Neal Ascherson reports from Kiev

...Superficially, the spectacle on the Maidan looked like a personality
binge. Few human beings who are not dictators can have heard their name
chanted by so many, so often, for so long. The human ocean stretched out of
sight, waving its forest of long-stemmed flags, swaying to thunderous
Ukrainian rap, bellowing ‘Yush-chen-ko!’, cheering every speech or scrap of
good news. Most nights, their man came in person to thank them for standing
firm and to report....Today they love Yushchenko for his very awkwardness,
for the ruined face which an assassin’s poison inflicted on a once handsome
man. Now, with his scars, he is no better than anyone else with an orange
ribbon on his sleeve – ‘one of us’. And yet I didn’t meet anybody who was
uncritical about him as a leader. The loyalty is conditional.
...
Is this to be the story of the Orange Revolution of 2004? Those who took
part still feel that something has changed for ever, in their country and in
themselves. But no movement to embody and enforce the will of the Maidan has
emerged. The Pora group, although it helped to direct and organise the first
eruption of protest, is too small and vague in its aims to do this job.
Apart from a loose parliamentary coalition called ‘Our Ukraine’, a President
Yushchenko would have no political troops of his own. During the ‘orange
weeks’, the word has been that ‘the people’ will return to the street and
depose him if he betrays their hopes. Will they? And will they return to
save him, if those who tried to murder him four months ago try again?...


LRB | Vol. 27 No. 1 dated 6 January 2005 |

Is this to be the story?


Neal Ascherson reports from Kiev

Revolution is a staircase. In February 1848, the poet Lamartine found
himself in charge of a Paris revolution, from an upper floor in the H?tel de
Ville. He identified on the staircase something as specific as a tornado: a
roaring double helix formed of those fighting their way upwards and those
pressing downwards. It appears whenever a society mutinies and decides to
make a new world. I first saw it in the Sorbonne in May 1968, clinging to a
landing-wall to avoid being sucked into the deafening vortex, the up-torrent
waving despatches from the front line and the barricades, the downrush
battling towards the street with rolls of posters and strung bundles of
fresh leaflets. Since then, even in the little history I have seen, there
has been the staircase of Solidarity’s first Warsaw strike headquarters in
1980, or of the White House parliament during the 1991 Moscow putsch.

Now it’s at Kiev, on the staircase of the trade-union building taken over by
the Orange Revolution at the corner of Maidan Nezalezhnosti – Independence
Square. Here is that same spiral tumult. Up struggle the deputation of
nurses, the delegation of building workers in orange hard hats, the men with
sacks of potatoes, the boy with a tray of bread and sausage balanced above
his head. Down struggle the Turkish and Mexican journalists, the giant in a
fur hat with a bundle of orange armbands, the pallid youth clutching
bulletins and biting a green apple, the schoolgirls’ strike committee
chanting ‘Yush-chen-ko!’ Somewhere above, a boy is throwing out poems which
whirl down the stairwell and are trampled into the black meltwater on the
ground floor. In dim corridors stacked to the ceiling with mattresses, young
women are asleep on kitchen chairs or lying against the wall. Along trestle
tables under the names of Ukrainian towns, a mob jostles to register. Over
the din, I can hear the howl of pop music in the square, the cheers of the
crowd, the sound of bass voices practising Slav harmonies on the next
landing, the parliamentary speaker on television shouting for order. There
is a reek of dirty socks and cheap cigarettes. Someone has written on the
wall: ‘We are a people, not a herd.’

So this is the genus ‘revolution’ all right. But which species? Some foreign
commentators, especially in London, suggest that it’s a specious species:
that the Ukrainian upsurge is only one of a series of carefully staged coups
(Serbia, Georgia, now Ukraine) managed with American money and planning. The
American backing was certainly there, channelled through the Freedom House
foundation into the radical youth movement Pora (‘Time’s Up!’); it provided
tents, food, communications gear and probably cash as well. But it was not
decisive, and did not obviously benefit any White House cause. I found the
people on the square, young and old, sharply critical of the United States;
they disliked President Bush, wanted Ukrainian troops out of Iraq and were
suspicious of American meddling in Ukrainian affairs. The foreign
interference which did count was the work of the election observers and,
above all, the clever publication of reliable exit polls at the moment when
the fraudulent results were about to be published.

