Posted on 03/19/2014 12:12:29 PM PDT by No One Special
If she ever makes another YouTube video or movie, Yulia Marushevska wants the next on to be a happy one with a good ending.
Before the Feb. 22 fall of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukraine’s fourth president, the 24-year-old Ph.D. student of Ukrainian literature at Taras Shevchenko National University was known mostly – if at all -- as “the girl” on a riveting video that’s been seen more than 7.7 million times.
It’s hard for her or anybody else to explain why her two-minute message went viral, but some of the reasons include her beauty, sincerity and passion. She also delivered a powerful message in accented and imperfect English, giving the video clip even more authenticity.
“I want you to know why thousands of people all over my country are on the streets. There is only one reason: We want to be free from a dictatorship,” she says, looking into the camera while standing on Hrushevskoho Street on a cold winter night. “We want to be free from the politicians who work only for themselves, who are ready to shoot, to beat, to injure people just for saving their money, just for saving their houses, just for saving their power. I want these people who are here to have dignity, who are brave, I want them to live a normal life. We are civilized people, but our government are barbarians … We want to be free. I know that maybe tomorrow we will have no phone, no Internet connection and we will be alone here. And maybe police will murder us one after another, when it will be dark here.”
She shot the video after the Jan. 22 deaths of the first five protesters, including three from gunshot wounds. Little did she or anyone else know how bad the death toll would get, rising to nearly 100 people by Feb. 20. The video was uploaded by her Los Angeles filmmaking friend Ben Moses on Feb. 10 and quickly went viral.
She made the video partly out of guilty because she felt that she wasn’t doing enough to help the EuroMaidan Revolution and partly out of frustration with foreigners’ ignorance about why demonstrators were camping out on Kyiv’s freezing streets to change their government.
“People know nothing about Ukraine. Ukraine is terra incognita for the world,” she said. “We have to create this Ukraine of great potential of its people, of rich resources with great seas and mountains.”
But more than anything, she hopes that her country is transformed forever and will no longer tolerate corrupt ways embodied by Yanukovych.
“He was lying, stealing, he was killing, he was breaking the laws and we were living in our small world and not paying attention,” Marushevska said. “Now we paid for not being involved, for everyone who didn’t care. It’s our price for not reacting to every crime. We have to control our politicians, our government, our activists, our journalists, our media – actively. We have to put pressure on those in power; it is our power, for these events not to be repeated in the future.”
She said that “our politicians cannot exist without control. All are humans; humans are weak; humans have to be controlled. Maybe it’s a part of the Soviet Union mentality -- they do not understand that they are servants; that their main aim is to serve.”
Marushevska had another awakening when she toured Yanukovych’s abandoned billion-dollar Mezhyhirya estate on 140 hectares north of Kyiv near the Dnipro River.
“I was shocked by this mad person. What is in your brain to make everything in gold?” she asked rhetorically. “He thinks about him like he is the king of Ukraine. He even has a medieval style. In a democratic society, politicians are servants and he didn’t understand this. There’s a difference. We are not people who need a king. We want an equal guy.”
The tour convinced her that her video script – in which she calls Yanukovych a dictator – was right.
“When I was making a video I was thinking do I have a right to say he’s a dictator. I was doubting it,” she said. “When I saw his house and how he lived, I understood that he was a real dictator who did whatever he wanted…golden forks and so forth. A normal person doesn’t do that when there are children dying from cancer and he’s buying this stupid, useful, ugly stuff for nothing. It’s useless.”
She was a EuroMaidan supporter from the start, finding that Yanukovych’s refusal of an association agreement with the European Union on Nov. 21 was the collective last strong.
“I know it was a guarantee of nothing. But it was a chance to develop. It’s a vector and that is all, but for us it was a small hope to a better life,” she said. “He showed he doesn’t need these hopes and that he will build a society of gangsters and that’s all.”
Her mother is a big supporter of the EuroMaidan Revolution. She volunteered day and night to help feed demonstrators and slept on the barricades. Marushevska also volunteered in hospitals, and was particularly moved by one mother of a beaten young demonstrator who faithfully brought her son meals every day as he recovered.
But she felt she wasn’t doing enough, especially because of her studies in Lviv.
When Marushevska returned to Kyiv before shooting the video, she wanted to do more to help. She had served as a translator for American filmmaker Ben Moses, who is making a documentary on Batkivshchyna party member of parliament Andriy Shevchenko, during his previous visits to Kyiv.
So she came up with the idea of a stand-up video on Hrushevskoho Street, the scene of the deadly clashes, and got help from Moses and British friend Graham Mitchell in writing and editing the text.
“Whatever you do; it’s not enough,” she said, “because people are now dead and a lot of people don’t know what is going on in Ukraine in general. Foreigners were sure alcoholics and poor people without jobs are on Maidan (Independence Square). They have some strange stereotypes. So I wanted to take these words and go on camera; and talk to foreign people. I asked my friend who had a good camera. We went to Khrushevskoho where people were killed.”
