DREAMING OF EUROPE

I left Ukraine as soon as I got back from Meganom; my time was up, and I returned to New York to go to graduate school at last. (I also started writing for magazines, usually about Ukraine and Russia.) But in the summer of 2012 I got a short-term job coordinating harm reduction activities during the European Championship soccer tournament, the Eurocup, which was being held jointly in Poland and Ukraine.

In 2009 Viktor Yanukovych, the man who’d tried to steal Ukraine’s presidency in 2004, had been elected president. This time he won in a fair vote. His victory testified to Ukraine’s disillusionment with the leaders of the Orange Revolution and to the country’s regional divides. Yanukovych and his Party of Regions had always maintained substantial support in eastern Ukraine, their economic and political base, as well as in southern Ukraine and Crimea. Yanukovych’s ascent was depressing, but not surprising.

Yanukovych, who was nothing if not classy, invited foreign investors to Ukraine to see the chestnut trees in bloom and watch “how women begin to take their clothes off when it gets warm.” As the championship approached, there was much anxiety about the moment when thousands of drunk, virile, Euro-spending soccer fans would descend on a country already notorious for its sex trade and HIV epidemic. Femen, Ukraine’s “topless feminist” group, soon joined the fray, claiming that the tournament would increase sex tourism and prostitution. As an act of protest, two gorgeous Femen members stripped off their shirts and snatched the Eurocup trophy that was on display in Dnipropetrovsk.

THE UKRAINIAN PASSENGERS on my flight were bubbling with a patriotic enthusiasm I’d never seen before. About half of them were dressed in soccer jerseys; some were obviously members of the Ukrainian diaspora, returning to celebrate Ukraine’s moment in the international limelight. As we approached Kiev, flying low over the green fields, a young man shouted, in Russian, “What a land we have!”

I stayed in my old apartment on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street. After I’d moved out, my elderly landlords had rented it to another foreign student, but my abandoned souvenirs and even my half-used shampoo bottles were in the same places I’d left them. The cold-water tap still didn’t work, the babushka next door was still insane, and the shop downstairs was still selling the same hideous, overpriced porcelain statues of muscle-bound Cossacks and Ukrainian maidens in folk costume. The only difference was that a few chunks of plaster had fallen from the ceiling.

But when I walked down to Khreshchatyk Street, Kiev’s main strip, I found a semipermanent carnival. One of Yanukovych’s first projects as president had been the prosecution of the golden-braided ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who’d been convicted of embezzlement and thrown in prison. She was probably guilty of a number of crimes, but so was nearly every other Ukrainian politician; it was clear that Yanukovych had prosecuted her in order to eliminate a rival. At the intersection of Khreshchatyk and Bohdan Khmelnytsky stood a “Free Yulia” encampment, with pictures of Yanukovych defaced with colored spray paint:

SADIST!

DIE, BASTARD!

DOWN WITH THE CRIMINAL BAND!

THE COUNTRY WILL BE RESURRECTED!

A fairground-style board showed Yanukovych being knocked out in a boxing match; you could look through the hole where his opponent’s face should have been and have your picture taken. A sculpted pile of shit had the flag of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions planted in it, and a pig Yanukovych was ready to be cooked on a spit.

On Khreshchatyk Street, each national group had its own booth serving its national specialties, and the visiting fans moved in national packs. In the Swedish Corner, strapping men of all ages sat on long wooden benches and drank beer, wearing Swedish blue and gold, served by Swedish bartenders and cooks and even policemen; apparently the Swedes didn’t trust the Ukrainian police to protect them, which was reasonable. My friend Julia Y., who always knew everything, said the Swedish cops were afraid to leave Khreshchatyk. Julia spoke perfect English, had traveled extensively in Western Europe, and was always making friends with foreigners, who viewed her as a nonthreatening intermediary, not a “real” Ukrainian woman. When she’d invited eight Swedes over to her apartment, they’d congratulated themselves on even making it to Ukraine, an incredibly dangerous and totally incomprehensible country, and discussed the fact that they’d decided not to sleep with locals under any circumstances, because they’d heard that Ukrainian women would poke holes in the condoms and give them AIDS.

Other Swedes of Julia’s acquaintance complained that Ukrainian girls weren’t interested in them. The Swedish men and Ukrainian women had gathered one night on Trukhaniv Island, on the Dnieper, but it had been a failure.