There is a more hopeful definition of what has been happening. This is the
‘second round’ of European revolutions, following the grand upsurge of 1989
after a gap of 15 years. The first round carried away the external Soviet
empire. This second round is setting fire to the post-Soviet systems around
Russia’s borders. It began just over a year ago in Georgia. Mikheil
Saakashvili said then that his country would be the first in the post-Soviet
zone (the Baltic Republics apart) to follow the path opened by the nations
of East and Central Europe 15 years earlier. If the peaceful uprising in
Ukraine succeeds (and it is too early to know how Viktor Yushchenko will use
his powers as president), others will follow. Lukashenko’s disgusting regime
in neighbouring Belarus will be doomed. Opposition forces in the autocracies
of Central Asia will take heart.

And Russia? At the barricades outside the presidential office I met Sasha,
in charge of keeping the blockaders and the police line apart. ‘This will
spread to the Russian people too. They will see what happens here, and they
will begin to understand what Putin is doing to them. And the same in
Belarus. If we succeed – only if!’

There is a good term for these regimes – ‘demokratura’. Most of them have
democratic furniture: constitutions, parliaments, a formally separate
judiciary, regular elections, guarantees of free expression and assembly.
Communism, after all, has been overthrown. In practice, these institutions
are manipulated to maintain the privilege of a post-Communist elite. In some
demokraturas, like the Asian ones, manipulation is total and shameless. In
others, like Ukraine or Russia, the falsification of elections and the use
of state violence against political challengers has usually been undertaken
with some discretion. The important thing is to keep your own mob in power
while persuading the people and the outside world that the political process
at least roughly reflects the popular will.

In Ukraine last month, demokratura hit the limits set by its own hypocrisy.
The presidential election result had to be cooked, and yet there was no
practical way to exclude foreign election monitors while maintaining a
pretence of fairness. Worse still, with TV only partly under state control,
Ukrainians had been warned to expect fraud at the final run-off vote. When
the foreign observers loudly confirmed that fraud had taken place, the lid
blew off.
There are two conflicting views – one hopeful, the other ‘realistic’ and
dismissive – about these second-round revolutions. The hopeful version is
that these uprisings (‘rose’ in Tbilisi, ‘orange’ in Kiev) begin the
transition from demokratura to democracy, ‘the completion of 1989’. The
pessimistic version is that these are merely succession wars – what the
Germans call a Diadochenkampf – between members of governing elites and
clans who stir up popular passion for their own temporary purposes. The
sceptics suggest that what really matters in a demokratura change of guard
is not largesse with human rights (freedoms scattered to the crowd like
handfuls of small change), but the dirty trade in immunities. Putin got the
Russian presidency by promising Boris Yeltsin that he would push through an
act of amnesty for Yeltsin and his family despite their colossal thefts of
public money. Nobody is going to send Edward Shevardnadze to jail in
Georgia, though some of his greedy relations may be less lucky. Yushchenko
probably offered an immunity deal to get the outgoing president, Leonid
Kuchma, out of his way; charges against him could range from gross
corruption, complicity in the beheading of the opposition journalist Georgiy
Gongadze, and conceivably involvement in the attempt to poison Yushchenko in
September.

