SMOULDERING fires, streets covered in soot, a smell of burned tyres; young men in military rags wandering around purposelessly. A heavy atmosphere of apprehension, anger and disbelief still sits on Independence Square, the gathering place in Kiev that has lent its name, Maidan, to the political protest movement born there, and thereby to the broader popular sentiment that supports it. Despite the toppling of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, there is no sense of triumph among the quiet tears and loud words. But there is an abiding power.

That is why the country’s new cabinet presented itself for Maidan’s “approval” on the evening of February 26th. A crowd of tens of thousands heckled the mainstream politicians and cheered those—about a third—who were nominated from their own activist ranks. “Shame!” they shouted when Alexander Turchinov, the speaker of the parliament (Rada) and acting president, appeared on stage.

“The only legitimate power today in Ukraine is the Rada,” he told the crowd. “You can criticise it but there is no other.” And he went on to assure them that whatever they thought of the government, they would not have to suffer it for long, with an election set for May. “This government is doomed. Three, four months and they won’t be able to work, because they have to make unpopular decisions.” He himself, he said, would step down once things had stabilised. The crowd was just as dismissive of Arseny Yatseniuk, who has been nominated for prime minister; he too said it was a “kamikaze government”.

The evening’s announcements made two things clear. One is that the government is going to be controlled by Yulia Tymoshenko, Mr Yanukovych’s archrival, who was in prison until February 22nd. She has no official post, but Mr Turchinov is her right-hand man and Mr Yastsenyuk is the leader of her party, Fatherland. More importantly, it demonstrated the level of Maidan’s mistrust of established politicians and its refusal to delegate the power it has won.

The appointment of the interior minister, Arsen Avakov, was actually vetoed by Maidan. Vladimir Parasyuk, one of the Maidan leaders, said: “As a citizen of Ukraine I won’t allow this. My conscience won’t let me.” He said the interim government had one night to decide, but it must present a new candidate. “Maidan will not disperse,” he went on. “We will be a controlling organ and they should know that if they betray us, we will come to each one of them and demand answers on behalf of our dead comrades—the heroes of Ukraine.” The crowd cheered.

The revolution which last week saw the overthrow of Mr Yanukovych, a corrupt, cowardly and thuggish president, has not yet been given a name. Perhaps that is fitting; it is not yet over, nor is its final destination in clear sight. Mr Yanukovych is gone and his regime broken, but the post-Soviet order which prevailed in Ukraine over the past two decades has not been uprooted. There is little by way of an elite devoted to forging a new, modern nation state; the possibility of failure, a descent into chaos, insurrection—notably in the Crimea—or even secession remains stark.

This revolution is thus more important than the Orange revolution of 2004, which was a response to Mr Yanukovych’s election to the presidency through a fraudulent run-off eventually overturned by the supreme court. While the other post-Soviet revolution at around the same time—Georgia’s 2003 Rose revolution—succeeded in resetting its country’s direction, the Orange revolution foundered. Ukraine’s revolution-yet-to-be-named was largely brought about by the failure of that previous, more peaceful but frustratingly unsuccessful uprising to change the country’s dysfunctional political culture or build bridges between its regions, which have little by way of history to unite them. And what then degenerated into bitter farce may yet end up, this time round, in tragedy.

Three days that shook Kiev

In 1917 tsarist Russia vanished within just three days. The Soviet Union was despatched in just as short a tumult in August 1991. The collapse of the Ukrainian regime did not take much longer.

The stage was set when, last November, Mr Yanukovych decided to abandon negotiations aimed at an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union (EU) in favour of easy money and political cover from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Ukrainians—particularly young ones—saw a lifeline that might have winched them up to a civilised European world being cut, and the “EuroMaidan” protests began.

On February 18th, after clashes with protesters outside the Rada, the Berkut riot police tried to storm the Maidan encampment. By the next day 25 protesters had died, some at the hands of plain-clothes thugs and semi-criminals deployed by the government. The House of Trade Unions, which served as a revolutionary news centre and hospital, had been torched. But the opposition still held the square.