When the foreigners did make the first move, romantically speaking, they were often less than chivalrous. Many of my Ukrainian girlfriends complained that foreigners kept propositioning them on the street or simply groping them; the foreigners seemed to have the impression that all Ukrainian women were up for grabs, a whole country’s worth of sex volunteers. Countless soccer fans were beaten with handbags and berated in a language they didn’t understand.

The city had added heavily accented English-language announcements on public transportation; they sounded strange to everyone.

“You know,” a young man on the trolley said to me, “in the Second World War they made a rule that all the announcements had to be in German. And then Russians made them Russian. And now they’re in English.” He smiled grimly.

There was indeed a sense that Ukraine was under occupation. One day I saw a Ukrainian folk choir on Maidan waiting for the American commercials on a giant screen to end, so they could start their song. The Ukrainian singers were dwarfed by the monumental American actors. On my way home one night, I saw a mob of people, many of them dressed in blue and gold Ukraine gear, surrounding a Pepsi truck, shouting and jostling; they were competing for free cans of soda, like children begging foreign soldiers for treats.

Most of the visiting fans didn’t know that the previous March, in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, a young woman named Oksana Makar had been raped, set on fire, and left to die. Two of her three suspected attackers were released, apparently because of the political connections of their parents. The media protested, and demonstrators gathered in Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, and Odessa.

But this wasn’t enough to stop the depredations of local officials, who had become accustomed to impunity. In the summer of 2013, in Vradiivka, a small town in the south, it emerged that two local police officers had raped a woman named Iryna Krashkova, beating her nearly to death. The police department had covered up the crime because of the family connections of one of the officers, who seemed to be responsible for raping and murdering at least one other woman. The police had also apparently forced innocent men to confess. (Two died in police custody.) Hundreds of protesters stormed the local police station, demanding that the officers be prosecuted. They smashed windows, broke doors, and set fire to the building. We didn’t know it then, but this bunt, this insurrection, was a taste of Ukraine’s future.

IN NOVEMBER 2013, still in graduate school in New York, I started seeing reports about protests in Kiev. President Yanukovych had pulled out of a planned Association Agreement with the European Union, saying he didn’t want to break ties with Russia. About two thousand protesters, mostly students, responded to online calls from Mustafa Nayyem, an investigative journalist, and other activists to assemble on Maidan. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first—just another example of Yanukovych drawing Ukraine further into Russia’s orbit, with another small, futile protest in response.

But on November 24 a rally on European Square, a few steps from Maidan, attracted an estimated fifty thousand people. The protesters waved EU flags, chanted “Ukraine is Europe,” and sang the Ukrainian national anthem, “Ukraine Is Not Yet Dead.” The country hadn’t seen a demonstration this big since the Orange Revolution.

A stage was erected, much like the one where Toporkestra had played during the European soccer championships. Ruslana, a onetime Eurovision winner, sang for the protesters, along with a few other national-minded musical acts. Lithuanian and Polish politicians arrived to make speeches; these were the EU members most eager to see Ukraine reject Russian influence and act as a buffer between Russia and the EU.

On November 29, when it became clear that Ukraine had not signed the Association Agreement and probably never would, about ten thousand protesters assembled in Kiev, and twenty thousand in Lviv. They called for the resignations of President Yanukovych and Prime Minister Azarov.

At a time when many Europeans were having grave doubts about the EU, it was surprising to hear that thousands of Ukrainians wanted so badly to be a part of it. The Association Agreement was part of the EU’s Eastern Partnership program, which was meant to bring former Soviet states closer to EU standards. The agreement included provisions related to foreign and security policy, justice and home affairs, “deep and comprehensive free trade,” and standards related to the environment, transportation, and education. It wasn’t EU membership; it didn’t even guarantee Ukrainians visa-free travel to EU countries. So why were Ukrainians so worked up?

In Ukraine, European was a vague term used to signify many things that were desirable but hard to attain. Apartments were advertised as having Evro-remont, “Euro-renovations”: this meant that they were new, clean, modern, and unaffordable for the average Ukrainian. (My crumbling apartment on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street was the antithesis of Evro-remont.) Those lucky enough to have the money bypassed the dingy, corrupt state health system and paid to go to private clinics like Kiev’s EuroLab, which was clean, up-to-date, and more expensive than the state system.

