'Before this, I didn't know we were so united'

UKRAINE: An extraordinary tent city has sprung up in Kiev's main square as protesters keep vigil, writes Chris Stephen

"Tent City" has become the symbol of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, a sprawling encampment that extends the length of Kiev's Kreshchatik boulevard.

Normally the expensive shops on either side are the province of the city's rich, the small band of tycoons and businessmen making money in a country where poverty is the norm.

But for the past seven days it has been home to an extraordinary encampment. What started as a few tents set up with nails hammered into the tarmac to give out-of-town protesters a place to sleep has grown into a huge encampment.

Tent City is a cross between rock festival and garrison: army tents are wedged cheek-by-jowl, all now pitched on top of polystyrene foam sheets to keep out the cold and damp.

Sympathetic army commanders have provided big MASH-style khaki tents for storing food, and they have parked mobile cookers on green trailers to boil water.

Ms Anastasia Martynenko, an 18-year-old student, has been here from the beginning. She lives in Kiev, but spends her days and much of each night at Tent City, living her revolution. Now she stands by the fence, blonde hair peeping out from a big orange sou'wester she picked from the piles of donated clothes that arrive each day.

"It's hard to stay away. When I get home, I can't sleep at night, I can't think of anything else but coming back here."

I met Anastasia, a student of Slavonic studies, at a low metal fence that in normal times keeps pedestrians from wandering on to the roadway but which now serves as the border for Tent City.

Nervous, perhaps paranoid is a better word, that the government will send in infiltrators, the occupants of Tent City take it in turns to hold a cordon along this barrier. Their cause is straightforward: everyone you talk to says opposition challenger Mr Viktor Yushchenko should be president, and blames Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich for rigging the election.

"We are here because the election was stolen. If the election was honest and Yanukovich was elected, then I think there would be less protest," says Anastasia.

"I voted for Yushchenko because he is the lesser of the two evils."

Keen to meet outsiders, she stuck a placard on a wire hung from a tree above her head saying "English Spoken Here".

"I wanted to meet foreigners, and practise my English," she explains. In fact, foreigners get special status here these days. The Orange Revolution is all about breaking Ukraine out of Russia's orbit, and charging into the arms of the European Union.

Permanent euphoria is the best way to describe the buzz that surrounds this place. Whether it will last if the protest counts its time in weeks rather than days is unclear, but for the moment everyone is buoyant.

"Here you meet as many people in a day as you might meet in six months in normal times," says Anastasia. "I made a lot of new friends here, from all over Ukraine."

One of these friends is Vitaly, a portly, middle-aged teacher from a village, Jitoma, in central Ukraine. "This protest is for a simple reason," he explains. "We want to be free. We do not want our children to have to be on their knees. We will stay as long as it takes."

Tent City is a busy place. As we talk, a man walks up, gives Anastasia two bars of chocolate and a smile, then walks off. "Total stranger," she says, handing the chocolate to a friend next to her. "This happens all the time. People come and give us food and give us clothing. It is so unexpected. You know, before this, I didn't know we were so united."

A great support network has grown up around the encampment. Local residents open their apartments for groups of protesters to take hot showers. City Hall keeps its canteen going 24 hours a day and its first floor is sleeping quarters for those tiring of tent life. Most shops and kiosks are busy providing tea, coffee and at-cost hot-dogs.

The mayor publicly backs the protest, laying on power for floodlights, lines of blue portable toilets and garbage trucks to keep the place clean.

The numbing cold also does its part in keeping vermin out and disease at bay.

Rock music from a radio station that has set up a tent in the middle of the city mixes with the hoots from plastic horns, and wood-smoke from dozens of cut-down oil drum brasiers fills the air.

Yesterday morning a local supplier arrived with 700kg of meat, and now the entire camp is full of people roasting it, kebab-style, on metal skewers. Several medical tents have been set up with little white flags and red crosses, and there is even a chapel - an orange tent with a man-sized wooden cross outside. Next to it is a tall plastic Christmas tree, painted orange.

Opportunism is everywhere. Last week a thousand pro-government supporters were bussed in to Kiev, provided with army tents, and set up a rival camp at Mariinsky Park, half a mile up the road. When they marched off for a demonstration, opposition supporters raced up, uprooted the tents, and added them to the camp at Kreshchatik.

Anastasia says the mood is unaffected by the endless ups and downs of political developments, which are relayed to them by tannoys from Independence Square at the top of the boulevard.

The only fear is of infiltrators, or organised mobs sent from the east by the government to break up the camp. On Sunday night word flashed around on a hundred mobile phones that miners were on the way, and tannoys barked out orders for the men to go to the railings and the women, a minority here, to gather in the middle.

Discipline is tight. There are marshals, from Mr Yushchenko's party, patrolling behind the line of volunteers on the boundaries of the encampment. And Tent City is "dry", no alcohol allowed, unlike the streets around it where crowds swig beer as they march and chant.

"People are much kinder to each other now than in normal times," says Anastasia. "In the metro, people hold open the doors for each other. On the moving stairs the people going down sing to the people going up," she tells me. But not everyone is happy with Anastasia's revolutionary zeal.

"My boyfriend asks me when I will come back to the normal life," she says. "My dad calls me several times a day on the mobile phone and asks me when I will come home. He says I have to learn at my university. But I want to be here - I am 18 years old and I can decide for myself." She is confident, perhaps over-confident, in final victory, but she looks forward to the success of the protest, and the dismantling of Tent City, with a touch of sadness. "I made so many friends here, but when it is all over, most of us will never see each other again. And I know that will make me sad."