MASKS AND MONUMENTS

In late February, as the violence peaked, someone on Twitter posted a video with the note, “This is the worst so far.” I clicked, and saw a dark-haired woman in Khmelnytsky, a town in western Ukraine, being shot in the head by a sniper.

At the time I was deeply moved by this display of strength in numbers, which seemed a physical embodiment of the power of ordinary people to overturn an unjust social order. The video—wherever it came from, whoever had filmed it—fit neatly into the narrative of Maidan that I’d accepted, that most of my Ukrainian friends had accepted: it was a good kind of revolution, one that gave you hope for the future. But not everyone believed this story.

Conspiracy theories proliferated. Many were clearly false, generated by Russia’s hyperactive propaganda machine. But there were legitimate questions about what exactly had happened in Ukraine that winter. Why had the special police attacked student demonstrators without provocation, an act that was bound to discredit Yanukovych’s administration and give new strength and purpose to the protest movement? To what extent (if any) had opposition parties and their oligarch backers planned and funded the protests? Who was responsible for the kidnapping and torture of activists? Who were the masked men who had attacked the police in the early days of Maidan? Who had shot at the police during the final battles, and who, if anyone, had ordered them to do so? And most importantly, who were the mysterious snipers on the rooftops? None of these questions were fully answered in the weeks and months after Maidan.

In fact, many officials in the new government were holdovers from the old one; they’d simply changed sides. It was easy to guess that these seasoned politicians might not be enthusiastic about a thorough investigation into the bad deeds of the old government. The new government also had obvious reasons to cover up any crimes committed by Maidan protesters, who were now heroes. Some evidence suggested that there had been antigovernment as well as government snipers on Maidan in February. (Two men would later admit to journalists that they had intentionally shot police from the windows of the occupied Kiev Conservatory, off Maidan.) Had the attacks and murders been provocations meant to legitimate the overthrow of the government—perhaps by extreme nationalists, or by oligarchs who wanted Yanukovych out because he’d been plundering their treasure chests? You could take your pick of plots. They were all hopelessly confusing, without enough hard evidence to make them credible; but the official story about Maidan was confusing too, with pieces that didn’t fit.

Conspiracy theories fell on fertile ground in the post-Soviet world, where plots, double agents, and provocateurs had a long and lurid history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian security forces planted police informers throughout worker and revolutionary organizations. Informers didn’t just spy on the revolutionaries and labor unions; they participated actively, rising through the ranks and taking part in assassinations and bombings. Soon the revolutionaries planted their own agents in the police service. Informers from both camps were embedded for so long that they often seemed to forget which side they were on.

Traitors made their way to the very top. In 1908 the revolutionaries exposed Yevno Azef, a high-ranking Socialist Revolutionary terrorist who had been on the secret police payroll for some fifteen years, during which time he had helped plan the successful assassination of the minister of the interior.

In order to justify the hardship and oppression faced by its citizens, the Soviet Union had to unmask its enemies again and again: capitalists, the bourgeoisie, kulaks, nationalists, saboteurs, provocateurs, spies. In the 1930s Stalin built his purges on staged trials, fictional confessions, fantastical conspiracies. Routine unmasking required the steady fabrication of plots. Even as they seethed with hatred for external and internal enemies (as they did again in the post-Soviet period), Soviet people learned not to trust the news, to read between the lines. Some dissidents spoke about the truth that would emerge once the authoritarian monster had been slain, its propaganda machine shut down for good. But many Soviet citizens were skeptical of anything they hadn’t seen with their own eyes or heard directly from a friend. (As Bulgakov put it as early as 1923, “Kievans don’t read newspapers, being firmly convinced that they print lies. But since a person can’t live without information, they get their news from the Jewish bazaar, where old ladies find it necessary to sell their candelabras.” The rumor mill produces fantastic, almost mythical tales.) In the Soviet Union, it was assumed that politicians were liars; that was their job.

Even if you weren’t susceptible to conspiracy theories, there were aspects of Maidan that didn’t gibe with the rhetoric about a nonviolent “Revolution of Dignity.” Not every bit of ugliness could be blamed on provocateurs.

When I saw the documentary All Things Ablaze, which was filmed by three Ukrainian journalists on the front lines of the fighting from the beginning to the end of Maidan, I realized that there were many versions of Maidan. The film shows the heart of Kiev in flames, full of angry mobs and meaningless violence. As in reality, it isn’t clear who started the violence, or who’s fighting for what, exactly. It often seems that people may be fighting just for the sake of it.

Protesters parade a bloody pro-government thug down the street, screaming that he’s a traitor. They beat a Berkut officer who’s lying on the ground, as some onlookers try to stop them. Men smash what they take to be a Party of Regions car. As its alarm wails, someone asks, “Why are you doing that? Do you even know whose it is?” A young man wrapped in a Ukrainian flag announces, “The smell of smoke and tear gas is the smell of freedom. Glory to Ukraine! Ukraine over all!” People set themselves on fire while trying to light the Molotov cocktails that they’re heaving at the police. A masked man shoots a rifle as someone plays the “Ode to Joy,” the EU anthem, on a bagpipe. When the masked man hits his target, which we cannot see, he high-fives his friend.