This metaphorical use of Europe was obvious in statements collected by journalists during “Euromaidan,” as the protests soon came to be called. One protester said, for example, “I’m not part of any political party, but I understand that only by trying to be more European can we end our troubles.” Europe meant freedom, fairness, and transparency. (This was before the Greek debacle.) It meant rights for minorities and freedom of speech. It meant exciting vacations to beautiful places where the food and wine were better than they were at home, where the air was clean, where the trains were fast and safe. (Never mind that they were so expensive.) It meant an escape from the past, an alternate reality in which Ukraine was never subjugated by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union but instead became a “normal” European country like Germany or France. Western Ukrainians, in particular, seemed to feel that they were Europeans who had been held hostage for decades, held back from the European destiny that was rightfully theirs. (They had repressed the memory of domination by the Poles and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

Yet the EU was not a spiritual condition; it was a vast bureaucracy with difficulties of its own, and it wasn’t about to solve Ukraine’s economic problems. When Euromaidan started, Ukraine was on the brink of default. Yanukovych was rushing from door to door, trying to cadge money from the EU, Russia, and China. EU Association offered access to EU markets, but it also required the adoption of about 350 EU laws within ten years, as well as legal and judicial reforms. The EU refused Yanukovych’s bold request for 160 billion euros to implement the new standards. And EU Association would mean the wrath of Putin.

ON NOVEMBER 30 at about four a.m., Berkut, a Ukrainian special police force whose name means “golden eagle,” appeared on Maidan and, without provocation, attacked a thousand unarmed student protesters with stun grenades, batons, and tear gas. They chased down bystanders, beating and kicking them. Some protesters were detained, and the rest were dispersed. Around nine a.m. Berkut tried to get into St. Michael’s Monastery, where protesters, including some of the wounded, had sought refuge.

Videos of the attack flooded the Internet. Even Ukrainians who hadn’t cared much about the Association Agreement were outraged to see Berkut attacking unarmed students—women, young people. A government spokeswoman offered a pitiful excuse, saying that the Berkut attacks had been necessary because the protesters were making it impossible to put up Maidan’s traditional New Year’s tree. (In the conspiratorial tradition of Soviet and post-Soviet politics, some people, including government officials, suggested that the attacks were a provocation intended to make the government look bad.) That afternoon protesters assembled outside St. Michael’s and were visited by a number of ambassadors from EU countries. By evening ten thousand people had gathered, with another ten thousand en route from Lviv to Kiev.

The next day, December 1, hundreds of thousands of furious protesters gathered on St. Michael’s Square. Many marched down the hill to Maidan, defying the recent ban on demonstrations there. Riot police failed to stop the protesters from seizing Maidan and occupying several government buildings. President Yanukovych threatened to declare a state of emergency. Protesters blocked the entries to city administration buildings and began forming self-defense units; the police disappeared from the city center. Several cities in western Ukraine declared general strikes.

Protesters erected a tent city on Maidan and built barricades using any materials available. Maidan started to resemble a never-ending festival, with cauldrons of soup, open fires, a giant stage, and musical performances around the clock. People took turns playing an upright piano painted blue and gold.

An online news station had set up a live feed by then, and my Ukrainophile friends and I started watching it as much as we could. I would sit and work with the Maidan live feed on in the background, and wake up in the middle of the night to check on the protests. Every night I went to sleep with the national anthem in my head, because Ruslana sang it onstage at the top of every hour:

Souls and bodies we’ll lay down, all for our freedom,

And we’ll show that we, brothers, are of the Cossack nation!

Almost everyone I knew in Kiev was taking part in Maidan: Alik, Alina, Mitya, my old Russian teacher Vakhtang, and many more. Like so many other Kiev residents, like so many other Ukrainians, they helped with donations of food, clothing, medicine, wood and tires for barricades, and money, or they worked in the soup kitchen, at the medical assistance points, or in the cleanup crew. A hotline was set up to help people find a place to bathe or sleep or get warm. People went to work during the day and to Maidan at night. As I watched the footage and looked at photos in news reports and on social media, every familiar building, every stretch of sidewalk, was transformed. Familiar people had changed, too.

My friend Julia Y. sounded more idealistic than I’d ever known her to be. As a highly educated, cosmopolitan, multilingual twentysomething, she fit the profile of the pro-EU student type, but years of work in Ukrainian business and politics had left her with few illusions. Now she had devoted her formidable energies to helping Maidan, and she found her hope and anxiety to be almost unmanageable.

“Twenty days of constant protests have made me question my ability to count,” she wrote to me.

