CHAPTER ELEVEN The Rise and Fall of the Orange Revolution
IT IS DECEMBER 2014. I am having lunch at a seafood restaurant off Marylebone High Street with my husband and some new friends, a Ukrainian fund manager-turned-novelist and his linguist wife. We chat about their daughter, just starting a masters degree at Cambridge, then move on to the situation in Ukraine. They tell us that they are sponsoring a twelve-man sniper unit within the Ukrainian army. ’We’ve bought them winter camouflage clothing, from Germany, and proper sleeping bags, and binoculars. We got hold of a night-scope too – American made, not bad. The only things we’re not providing are the actual rifles.’ Their unit is stationed outside Donetsk, facing Russian-backed militias that have held the city since the spring. The sea bass arrives, topped with samphire. ‘You can donate to the army through Facebook – there are several sites. Or you can help like us, directly. It’s nothing unusual. All our friends are doing the same.’
Why does a middle-aged, ethnic-Russian Ukrainian, late of Barings and the Carlyle Group, find himself privately funding the Ukrainian army? When I wrote the first edition of this book back in the late 1990s I closed with two possible scenarios. In the best case, Ukraine would become a ‘rich, heavyweight democracy in a continent-wide partnership of friendly like-minded states’. In the worst, it would turn into a ‘fragile, poverty-stricken buffer-state in a new divide between an introverted West and an aggressive, unstable Russia’.
For most of the time since, Ukraine has hovered near the gloomier end of the spectrum. Best measure of its failure to thrive economically is the Polish comparison. In 1990, GDP per head in the two countries was roughly the same; by 2013, Poland’s was three times bigger. On the other hand, Ukraine could congratulate itself on reasonable ethnic harmony and political stability: there were crises, but they were resolved via negotiation and the ballot box, and never translated into large-scale violence. That all changed in February 2014, when the security forces shot dead over a hundred anti-government protestors in central Kiev. The atrocity was immediately followed by a Russian invasion, first of Crimea, then of the Donbass. At the time of writing (February 2015), Crimea has been officially declared part of the Russian Federation, and in the Donbass fighting alternates with stop-go ceasefire talks. Acquaintances still ask, ‘Is Ukraine really that different from Russia?’ But now at least everyone knows where it is on the map.
What went wrong? Though Ukraine is far from the failed state of Russian propaganda, for Ukraine-watchers the keynote since independence has been disappointment, at a string of bad governments and reforms left undone.
The rot set in under Leonid Kuchma, the reptilian ex-missile factory director elected president in 1994. It was hoped that given his managerial background, he would usher in a new era of modernisation and reform. Instead, he brought in Russia-style oligarchy, as contracts, subsidies, cheap loans and cut-price privatisation deals were handed out to political allies and cronies. The most lucrative of these arrangements was the gas scam, whereby profits from Russian and Turkmen gas sales to Ukraine were diverted, via otherwise wholly unnecessary intermediary companies, into the pockets of Russian, Ukrainian and Turkmen politicians.1 What emerged from the grab-fest were depleted budgets and a hollowed-out political system, with political parties acting as fronts for semi-criminal businessmen. The best-investigated case from the period is that of ex-prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who having milked the gas scam, fell out with Kuchma and fled to California (where he bought a mansion which had once belonged to Eddie Murphy). Prosecuted for money-laundering by the US government, he was sentenced to eight years in gaol, the court hearings turning up $250m hidden in a spider’s web of codenamed accounts in Switzerland, Guernsey, Antigua and the Bahamas.
In the bits of the country with most to fight over – the industrial east and the tourism honeypot of Crimea – the scramble for assets descended into outright gangsterism, featuring protection rackets, assassinations, and armed raids on rivals’ factories and offices. Most notorious for criminality was Donetsk. Its reigning oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, rose to vast wealth after senior mobster and fellow-Tatar Akhat Bragin, otherwise known as ‘Alik the Greek’, was killed, together with five bodyguards, by a large bomb in the city’s Shakhtyor football stadium (his remains, according to legend, identifiable only by his Rolex).2 Even among Ukraine’s nothing-if-not-tolerant business elite, this raised eyebrows. In his office block in Dnipropetrovsk, a property-developer carefully explained to me how post-Soviet wealth creation was a natural process akin to erosion: ‘It warms, it cools – then what happens? A rockfall, an avalanche. And of course, the rocks land in some laps, but not in others.’ Poor Ukrainians, I countered, didn’t quite see it that way. He went slightly pink: ‘Poor people lack knowledge, they think primitively! They only see the surface, they don’t analyse!’ When it came to Akhmetov, though, even he thought they might have a point: ‘He didn’t create, privatise, consolidate – not anything! He just took! Alik the Greek founded a criminal empire. Then the day after he’s killed in the stadium’ – arms spread, a footballer’s strut – ‘Akhmetov – the great capitalist!’ Valued by Forbes at $11.2 billion, Akhmetov is today richer than the next six wealthiest Ukrainians put together.
