The Twitter-active were in denial. They ignored the militia recruiters on soapboxes and food crates signing boys up for the cause. These were the ones I wanted to talk to: the revolutionary heroes. People were posing for selfies nearby. But I had crossed an invisible line, too close to the loitering thugs.

"Fuck you, you fucking paedophile." His breath stank: it was vodka. This was a militiaman, his eyes behind yellow shades. "You fucking European paedophile gay rapist." Drunken anger brought its head close to mine, hinting at a headbutt: "This is gonna be fucking World War Three . . ."

Night fell over Maidan. The barricades smelt beautiful: they were lined with blankets of flowers to the revolutionary dead. Maidan was one enormous cemetery. Blankets of flowers were lined by hundreds of candles in yoghurt-sized coloured glass pots: massacred souls turned into 30-metre-long rows of orange, blue, green, yellow, purple light. Men knelt to sob at photographs. Mothers left icons for their sons, with the wood-sprite face of the Slavic Christ. Piles of wilting roses were pinned with plastic dividers holding watermarked poems from little sisters. Dead faces — with the forced smiles of school portraits and Facebook pages — were pinned to lamp-posts and trees sliced through with bullet marks.

The revolution: fascism, Nazism, Jew-baiters. Russia TV pumped out this account hourly. Among the flowers I wandered with a voice of Maidan — the charismatic TV host and activist Nataliya Gumenyuk. Pretty and slight, she was braver than Maidan's camouflaged six o'clock shadows. Because the ancien régime loved to abduct powerful journalists, to slice bits off their ears.

"Aren't you frightened of these militias — these unemployed men from the countryside and teenage losers camped out here with guns?" Barricades of flowers and rubble lined an avenue where 30 or more protesters were shot by the Berkut riot police.

My friend winced. "Don't you get it? The people terrorising Kiev were not on the square but in power. They sent paid thugs to beat up, to chase out even random people who came to the square. They were the ones who sent death squads and then sent out the kidnappers. Fascism? This was everything — a messy everything — lefties, rightists and my liberal friends."

Maidan had few people like Nataliya left on it. But they had begun the revolution: internet activists, anti-corruption campaigners, foreign MAs, now running revolutionary supply lines — but it was not them who tipped Maidan over the edge. The state had barred its teeth; the militia fought back. They were the ones who ran Russia's criminal puppets out of Kiev.

Nataliya and the democrats were uncomfortable. Yes, Maidan had been everyone. Yes, the revolution was not what Moscow called it: "a Nazi-Fascist coup". But when the Berkut fired and the rock concert turned into urban war, it was the Right who fought the hardest. This left the liberals uncomfortable. Grateful and awkwardly deferential.