HEROES DON’T DIE

In May 2014 Halyna, the woman who looked after the apartment, let me into my old place on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street. She looked the same as always, strangely ageless. But she had a new manic sparkle in her eyes as she told me to be careful at night and not to allow anyone to follow me into the building, because there were bands of disreputable characters roaming the streets.

“Every second person in Donetsk is a separatist,” Halyna said with a hard smile. “Lumpen. Do you know what Lumpen means? They just want to drink and steal, they don’t want to work.” She was referring to the Marxist term Lumpenproletariat, which described the dregs of the lower classes, the criminals and degenerates who would never achieve class consciousness.

The apartment was as I remembered it, only more decrepit. Halyna told me that it had been empty all year, which wasn’t surprising. It was now in such bad shape that it was hard to rent out; the building’s plumbing was rotten. The poorly lit vestibule and chipped marble staircase, once so familiar, had become menacing. At the all-night convenience store around the corner, the place where my friends and I had often bought supplies for late-night parties, a chalkboard announced a sale on vodka and beer. A building down the street had been turned into Right Sector headquarters, its front balconies draped in Right Sector’s colors: red for blood, black for earth.

It was Kiev’s most beautiful season, the one I’d encountered during my first visit seven years earlier. Khreshchatyk Street, the wide boulevard that leads to Maidan, bore no resemblance to what I’d seen in the live feeds and videos I’d spent the winter watching from New York. Then everything had been snowy, barren, charred, and clouded with smoke from open fires and burning tires; now it was leafy and green, just coming into blossom. There was pouring rain almost every day, as if the sky were trying to wash away the pain and destruction of the preceding months.

Khreshchatyk was still closed to cars, though, and the protesters’ tent city was still standing. I passed some scary-looking guys in fatigues. One was wearing a balaclava and pointing a very old rifle at his friend’s head, apparently as a joke. In front of the central post office, I watched a disheveled man in fatigues buy a cloud of cotton candy. Someone had painted pink polka dots on the burned-out Trade Union building, giving it a strange, cartoonish look. Maidan protesters had often talked about their desire to live in a “normal European” country, but nothing was normal or European about this scene; neither was there the mild, friendly mood that had made me fall in love with Kiev on my first visits.

The people still camped on Maidan were the most marginal protesters, the ones who had no jobs to return to and no kitchen gardens to tend, who hadn’t chosen to go and fight in the east. They’d settled into domestic life on Maidan, a cozy permanent revolution. People were cooking, couples were arguing, and music played from boom boxes. A man fed pigeons, and a toddler in a motorcycle jacket poked his head up above the wooden boundary of the encampment. A banner with photos of a Maidan martyr cried, “Revenge the death of the great knights!” The tents were marked with the names of sotni, regiments: a city name, or “OUN,” for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or “Hutsul,” for the Carpathian cowboys.

A sidewalk exhibit showed homemade bulletproof vests, leg shields, and armor. There were a number of small altars with photos of the dead, candles, and flowers. People watched news about the war in the east on a giant screen. Down the street, a man in a sailor’s hat was playing a cheesy song in English about a miracle. The blue and gold Maidan piano had fallen terribly out of tune.

As I passed a young man wearing a shirt with an eagle on the front and “SS” on the back, a guy in a horse costume came and put his arm around me.

“Take a picture with a horse,” he said, “It will be fun!”

The horse was not alone.

As the center of Kiev’s downtown, Maidan had always been full of furries and vendors. The tourist trade had persisted even as the coffins of the dead were carried through the square. But now it was different: everyone was in costume, and it had become hard to distinguish the amateurs from the professionals. There were would-be soldiers with their uniforms and antique rifles, Cossacks with billowing pants, high boots, and swords, and girls dressed as village maidens of the past, in embroidered blouses and red beads. Many people were wearing blue and gold outfits. In a way it was touching, but it was also intolerably kitschy, as if Americans all decided one day to go around dressed as pilgrims. The overt theatricality gave the proceedings an air of insincerity that was the very opposite of Maidan’s famous ocean of shining eyes.

