sector was truly born. Nationalist groups on social networks shared information on how to make your own arms and armor.

On December 1, on Bankova Street, just above Maidan, a group of protesters commandeered a bulldozer and tried to pull down the fence around the Presidential Administration building, though some prominent figures, including MP Petro Poroshenko, the “Chocolate King” who had once sparred with Yulia Tymoshenko, tried to stop them. Some protesters threw bricks, and masked men threw Molotov cocktails; police responded with stun grenades and smoke bombs. That night a group of radical nationalist protesters used sticks, stones, and ladders to attack Berkut officers who were guarding the Lenin statue at the end of Taras Shevchenko Boulevard. The officers responded with tear gas and flash grenades. The protesters managed to push Berkut back, but two officers were left behind and beaten by the mob.

Opposition leaders were eager to maintain Maidan’s reputation as a purely nonviolent movement that deserved the wholehearted support of the West. They disavowed the violent protesters, calling them provocateurs: agents of Russia or of the Yanukovych administration, trying to discredit the demonstrations. Maidan’s “self-defense force” patrolled the square all night, making sure there weren’t any drunk people or drugs, hoping to head off any future “provocations.” (One of the most obvious marks of Maidan’s extraordinary nature was the absence of intoxicants.) But in a grassroots protest movement that was largely spontaneous, it’s hard to understand how opposition spokespeople could know that violent protesters weren’t authentic; they never presented any evidence that the masked men with Molotov cocktails were paid, for example.

Right Sector had made little effort to conceal its fondness for physical confrontation. Dmytro Yarosh’s paramilitary nationalist youth group, Tryzub, published an article online entitled “Confessions of a Provocateur,” saying, “On December 1 we struck first. And what happened next? The acts of the real provocateurs”—presumably the Yanukovych administration—“acted as a catalyst for the psychology of victims, and they started calling us ‘provocateurs.’” This article was soon removed, but the next day the website published another called “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the ‘Provocateurs’!,” expressing similar sentiments without admitting to any specific crimes.

Still, the EU and the United States continued to refer to Maidan as an entirely nonviolent movement. It was funny, with memories of Occupy Wall Street still fresh, to imagine what the United States would have done if protesters had occupied New York’s City Hall, thrown Molotov cocktails at police, and made a barricaded tent city in Times Square. There was a measure of truth in the Russian government’s accusations of Western hypocrisy.

Russian official media seized on every instance of violence on the part of the protesters, portraying Maidan as a CIA-sponsored coup against a legitimate government. It was true that Yanukovych had been elected fairly, even if he was a criminal and his police had attacked peaceful protesters without provocation. Russian accusations of American involvement gained momentum after someone (probably Russia) leaked a phone conversation between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador to Ukraine, in which they discussed how power should be distributed after Maidan. Nuland didn’t want Klitschko in the government, because of his lack of experience, or Tyahnybok, presumably because of his fascist politics. She wanted Yatsenyuk, the experienced politician. One of Putin’s advisers promptly told the Ukrainian press that the United States was spending $20 million a week on Ukrainian opposition groups and on arming and training “rebels.”

ON JANUARY 22 the police were authorized to use water cannons, though Prime Minister Azarov promised that Berkut was not permitted to use live ammunition. By now protesters tossed Molotov cocktails freely, repurposing Kiev’s empty vodka and beer bottles for revolution. Women formed lines, pulling up cobblestones and passing them along to be thrown at the enemy. Klitschko announced that the protesters would attack if their demands weren’t met within twenty-four hours. The far-right Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense called on all Ukrainians with guns to defend Maidan.

At first only extremists had been willing to resort to force; now, outraged at the government’s willingness to torture or kill unarmed citizens, many people were coming around to the idea of armed resistance. The uncompromising men of Right Sector began to look like heroes rather than provocateurs.

Sasha, my Russian FrontAIDS activist friend, had moved to Kiev, where she was living with her Ukrainian boyfriend. In the years since I’d first met her in 2006, many of her fellow Russian activists had died of AIDS-related illnesses or overdoses, often because of Russia’s refusal to provide decent medical care. Sasha was furiously in favor of Maidan, working at one of the first aid points. After the police turned violent, she wrote on Facebook,

Rights are not given, but taken. Sometimes roughly. The government has a monopoly, a mandate on the use of violence. As citizens, we delegated that right to the government. But not for use against its own citizens. So we’re retaking the right to self-defense from the government, with cobblestones in hand.

When I was undergoing an NGO audit in Russia, answering endless questions about our protest, as I came out of the Ministry of Justice I cried, wrapping my arms around an ancient oak tree near the park where I grew up, where I went swimming in the Neva River with my parents when I was a child. Because it’s my land, my city, and it’s under occupation, and I can’t do anything about it. I spent half my childhood with my grandma in Chernigiv [in Ukraine]. Here I can do something. And I will.

