MAN OF THE PEOPLE KATE WAGNER laments attempts to read too much into Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’
“‘People power’ is the political fairy tale of our times. … The people in post-Soviet states are like the chorus in a Mussorgsky opera: power is brokered behind the scenes, the people are there just to cheer on cue or to boo the villain like in a pantomime.” Mark Almond, Oxford Forum, Spring 2005
OFTEN,WHEN SUCH a great deal has changed, it is the little things that jump out at us. Finally, after 13 months out of the country – and the better part of a popular revolution, I was returning to Ukraine as an election observer for the repeat second round presidential election. While the other 99 observers on my flight buckled up and swapped mini-CVs and tales of the first two rounds (“it was so cold in Lugansk – I brought two pairs of long underwear this time!”), I mulled over the departures monitor at Gatwick, which listed ‘Kyiv’ instead of ‘Kiev.’ That, I thought, was real change.
Despite pouring over the Russian, Ukrainian and Western medias’ various interpretations of the first two rounds of elections and the ‘Orange Revolution’, I did not know what awaited me. What would this revolution really look like? Would it just be a few bundled students camping on Khreshatyk, or something running deeper? Was ‘people power’ merely a political fairy tale for the idealistic? As someone who had seen great changes in the country between 2001 and 2003, I was cautiously optimistic.
I was in Ukraine for the 2002 Rada (parliamentary) elections, in a small but economically important factory and port city just north of Odesa. With the exception of a whirlwind visit by Viktor Yushchenko to the only Ukrainian-language school in town, a few precariously-hung campaign banners and an intimidating city council contest, the election passed with considerable silence. I never saw more than a dozen people attend a stump speech in the square. Most locals to whom I spoke did not vote, did not believe that their vote would count and did not trust politicians to look after their interests. As usual, the OSCE condemned the election as fraudulent, but there was little protest. What had happened in the two intervening years to cause such a drastically different response both nationally and internationally? Was it merely a reaction to the Georgian ‘Rose Revolution’, or orchestrated by the ever meddling US? Or was there something to this notion of ‘people power’?
I am not going to compare Ukraine in 2004 with Georgia in 2003. The two are radically different in history, process and outcome. Although the Rose Revolution was symbolically important, and did provide a concrete example – whether fairytale or reality – that post-Soviet people can make a difference, the factors that facilitated the Orange Revolution were primarily home grown. And the crowd was one of those factors. Whilst the people may not have held the power directly, they did monitor and influence those who did – the President, the Rada and the Supreme Court – to follow the letter of the law. And, unlike in Georgia in 2000 or in Kyrgyzstan today, it was the law that dictated the change of power. In many ways, the Orange Revolution turned the Mussorgsky opera on its head: the politicians began to operate on stage, taking their cues from the boos and cheers of the ‘Maidan Million’ and vice versa. The change from popular indifference to political dialogue and from a passive to participatory political culture in Ukraine could be the most lasting – and important – result of the revolution.
It is difficult to write history as it unfolds. It is incredibly difficult, therefore, accurately to pinpoint the origins of the Orange Revolution or to weigh their relative influence. Ukraine in 2002 and Ukraine in 2004 were vastly different places. The unique confluence of popular dissatisfaction with corrupt and selfish politicians, a changed international context, Russia’s interference, mistakes by the government, the appeal of Yushchenko and the role of the courts all prevented the 2004 presidential election from remaining just another fraudulent post- Soviet blip on the international radar.
In a speech to the Woodrow Wilson Center in January, US Ambassador to Ukraine (1993–1998),William Green Miller, stated that “there had been a fundamental irreversible transformation in attitude on the part of Ukrainian voters” since the 2002 election. After the election, President Leonid Kuchma and his cronies managed to keep control over the Rada, but the fact that more than two thirds of the electorate voted against Kuchma’s party undermined his authoritative power. During the subsequent two years of wrangling between opposition and government parliamentary factions, opposition forces coordinated and lobbied together. In the summer of 2003, while Kuchma attempted to push through a constitutional amendment allowing for the election of the president by the Rada, those opposition forces – led by Yushchenko and his current acting prime minister (and avid Orange Revolutionary) Yulia Timoshenko – set up tents on Khreshatyk, not for the first nor the last time. The support of fellow opposition figures such as Timoshenko and the well-respected Socialist Party of Ukraine leader Oleksandr Moroz was crucial in organising and leading a united opposition through the protests, as well as through the Rada debates and court cases that were the less-glamorous, but more instrumental, side to the Orange Revolution. Non-opposition was also influential. Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn did not stop debate on election fraud and annulment; Kuchma did not prevent protestors from amassing in Kyiv, and popular Kyiv mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko provided sanitary and health services for Tent City while remaining politically neutral.