It is April 2014 and I am being driven round Donetsk – at that stage midway through declaring itself the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ – by a friend of a friend, Andrei. If Akhmetov – as a star-struck election observer put it to me – is a Renaissance prince, Andrei, with his streetwise good looks, skinny jeans and deft juggling of steering wheel, Samsung and Marlboro, is a junior condottiero. As we swerve between potholes he jerks a thumb at the new buildings that have landed like spaceships among the staid 1950s boulevards. A bulky glass biznes tsentr belongs to the son of the recently deposed president, Viktor Yanukovich. A yellow-panelled building supplies depot – again, ‘Yanukovich’s son’. A fenced residential complex belongs to ‘Rinat’, who carved it out of the city’s botanical gardens.
When new money first made its appearance back in the early 1990s, it was greeted with some amusement, even backhanded pride – the subtext ‘Look, we can do filthy rich too!’ Now, it prompts straightforward anger and resentment. Together with his wife and toddler son, Andrei still shares a flat with his parents, both of whom worked for a mine. Together, their pensions are worth 2,600 hryvnya ($260) a month. Andrei’s own career is a saga of modest, frustrated ambition: a pig farm that went bust when a local politician set up in the same business; a job installing satellite television aerials gone when the firm folded; a minivan written off when a drunk barin ran into it on his way home from a restaurant. His mobile rings: it’s a notary, he explains. He is trying to buy a flat, and the man wants a bribe – $1,000 – on top of the official fee. So do the property registration office and all the utilities.
Like almost everyone I talk to in Ukraine, Andrei has no faith in politicians of any stripe: ‘They don’t listen; it’s always the same faces.’ He resents Kiev – ‘they pretend we’re all criminal, stupid, with bad teeth’ – but doesn’t want reunion with Russia either – ‘Moscow would just use us’. In so far as he has any hopes at all, what he would like for the Donbass is federalisatsiya, by which he means some sort of semi-independence within Ukraine. If I want, he can introduce me to the guys who have taken over the regional administration building and declared a People’s Republic. They are a bit on edge – ‘like matches – ppfft!’ – but he was at school with one of them, so we should be OK.
Fronting a park, the 1970s building is surrounded by barricades. Built of everything from bedsteads to car bumpers, they are covered in handwritten posters and topped with coils of razor wire and white-blue-red Russian flags. The dozen or so men hanging about outside the entrance have taken their look – heavy-metal T-shirts, biker bandanas, touches of camo – from Call of Duty: Black Ops. Some wear black knitted balaclavas, and nearly all carry baseball bats. In the next-door municipal flowerbeds, neatly pruned rose bushes are coming into leaf, and tulips just starting to go over. No police are visible, and passers-by – sixth-formers carrying sketchpads, a woman in peep-toe gladiator boots wheeling a pushchair – go about their business without a second glance.
Negotiating entry takes a while. While we wait, I read the posters on the barricades. Several are in English: ‘America, Hands off Eastern Ukraine!’, ‘No to Fascism!’ and ‘Yankee Go Home!’ One of the slogans – ‘Donbass Arise!’ – is a conscious inversion of the ‘Ukraine Arise!’ chanted by anti-government demonstrators in Kiev a few months earlier. A poster captioned ‘Agent Yuliya Obamovna’ shows Barack Obama dressed in the blonde braids of the pro-European opposition leader Yuliya Tymoshenko. Another contrasts a couple kissing on a Gay Pride float with goose-stepping military cadets, above the question ‘Which parade will your son be in?’
