3,000 Odessians gathered today on the Potemkin Steps for the 200th anniversary of the famous national poet Tara Shevchenko. They sang the Ukrainian national anthem together, maidantranslations.com reports. 

Yes, this is another pro-Maidan film that has a bit of the "We Are the World" feel. No matter. Odessa is a predominantly Russian-speaking city also known for its thriving Jewish community, and so people gathering on these iconic steps sending this particular message of inter-ethnic peace against Putin the Instigator (as Der Spiegel rightly called him on the cover today), are all to the good.

It's especially important because of the memory indelibly imprinted into the mind of every Western intellectual, especially those of us who watch indy movies in New York City:

The Potemkin Steps were made famous by Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, a revolutionary propaganda film. The massacre on the steps with the iconic baby carriage tumbling down in fact never took place, although there were reports from the British consul and a British newspaper at the time of tsarist troops shooting at crowds of demonstrators at other locations.

There isn't evidence that those troops deliberately shot women, children, and nurses, however, which is the propagandistic take on it that Eisenstein, a supporter of the Soviet revolution, made on it.

Ebert, the famous film critic, had this to say:

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director.

But Ebert was wrong. It was not "his job as a director" to mix and match and provocatively mash up in a "montage" incidents that happened elsewhere, and didn't in fact (as far as we know) involve deliberate shooting of these types of civilians.

That was his job, in fact, as a Soviet state propagandist — which is what he was.

If you were to start a conversation with any New York liberal about their attitudes towards Ukraine, if they don't have any direct family experience of the "fascist Ukrainians," they will have this — the baby carriage and the nurse's shattered and bloody glasses.

That they didn't exist doesn't matter — and doesn't matter even to Ebert, who should have known better.

The conviction that Ukrainians are fascists will not go away in our generation, and will have a hard time going away even if the new coalition government in Kiev succeeds, and treats every ethnic conflict and every disenfranchised people (including the ethnic Ukrainians themselves) like a fragile painted Ukrainian Easter egg, complete with the dotted tears of the Mother of God.

Fifty years — actually one hundred years — of very brutal memories of Jewish and other minority pogroms in Ukraine are not going to go away. The task isn't to pretend they don't exist, or to discount them, or to say they are outdated, but merely to get people to walk and chew gum at the same time. To add to their picture store. To  affirm that yes, these past atrocities did indeed happen, but that doesn't mean that every 20-year-old invoking the name of Bandera (and there are actually a lot less of them than Russian propaganda TV claims) is about to kill a Jew or a Tatar.

The fact that not a single Jew, Tatar, Russian or any person of any other ethnic minority has been killed in the last three weeks since Yanukovych was deposed ought to count. Why doesn't it?

The fact is that bused-in Russians from Russia killed two EuroMaidan demonstrators in Kharkiv should explain the problem here. Why doesn't it?

My old Jewish dentist on the Upper West Side once told me of a stark memory embedded deep into his consciousness — his father, as a boy (so that means we are talking of events of 100 years ago), cowering in terror as a mounted Cossack slashed his pet dog in half.

Just a dog, not a person, and a really long time ago — but enough to ensure that this Jewish family that emigrated to the United States, and their relatives and friends and patients, including me, a Catholic — would never forget. Not all Cossacks were like this — but whose going to start anthropological research when their family dog is chopped in two?

There's the emblematic scene in Fiddler on the Roof — the director creates a montage, there, too — where the father and mother remain in the shtetl despite the tsarist pogroms, but the daughter and the new husband leave for Poland. And one of the sons, in a leather jacket and cap, says he is off to join the communists — the communists who themselves are later responsible for atrocities worse than the tsar's — which later include killing Jews like the theater director Mikhoels. And that's part of the story, too. All of it is the story, but people obviously remember only their part of it.

Andreas Umland launched a complicated and cumbersome petition to his fellow academics and writers not to stigmatize the Ukrainian opposition/new government with these images of atrocities of the past. It was so complex I couldn't sign it because I didn't feel the message was clear enough, even though I generally support the idea that people need a more nuanced picture of Ukraine. But now this petition is misrepresented by New New New Leftist Keith Gessen as a call to "shut up" about the concerns about the right-wing tendencies of this government. It wasn't that; it was a call to be more complex. Twitter doesn't allow for that — but you know, it does, if you work it right.

This picture, taken in January 2014, doesn't help me personally to have a good feeling about some of the forces around the Maidan Square protests. Masked, hooded men swinging a medieval weapon at the prosecutor's office?! But I've been following events closely, and I haven't seen that these people have done anything like their dress-up would indicate they might do.

Maybe things aren't exactly back to normal in Ternopol, maybe these fellows have disappeared and other guys in suits and ties are coming to do the People's business now in the justice system, with less corruption. But I just don't know. The point is, we don't have any authentication of this picture as a harbinger of the government to come.

This picture is one that also Russians cite constantly. I don't know what's up with this. Is somebody re-enacting a Jerzy Kosinski novel (and we're told even those weren't true). Well, I'm glad they're not people, for starters.

But so far, what I see in three weeks of intensively covering this situation, the only people in Crimea who have had their heads bloodied are actually journalists, including foreign journalists — not Jews, not Crimeans, not Ukrainians, not Russians.  The purpose was simple: to prevent them from continuing to tell the diverse and nuanced story that needs to be told.