My clarinetist friend Mitya told me that Maidan had been a theatrical performance from the beginning. At one point, he said, he’d been kept waiting for a long time to perform on the main stage. As he stood in the wings, he watched a man yelling into the microphone, sounding very aggressive, exhorting the crowd. Mitya thought he had the mannerisms of a fascist and assumed he was an orator, a political figure. But when he came closer, Mitya saw that he was wearing eyeliner; he was an actor. This was Evhen Nishchuk, Maidan’s unofficial MC. The role came easily, since Nishchuk had also helped run the Orange Revolution. He was a professional.

“He’s not an orator, or a politician, or a revolutionary,” Mitya said.

MITYA PUT ME IN TOUCH with Taras Kompanichenko, a latter-day Ukrainian bard. When I met Kompanichenko on Khreshchatyk, he was dressed in full Cossack regalia: loose sharovary, pants suitable for riding on horseback; long, pointy shoes; and a tie woven in a traditional Ukrainian pattern. His hair was closely shaved except for the Cossack oseledets, or “herring,” a long, graying plume on the top of his head. For convenience, he’d wound his forelock around his ear. His thick, dark brown mustache curled up at the ends. This wasn’t a protest costume, or a means of attracting tourists; this was how he got dressed for work.

He kissed my hand and escorted me past a group of boys breakdancing to techno music, into Puzata Khata, a chain that offered Ukrainian cuisine at fast food prices. (The name translates to something like “Belly Cottage.”)

When the chivalrous Kompanichenko brought me tea and a slice of cake, I noticed that he had the long nails required to play the kobza, the lute used by the Ukrainian minstrels known as kobzari. The kobzari, who were usually blind, roamed Ukraine for centuries, relying on the generosity of their listeners. Their songs often dealt with religious and historical topics. As vectors of Ukrainian national feeling and as wandering mendicants, kobzari were repressed first by Russian imperial authorities, then by the Soviets. According to a story in wide circulation in Ukraine, Stalin summoned all the Ukrainian minstrels to a conference in Kharkiv in 1939 and had them shot. State-sanctioned kobzari endured, however, within Soviet Ukraine’s institutionalized folklore. The kobzar tradition gained new life after Ukraine became independent, as part of the effort to recover and purify the nation’s identity.

A professional musician and composer, Kompanichenko played very old songs, some of them dating back to the seventeenth century.

As Kompanichenko spoke, he stroked his forelock, which he’d unwound from his ear. He was the most earnest person I had ever met. I was moved by his gentle sincerity, but I couldn’t help finding him a little ridiculous, like a museum exhibit that had come to life and wandered out into the streets.

In the early days, Kompanichenko said, the Maidan protests had been something like a people’s national liberation festival. The music had been acoustic, and there was only one microphone. Maidan’s musicians had acted as private citizens, as protesters. They hadn’t been detached from reality, hadn’t been stimulated by alcohol, fame, or money; they had participated because they cared about their country. This sense of a higher purpose had given Kompanichenko an almost superhuman strength, he said, enabling him to play endlessly in the rain or snow, long after he’d lost his voice.

Then Svoboda, the ultranationalist party, got sound equipment. Everything became much more formal. There was a long line to perform, and the political parties took turns running the show. Some musicians were paid by political parties; Kompanichenko was concerned about the spiritual as well as financial corruption that this had caused.

“Our weapon is our soul,” he told me. “Music is magical. It can carry ideas into the heart, by giving them the wings of emotions. But it has to be sincere, not manipulative. It has to search for the truth, for universal human values.”

During Maidan, Kompanichenko and his Cossack choir made a point of performing only familiar songs so the crowd could sing along.

By February 19 performers were being shot with rubber bullets. The only person onstage who had a bulletproof vest was the MC. Kompanichenko continued singing, though he was consumed by the fear that a bullet would fly into his open mouth and pierce his throat.

By this point in our conversation, Kompanichenko was close to tears. Daft Punk’s latest single was playing in the background.

“Did my music provoke violence?” he asked plaintively. “It raised the protesters’ spirits. They were so brave. They didn’t know how terrible the consequences could be.”