Demokratura certainly has recurrent patterns. Ukraine has 48 million people,
while the unrecognised statelet of Abkhazia, on the other side of the Black
Sea, has only about 250,000. But events there in November prefigured what
was to happen in Ukraine only a few days later. There too, a presidential
candidate approved by the incumbent, and explicitly backed by Putin,
suddenly faced a more ‘democratic’ challenger calling for a clean and
independent Abkhazia. There too, the results of the election were clumsily
cooked. The electoral commission gave victory first to the challenger,
Sergei Bagapsh, and then – under pressure – to Moscow’s man, Raul Khajimba.
There too, the supreme court was about to pronounce for the challenger when
an invading mob forced it to change its verdict. Finally, as rival bands of
armed supporters occupied buildings, Bagapsh was proclaimed president – and
promptly left for Moscow to make his act of fealty to Putin. The election is
now to be rerun, with Bagapsh and Khajimba as running mates, and the young
reformers who had backed Bagapsh are weeping in disillusion. Perhaps it’s
lucky that the orange revolutionaries in Kiev have been too busy to hear
about this.
It’s true that evidence for final democratic victories in second-round
revolutions is still skimpy. In Georgia, Saakashvili is scarcely
accountable. The general election in January gave him a vote so overwhelming
that he has practically no parliamentary opposition at all – a one-party
presidential democracy. In Ukraine, the compromise deal signed on 8 December
leaves Yushchenko heading for a weakened presidency and shackled by a
largely hostile parliament. Many of its parties and members remain the paid
clients or agents of a dozen gigantically wealthy oligarchs who control
politics through their ownership of privatised industries, services and
media. Fresh parliamentary elections are not due until 2006.

Luckily, though, stale compromise is not the only outcome in Ukraine.
Matters have gone too far: the old order is broken. This is because the
protest has gone on for so long, and involved so many people. Given that the
crowds packed onto the Kiev Maidan often numbered more than a hundred
thousand, that they were regularly relieved by fresh contingents from their
own home-towns, and that rallies took place and smaller ‘tent camps’ were
set up in six or seven other cities, it’s probable that several million took
part, in a nation of 48 million. The protest lasted in full strength for
more than a fortnight, with five thousand mostly young people encamped night
and day down the Khreshchatik – Kiev’s Champs-Elys?es, running up from the
Maidan as the place de la Concorde. What this means is that the Orange
Revolution took on a life, spontaneity and consciousness of its own.
Saakashvili was nervous about ‘stability’ after his short, well-prepared
storming of the Georgian parliament; he ordered his supporters in other
towns not to occupy public buildings but to get off the streets and go home.
He was obeyed. But it is too late to demobilise the Ukrainians like that.

The demonstrators say that they have discovered a new country, a Ukraine
they can be proud of. ‘Before, we were a people not a nation,’ several
people said. In this new country, which they are still exploring, they will
catch up with ‘other European nations’. Once, an older European nationalism
understood this ‘catching-up’ as matching rivals in armaments, steel
production, colonies. Now, what’s envied is not missile batteries or
hydroelectric dams but something called ‘normality’. Among the smoking
field-kitchens of the Maidan, on night trains, in caf?s in other cities, I
asked Ukrainians how they imagined this beautiful normalness. They said
things like this: ‘To be normal means not to have a criminal as a prime
minister’; ‘It means to have votes which aren’t falsified, to pay for what
you want instead of bribing for it, to trust the currency, to get ahead on
merit instead of by corruption, to have natural resources run in the public
interest and not by selfish dinosaurs’; ‘It means that those who steal from
the state, even presidents, must stand trial’; ‘It means having a clean
country’; ‘Thirteen years since independence and we still don’t have the
confidence to be a real, normal European nation. Until now.’
Again, traditional nationalism has been concerned with ‘unity’ – usually
meaning ethnic homogeneity and the demonising of minorities. These people
too, a few generations back, believed in ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians’ and some
took part in terrible crimes against Poles and Jews. Now, though, ‘unity’
means overthrowing artificial barriers, the ignorance and jealousy which
allowed their rulers to play off western against eastern Ukraine, and to
foment threats of secession in the largely Russian-speaking coal basin
around Donetsk. The great Kiev protest functioned as a street university, in
which people from all over the country met, debated and discovered what they
held in common. Back in 1980, Lech Wale?sa used to tell Solidarity: ‘A Pole
must be able to talk to a Pole!’ Among other things, ‘normality’ and ‘unity’
mean that Ukrainians should learn to talk to Ukrainians.

In the tent city I met Yuri, a young charity worker from Nikolaev near the
Black Sea. That wasn’t Yushchenko territory, but a decayed industrial city
which built ships and aircraft engines for the Soviet military. Some 60 per
cent were ‘recorded’ as voters for Viktor Yanukovich, the prime minister and
the candidate favoured by both President Kuchma, and – with loud
endorsement – by Putin. Smiling as a rare interval of sunshine lit up the
snow and slush, Yuri described the way absentee votes were processed to
corrupt the count. But as soon as the results were announced, a protesting
crowd gathered outside the Nikolaev town hall, and some 1500 people set off
with Yuri to join the revolution in Kiev.

