The remains of revolution: Stalinist edifices and barricades as high as sand dunes in Maidan

Kiev was always the city of very cheap prostitutes. But it was never the city of nightmares. Kiev was always the city of dreary bars. Never the city of war.

Like everyone else in Kiev my friend has been having nightmares. This one happened more than once. My friend wakes up. Rubs his crusty eyes: and there they are. They are in the corridors. They are on the sofas. They are in the rackety lift shaft.

My friend trembles, panics. Russians are here. Russians in balaclavas. The Russians have taken over the apartment block. My friend tries to run, to get out, to get to the underground. But Russians can run faster.

The revolution was over. But the war had not yet begun. When I arrived, the airport was ticking over normally. The waitresses were taking orders normally. The roads were clogged normally with second-hand German cars. Until Independence Square — Maidan Nezalezhnosti.

I blinked at Maidan. This was where it happened: the remains of the revolution that overthrew Viktor Yanukoych three weeks earlier. Between the baroque Stalinist edifices were the barricades: rubble, earth and singed tires, planks and smashed glass, netting of copper wire — as high as sand dunes.

Pale sun shone. It was not quite spring. Maidan was peaceful. Maidan was a family day out. Mothers held the hands of little boys. Father stopped for photos with happy daughters. Militia, unshaven, held court in tarpaulin tents with their "exhibits" hammered to wooden planks: bullets, shrapnel, shields and helmets of the riot police who had tried to kill them.

The revolution was over. But the militia were still there. Military tents and makeshift tarpaulins squatted the avenue and covered the square. Maidan, a pretty Facebook activist told me, had changed. Maidan kept changing, beginning with the internet-savvy and ending with the unemployed who still camped waiting for the war.

These were the "self-defence" forces of the revolution: construction workers and teenagers unable to leave Maidan. Aimlessly they warmed chapped hands with crackling oil-drum fires. Afternoon after afternoon, they wandered through the tarpaulin encampment — stuck.

The Facebook activists were exuberant: online government, radical transparency, post-party politics, civil society and social connectivity. They were also in denial. The EU flags were no longer Maidan's majority. The red-black flag was: the flag of Western Ukraine's forest partisans who,  led by Nazi collaborators, fought the USSR into the 1950s.