To gain admission to the March for Equality, which took place today and was the sole public, outdoor component of Kiev's Pride Week, one had to register. In order to register, one had to fill out a sizable online questionnaire and give the name and phone number of at least one person trusted by Pride organizers who could vouch for the applicant. If approved, on the morning of the planned march the applicant would receive a text message with the address of the event. These precautions were taken to insure that far-right activists who had sworn to attack the march wouldn't know where to go and so that the organizers could call every potential participant's phone in case the police failed to show up to protect the marchers. The plan for the latter eventuality turned out to be unnecessary; the precautions failed to prevent the former from happening.
Kiev Pride organizers had been in negotiations with police for a month. According to the event’s executive director, Anna Sharygina, in the days leading up to the march they were meeting daily—still, the police would give no promises. They did, however, insist on a specific location for the march, near a golf club and a small gated community on the embankment of the Dnieper River on the outskirts of the city. Late into the night, the organizers were making contingency plans for “what we would do if we showed up and there were three cops there,” Sharygina told me. When they showed up, they found several buses full of police in riot gear—but also a number of young men and at least one woman wearing black T-shirts with the logo of Right Sector, the ultranationalist coalition that had threatened violence.
“Right now, during the war with Moscow,” the Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh wrote on his Facebook page on the eve of the march, we “will be forced to be distracted from other things in order to stop those who hate the family, break morals, and destroy morality and the traditional concepts of humankind.” He went on to say that the West is exercising too much influence over Ukraine “in order to force them to introduce the ideology of L.G.B.T. people.” Here the Right Sector seems to see eye-to-eye with the enemy in Moscow, which has long claimed that Ukraine's move westward will expand the influence of the homosexual lobby.
Many of the marchers who came on Saturday had also been at the 2013-2014 protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev's central square, that ultimately toppled the country's old pro-Moscow government. The right to march unassailed with a rainbow flag was part of what they felt they had won in the revolution. In Warsaw, the nearest capital city to the west, the Pride Parade will be held a week later and will, as it has for each of the last few years, draw thousands of people to an extravaganza of floats and flags that looks as much like a party as any other western Pride celebration. In Moscow, the nearest capital city to the east, an unsanctioned Pride Parade was attempted a week earlier; its participants were beaten and arrested, and two of the organizers are still serving their ten-day jail sentences. It was to underscore the march's Maidan heritage that the participants chanted one of the revolution's most popular slogans: “Human rights come first!”
Shortly before 10 A.M., about two hundred and fifty people, surrounded by roughly twice as many police and interior troops in riot gear, stood in formation and chanted for about fifteen minutes before setting off. I was among them, and no sooner did we start walking forward than the volunteer marshals in baby-blue baseball caps and crossing-guard vests told us to retreat. The police were beating back gay-bashers, some of them dressed in the Right Sector's black T-shirts and others in camouflage uniforms. The attackers were throwing flares and firecrackers, but after about a minute, all seemed safe. As more police in riot gear ran toward the front, soon-to-be marchers applauded. As the police led back the gay-bashers they had detained, some of whom screamed “Death to the faggots!” the crowd chanted, “Riot, love, and don't give up your rights!” After a few minutes, happily, the volunteers led the marchers to reassemble in groups, five people across and five people deep.
Then I noticed a group of Red Cross staffers working on a policeman who was lying on the ground. Apparently, the attackers had modified firecrackers by adding small metal fragments to them, and one had hit the man in the neck, severing his left carotid artery. He was bleeding out on the grass. It took a city ambulance about fifteen minutes to arrive. It attempted to drive down a steep set of stairs down to the embankment and got stuck. A couple of paramedics ran down with a stretcher, and no fewer than a dozen policemen carried their colleague back, one holding his hand on the man's neck to stem the bleeding. A new ambulance, from the Red Cross, had arrived by then.
The march finally began at 10:30—half an hour after the appointed time—and lasted all of ten minutes. Chanting, “Rights are not given, they are taken,” we walked past a large puddle of blood. The police were now massed at the front. Behind us, they had, I was told, sealed the entrance to the embankment. But walking in the back row, I saw scores of people suddenly running after us. Had the thugs broken through the police barrier? As they got closer, I saw that all of them were holding objects up in front of their faces—cameras, tablets, and cell phones. These were journalists, who had been given a different address at which to assemble and had just been bussed in, as the last of our twenty-five rows of people was about to arrive at the end of the short route.
The organizers had been able to secure two buses—one to bring in the journalists and the other to ferry out the dignitaries—two members of parliament, the Swedish ambassador, and a few other foreigners. One of the bus companies, Sharygina told me, had told the organizers **“We'll take the diplomats and the journalists but not the faggots.” All the other companies they approached refused their business altogether. Sharygina spent weeks trying to organize transportation away from the site of the march, and failed. At the beginning, the volunteer marshals had instructed us, “Do not break off in singles or in pairs. Walk to surface public transportation in large groups. Do not descend into the Metro or underpasses.**” Now the instructions came from the golf club's security chief, a burly middle-aged man in a polyester polo shirt: “Get the fuck out of here, faggots!”
We walked away in a group of about thirty people, trailed by a dozen riot police in black. One of the Red Cross staff who had worked on the badly injured policeman was walking just ahead of me, next to Sharygina.
“A cop was injured because of you,” he said.
“I am so sick of this!” Sharygina, a stout woman with a shaved head, shot back. “You are blaming the victim! We are not the ones who endangered the cops! The people who attacked them did that!”
Right around then, someone screamed, “Run!” We ran, chased by thugs, for a few minutes, through a nineteen-eighties apartment block and across a wide street.
But then the police seemed to have held back the attackers. We stopped. One of the organizers called me a cab.
“Why don't we go into a store to wait?” I asked.**** ****
“Because they are all closed,” the organizer, a Maidan veteran named Maria Makarova, answered calmly.**** ****
And then there were people coming from the other direction, saying that they were running away from attackers. The thugs were now on both sides of the street. I saw a bus pulling up and ran toward it, but the driver wouldn't open the doors. Joined by several more people, I pounded on the glass, to no avail. Then a bottle whistled past my left ear and broke on the ground a few feet ahead. Our little group ran into the street and then to the other side, where a too-small clump of cops stood. An explosion sounded on the other side of the street.
“Get the fuck out of here, faggots!” The polyester-polo man was trying to push us back out into the street.
**** ****And then a bus going in the opposite direction opened its doors, and we all piled in.
Makarova, standing next to me, paid the fare. Then she calmly called to cancel the cab. Then she said, smugly, “You know, that bottle that almost hit you—that was supposed to be a Molotov cocktail too. They can't even make one right! Everyone who was really at the Maidan can make a good Molotov cocktail every time.”
The fighting continued for at least an hour. Ten march participants were injured, none of them seriously. Nine policemen were injured in all, including two who were struck during the march itself—the one with the severed artery was in the hospital in serious condition. Twenty-five people had been arrested, none of them from among the marchers, and this, of all things, signalled that a new era had begun.
But the rest of Pride Week's events had to be cancelled, because of ongoing threats, because the locations had been leaked, and because, Sharygina said, “the bashers didn't get their satisfaction.”
