...Amidst a sea of ugliness*
I was browsing through the EuroMaydan page on FB the other day, and I was impressed by the stories coming from a few female participants in the Ukrainian protests. One story sticks out for me, that of one Lyubov, a 19 year old girl who was regularly spending time around the soldiers who had been brought in the military vehicles to line up and guard the government quarters in Kiev.
She is just a girl, black hair, not very tall, with a constant smile on her face. She is a member of the so called "women's sotnya", the female brigade at the Maydan, the central square in Kiev that has become the symbol of the Ukrainian protests. The majority of the protesters had been urging their peers to refrain from violence, believing that the regime would be best brought down through peaceful, but persistent protests.
So Lyubov (whose name means 'love') often sat next to the place where the soldiers were being gathered, preparing to take position, guarding the government buildings from the crowds. "Hi, how are you, are you cold today?", she would occasionally ask the lads in uniforms who were deployed by the Ministry of the Interior, behind whose backs the special task force Berkut were lining up, trained and prepared for a possible "full contact" with the protesters.
Frowning at first, the soldiers would initially respond with a hesitant, "We're fine". A bit later as she stood on, they would begin returning her smiles, and starting simple conversations with the charming young student (who comes from Lvov, one of the fortresses of Ukrainian nationalism). Then the conversation would move on through short exchanges about the events of the day, then through discussing some ideological differences of the two sides... More curious soldiers would flock to the truck, gradually joining the conversation. And thus, one hour, two hours would pass. And the same would repeat every next day.
Lyubov, along with other girls like her, wrote in their FB pages that they would often come to the barricades in the same manner, put their protest notes down for a while, the ones reading, "We also want to go home; the Maydan loves you all", and have a conversation with the soldiers. Like, a human to another human.
But last week, the protests changed. Those same soldiers saw a cannonade of pavement stones and Molotov cocktails flying their way. All the while, Lyubov insisting to be heard: she and her fellows tried to explain that the protest should remain devoid of aggression. "They shouldn't have done that. The protesters could have taken all government buildings without a single stone being tossed - but just through overcoming the fighting spirit of the soldiers with simple gestures like these".
Despite the violence, her example was promptly followed by lots of other young women who did a similar thing around the barricades surrounding the government quarters. "Be yourself, just talk with them, they are people too. Ask them what their name is, where they are coming from, do not ask them complicated questions, they are not standing a trial or something", Lyubov recommends on her FB page.
I really like what these girls have done, and have been doing. And I think it deserves much more attention than it is getting right now. Because that is the other face, another face of the Ukrainian protests. What Lyubov and her fellows are doing is potentially very important for the Maydan. Sitting around the various buildings representing authority and doing nothing particularly aggressive or threatening, but just acting like normal human beings with the representatives of authority (and treating them not as enemy, but as fellow humans), is what tends to unnerve the rulers most of all. I'd like to believe that it makes them contemplate. Well, at least some of them.
True, it may be too late for all that at this point. Although the majority of the protesters wanted to express their disapproval of the direction their country was taking, without resorting to violence, the fact is that relatively tiny, but disproportionately loud and active paramilitary ultra-nationalist groups like Right Sector had successfully hijacked the protest, and the Molotov cocktails were soon to follow. That of course provided the excuse that the authorities so desperately needed, to crack down real hard on the protests. Granted, some of the extremist elements may have genuinely believed that the peaceful element of the protests had spent its potential, and it was time to up the ante. "That was wrong, it was bad, it was... unfair", one FB user wrote at the EuroMaydan page about the extremist intervention.
In a sense, whenever a protest resorts to violence, it will always suffer losses - be it a direct defeat to the hands of a much more powerful authority, or even worse (IMO), in terms of losing its face, its integrity, and its moral credit, which is a loss with much longer-lasting consequences.
As expected as it is, it is also disappointing to watch the dominant machist, aggressive, simplistic approach to doing politics repeatedly prevail in future-defining moments like these, with all the consequences that follow from this. But on the other hand, this makes the female participation in the protests even more crucial. Whether it is through defending the barricades with a smile, and facing the auhorities with a human face that could potentially melt walls of ice; or through appealing to their humanity through simple gestures.
Allow me to go on a limb here and hypothetise that, had a couple thousand women appeared at the gates of Parliament the other week, they could have overcome the police lines without having to beat the blood out of them, and having themselves being shot in the back by sniper fire.
* the title is an allusion to a previous post here, and I think there are lots of parallels between the two stories.