Through a chicane of sandbags into the lobby, we are hit by the smell of dirty lavatories. In one corner, blankets and sleeping bags lie in a heap, surveyed by framed portrait photographs of old regional First Party Secretaries. In another, beer bottles stuffed with rags stand grouped around a startled-looking cheese plant, together with a canvas gas mask and a plank spiked with nails. The lifts are broken, so we climb the stairs. Our escort, all eyes and teeth beneath his balaclava, pauses to clasp fists with everyone we pass on the way, giving me time to catch my breath. We stand aside for a posse coming down; in its centre is a man in a suit. Who is he? A shrug: ‘A pomochnik’ – a political assistant. On the eleventh floor we are shown into an office. Would I like tea or coffee? How many sugars? The tea arrives in a china cup and saucer, accompanied by cellophane-wrapped ginger biscuits.
In normal life, Andrei’s friend is a long-distance lorry driver. He is in his mid-thirties, with a shaven head, gaunt stubbly cheeks, and red eyes. Though Donetsk born and bred, he spends eight months of the year in Magadan, the Far Eastern town that was once a hub of Stalin’s Gulag. Pay is better there, he says, and petrol cheaper, leaving him with enough money to send home to his family. As we talk others gather round. Slightly reluctantly, they admit to being a builder, a warehouseman, a ‘sportsman’ and a miner. The miner, more wired up than the rest, takes pen and paper and scribbles an outline of ‘our’ – heavily ironic – Ukraine, bisected by the Dnieper. ‘Here’ – jabbing at the eastern half of the country – ‘we make coal, steel, chemicals, rockets, tanks! There’ – jabbing at the west – ‘all they have is agriculture and tourism. We send all our money to Kiev, and only get half of it back! What do they do? They work abroad, pay no taxes, then come home and build themselves two-storey houses. Me, I haven’t even got one storey!’ More scribbles, of NATO countries encircling the old Soviet Union. The partitions of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were part of America’s grand plan. So is Greece’s debt crisis. Even the Great Famine was the West’s fault: ‘Stalin had to buy arms from you, and you demanded grain and potatoes in return. Children were dying! What did England do? Nothing!’ What does he think of the new pro-European government in Kiev? He scribbles down the names of various MPs, stabbing at them with the point of his biro. ‘Him’ – stab – ‘gay. And him – gay. Him – gay AND a Jew.’ ‘And a paedophile’, one of the others chips in; ‘it’s on the internet.’ ‘That’s right. Gay’ – stab, stab – ‘AND a Jew, AND a paedo.’
During his second term, won with the help of flagrant media manipulation and the convenient death of Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil in a car crash, Kuchma was hamstrung by a spectacular series of scandals. On 2 November 2000 a decapitated body was discovered in woods fifty miles south of Kiev. It proved to be that of Georgiy Gongadze, young editor of the investigative online paper Ukrainska Pravda, who had not been seen since leaving his girlfriend’s flat six weeks previously. Next, the leader of the Socialist Party, Oleksandr Moroz, announced to parliament that a member of Kuchma’s security detail, ex-KGB man Major Mykola Melnychenko, had secretly recorded the president’s private conversations, using a digital recorder hidden inside a sofa in his private office. Melnychenko having fled for safety to a secret location in Europe, Moroz went on, it was now his patriotic duty to play an excerpt – whereupon voices similar to those of Kuchma and his interior minister, Yury Kravchenko, were heard discussing Gongadze’s disposal. ‘The Chechens,’ growled Kuchma, ‘should kidnap him, drag him off to Chechnya by his dick, demand a ransom! Take him there; strip him, the fucker; leave him without his trousers on!’ In reply, Kravchenko assured him that he was working on the problem and had just the men for the job, who would ‘do whatever you want’.