While the video went viral with the power of her appeal, she is critical of her performance.
“It was very cold, those nights when it was very cold,” she said. “I did two tries, two takes, but I was frozen to death and could not talk anymore. My accent is horrible. I could not find the right words and right intonation. I tried. I thought I would try later, maybe I will do it better. But then all these events happened and the situation got worse. It was apathy and depression, and I had no energy to do it again.”
So she edited the piece, showed it to her friends and they assured her “it’s powerful and it can work.” So it got uploaded to YouTube and her popularity soared.
Hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, became transfixed by her message. She acknowledges that her video helped the revolution, but her fame still comes without joy.
“My popularity is based on the tragedy of my country and dozens of people,” she said. “I understand there’s nothing to be happy about it. I know it changed the situation for a little. People say ‘ah, you’re the girl,’ but it’s not this kind of popularity when everybody loves you. I’m associated with tragedy. People don’t want to see me. With this video, I mean, it’s better that I don’t exist. But I know how much more people gave to Maidan, like my mom spending days and nights on the barricades, like a lot of people who risked their lives. Everybody has to do what he or she can do.”
She continues to stay involved and hopeful. On her Facebook page, Marushevska wrote on March 2, after the Russian military invasion of Crimea:
“Putin is trying to occupy my country. He cannot understand that we are united in our will to build a prosperous, democratic Ukraine. Today thousands of people in the south and east went to the streets saying to him: we are Ukrainians.”
Maybe she’s got at least one more video in her.
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at bribonner@gmail.com
If I were her, I’d run for my life. When putative US conservatives become lick spittle for Putin, people like her are in grave danger. We’ve so many Putinistas here that I fear she must accept that whatever horrors Putin wishes to inflict on her country will just be a great joke for them. Get out while you can. Obama won’t help you, and the former friends of freedom think it’s cute to laugh at Putin’s victims.
“Yah Ookraeenskovah”
“I am a Ukrainian!”
Written with the same compassion as JFK’s:
“Ich bien ein Berliner”,
Written with the same zealotry, as when demanded, ‘
Which one is Spartacus’,
“I am Spartacus!”
But, speak softly, dear, “the leader of The Free World”, hates everything you just said!
It won’t be long before a video like this is made here in America by an American youth . Is our government very far behind what she described? Who is there to come and rescue us?
Agreed. Obama and Putin share the same outlook, values, and goals.
She's one of us.
Could it be that “her people” have just as barbaric tendencies as early 20th century Germans? I don’t see them as any higher on the ‘civilized’ totem pole.
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685
Ultimately, can we say Americans were the good guys in WW2 because of slavery?
If that made no sense it’s because it’s a non-sequitor, same as yours
It's sad indeed. Logging in and seeing all these fans of Putin posting RT propaganda as if it were a legitimate news source has been disheartening.
Part of it I think is the rotten Ron Paul influence over many that call themselves conservatives. These people tend to be conspiracy nuts who think this is all about fiat currency or who has the most gold stocks. I guess some others actually like Putin because they hate the EU more (I also hate the EU, but not enough to wear blinders), or find him an ally against the homosexual agenda, or just reflexively side with anyone who opposes Obama no matter what the cause, etc.
If we let Russia continue to get away with this sort of thing, it will embolden our enemies everywhere. And where we recede from the world, something certainly worse than us will fill the void. Isolationism didn't work in the 30's and it sure as heck isn't going to work in today's globalized world.
“She’s one of us.”
We are rapidly becoming them. Listen to the wisdom in what this young lady is saying.
I had highlighted and copied the exact same line and was going to add a similar thought before I scrolled down through the comments and saw yours. :-)
It’s a sad day to be an American, a sad day to be a conservative, and a very sad day for this website when a bunch of pro-Putin loons can become the dominant voice on the site. Meanwhile, honest, ordinary, nonpolitical Ukrainians are being threatened, once again, by a former KGB agent, narcissistic psycho for pseudo nationalist reasons. When they started out as “conservatives” did they imagine they’d end up as apologists for a former KGB agent?
What effective measures would you have us take? The only reason Crimea is a part of Ukraine is because Kruschev gave it to them. I don’t want to go to war defending Kruschev’s decision. If you do, I’m sure there are plenty who will join you. Unfortunately, some wouldn’t have a choice if the war-hungry here on FR have their way.
I don’t like Putin, but I’m not stupid either. If the only effective response is the use of force, I don’t want it to be in defense of a bad decision by a Soviet bureaucrat.
Do you mean, are we any more civilized because of slavery at the inception of our country? Yes— because we burned it out of our psyche in the Civil War.
Am still not sure what's going on over there, but its being a first rate fustercluck is in little doubt.
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