A negotiated truce soon broke down. On February 20th someone—it is still not clear exactly who—gave the order for snipers positioned on the roofs around the Maidan to open fire. Within hours the death toll rose to nearly 80 people—“Heaven’s battalion”, now commemorated in the square with shrines of candles, flowers and photographs. Talks between government and opposition, mediated by the foreign ministers of Germany, Poland and France, resulted in an agreement to return to the country’s 2004 constitution, increasing the power of the Rada, and to call presidential elections by December 2014. But the agreement did not satisfy the protesters who had lost comrades to the snipers. Their leaders said that if Mr Yanukovych was not gone by the morning of February 22nd, they would come and get him. Mr Yanukovych fled the capital. On February 27th he issued a statement asserting his continued presidency and asking Russia for shelter.

The revolution was not just about getting rid of one kleptocrat. As Yulia Mostovaya, the editor of Zerkalo Nedeli, an influential Ukrainian weekly, puts it, it was a broader uprising against a malevolent state which failed in its basic tasks—a state in which the government robbed the public rather than served it, in which the courts covered up injustice rather than right it, in which prosecutors perpetrated crimes instead of investigating them.

Years of pillage

In part because of that broader agenda, in part because of last week’s brutality, the swift overthrow of Mr Yanukovych produced no euphoria. Ksenia Kovaeva, a 27-year-old who brought flowers to commemorate the dead and to thank the living, says “I am scared to give birth in this country at the moment.”

Over the past three months of demonstrations Maidan displayed exemplary discipline and self-organisation. Now the protesters have won, and the Berkut has been disbanded. But the rest of the police have vanished from the streets, too, which is worrying. So far there has been no looting, but Ms Mostovaya says the number of crimes has gone up. The house of Petro Simonenko, the leader of Ukraine’s communist party, has been torched; Andrei Klyuev, who is widely believed to have been in charge of the attack on the protesters, has been shot in the leg.

Civil order may well be maintained; but Ukraine is also staring into an economic abyss. Mr Yanukovych’s government not only continued the country’s poor economic performance (see chart); it was a huge drain on its resources. Anders Aslund, a Ukraine expert at the Peterson Institute in Washington, estimates that the president and his family, broadly construed, embezzled between $8 billion and $10 billion a year since he took power in 2010. Mr Yanukovych’s 130-hectare estate in Mezhigorye, outside Kiev, featured lakes and golf courses, marble mansions, an ostrich-stocked menagerie and much more.

The government wasted much of the money it did not steal on supporting the country’s currency. This is now fast depreciating, which is both inevitable and, in the broad scheme of things, necessary; but it will drive up inflation and encourage all who can to get their money out of the country’s banks to do so. The government has no chance of borrowing in the international capital markets, and the country’s foreign-exchange reserves are down to $12 billion. Its current-account deficit stands at 9% of GDP. A $15 billion credit line from Russia has been put on hold.

Ukraine is thus in dire need of some sort of rescue package from the IMF and the EU if it is not soon to run out of cash. Any such support will be conditional on the country finally committing itself to structural reforms, including cuts in its vast energy subsidies, and to curbing corruption. The first will bring prompt pain to almost all citizens, the second will be resisted by many functionaries.

For such commitments to merit credence, Ukraine needs a legitimate government that will sweep away the old political set-up—which is also what Maidan is demanding. The problem is that Maidan was not the only player in the revolution. A less visible battle has been going on between various Ukrainian oligarchs and the members of Mr Yanukovych’s extended family who took their place at the trough. These oligarchs used their money, influence and political fronts to pile on pressure.

But although Mr Yanukovych provided oligarchs and Maidan with a common enemy in the run up to the revolution, the allies could well turn into adversaries in the aftermath. The oligarchs and their political place-men are creatures of the dysfunctional state that Maidan rejects; some will surely seek to use the revolution to regain their lost interests and restore the pre-Yanukovych status quo.

The Rada is itself the product of this corrupt system, its seats bought and sold by the oligarchs’ factions for years. The first days in the post-revolutionary Rada showed little by way of improvement, with posts being horse-traded and opaque deals being struck. Mr Parasyuk was enraged: “What is going on in the Rada today is a repeat of 2004. We will not allow this to happen. This is official—for all politicians to hear: forget it!”

None of the politicians, including the three opposition leaders Arseny Yatsenyuk, Vitaly Klitschko, a former boxer, and Oleh Tyagnibok, are trusted by Maidan. Witness the reaction to Ms Tymoshenko’s appearance on Maidan after her release from prison. In the Orange revolution she was treated like a messiah. This time, while people were glad to see that she had been freed, they knew better than to put their fate in her hands—or those of any other politician for that matter.