AT THE GALLERY PARTKOM, I struggled to imagine the white space filled with wounded people, just as I had struggled, while standing on Maidan, to imagine the many thousands of peaceful protesters who had been gathered there a few months earlier.

I was looking for my friend Seryozha the Gypsy; instead I found Okhrim, a violin player I knew through Toporkestra. Okhrim was the oldest of the group, an inveterate carouser with a gray pageboy haircut and bottle-cap glasses. My first memory of him was from a party where he’d leaped onto a table and played an exuberant fiddle version of a 1980s underground pop song, “A Romantic’s Walk,” howling out the sweet lyrics:

There’s thunder through the windowpane

The streetlights shine and the shadows are strange

I look into the night, I see that it’s dark

But that won’t stop a romantic’s walk.

Having finished his song, Okhrim fell asleep in the corner; someone had to play a tuba in his ear to wake him up. Despite his passion for cheap Armenian cognac, he was nice, in an obscene sort of way.

Okhrim specialized in Ukrainian folk music and had played on the Maidan stage several times. On February 22 he and Taras Kompanichenko had played a funeral march in honor of the Heavenly Hundred, the martyred protesters.

“Topor said Maidan was a circus, and he was glad he missed it,” Okhrim reported. Topor, our Moldovan bandleader friend, had spent the winter in Goa with some of his fellow musicians. “But I was glad I was there.” Okhrim’s tone was solemn. “I’m a new person now. When you saw the look in people’s eyes after Maidan, you saw that they were new people, too. We had to sit in silence for a while, absorbing it all. Ever since Maidan I don’t go on drinking binges. I just drink sometimes.” He was smoking a cigarette and drinking a bottle of beer as we spoke, early in the afternoon. I suspected that not even a revolution could make Okhrim get sober for good.

I WENT TO AN ARTISTS’ TALK, curious about whether revolution had given new vitality to the Kiev art scene. Everyone was supposed to be speaking Ukrainian, partly out of patriotism and partly because one of the panelists was Polish and understood Ukrainian but not Russian, but people kept forgetting.

“I don’t understand everything,” the Polish panelist said pleasantly, when one Ukrainian, Liza Babenko, criticized another, Larisa Venediktova, for speaking Russian. Venediktova spoke Ukrainian for about thirty seconds, then returned to Russian as she discussed the fact that the future was simultaneously now, never, and always.

Denis, a very young leftist activist, said in Russian that he had been preparing for the revolution for his entire life. He had the feeling that time was leaping forward; perhaps it was getting ahead of itself. “I have arrived in the future,” he said ecstatically. He had an artistic it-boy look, tall and skinny, with a strong chin, a straight nose, and hollow cheeks.

“Has the future passed?” an audience member asked.

Denis thought for a while.

“The future has come,” he announced. By then almost everyone had given up and switched to Russian, though most of them didn’t seem aware of what language they were speaking. Only the poor Polish woman toiled on in Ukrainian, and had to keep asking clarifying questions. She asked one woman to translate a word into Ukrainian; the woman, who was Ukrainian, had to ask another panelist. It was all very symbolic, this disjunction between intentions and inclinations, this literal failure to find a common language.

“The future is the bottom,” someone opined. At the exhibit that accompanied the talk, I had seen a large square of black paper taped to the floor; perhaps, I thought, this had been the future.

Actually, Venediktova said, history was an endless stack of paper in a bottomless hole.

“Then what is the paper at the bottom of the pile?” a man in the audience asked. He broached the idea of the end of history.

“No, no, no,” Venediktova said impatiently, in English for some reason.

“Maybe the future is a swimming pool,” someone suggested. By then about half the panel had gone out for a cigarette.

WHILE THE LEFTIST ARTISTS were preoccupied with the future, Laima Geidar, the lesbian activist who’d worked as a medic during Maidan, was interested in the past. When I asked to interview her, she wanted to meet at the McDonald’s on Khreshchatyk, a place where she’d spent many hours during the protests and battles, getting warm.

When we started talking, I was surprised to discover that Laima had become an avid proponent of the Ukrainian national idea. This was remarkable not only because she was a lesbian feminist—not exactly part of the usual nationalist demographic—but because she was a Russian speaker whose mother, with whom she was no longer on good terms, lived in Siberia. The Ukrainian and Russian national ideas were at war in her head.