THE SUPREME AND Constitutional courts provided an important mediating force in the Orange Revolution. Unlike in some post-Soviet states, the Ukrainian court system has recently asserted its independence from the government, proving itself to the public to be a fair and impartial judge. One example of this perceived objectivity was the much-publicised 2003 decision that allowed Omelchenko to keep office despite Kuchma’s attempts to remove him on the basis of an obscure law forcing public servants to retire at the age of 65. Ironically, Omelchenko and Kuchma share the same birthday: August 9, 1938. A current senior US diplomat in Kyiv believes this case heavily influenced Omelchenko’s enabling of Tent City.
Both Yushchenko and Yanukovych saw the courts as the first and last avenue to plead their cases, with Yanukovych conceding defeat after using every possible appeal in January. Domestic observers from both camps had hovered around polling stations and territorial election commissions with well-thumbed copies of the constitution and voting regulations, chronicling every break from procedure in order to bolster their respective cases.
From the 2002 campaign to his presidential one,Yushchenko arose as the leader of the opposition movement, gaining near constant – if rarely positive – media coverage. Finally, there was a face to the opposition. In fact, the same photograph of Yushchenko hugging a small child was used in both the 2002 and 2004 campaign posters. The ravages of dioxin poisoning only gave greater emphasis to the fresh change that Yushchenko represented.
While Yushchenko’s camp made crucial campaign blunders in 2002,Viktor Yanukovych’s camp made even more grievous mistakes in 2004. Indeed, perhaps the first error of the campaign was in deciding to choose Yanukovych at all. Corruption has been a known and begrudgingly-accepted part of Ukrainian politics since long before 2002, but the advocacy of Yanukovych – seen by many as uncultured and with a checkered past – may have pushed the envelope too far. His industrial magnate friends, government backers and Russian money rubbed the last veneer of legitimacy off of the 2004 election campaign.While Yushchenko presented at least the appearance of change, Kuchma’s chosen successor represented its prevention. Throughout the campaign, and particularly after the inception of the Tent City, Yanukovych’s demeanor was less open, more defensive and at times vicious – as any reading of the presidential debates (the only two in Ukrainian history) reveals. The brazen nature of the election violations in the second round in November – such as the busing of repeat absentee voters to the West from the East – also insulted the process beyond popular acceptance.
RUSSIA'S INTERFERENCE WAS also a large deterrent to Ukrainian voters. Although many Ukrainians, especially in the East and South, do prefer close relations with Russia, they do not necessarily desire a puppet government. President Vladimir Putin’s open campaigning for Yanukovych, the constant presence of Russian PR and campaign specialists and the $300m donated directly to Yanukovych’s coffers backfired. Following the public backlash to Putin’s premature congratulatory call to Yanukovych after the November election, Yanukovych actually retreated from his image as Putin’s ally – albeit too late.
Russia’s direct negative impact on the election certainly trumped any influence that the West supposedly imposed.At a recent speech at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, US Foreign Service Institute Ukraine specialist Dr William Gleeson outlined the Bush administration’s failure in US-Ukraine policy both before and during the Orange Revolution – voicing opinions shared by current US Ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst. Instead of following the State Department’s strategy of promoting fair elections, during 2004 the myriad high-profile US visitors spent more time lauding Kuchma’s deployment of troops to Iraq than warning against fraud. Gleeson argues that US foreign policy toward Ukraine in 2004 was merely an arm of its Iraq policy – a weakness that Kuchma hoped to take advantage of, and that the Ukrainian public grew to resent. The US message was muddled, and its funding negligible with respect to spending on ‘democracy promotion’ in the Middle East – or with respect to Russia’s outlay. President George W. Bush received much criticism at home for not supporting a revolution some abroad credit him for manufacturing.
These are but a few of the many factors that interwove in 2004 to create the Orange Revolution. I could also mention the importance of the recent EU enlargement, which allowed Ukrainians to compare personally the EU with Ukraine and with Russia. While many large businesses still look toward Russia, small- and medium-sized businesses look increasingly westward. It is far too soon to judge how important each of these factors was in brining about change. But it is clear that change occurred – more than just signs at the airport and tents in the square. As the Russian politician Grigory Yavlinsky said this winter, “I’ll give you a tent and you put it on Red Square and see how many people go live there – even if you make sandwiches.” Two of my colleagues in Ukraine who did not vote in the 2002 election – and did not know what the European Union was in 2002 – were polling station commission members in 2004. That might not be overwhelming power, but it is ‘people power’. There is a long and extremely difficult road to hoe in Ukraine, and as the feeble promises President Bush made to President Yushchenko on April 4 illustrate, future success, like the Orange Revolution, will be a mostly home-grown affair. As usual, I’m cautiously optimistic.
Kate Wagner is an MPhil candidate in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College. She was a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Yuzhne, Ukraine (2001–2003), and a short-term election observer with the OSCE in the repeat second round of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election