Yuri was one of the first to show me that the movement was out of its box
and under nobody’s orders. ‘This is for Ukraine, what we are doing. It isn’t
for any politician, not even for Yushchenko. Even Yushchenko will be dealt
with by the people if he betrays us.’ I kept on hearing it. Maxim is a Kiev
businessman in his thirties, a member of Pora who has been acting as
quartermaster and billet officer for the tent city. ‘A hundred years ago,
like last week, I was doing well in systems integration.’ Then he said the
same as Yuri. ‘The people on the Maidan, the people here, they are not
obeying any politician. It’s Ukraine they answer to. They will turn on
Yushchenko if he lets them down.’

Superficially, the spectacle on the Maidan looked like a personality binge.
Few human beings who are not dictators can have heard their name chanted by
so many, so often, for so long. The human ocean stretched out of sight,
waving its forest of long-stemmed flags, swaying to thunderous Ukrainian
rap, bellowing ‘Yush-chen-ko!’, cheering every speech or scrap of good news.
Most nights, their man came in person to thank them for standing firm and to
report. On 3 December, the day the supreme court annulled the election
result, the stage turned into the setting for a victory party. Yushchenko, a
tiny blonde daughter hugging his leg as he tried to hold onto his notes,
told the crowd that without them, without the Maidan, nothing could have
been done. Then the rock band exploded, the lasers swept round the skyline
and on the giant screens the Yushchenko family and team began to dance.
The crowds danced too, laughing and crying. Today they love Yushchenko for
his very awkwardness, for the ruined face which an assassin’s poison
inflicted on a once handsome man. Now, with his scars, he is no better than
anyone else with an orange ribbon on his sleeve – ‘one of us’. And yet I
didn’t meet anybody who was uncritical about him as a leader. The loyalty is
conditional.

Soon the crowd began to call: ‘Yulia, Yulia!’ But she chose to stay away.
The mass may feel less affection for Yulia Tymoshenko, but it’s her
leadership – more aggressive than Yushchenko’s – that turns them on. She may
look like Princess Leia in Star Wars, with her hair coiled in braids, but
this is a real warrior queen, a millionaire oligarch who once had Ukraine’s
gas industry in her purse, who has a Russian warrant out for her arrest, who
urged the crowds to besiege the parliament and warned her opposition
comrades that any hesitation, any delay, any sign of compromise could be
fatal.
Tymoshenko is a revolutionary romantic. She didn’t just praise the crowds
for standing firm in snow and frost-winds. She reified them into a single
imaginary monster, with its own will: the Maidan. ‘So far,’ I heard her say,
‘the Maidan feel that the things they wanted have happened, but if they feel
that the people’s will is not being fulfilled, nobody will be able to stop
or manage them.’ Or: ‘The Maidan are sure that the only person delaying this
process is President Kuchma.’ Not surprisingly, it turns out that only Yulia
can interpret the monster’s voice. ‘The leaders of the Maidan want me to
tell you that they respond only to the interests of Ukraine. If Kuchma doesn’t
sign the new electoral law at once, the Maidan will not tolerate it. Even if
Yushchenko tries to stop the Maidan, he will not succeed, for it’s not
politicians they obey.’

She was right and she was – probably – wrong. In calling for ultimatums and
threatening direct action, Tymoshenko was following a sound instinct. If the
opposition had acted Georgian, storming the parliament and the presidential
offices, the police would almost certainly have disobeyed any orders to stop
them by force. Yushchenko, who has already declared himself the legal
president, would have taken power at once, without the grubby compromises
involving the reduction of presidential influence sold to him by the
departing Kuchma. The business of ‘making a new nation’ would have started
with a rush, frightening many powerful figures into compliance.