Crimea and punishment

What complicates the picture further is that holding the country together depends in large measure on the co-operation of the oligarchs, who control industrial assets in the east of the country, as well as on the co-operation of local elites.

Ever since its independence Ukraine has been divided between the east and south, which boast large ethnically Russian populations and, until then, were home to large chunks of the Soviet military-industrial complex, and a more nationalist, pro-European west (see map). The two parts have different national heroes, different languages, different churches and different ways of life. Western Ukraine was only occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939. It never voted for Mr Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, nor submitted to his rule; it sustained Maidan both spiritually and physically.

The thing the two parts of the country had in common was Kiev, which both considered their capital. Now many people in the east feel that Kiev has been seized by the west. On February 23rd the Russian-speaking population of Kharkiv, the first capital of Soviet Ukraine, demonstrated in front of their city’s giant statue of Lenin, calling for confrontation with the NATO-sponsored “fascist collaborators” in the west. Some this is the product of hysterical propaganda on the Russian television channels that are watched on that side of the country. But the Rada’s decision, in its first days, to take Russian off the list of Ukraine’s official languages played provocatively and irresponsibly into the hands of people trying to stir up such feelings.

Successive Ukrainian governments failed to find a vision or narrative with which to unite the country. Encouragingly, the elites in the west and the east of the country seem to understand this problem. Andrei Sadovyi, the popular mayor of Lviv, says people have been dying on Maidan to keep the country together. Western Ukraine’s ultranationalist Freedom party—the force that got Russian taken off the books as an official language—has poll ratings of only 20%, and the intelligentsia in Lviv has declared it will speak Russian for a day in solidarity with Russian speakers in the east. Some people in Donetsk—Mr Yanukovych’s home city—have said they will reciprocate by speaking Ukrainian.

Neither the oligarchs nor the politicians of the east want to join Russia. Gennady Kernes, the mayor of Kharkiv and one of Mr Yanukovych’s allies, has said he recognises the new government’s legitimacy. Most important of all Rinat Akhmetov—Ukraine’s richest man, Mr Yanukovych’s longtime political partner and, in effect, the boss of Donetsk—has also turned to the side of Maidan, defending economic reforms, modernisation and accountability.

But then there is the problem of Crimea, a problem Mr Putin will exacerbate. It was part of Russia until 1954; when in that year Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine he surely imagined it was a change that made no real difference. Sebastopol, Crimea’s largest city, is mostly populated by Russians —not least because it is home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet. On February 23rd some 20,000 people in Sebastopol overthrew the mayor, who was appointed by the central government in Kiev, and replaced him with a Russian citizen.

Mr Putin may now use the window of opportunity to seize Crimea, using co-ordinated propaganda, agents of influence on the ground and Russia’s army. Politicians in Russia are talking of distributing passports in Crimea—a ruse used to strengthen Russia’s pretext for annexing the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008. Armed men have raised the Russian flag over Crimea’s parliament, and on February 26th pro-Russian demonstrators clashed with Crimean Tartars, who make up about 13% of the peninsula’s population and strongly wish to stay part of the Ukraine. While making no public comment on Mr Yanukovych’s defeat, Mr Putin has ordered an urgent drill to test the combat-readiness of 150,000 soldiers in the region. A massive military exercise preceded the 2008 invasion of Georgia.

When Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia, it had actually come under fire from Georgia, provoked by Russia’s interference in the region. Crimea and Sebastopol are clearly not under threat from Ukraine. But Mr Putin lost a lot of face when Mr Yanukovych was toppled; he despised the man, but placed great store in having a compliant Ukraine. Taking back Crimea would be a blow to the new regime in Kiev, gain him the appearance of strength, and secure a lengthy Russian coastline on the Black Sea.

But restoring the peninsula to Russian rule would be costly, especially if it involved conflict in which Tartars or others resisting the action were killed. Russia would probably be isolated, which would harm the economy, antagonising the elites on whom Mr Putin depends. Even if Russia does not make a military move on Crimea, it may use it as a lever to ratchet up pressure on whoever holds power in Kiev. A democratic, European Ukraine moving out from under its influence would be a profound threat to Mr Putin’s Russia. He will take it seriously.