Or to estimate the number of people I see. Every day people ask each other: how many people were there today? How many were there on the biggest day? I’ve realized that it’s almost impossible to tell for sure. All most of us can imagine is a stadium. It’s about 70,000 people, right? But this crowd is much bigger than that. When someone says there were about 100,000 people, it seems too little, because if you support the demonstrations, you want it to be at least a million, or better two. And the worst part is that I can’t help but want it to be more, want more than 2,000 people to spend a very cold Monday night in a camp in the middle of a country of 45 million, and I don’t want to wonder how many people are enough to make it matter. I’m afraid that whatever I say will sound like one of the cliches I hear from almost every person who’s been to Maidan lately—something about being inspired, about the kind and shining eyes of the people there, about helpfulness and politeness, and how striking that is compared to any regular gathering of people in Ukraine—for example, a ride on the metro at rush hour. But I want to talk about how after being there your clothes, hair, and skin smell of fire, the smell you remember from childhood—just plain burning wood. It comes from dozens of metal barrels that protesters turned into makeshift furnaces right there in the square, to fight below-zero temperatures. This smell is very hard to get rid of. It follows you everywhere, and I can often tell by the smell whether a person elsewhere has been to Maidan.

Even Alik was intoxicated by revolutionary hope, by the masses of people with shining eyes and a common purpose. His familiar humor and punk ethos were mixed with a political ardor I’d never seen in him.

“One of my friends was on a huge speed binge in November; I was worried about him,” Alik wrote.

Then the guy he was getting the speed from disappeared, and he redirected his passion into revolution. As I am leftist and antiglobalist, I made the slogan “Fuck the EU, fuck the police.” I had been working against certain points in the EU Association Agreement—it would have extended patents and prevented us from registering generic drugs, which are much cheaper. But that’s all over. Now it’s about standing against the power that still considers us—left and right and liberal, Christian, Jewish, Tatar, Georgian—as its slaves.

Like Alik, Alina was a skeptic, not a joiner. But she too had been swept up in revolutionary euphoria, even as she remained alert to dissonant notes. “All my old friends have been out on Maidan,” she wrote.

In two weeks we’ve changed more than we have in the last twenty-two years. Vakhtang set up a headquarters and he’s there all the time, giving everybody instructions, making phone calls, collecting information, building barricades, guarding Maidan at night. They have to make sure there are enough bodies there so the police will be afraid to fight with them. Marta is out all the time too, helping with food. For a while she was in the Trade Union House making hundreds and hundreds of sandwiches for the protesters. Every half hour, they sing the Ukrainian national anthem. It stinks in there. Now she’s making soup. So much soup!

Unsatisfied with the quality of the sandwiches being distributed, Marta, Vakhtang’s wife, had started what she called the “Euroborscht” project. “We drove into Maidan with the big pots of borscht in the trunk of the car,” Alina told me.

We had to go through a cordon—they ask you why you’re coming, what you’re doing. On Maidan you can’t check anything, so everyone just has to trust each other. It’s beautiful, but you also think about how vulnerable it makes everybody.

We opened the trunk and started ladling out the soup. It was gone in ten minutes. There was one guy who had been on Maidan for a long time. He said he had been living in Italy for thirteen years, but he’d never seen anything like that there. Tears were rolling down his face. Maidan smells like wood and food being cooked, like you’re in another century.

I keep wondering—is this what a revolution feels like? Is this what it was like in 1917? The people took over the palace—City Hall. There are so many people in the streets, they look like waterfalls. It’s strange. Surreal. On Maidan there’s the revolution, but then I go home and I see mothers pushing their strollers, people going to the store for bread. Just living their lives like usual, like nothing’s going on. At first I was a little afraid to participate. What will happen if we lose? Will they come after us? But then I realized—I don’t care. Fuck it. You have to be brave.

Pasha Skala, an army veteran, ex-cop, and drug policy reform activist I knew from my harm reduction work, was on Maidan from the second day of protests; he said he’d felt guilty for not being there from the beginning. As he had during the Orange Revolution, he wore the beret of a UN peacekeeper; in 2001–2 he’d served in a UN mission in East Timor. He felt that his most important role on Maidan was talking to the police—“counterpropaganda,” as he called it. He’d show them his police ID and explain to them how police worked in “civilized countries,” telling them that Yanukovych was a simple criminal, a bandit. But after three years under Yanukovych, Pasha told me, all the “normal” cops were gone. The only ones left were the ones willing to do anything they were told. It wasn’t like the Orange Revolution: this time the police were ready to shoot.

Pasha spent many nights on Maidan, holding the square. During the fight of December 1, he talked to a general and negotiated a neutral zone.

“When they saw my beret, they were ready to talk to me,” he said. “But by then it was clear that there was no going back. I collected gas canisters and grenades. By then I had a whole backpack full of stuff.” By February 20, he’d added a gas mask, handcuffs, and a knife.