But the monster Tymoshenko invoked did not really exist. The Maidan was not
carnivorous. Storming buildings did not come naturally to the hordes in the
streets. They were steady, faithful and physically tough. (How could people
who had spent almost two weeks sleeping rough in the slush rise every
morning with such exultant energy, tramping off up the Kiev hills in singing
columns as if each successive day was the first day of their protest?) But
their lack of aggression was impressive. At the barricades outside the
presidential office, I watched four young women in orange scarves singing to
the riot police. And behind the black helmet, visor and shield, I saw a
policewoman smiling and swaying to their rhythm. What would have happened if
somebody had ordered the police to break up a crowd, or seize one of
Yushchenko’s lieutenants? Or if special forces had broken into an
anti-regime TV station? None of these things happened, and nobody expected
them to happen.

There was a lack of aggression because there was a lack of fear. For the
first time in my experience, men and women who had gone into the street to
overthrow a regime seemed not to consider that they might be fired on by
security forces, that there might be a state of siege and a military putsch,
that there would be mass arrests and persecutions if they failed, that
foreign tanks were massing on the frontier. A young policeman I met from
Lugansk, near the Russian border, insisted that his colleagues had seen
Russian Spetsnaz special forces arriving in the region – that was a
widespread rumour. But Olena, a psychologist caring for the boys and girls
at one of the barricades, said: ‘There is some homesickness. There is some
depression; they are very exhausted now, and sometimes they think it’s not
getting anywhere. But fear? No, that’s not something I come across.’

In a country with a history like Ukraine’s, this fearlessness is new and
wonderful. Always a battlefield between occupiers and a corridor for
contending armies, Ukraine has seen itself as perpetual victim, its options
limited to a gambler’s choice between one conqueror or another. But now,
faced with a regime they despised rather than feared, millions of people
poured into the street. They had been profoundly insulted by what had been
done to their votes. They would have the wrong put right, and nobody would
shoot them for it. That confidence, and that touchy civic honour, are surely
part of what it means to be ‘modern’ and ‘normal’.

So the Maidan was never going to burst with impatience and storm the Kiev
ministries on its own. In that sense, Tymoshenko’s strategy was mistaken,
and perhaps she privately knew it was bluff. Her own party, Hromada, voted
against the final compromise deal, on 8 December, but she must have
realised – as endurance out on the freezing streets at last began to sag –
that there was little chance of winning a better one. She was up against the
‘national character’: a young green oak which is immensely strong and
resilient, but slow to take fire.

‘If Pole and Ukrainian start an argument about history,’ a Polish historian
said to me the other day, ‘we will both finish that argument in Siberia!’ In
the city now called Lviv, in the western Ukraine, it’s clear what he meant.
Here they did argue, about whether this sinister old metropolis was the
heart of Polish culture or the fortress of antique Ukrainian virtue, and
they did indeed both wind up in Siberia. The Poles were deported in 1940,
after the Soviet Union annexed Galicia. The Ukrainian intellectuals and
patriots followed them in 1944-47, as Stalin took vengeance on those who had
collaborated with the Germans as a lesser evil.

It has been Lemberg and Leopolis, Lw?w and Lvov, and now Lviv. This is the
last great unrestored Habsburg city. Under the domes of Catholic, Greek
Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, the walls are leprous, the unlit
side-streets pitch black, and the small blue trams (bought second-hand from
Prague) whang their bells as they leap over broken cobbles. The first latte
caf?s and Western chain boutiques are already open, and in ten years’ time
this old baroque capital of Galicia will be a painted and pedestrianised
honeypot for tourism. But meanwhile suppressed memories of atrocity haunt
the archways and courtyards. The Poles persecuted the Ukrainians, the
Ukrainians slaughtered Poles and Jews; the NKVD in 1941 murdered Ukrainian
nationalists, the Nazis made the Jews dig up the nationalists and then shot
them in the same mass grave, the Ukrainians (some of them) put on German
uniform and fought the Red Army and the Poles in a guerrilla war which
lasted until 1947.

Fearless candour has not paid off in Lviv’s past. When I was there, the
orange ribbon was everywhere; the region had voted 91 per cent for
Yushchenko and the mayor was giving press interviews for freedom and
democracy. But the happy public smile turned out to be rather forced.