“The murder, the suffocation of Ukraine—this is part of Russia’s national idea. Now, analyzing all these events, I think Yanukovych was Putin’s project,” she said in Russian. “They decided to find a jailbird, make him a governor, make him prime minister, and then he could become president. His only interest was in stealing. He had no national idea—just murder and kitsch, like at his mansion.

“During our revolution, I discovered our classics—our prophet, Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, writers who taught us about the moskali”—the derogatory Ukrainian word for Russians—“about their lying, thieving ways, about their amorality in the pursuit of their goals... and only now, surviving all this terror, I understand the greatness of these poets, these prophets. Shevchenko wrote something like ‘It’s all the same to me which God a boy prays to. But it makes a difference to me when evil people lull Ukraine to sleep, and Ukraine wakes suddenly from her dream in the middle of a fire.’”

After Laima finished crying, we walked around Maidan. Laima wasn’t the only one with Taras Shevchenko on her mind; there was Shevchenko graffiti everywhere. On one wall, Shevchenko was a Marvel-style superhero with a purple mask and a bulging groin. Another mural showed him in an embroidered Ukrainian blouse and an orange helmet, the kind popular on Maidan, with red and black Molotov cocktails forming X’s on either side of his face and the words OUR WHOLE LIFE IS WAR in a banner over his head. In yet another painting, he wore a red and black nationalist bandanna over the lower half of his face, scowling above the words THE FIRE DOESN’T BURN THOSE WHO HAVE ALREADY BEEN TEMPERED IN THE FLAMES. Nationalism was a cult of war, a cult of death, a cartoon.

Laima pointed out some girls in hijabs, saying they were resettled Tatars from Crimea. She described treating a man whose stomach had been slit open, and others who had been shot in the head by snipers on the rooftops, and she showed me the place where her fellow medic, a young woman, had been shot through the neck by a sniper. (In the hospital, the woman had tweeted “I’m dying” and then gone silent, prompting an Internet furor. She survived.)

Laima was furious with Germany and the United States for not helping Ukraine to defend itself against Russia. “They don’t know who they’re dealing with—you can’t put on a tie and talk to these people,” she said. “You have to pick up a stone and throw it.” Maidan’s cobblestones, once torn out and thrown at police, were now piled in neat stacks.

We looked at the displays in some of the tents.

“‘A good Communist is a dead Communist,’” Laima read approvingly from a sign above a hanged mannequin. Another hanged effigy was dressed in a red snowsuit decorated in hammers and sickles.

Someone was drumming inside the music conservatory just off the square. Laima stopped to enjoy the rhythm; she didn’t seem to notice the foul smell in the air. Maidan stank, like an infected wound.

“I don’t like to go to Maidan anymore,” Mitya told me later. “It’s like a corpse—the body is there, but the soul is gone.”

WITH WAR ERUPTING IN THE EAST, the euphoria and solidarity of Maidan had been replaced by grief and anger. Fear contorted faces that I’d always known as friendly and calm, and the air was thick with suspicion. Anna, a young woman I knew from AIDS work, another person who’d helped coordinate medical care for wounded protesters, told me that she believed rumors that Right Sector was a Kremlin project and that Tyahnybok, the leader of Svoboda, was on the Russian payroll. Yulia Tymoshenko had never actually been in prison and was paid by Putin; it had all been an elaborate plot so that she could become president. Anna had heard from a person who worked for Vitaly Klitschko, one of the opposition leaders, that some people were paid by opposition political parties to stay on Maidan—to live there. “Otherwise who would stay on Maidan for months?” she asked. “And they were so well organized.” The first clearings of Maidan had been done to provoke further protests—it didn’t make sense otherwise. Anna couldn’t say who’d brought in the snipers, though. Maybe Tymoshenko, maybe the United States, maybe Russia. She was convinced that China was involved, too.

By the time she was finished, I felt dizzy. I asked what she thought about the situation in the east.

“I am supporting the idea of exterminating separatists,” she answered casually. (We were speaking English.)

“Exterminating?” I asked, shocked.

