Cross

- Guys, how long are you going to stand here?

- Before the elections. Let's make sure it goes well. If necessary, we will stand after the elections.

The guys, dressed in camouflage, are 22 years old, a carpenter and an auto repair shop worker from the Ivano-Frankivsk region. They have been on the Maidan for four months. One was fired from work, the second is on leave without pay. They say that they were not afraid either during the Berkut attacks or during the work of the snipers; It’s scary when a person is alone, but when together there’s only anger and adrenaline.

Parents, of course, call home and are worried, but the guys ask them to be patient. Local residents bring food and money and take them home to wash and do laundry. They ask you to tell Russian listeners and readers to quickly dump Putin; then Ukrainians and Russians will be friends again. There are about 15 of these guys in the army tent, the oldest one looks about 35 years old. There are about thirty of these khaki-colored tents on Khreshchatyk up to the intersection with Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street, and there are about the same number on Independence Square itself.

On the square, the tent city forms a complex conglomerate, a city within a city, in a couple of places there are warning signs that passage is prohibited, but even without them it is clear that this is a male paramilitary nomadic world, where civilians are not very welcome. There they cook, drink tea (they still don’t drink anything stronger on the Maidan), mend, draw, repair, solder, and, of course, argue about the fate of their homeland. One team created a small garden of three beds, where onions, radishes and parsley grew over the last warm days. This is not difficult: the cobblestone, the weapon of the proletariat, has been pulled down to the ground; It stands in stacks along the edges of the Maidan. “Maidan has become homeless,” one of its enthusiasts winces, “you haven’t caught him doing real work.”

In the center of the tent city is the “Yolka”, a cone-shaped structure with the flag of Ukraine on top and the inscriptions “We love Russians, we despise Putin”, “Let us help the Russians - we will save Ukraine!”

But for me, the seriousness of the plan can be judged by the design, which is still observed with different emotions by various visitors and local onlookers, taking pictures with the guys from the Maidan self-defense. This is a type of family weekend leisure. Onlookers are offered goods on trays: gold loaves (magnets for refrigerators), foot mats with a stenciled portrait of Yanukovych, souvenirs with national symbols. If you look at the Maidan from above, then it, this majestic installation by an unknown artist, this city within a city, should look like a cross, the vertical of which is Khreshchatyk, and the horizontal is the square and Institutskaya Street extending from it to the right.

I ask my friends to go out with me to shoot. They admit that they have not been to Institutskaya “since those very days.” We leave the house, it is next to the Kozatsky Hotel. I have been here many times and see how this once peaceful place has changed. The first thing that hurts the eyes is the huge burnt building of the House of Trade Unions. At the top there are bright pink dots. Comrades say that this is an action of a local artist, which was carried out with the help of climbers; The dots were supposed to be red in memory of those who died in the fire, but the paint changed color. It's very beautiful and quite scary.

In the center of the tent city in the city is the famous “Yolka” (Yolka), a cone-shaped structure with the flag of Ukraine on top and the inscriptions “We love Russians, we despise Putin”, “Let us help the Russians - we will save Ukraine!”, “Eternal glory to the heroes”. In general, judging by the number of graffiti and street slogans, they think about Vladimir Putin no less than about Jesus Christ, Stepan Bandera and Taras Shevchenko, only horns are painted on Putin’s images and curses are attributed. And one more thing: Cream is ours, the graffiti artists write.

The structures are filled with decorative elements. Primary colors are red, black, yellow and blue. Colors of the flag of Ukraine and colors of mourning. All the corners of the tent camp, all the unassembled and painted blue-yellow tires, all the space near the stage, at the “Christmas tree”, at the Column of Independence are filled (crowded, littered) with photographs of the “Heavenly Hundred”, colored glass lamps, fresh carnations and artificial flowers, embroidered towels, small icons, white crosses and rosaries. Lists of the dead. Some photographs are replaced by black ovals.

Black color predominates on the rise to Institutskaya. The street has been left almost as it was during the winter days. The barricades have hardly been dismantled. Huge black and white banners with photographs of the dead hang from the suspended pedestrian bridge. Here is the beginning of an impromptu memorial. Immediately behind two lines of barricades (they were erected seriously; I’m not sure that such structures could be easily crushed even by armored vehicles) on the right side of Institutskaya (the second inscription is the street of Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred) on each tree there is attached a photograph of the deceased, wreaths, flowers, lamps, drawings, notes; the entire warm world of Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Catholicism is in mourning.

This is a real avenue of military glory, only instead of sculptures there are living trees and photographs of the dead. In the middle of the alley there is a large wooden cross (flowers, wreaths, lamps, towels) and a gray cube made of sidewalk cobblestones with a black marble plaque: “My sons, my brothers! Forgive me for not saving you from a sniper’s bullet on February 20, 2014. Glory to Ukraine! Kievite.” A little higher, closer to Bankovaya, the administrative quarter that Berkut defended, the mourning line ends, the graffiti becomes colder (but the curses and the will to win or die are no weaker) and disappear a couple of buildings before the Presidential Administration. Here the colors are gray and beige.

Grushevsky Street has been cleaned to a shine; it seems that the cobblestones were not only laid, but also washed; The Verkhovna Rada has a couple of cars with flags of Ukraine and the European Union. The slogan “Peace to huts, war to palaces” is a hundred meters below, at the level of the Dynamo stadium. The gates have already been painted blue and white, but the barricades have not been completely dismantled, and black and white photographs and lamps again appear among the tires. And a triptych by an amateur artist: in the center, Christ, whose halo is stylized as an American flag, stands among fly agarics, and on either side of him are strange archangels: young female freaks in shorts and military boots, in masks and with machine guns at the ready. That these are archangels is clear from their wings.

Elena Fanailova is a poet, winner of several literary awards, author and host of the Radio Liberty program “Freedom in Clubs”

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