Oleksandr Techinskiy, one of three directors of All Things Ablaze, is a dark-haired man in his thirties, well educated, well traveled, polite. Originally trained in medicine, he went on to become a photographer and a stringer for foreign journalists, mostly Germans.

“When I was on Institutska [one of the streets where heavy fighting took place], I didn’t see any self-defense squads,” he told me, a year after Maidan. “I saw a lot of lost people. Boys in ski jackets.” For him, the story of the heroic self-defense battalions was a myth; the truth was sad and scattered.

Techinskiy believed that one of the biggest mistakes made during Maidan was the choice of some protesters to start hiding their faces. “When this is all over, will we build monuments to men in masks?” he asked.

It was a good question. I thought of all the Maidan protesters who had put themselves in danger by organizing openly, believing wholeheartedly in the “Revolution of Dignity.” I remembered Sasha, my Russian AIDS activist friend, whose great act of bravery had been to take off her mask and speak publicly about having HIV. Shouldn’t a just revolution show its face? What were the masked men of Maidan hiding?

In All Things Ablaze, as Kiev burns and both sides fire, a priest waves a cross and Bible and shouts, “Don’t throw stones! Don’t shoot!”

Some protesters run over. “Get away,” they tell him, “it won’t help, those souls are lost.”

Many of my friends and acquaintances who’d been on Maidan had spoken about how inspired they’d felt at the sight of ordinary ladies in office clothes prying up cobblestones with their manicured fingers, passing them down a line. Most of the press accounts I’d seen of this, too, portrayed it as a miracle of spontaneous mass organization—a hive of righteous protesters. But people power can be hard to distinguish from mob violence. All Things Ablaze lingered on the faces of the police who’d had cobblestones thrown at them. Many of them were very young, and they looked terrified. For much of the time they weren’t allowed to shoot, and they made it clear that they felt this was unfair.

ON DECEMBER 8, 2013, after a huge rally, Maidan protesters toppled Kiev’s Lenin statue. The international media were delighted, mostly ignoring the fact that the topplers were far-right nationalists. (The Svoboda party took credit.)

In All Things Ablaze, the fall of Kiev’s Lenin has an emotional tenor completely different from that of Western news stories covering Ukraine’s “Goodbye, Lenin!” moment. It’s nighttime, and a mob is taking turns smashing Lenin’s body with a sledgehammer. A young man shouts hoarsely, “Outsiders don’t forget, Ukrainians are in charge here!” An Orthodox priest takes a turn with the sledgehammer as the mob fights for fragments of the statue. Then the camera discovers Lenin’s head in the darkness. With its stone eyes, it looks like the head of a man who is sleeping or dead. Soon the mob finds it, too. A grinning blond girl poses beside it: a bizarre, postmodern Pietà.

The camera moves to a silent middle-aged man in a black fur hat. Looking dazed, he wraps his arms around Lenin’s body, pressing his own body against it. He is an old Communist from the Institute of Physics. The crowd is shouting at him, taunting him, taking his picture. Everyone tells him to get away from the statue so they can continue destroying it. One man tells him he ought to hang himself. A woman, obviously afraid he’ll be injured, tries to persuade him to leave.

Men drag him away, but he returns to Lenin, still silent. “Don’t hit him,” someone says. The old Communist looks like he’s being torn away from the corpse of a loved one.

“You’re the last like this in Ukraine,” a man in the mob says. “When you’re dead, there will be no Communists left.”

But the man in the fur hat wasn’t the last Communist in Ukraine, not by a long shot, and many Ukrainians, even those who weren’t Communists, were displeased at the country-wide “Leninfall” triggered by the downing of Kiev’s monument.

In Dnipropetrovsk in February, someone got up on the pedestal of the city’s steel Lenin statue and put a harness around it. The crowd pulled in unison, as if in a tug-of-war with the past, but they weren’t strong enough; finally someone arrived with a truck and toppled the leader at last. Lenin fell directly on his head, which broke off. People started beating him.

In the morning, when the ardently pro-Maidan journalist Marina Davydova arrived, Lenin’s head sat on the pavement, a noose around his neck, his eyes still wide open. (His head was eventually moved to the Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum.) Marina managed to get a chunk of Lenin as a souvenir. She later described her ecstasy, on that sunny day, at the destruction of this “symbol of a totalitarian regime,” as she called it. “I thought it was a victory, the beginning of a new world,” she told me, “though I didn’t know what kind of new world it would be.”

A group arrived carrying Orthodox icons and asking for the body of their leader. (Communism and religion had reconciled long ago.) One man made a YouTube video showing his fellow citizens hacking away at the steel body. The crowd is much calmer and less menacing than the one shown in All Things Ablaze.

“Here are the results of yesterday’s vandalism,” the man with the movie camera says dolefully. “People are still trying to get their little piece of the monument.” His tone becomes sarcastic. “So, we’ll live well now that the monument has been knocked down. Everything will be great in our country.”