“I would deport them, I mean. I would buy them tickets myself.”

Anna’s attitude was not unusual. Many otherwise pleasant people had concluded that the only answer was to excise a certain portion of Ukrainian society, cutting it off like a gangrenous limb. No one had ever liked Donbas much anyway; wasn’t it just Soviet deadweight in a Ukraine eager to flee westward, into Europe and the future?

I MET UP WITH TOPOR at Bessarabsky Market, near where the statue of Lenin had fallen. People had covered the empty pedestal with Lenin posters and pro- and anti-Soviet propaganda. A glued-on picture showed Lenin sitting at his desk, reading a book and drinking tea, looking thoughtful. Someone had scratched out his face, but his reflection was still visible in the window beside him. At a restaurant across the street, a chalkboard advertised a new dish: “marinated Yanukovych ears.” (I think they were mushrooms.)

Topor’s beard had grown very long and bushy, and his dark hair was turning gray. As we stood on the street eating bad shawarma, a drunken bum approached us. Mistaking Topor for a priest, he tried to kiss him on the cheek and asked for half his sandwich. Topor brushed him off good-naturedly.

Topor had notoriously perverse political views. We’d once had a long argument about who killed more Soviet citizens, Stalin or Gorbachev. His position was that Gorbachev was the guiltier of the two, because under Gorbachev people starved to death, while Stalin killed people who were guilty—or who would have done something wrong if they’d lived long enough. There was an element of irony in Topor’s argument, but it was also clear that he had been marked by the trauma of perestroika and its aftermath.

On another occasion he reminisced fondly about his time on a student exchange in Kentucky. “It was very good there,” he said, “like Moldova under Brezhnev. Very calm. Everyone had a house, a car, a wife, and a mistress.” That was Topor’s ideal: peace, and moderate prosperity.

“I’m against Maidan!” he exclaimed before I’d even asked. “Why should I die for a national idea? What am I, a sucker? Anyway, it’s not my nation. You know, the titushki”—pro-government thugs—“were the Ukrainian people too. Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about that? They were the ones acting rationally—they were the ones who got paid!”

I mentioned my conversation with Okhrim about Maidan.

“Okhrim killed people! You know why? Because he encouraged them with his music. If he hadn’t stood on that stage playing, maybe they wouldn’t have gone and fought!”

I couldn’t tell whether he was being facetious.

“But on the other hand,” he continued, “I’m for Maidan! Now the police are afraid of the people, which means they’re afraid of us, too. We can play on the street as late as we want. And who’ll complain about street music after they’ve heard the sound of snipers? They’re happy to hear us playing. That’s why I’m for Maidan.”

As we drove around in his van, he delivered a virtuoso account of conflicting Maidan conspiracy theories, one of which revolved around the mechanics of porta-potties.

“What did they do with all the shit?” he cried, thumping the steering wheel. “Where did it all go? If it was really there, why didn’t they use it to make barricades?” Then, twisting the knife, he gave me a lecture about how AIDS didn’t exist.

“So you’re writing a book about us? Making money from our suffering? Where’s my money?” he asked as we pulled up in front of my building.

I staggered out of the car and went straight to bed. The shawarma had upset my stomach.

THE NIGHT BEFORE the presidential election on May 25, there were campfires on Maidan. If something went wrong, people were ready to protest again.

I had dinner with Alina and Igor, our friend from Rakhiv. Always a font of insider information from mysterious sources, Igor gave me the rundown on all the presidential candidates and what would happen next. He said that Ukrainians looked favorably on the expected winner, Petro Poroshenko, the “Chocolate King,” because he came from a relatively well-to-do family; unlike most Ukrainian oligarchs, Igor said, Poroshenko didn’t use the ruthless tactics common among those who became rich in the lawless 1990s. But Poroshenko wouldn’t be able to salvage the situation. Igor predicted that there would be blood.

On the restaurant’s television, we learned that Russian TV viewers were getting a different picture of the Ukrainian elections: Russia’s Channel 1 reported that Dmytro Yarosh, leader of Right Sector, was in the lead, with 37 percent of the vote. In reality, Yarosh won less than 1 percent. Russian propaganda had sailed into a world of pure fantasy, and somehow it was bringing much of the Russian population along with it.

