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.”
The video “I am a Ukrainian” with Yulia Marushevska
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 [email protected]
