Their
ranks included Ruslana Lyzhychko, the first Ukrainian Eurovision song contest
winner, and babushkas from the provinces. Women disproportionately answered the
call during Ukraine’s Maidan Square protests, because they found the Russian-backed
regime’s use of force against peacefully demonstrating students simply
unacceptable. According to Putin and the gullible media, they were also largely
neo-Nazi nationalists. Of course, that was a libelous lie, as viewers can
easily discern when watching Olha Onyshko’s Women
of Maidan (trailer
here),
which screens during the 2016 Culver City Film Festival.
In
retrospect, unleashing the paramilitary Berkut forces on orderly protesting
students in November of 2013 was the Yanukovych Gang’s biggest mistake. It unleashed
a sleeping giant: Ukraine’s mothers and grandmothers, who quickly filled the
square to protect the nation’s “children.” Like many of the demonstrators, Onyshko
arrived soon after the first brutal attack and quickly settled in for a long
siege.
It
is amazing how thoroughly the Euromaidan protests have been covered by
documentarians, yet Putin’s disinformation campaign has still been so
insidiously successful. If it were really an expression of anti-Semitic
nationalism, one would think there would be signs peeking through Onyshko’s
footage or that of Evgeny Afineevsky’s Winter on Fire, or Andrew Tkach’s Generation Maidan, or Sergei Loznitsa’s observationally immersive Maidan, but that just was not the case. However, probably no
previous doc (except perhaps Dmitriy Khavin’s post-Maidan Quiet in Odessa) so thoroughly discredits such slander as Women of Maidan.
Onyshko
talks to a wide cross-section of the women at the Square, none of whom come
across as ideologues of any stripe. In case after case, they are simply moved
by a desire to see a better future for younger generations. They are fed up
with Yanukovych’s corruption and deeply skeptical of his chumminess with Putin—especially
those who lost family members during the Holomodor, Stalin’s deliberate terror
famine.
