Inside Kiev's chaos
Ukraine's suddenly assertive democracy movement has been years in the making
Two weeks ago, who would have thought of orange as a revolutionary color and chestnuts as a symbol of democracy? For most casual observers, orange-clad supporters of the Ukrainian democracy movement who flooded the streets of Kiev after last month's contested presidential vote seemed to come out of nowhere. Seeing them on television--chanting outside the Parliament, erecting a tent city to camp out in subfreezing weather--it's easy to wonder: Aren't they a little too well organized? How long can they last? These are good questions, considering that Ukraine's Moscow-backed regime has tried to prolong the conflict--at least in part in hopes that the opposition will get cold and tired and go away. Ukraine's future may depend on just how well organized the opposition is and how long it can last.
The answers look promising for supporters of reformist candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who turned out in massive numbers to protest his narrow defeat in an election widely viewed as fraudulent. On Friday, the Ukrainian Supreme Court, invalidating the election, ordered that a revote be held on December 26.
Ukraine's assertive democracy movement isn't quite as spontaneous as it may seem. The roots of the current conflict reach back at least four years, when the politicians who today lead the opposition split off from President Leonid Kuchma after the Ukrainian public was shocked by a series of revelations about Kuchma's governing style.
Decapitated journalist. Back in the fall of 2000, a former Kuchma bodyguard made public some audiotapes of conversations in which Kuchma appeared not only to insult everyone within earshot but also possibly to order the murder of an opposition journalist, Georgy Gongadze, whose mutilated and decapitated body had been found in the woods outside Kiev. The president's crude manner shocked the public nearly as much as the allegations of murder: Feeling, it seemed, personally insulted, thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets. Kuchma, then just beginning his second and final term, quickly lost his power base in parliament, and one of his deputy prime ministers, prominent entrepreneur Yulia Timoshenko, abandoned him. Eventually, he also lost his prime minister, Yushchenko, whose pro-western foreign policy (and marriage to an American citizen who once worked in the Reagan White House) galled the Communists, whose support Kuchma badly needed to retain. Opposition activists camped out in the streets of Kiev until the spring, when their tent city was finally broken up by the police.
The street presence was gone, but the chasm opened up by the scandal that became known as Kuchmagate grew only wider. On the one side, Russia came to Kuchma's aid, exploiting the Ukrainian president's weakness to forge ever closer economic ties with the largest and richest of its former satellites. On the other side, the opposition continued to organize, with U.S. help (which did not, however, come close to matching Russia's aid to Kuchma). In 2002, the opposition won a third of the seats in parliament. This meant Kuchma could not exert the same kind of control over Ukraine as his ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, wielded in Russia by, for instance, silencing independent news broadcasting. So Ukraine came to this year's elections with some opposition media.
Time, too, was on the opposition's side. In the years since Kuchmagate, a new generation of Ukrainians has come of age. Unlike their parents, most of them consider their native language to be Ukrainian, not Russian, and think of Ukraine (which has a population of nearly 50 million and covers an area nearly twice the size of Germany) as a potential European power, not as Russia's junior sibling. In the intervening period, all of Ukraine's neighbors except Russia and Belarus have either joined the European Union or applied to do so.
When Kuchma chose as his successor Victor Yanukovich, a Russian-speaking politician known for his crude ways and a criminal past, this touched the memories of Kuchmagate and stoked Ukrainians' fears of seeing their country pulled away from Europe and toward an increasingly isolated, unattractive, and meddling Russia.
As a result, many Ukrainians feel this is their last chance to choose one of two paths for their nation. This explains their resolve to remain in the streets and squares of Kiev through the long, cold winter nights. Anyone wondering just how long they can keep this up should remember the winter of 2000-2001, when they camped out in freezing streets until March. And they weren't even as desperate--or as well organized--then.
This story appears in the December 13, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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