Pasha Skala described seeing a man plant himself in front of Berkut with a shovel and say, “I have nothing but this shovel, but I will use it to protect my family.” People had started carrying baseball bats as a matter of routine. A friend told me about seeing a man at a supermarket carrying a pitchfork. (In the nineteenth century, Galician peasants were notorious for stabbing their Polish landlords with pitchforks.) Others announced their willingness to die for the cause. One protester’s plywood shield bore the message, MOTHER I WILL DIE FOR YOU BUT I WILL NOT GIVE UP IN SHAME HERE. FOR OUR UKRAINE AND FOR OUR FOREFATHERS I WILL NOT LEAVE MAIDAN WITHOUT VICTORY. His full name and phone number followed, so that his message would make it back to his mother even if he didn’t.

In other cities, especially in western Ukraine, protesters were seizing control of government buildings, often facing little or no resistance, and demanding that Yanukovych-appointed officials resign. Maidan was a nationwide movement, with more than two million Ukrainians participating in protests.

Yanukovych offered a compromise: Yatsenyuk would be prime minister, Klitschko would be vice prime minister in charge of humanitarian affairs, and there would be an amnesty for protesters who left occupied buildings. But the crowds on Maidan were vehemently opposed to any compromise, and Yatsenyuk didn’t accept. Prime Minister Azarov resigned, and Yanukovych’s Party of Regions revoked most of the antiprotest laws, but this wasn’t enough. Yanukovych went on sick leave.

Dmytro Bulatov, a leading Maidan organizer, was found badly beaten, soaked in blood, with an ear cut off and his hands pierced by nails, as if he’d been crucified. Missing for eight days, he’d been left to freeze to death in the forest outside Kiev. The police suggested, astoundingly, that he had faked the whole thing. They tried to arrest him in the hospital but were stopped by protesters.

On February 18 there was another huge protest, this time in favor of restoring the constitution to its pre-Yanukovych form. It became a pitched battle.

“We were called to go to the Parliament,” Vakhtang said. “I was very opposed—I thought the Maidan camp was established, and moving to the Parliament was very dangerous. But I went along with everyone else, unarmed, without special clothing or armor.”

“On the eighteenth of February I was sick with a temperature,” Lena Grozovska told me, “but I went out anyway and passed stones. I stood there for eight or nine hours. When I finally went home, I saw a big band of thugs waiting, already shooting. They shot at our car, but we made it through. I sat all night looking out the window on our balcony, watching them shoot at people. If I’d had a gun, I would have shot them. Your brain changes.”

“I spent the night on Maidan,” Vakhtang told me. “The Trade Union House was set on fire. Berkut tried to set fire to the medical point in the musical conservatory across the street, too—they threw Molotov cocktails on the roof, and people threw them off.” The Trade Union House burned down, with protesters trapped inside it. Snipers appeared on rooftops, shooting to kill.

When the violence began, Laima Geidar had started working as a medic. She wanted to rush to Maidan on February 18, but the police had closed the bridge across the Dnieper, blocking crowds of people who, like Laima, were trying to get across to help. Laima went to a hospital in her neighborhood; a crowd of people was outside, preventing the police from arresting wounded protesters. Laima helped organize a medical point at the Greek Catholic church for people who weren’t too seriously wounded.

People would get stitched up and want to return immediately to Maidan. “Give me a pill for a concussion,” said one man who’d been beaten with a truncheon. Even a man with two broken hands wanted to go right back.

During the next two days, Laima’s medical team found more than nine people who’d been shot in the left eye: evidence of the coldest and most expert sniper fire.

Olga Vrovke, whom I’d met at the mushroom festival in Vorokhta, saw a man shot by a sniper, then watched a doctor save the man’s life in the Hotel Ukraina. On her way home she was chased by a thug with a tire iron. But soon she was back to practical business, coordinating things on Facebook. Did anyone know the entrances to underground tunnels? she asked. Or did anyone have a military map? The snipers were probably using them to get into buildings without being noticed. Mountain climbers were needed to hold the roofs.

Olga’s Facebook organizing wasn’t unusual—much of the coordination of Euromaidan went on through social media. Unless you were throwing Molotov cocktails or shooting from rooftops, there was no thought of secrecy: this was the “Revolution of Dignity,” a public movement whose central tenet was transparency.

ON FEBRUARY 19 I watched on the live feed as priests and an imam prayed on the Maidan stage, surrounded by flames. The protesters kept up a steady, dull drumbeat, banging on shields and anything else available. This was the music of revolution: a clatter, a din, anonymous musicians cloaked in smoke. From across the ocean, it looked like the end of the world.

