Thinking With the Blood. Owen Matthews

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      2

      What a revolution looks like

      “There was no-one in authority, no government, no control.”

      The first crowds began arriving at Mezhgorye on the morning of the morning of 22nd February. Many came straight from the barricades of the Maidan, still in their makeshift protesters’ outfits of miners’ hard hats, Soviet steel helmets on top of thick woollen watch caps, motley camouflage and work uniforms. They carried batons, steel riot shields, hunting rifles. They found the gates unlocked. The 650-strong garrison, drawn from the same Berkut paramilitary police who had tried and failed to clear the protesters from the Maidan by force, had fled along with their master in the night.

      They found a vast palace complex which officially never existed. On paper, Yanukovych’s official presidential residence was a nearby wooden dacha known, modestly enough, as The House on Stumps.

      The property at Mezhgoriye was listed as an administrative office of his Dubai-based company, Tantalit. In reality, Yanukovych commissioned the complex soon after coming to power in 2010 as a lavish private estate for the use of himself and his closest friends. The main residence was a three-storied wooden building built in Germany and transported in pieces to Kiev for assembly. Perhaps because of its oddly pre-fabricated appearance, the house earned the nickname Honka after the Finnish maker of budget ready-made log cabins.

      The interiors were anything but cut-price. Even the inside of the lift was covered in mosaics and mirrors. The ground floor was paved in Florentine-style pietro duro cut stonework. The ground floor suite of rooms was decorated in neo-medieval style, including reproduction suits of armour, oak neo-gothic panelling and mosaics of chivalric scenes on the walls.

      Various self-organised armed groups from the Maidan came to protect the palace. Guards were posted, dressed in makeshift body armour and carrying captured riot police shields and police armed with sniper riles to keep the army of gawkers who flocked from Kiev to wander through the grounds of their President’s private Xanadu in order. A few looters managed to attack the palace’s safes and cut some paintings out of their frames, though they left major works by romantic 19th century nature painter Ivan Shishkin and fashionable 21st century portrait artist Nikas Safronov in place. For the most part, though, the palace was preserved intact.

      During those first, heady days, the two rather eccentric activists who today live in Yanukovych’s palace as self-appointed guardians first arrived at Mezhgoriye. One was Petya, a 34-year-old grocery salesman from Lvov and a passionate follower of Stepan Bandera. He is a wiry, intense man, who scuttles down the long echoing corridors of the corridor with a prim, clockwork gait. He wears a traditional embroidered Ukrainian peasant shirt and, for those who don’t immediately get his ideological affiliation, also goes around with the red and black flag of Stepan Bandera’s UPA draped over his shoulders. The other is Yulia Kapica, a slim, skittish thirty-something blonde who wears her hair in a traditional Ukrainian braid held up with a hairband of blue and yellow plastic flowers, Ukraine’s national colours. Petya lives in the main “Honka” wing; Yulia has been camped out in the health and sport wing of the palace since February.

      “I joined in the Maidan protests from the beginning, and stayed all through December,” says Kapica. “I saw that our country was changing and I wanted to be part of it. No-one knew it would end in shooting of course. But people saw the Maidan protesters and began to be interested in what Ukraine is, who Stepan Bandera was, what is our national anthem. They began to learn Ukraininan language. For me the Maidan wasn’t about the EU agreement but about getting our people to discover their Ukrainian identity. Before the Maidan people were ashamed to be Ukrainians. After they were proud. They had stood up for themselves.”

      Kapica came to Mezhugoriye on 23rd February — along with thousands of other Kiev citizens who came to goggle at the opulence of their deposed leader. “It wasn’t a shock for me to see this palace,” she says. “I knew who Yanukovych was and how he lived.” Kapica, a financial analyst from Berdyansk, spent the first days fishing Yanukovych documents from the lake and drying them out on the marble floors with hairdryers, then scanning them and sending the material to the Ministry of Finance and the police. In the evenings she and fellow activists barricaded themselves into the Health and Sport complex and mounted patrols to deter looters.

      “We just blocked the corridors with things which made noise so that we could hear if anyone trying to break in during the night.” They lived on the food stocks kept in the palace barracks, formerly home to the Berkut garrison. “There was no-one in authority, no government, no control.”

      Today, the palace is a major tourist attraction run by Petya, Yulia and a group of volunteers. No government department wanted to take responsibility for the palace which remains, technically, the private property of Tantalit. Yulia speaks of plans to turn the place into a “Museum of Corruption,” or perhaps a sanatorium.

      Each weekend, crowds of Kievans drive out to wander in the park, admiring the white marble neo-classical statuary, the sweeping view onto the Dniepr River, the imported olive trees in pots and the elaborate cascade of fountains and stone staircases that leads from the palace to a lakeside dining room built in the shape of a stylised pirate ship. On the elaborate ironwork of a gazebo overlooking one of the duck-ponds, visitors have tied hundreds of blue and yellow ribbons, as though to mark the place as theirs.

      Outside the palace gates, there is a bike hire stand, a Segway tour, a pie seller, and an ice cream van. Pairs of pretty girls walk with linked arms. Enterprising souvenir sellers have set up stalls selling lavatory paper with the face of Vladimir Putin on it, as well as fridge magnets depicting a Russian matrioshka nesting doll in camouflage, carrying a Kalashnikov. There are gold-painted miniature loaves of bread (a reference СКАЧАТЬ