In “Maidan: Tonight Tomorrow,” a short film about the unrest in Ukraine, a protester tells the camera, not without pride, that most of his friends call him a fascist. “To me, that sounds like ‘patriot,’” he says. “I say, ‘Thank you, that’s a compliment.’” Even after a pro-Western industrialist, Petro Poroshenko, won the recent Presidential election, the influence of fascism in Ukrainian politics remains a subject of debate. To Vladimir Putin, the country is full of fascists—but he has enlarged the definition to include anyone who resists partitioning the country. To the supporters of the protesters, including the prominent Yale historian Timothy Snyder, the fascist influence is overstated.
The film takes us to Maidan, when the new Ukrainian government was being forced to reckon with the far right. During the initial protests that forced out the corrupt government of Viktor Yanukovych, the ultra-nationalist group Right Sector played a crucial role, providing muscle to protesters who were largely unequipped to do their own fighting. The Right Sector had been viewed with some distaste in cosmopolitan Kiev. Now its members found themselves tolerated, even respected, by other protesters in the square.
In late March, a few days after Russia annexed Crimea, I visited the leader of the Right Sector, Dmitry Yarosh, in his office, situated in a run-down hotel not far from Maidan. A burly man of forty-two, with a shaved head, he was wearing a black sweater with epaulets and a knife in his belt. “Crimea is, was, and will be Ukrainian,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will take to recover it. But it will happen.” Yarosh estimated that there was a sixty-five-per-cent chance that other parts of Ukraine would be invaded. His men, he said, were preparing for a partisan war. Yarosh was clearly enjoying his group’s newfound popularity; at its height, he declared himself a candidate in the country’s Presidential election.
Not long after we spoke, Yarosh’s deputy—a notorious street fighter named Oleksandr Muzychko—was killed in a chaotic shootout with Ukrainian police, and his death led to the demonstration that is captured in this film. In it, a coffin is borne aloft through the square, while men in fatigues chant, “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!” Even in this moment of expressing solidarity, they were already overstaying their welcome. On April 1st, after a Right Sector member shot and wounded three people in Maidan, the government raided the group’s headquarters and forced its members to leave the city center. Yarosh wasn’t ready to give up the fight, though. Later that month, he left Kiev for the city of Dnipropetrovsk, where he has established an eight-hundred-man militia, intended, he told reporters, “to prevent the spread of the Kremlin infection.”
In Maidan, the entrenched protesters kept chopping firewood and ladling out free food. One of them, whom we meet in the film, is a young man, a landscape painter, dressed in camouflage as a member of the Maidan Self-Defense Battalion. “I hope things end peacefully,” he says. “That would be a victory for us.”