A video showed bodies splayed across the street where my friend Julia Y. had once walked her Labrador, Darcy. Men in camouflage and an older woman in a headscarf helped carry people, bloody and dazed, to an ambulance, as a priest in a black gown and green helmet talked to a crowd of injured people.

A medic did chest compressions on a man who seemed, to my untrained eye, to be obviously dead. The cameraman lingered until the medic said, “Don’t stand here!”

“A person is dying!” another man said angrily.

The cameraman retreated. Next, he approached a young, fair-haired man spread-eagled on the muddy ground. His eyes were closed.

“Are you alive, brother? Hey, what’s your name?” The blond man didn’t answer. The cameraman took his pulse and stepped back, lingering on the body before hurrying down the path at the edge of the park.

He saw another man and repeated his question: “Are you alive, brother?” This time the man in question nodded. His eyes were open, and his face was covered in blood. “Alive, that’s good!” the cameraman said, and hurried along. The crowd was roaring in the distance. Kiev was at war.

I was terrified, but everyone told me that it was less frightening to be there than to watch it on television. “When Maidan was going on,” Mitya said later, “it felt like the only safe place; it was like a centrifuge. At the center you’re safe, but anywhere else the force will send you flying.” Yury, one of Alina’s colleagues, told me, “It was scary to watch Maidan on TV, but it wasn’t scary when you were there—you felt the power of numbers.” He said that the more dangerous it got, the more people went to Maidan. After the snipers appeared, Yury said, “We knew that if we didn’t go, it was over for Ukraine.”

The city was disfigured by violence, but it was transfigured by solidarity and compassion. A stream of people went to St. Michael’s Monastery to offer help, donations, medicine, food. Blood collection centers had to turn people away. On Facebook, Andrei Mikhalevsky, who had been sorting donations at St. Michael’s, described an elderly woman who arrived, silent and flustered, and handed him a hand-made cloth bag. When he opened it, he found that it contained 200 grams of sugar, an orange, an onion, three heads of garlic, two pieces of candy, a half-full bottle of vinegar, and five hryvnia (less than a dollar). She had given everything she could.

People sent their children to stay with nannies and asked older children to make themselves dinner as they worked around the clock. At the All-Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV, many of my old public health colleagues were volunteering to provide emergency medical care, since the hospitals weren’t safe for protesters. It was hard to perform surgeries at the network’s office—they didn’t have proper equipment for anesthesia and had to operate on conference tables. But, miraculously, there were no infections. The doctors removed a blunt, round bullet from one man’s neck. Like many patients, he wanted to go straight back to Maidan.

ON FEBRUARY 20 I spoke to Alina on Skype. She was rumpled and panicked, like so many other people in the city. The metro had been shut down for two days, there had been runs on groceries, gas, and cash, and martial law seemed imminent. “This is the sort of thing that you should only see on television,” she said, looking like she was about to cry. Her mother, who worked as a custodian at a military hospital, said they’d let the staff go home and were preparing for an emergency. The place was covered in blood. She’d seen a very young policeman, a boy, almost, carried past with his insides hanging out; later she saw him being taken to the morgue. On a list of the dead released that day, the oldest reported casualty was born in 1949, the youngest in 1996.

On February 21 Yanukovych signed a deal with opposition leaders: there were to be constitutional changes and elections by the end of the year. But the protests didn’t subside, and an impeachment bill was introduced in parliament.

Julia Y. gave a friend of a friend a ride to the morgue; he had to retrieve the body of his father, who had been shot on Maidan the day before.

Pasha Skala put on his beret and went to talk to the line of Internal Troops behind the blue and gold barricade in front of one of the government buildings. They recognized him, and a general came out and told him they wanted to be given a corridor to leave. A bus full of troops was taken hostage by the crowd, but eventually a passage was formed to let them leave Maidan. The government was retreating.

ON FEBRUARY 22, after two months of protests, Yanukovych fled Kiev. Parliament declared him unfit to fulfill his duties. His mansion opened for tours; the people flooded through the gates. He left behind a number of incriminating documents, including a handwritten receipt for twelve million dollars and a list of journalists and activists—including Tetiana Chornovol—with photos and license plate numbers. Protesters still in helmets, still carrying shields, their faces still smeared with soot, started playing golf on Yanukovych’s private course. There were calls to make the mansion into a Museum of Corruption. It felt like a miracle, like the joyful ending of a film.

But more than a thousand people had been injured, and more than a hundred had been killed. The dead protesters were named “the Heavenly Hundred,” the Nebesnaya Sotnya, the divine regiment. Some were carried across Maidan in open caskets, through a crowd of thousands of people who were weeping, singing, praying, and chanting, “Heroes don’t die.”

“When Yanukovych left, there was huge euphoria,” Vakhtang said. “But soon enough, people had to face the fact that they were fighting Russia now.”