The Writers’ Union is a suite of crepuscular saloons, undecorated for
generations. Was it in these rooms that left-wing Polish writers fleeing
from the Nazis in September 1939 took refuge, finding the city already under
Soviet occupation? Among them were famous talents: the novelists Tadeusz
Boy-Z?elens?ki, Jerzy Putrament and Julian Stryjkowski, the poets Aleksander
Wat and Wladyslaw Broniewski, and many others. Here, for the first time,
these innocent radicals came face to face with the reality of Soviet
Communism and its cultural police. What followed was one of the most
pitiable moral surrenders in the history of literature. Poets and novelists,
scrabbling to survive as the arrests began, vainly denounced one another and
wrote odes to Stalin before they were swallowed by the Gulag. More terrible
things happened in the city in those years, but nothing more squalid.

It’s quiet there now, so cold that the writers wear hats and scarves at
their desks. Asked about the election and the public rebellion, the elderly
poet Roman Kaczuryvki told me that nothing except ribbons had changed in
Lviv. ‘We wanted some changes – especially the officials who take orders
from Kiev and not from here. We would like to sack and replace the chief of
police, the head of customs and excise, the chief tax officer, the director
of forestry. But they are all still there. As for Mayor Bunyak’s opposition
credentials, the regime had already appointed him head of our local
electoral commission, which tells its own story. Bunyak promised that Lviv
would have hot water 24 hours a day. But we still only have it for six.’

Postup (‘Progress’) is the most intelligent paper in Lviv. When I called at
its offices, its line was enthusiastically Orange; the editors even produced
a free-sheet for distribution on the Maidan in Kiev. But university students
told me that Postup had previously been ‘too favourable’ to Yanukovich’s
campaign. A fire-bomb this August, which gutted the main newsroom, may have
helped the change of perspective.

The journalist Jurko Banzaj was ultra-radical. ‘Everyone down to the
taxi-drivers in this place should be sacked! But how can you do this, when
everyone just changes coat? Look, we need a Moses to lead us through the
desert, and Yushchenko is no Moses – merely the best man we have, with a lot
of dubious characters in his entourage.’ Corruption paralysed everything in
Lviv, Jurko said. It was not just that the only taxes paid were illegal
ones. It was the fact that all services insisted on bribe and ‘black’ cash
payment in advance. Jurko had wanted to set up a small computer business,
but the up-front bribes demanded by the health and safety office, the water
board and the electricity firm were completely beyond him. Those on salaries
struggle to survive. His sister-in-law was in a factory painting Christmas
toys, and earning about ?7.50 for a six-day week.

Like most west Ukrainians, Jurko has peasant relations. But the countryside
is emptying, as men leave for migrant labour in countries which themselves
provide labour to the West: Portugal, Poland, Italy. He knew a village near
Lviv where the school roll had fallen from 20 to seven in five years. His
grandmother used to raise a few pigs and sell the pork for 20 pence a kilo.
Now the rising price of pig-feed makes it profitless, although the middlemen
are selling pork at ?2.50 a kilo on the Lviv markets. Farm production falls
away, scarcity drives up urban food prices and the villages – the shrines of
cultural identity, for western Ukraine nationalists – dwindle and die.

The wide, tree-lined avenue at the heart of Lviv has carried many names.
Currently, it’s Freedom Prospect. At one end, a crowd of Greek Catholics was
singing hymns and queuing up to kiss a 20-foot wooden cross wreathed in
roses. At the other, in front of the luscious opera house, a much larger
crowd was listening to the daily Yushchenko rally – a pop concert
alternating with booming speeches. One square man in leather jacket and
black fur hat followed another: ‘Our Ukraine is becoming a new nation’; ‘We
are many, and they won’t divide us’; ‘Shame, shame to the thieves and
bandits’; ‘Yush-chen-ko!’ Sometimes the crowd whistled, sometimes they
cheered, but as the winter night fell they did not go away.

At Postup, another journalist had said to me: ‘Our trouble is we are so
extreme. Everything has to be black or white. And in the same way, huge
enthusiasm blazes up like this, then subsides entirely so that old bad
things and people can crawl back.’

