The Maidan revolution has thrown Ukraine from the “blue” developmental level of neo-feudalism into the “orange” level of free market, representative democracy, Pekar wrote in a recent article, “and has allowed us to see through the flames into the ‘green’ level”—the crowd-funded, post-capitalist, self-governing, wiki-politics of the future.

It’s the Maidan itself, which is situated at the very center of the Ukrainian capital, that serves as the crucible for this revolution. When I arrived in the city, months after the violence that unseated Yanukovych, to attend an international conference about “the meaning of Ukrainian pluralism for Europe, Russia and the world,” the square was still occupied by revolutionaries cutting off traffic (“We’re making a new country, sorry for the jams,” a taxi driver told me). Massive tents are still pitched in the middle of the street, pinned to the asphalt. Towering barricades of tires, rocks, and rubble are everywhere, as if the very fabric of the city rose up and rebelled. Opposite sushi bars lie piles of chopped-up tree trunks for firewood. Metal ovens cook great vats of soup. Improvised shrines and hospitals sport fluttering flags.

If Kiev’s layout can be transformed, can’t all of society?

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Every tent on the Maidan, it seems, houses its own ideology: anarchists hand out pages of Kropotkin; young Cossacks, their heads shaved with one forelock dangling, practice fighting with metal poles and talk of reintroducing Cossack governance (“It’s direct democracy,” one tells me). There are priests calling for Ukraine’s spiritual rebirth, agrarian socialists, Euro-idealists. And there is the Right Sector, the right-wing, nationalist group whose members were among the Maidan’s violent avant-garde during the overthrow of Yanukovych.

“You can’t get away from genetics: Ukraine’s ancestors, the people who lived in this region, had a dominant DNA code of R1a1. They fought mammoths. It’s the warrior gene. That’s the genetics of Maidan,” said Yaroslav Babych, one of the Right Sector’s leaders, as we drank iced tea in Cafe Cossack on Shevchenko Lane, just off the Maidan. “We’re pagans,” he continued, “we worship DNA.”

Babych’s day job is as a lawyer in a Ukrainian investment company (“There’s nothing to invest in here,” he told me when I asked for a tip), but we met over the weekend and he was wearing a ring with ancient runic lettering and a T-shirt that said ‘Slavs.’

“What about those in eastern Ukraine and Donbas who have rejected the revolution?” I asked. The news that day was of Kiev losing control of cities in the Donbas region to pro-Russian separatists, and of Ukrainian police and army divisions defecting.

“A lot of people in the Donbas are Russians who were moved to the region after Stalin’s enforced famine wiped out the Ukrainians. They have different genes,” he responded.

The Right Sector has been a godsend to the Kremlin, whose propaganda has heralded the group as the fascist core of the Maidan, out to terrorize ethnic Russians in the east of the country. Unfortunately for Moscow, the Right Sector flopped in Ukraine’s presidential elections in May, mustering just 1 percent of the vote. The organization’s brand of pagan-DNA nationalism may be a fringe view, but its tents on the Maidan are still among the busiest.