During my short walk home from the Maidan metro station that night, I saw at least four men lying on the sidewalk, drunk to the point of unconsciousness. They didn’t look like bums.

I spent Election Day walking around the sunbaked, half-deserted streets. Many people feared that there might be a terrorist attack, or “provocation.” When I walked by the Central Election Commission, I saw that it was guarded by police with a bomb-sniffing dog. Farther down the street, a bus had let out a crowd of young policemen who were sitting in the grass, eating sunflower seeds and drinking kvas.

Outside Volodymyrskoye Market, an old lady held three empty glass jars. In Russian, with her Ukrainian accent, she called, or maybe begged, “Please buy a jar. Not expensive, not expensive.” Ukraine’s currency, the hryvnia, had lost half its value over the last year; revolution hadn’t been good for the economy. Inside the market, shoppers and vendors asked one another, “Did you vote? Did you vote?”

All over the city, Kievans were standing in the longest lines they’d ever seen at a polling site, with waits of up to two hours in hot, stuffy rooms. Many voters wore embroidered Ukrainian blouses to show their patriotism. They were sweaty, dizzy, and tired, but they waited, and cast their ballots. “My hands were shaking as I voted,” Alina told me later. “I felt such a heavy responsibility.”

The self-appointed leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the elections from taking place in their regions. Separatists abducted and threatened election officials, seized election offices and voting records, destroyed ballot boxes, and set fire to an election commission office. The police didn’t intervene; in some cases, they even helped the separatists. The overwhelming majority of polling stations were closed, and voters were afraid to visit those that were open. One election commission member in Artemivsk, north of the city of Donetsk, said that his commission had decided not to hold the vote. “If we have elections tomorrow, they will kill us,” he said. This obstruction meant that Ukraine’s new president would have little legitimacy in the east, no matter who he was.

Poroshenko won the election, with an absolute majority that precluded a runoff. Most of the people I had spoken to in Kiev had said that they planned to vote for Poroshenko because, given the current crisis, Ukraine needed a new president immediately. Poroshenko was the lesser evil. He spoke fluent English and had proven himself on Maidan, appearing regularly and doing his best to defuse violent situations, as when he tried to talk down the masked men in the bulldozer. Russia seemed to have a relatively conciliatory attitude toward him; at a press conference the day before the election, Putin had indicated that he would respect the results of Ukraine’s election and work with the new government, though he still considered Yanukovych to be Ukraine’s legitimate leader.

Poroshenko’s campaign slogan, “A New Kind of Life,” was less than convincing; he was a politician who’d survived many different political periods in Ukraine, making all the necessary deals and compromises. Under Orange Revolution president Yushchenko, Poroshenko had vied with Yulia Tymoshenko for the position of prime minister, but he had also helped found Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. Given Poroshenko’s deep roots in Ukraine’s corrupt status quo, it was unlikely that his presidency would mark a new epoch for Ukraine. Three months after the end of Maidan, Ukrainians had drastically lowered their expectations.

AFTER THE ELECTION, the Kiev city administration made a desultory attempt to clear Maidan, removing the makeshift museum exhibits and sending the campers and souvenir vendors packing. Many Kievans wanted life to go back to normal, to be rid of the stench of Maidan’s corpse, the suspicious characters, the spectacle of lawlessness. But some believed that the campers should be allowed to stay. Hadn’t they fought for Maidan? Would the revolution be over when they left? Going back to normal was frightening; Maidan had been about overturning the status quo and making a new reality, and at present reality didn’t seem very new at all.

When I took a final stroll on Maidan before flying home, I found the campers burning tires. Men in fatigues and balaclavas stopped cars on Khreshchatyk, checking their trunks. The occupiers were reluctant to give up their territory, to remove the costumes that had invested them with the power of history.

Old ladies were berating these dregs of the revolution, telling them to get off Maidan so it would be clean again. Grubby little men in camouflage sat on a tank parked in the square, along with a girl who was playing old Russian rock songs on a guitar.

A one-eyed drunk danced ecstatically.

“Glory to the nation!” he cried.