Is this to be the story of the Orange Revolution of 2004? Those who took
part still feel that something has changed for ever, in their country and in
themselves. But no movement to embody and enforce the will of the Maidan has
emerged. The Pora group, although it helped to direct and organise the first
eruption of protest, is too small and vague in its aims to do this job.
Apart from a loose parliamentary coalition called ‘Our Ukraine’, a President
Yushchenko would have no political troops of his own. During the ‘orange
weeks’, the word has been that ‘the people’ will return to the street and
depose him if he betrays their hopes. Will they? And will they return to
save him, if those who tried to murder him four months ago try again?

His most important appointment will be the chief prosecutor. Since the fall
of Communism, corruption has become systemic. It is how Ukraine works. It is
a sort of service industry in itself, stretching from the billionaire
oligarchs who own Ukraine’s resources, through the clientship and clan
networks of local power, down to the millions of underpaid bureaucrats and
policemen who must extort bribes to feed their families. The result is an
unreal economy. A huge labour force in the Donbas still digs coal that can’t
be sold, while the black earth of Ukraine, which used to feed the Soviet
Union and much of Europe with its bread wheat, is neglected (in Odessa
recently, I saw something once inconceivable: an American freighter
unloading wheat).

All ways of tackling this are dangerous. Yushchenko could follow Putin’s
example in Russia, and use the police to terrorise the oligarchs into flight
or submission. But the cost of that would be dictatorial lawlessness. The
super-rich of Kiev and Donetsk are clever. They got their wealth
scandalously but not often illegally. Another course is to raise pay in the
state services, while making a truce with the oligarchs. Most of them will
come and pay court to the new regime in Kiev, offering party funding,
private aircraft, even schools and hospitals in return for being left alone.
But even if they ceased to own Ukraine’s political class, they would still
be able to blackmail a government by threatening to provoke a banking or
exchange crisis. Worst of all, such a truce would demoralise the millions of
Ukrainian democrats who think Yushchenko, although no Moses, is worth
fighting for. As the head of the national bank and later prime minister he
was undoubtedly part of the Kuchma machine in the 1990s, but his supporters
hold that he was a technocrat and not seriously tainted. New cosiness with
penitent oligarchs could quickly change that feeling. Were a crisis to come,
were the old gang to feel strong enough to strike back at him, Yushchenko
might turn to the Maidan for support and find it empty.

Somehow, the new president will have to keep in touch with this host which
sprang out of the Ukrainian earth to rescue their self-respect – and his
candidature. This means that thousands of his supporters must swallow their
dislike of ‘politicians’ and enter politics, at the local and the national
level. By himself, he will not be able to ‘complete 1991’ (make Ukrainian
independence a reality) or push through the political and economic reforms
which will bring Ukraine into ‘normality’ – as defined by the European
Union.

Yushchenko’s best foreign ally is not the United States but the EU. And that
in practice means Poland. Thousands of Poles poured across the border to
join the Maidan, and their buses formed a shuttle service for demonstrators
between Lviv and Kiev. President Kwas?niewski dominated the round-table
negotiations which drove Kuchma to retreat, and Poland enjoys being
conspicuous in Brussels as the noisy advocate of Ukrainian interests.
Yushchenko can count on America to support him, but not to save him. ‘We don’t
want to exchange Putin control for Bush control,’ said a young TV journalist
in the tent city. ‘The Americans don’t care about our young country, which
nobody knows about. Maybe all this is just part of a bigger conflict about
oil between America and Russia, which we are not meant to understand.’

Her doubts were not in tune with the tent city motto: ‘I believe! I know! We
can!’ As revolutions go, this one overthrew no class, shed no blood, but
left an indelible marker. This indistinct, politically retarded society has
found its way to a sense of maturity, a confidence about its right to truth.
Maybe the best moment came right at the start when the woman signing the TV
news for the deaf suddenly began to make unexpected gestures. ‘This is all
lies,’ she signalled. ‘I will not do this job any more. I resign.’
17 December

Neal Ascherson is the author of The Struggle for Poland and Black Sea, among
other books.