Over the next two years, Melnychenko released the Kuchmagate tapes bit by tantalising bit. In one, Kuchma is heard ordering the head of the tax inspectorate to help him rig the 1999 presidential vote:
You should get together all your fucking tax inspectors . . . and warn them: those who lose the elections in their districts will not work after the elections . . . You should sit down with every [collective-farm] head and fucking tell them – either you sit in fucking jail – because I’ve got more compromising material on you than anyone else – or you produce some votes.3
In others, he demands $45m in campaign funding from the boss of a state-owned gas intermediary, and agrees with the head of the state arms export agency secretly to sell advanced anti-aircraft systems to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Though Kuchma conceded that the voice on the recordings was his, he claimed that the conversations themselves were cut-and-pasted fakes. Western experts declared them genuine, but were hampered by Melnychenko’s refusal to release the recordings in their entirety.4 Either way, by 2002 Kuchma’s international reputation had become so toxic that NATO’s Secretary General specifically asked him not to attend a summit celebrating the admittance of seven new Baltic and Central European members. Kuchma turned up anyway, later telling an interviewer that otherwise, ‘people would have said “Kuchma didn’t come because he’s guilty. He’s afraid to come and look his partners in the eye.”’5 At NATO summits, representatives are seated according to their countries’ alphabetical order, putting Ukraine, in the normal course of things, next to the United Kingdom and the United States. This time, the organisers switched the country names into French, banishing Kuchma to the lower end of the table next to Turkey.
The scandals didn’t topple him: a brief ‘Ukraine without Kuchma’ campaign fizzled out. But they weakened him sufficiently so that in 2004, instead of trying to change the constitution so as to run for a third term, he picked a loyal successor. The man he chose, Viktor Yanukovich, had risen from a dirt-poor background in the miserable steel town of Yenakivye (‘bandit country’, Andrei said as we drove through it) to become governor of Donetsk, on the way serving two prison terms, one for assault, the other allegedly for rape (the records have since disappeared). The likeliest explanation for his ascent was KGB patronage, there being no other way an ex-convict would have been given Communist Party membership. Going to meet him, in the words of former British ambassador Roland Smith, was ‘a bit like going to meet Al Capone. There was a roomful of burly men in dark glasses and him. He knew enough to be reasonably polite, but his story was “We know how to run this part of Ukraine. We don’t need any advice from you. Hope you enjoy your visit.”’
Yanukovich’s main rival, and the great hope of Ukraine’s liberals and the West, was a much more presentable figure, Viktor Yushchenko. The clever, good-looking son of provincial teachers, he had built a steady career in Soviet-era banking before being made chairman of the central bank by President Kravchuk, in which role he married a Ukrainian-American former State Department official and brought an end to hyper-inflation. Kuchma briefly made him prime minister, so as to woo the IMF. Friendly and famously disorganised, he was loved by journalists for letting interviews spill way over their allotted time slots, and chided by his staff for always running late.
The campaign was vicious. Touring the regions, Yushchenko would arrive in a town to find his speaking venue closed on the grounds of fire hazard, or subject to mysterious power outage. At one point, a travelling circus preceded him from place to place, occupying the squares where his supporters had planned to rally.6 State-controlled television either ignored him, or derided him as ‘Bushchenko’, lackey of the West. Claiming to have found explosives in a raid on the headquarters of student pro-democracy group Pora! (‘It’s time!’), the police arrested dozens of Pora! members, releasing them again without charge or explanation after a few days in custody. In the pretty cathedral city of Chernihiv, a fake bomb was planted in an activist’s flat, justifying more raids, and in Lviv, the offices of the pro-Yushchenko newspaper Postup burned down in an arson attack. Russian president Vladimir Putin was closely involved on the Kuchma/Yanukovich side from the beginning, sending in a team of experienced Kremlin ‘political technologists’, and making seven trips to Ukraine himself. The point man for the operation was the then head of his presidential administration, Dmitri Medvedev. According to one of the ‘technologists’, Medvedev ‘didn’t like this job . . . He liked things to be done legally, properly. And the work in Ukraine was neither legal nor proper.’7
In the early hours of 6 September, seven weeks before the first round of the elections, the dirty tricks hit a whole new level when Yushchenko was taken violently ill on his way home from supper with the head and deputy-head of the Ukrainian security service. The next day, the then British ambassador Robert Brinkley remembers, Yushchenko’s staff
called an urgent meeting with all the Western ambassadors, and said ‘Yushchenko’s been poisoned’. I thought – No, it’s just another gimmick. There had been quite a lot of this, trying to get the international community on side. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. He nearly died. He was flown to a clinic in Vienna, where they discovered that it was pure dioxin – not an industrial by-product: something made in a lab, deliberately. We still don’t know whether it was Ukrainians or Russians who did it.’8
A fortnight later, Yushchenko discharged himself from hospital and went back on the stump, caked in makeup to disguise hideous skin damage, and kept upright by painkillers fed intravenously via a portable drip. Before speaking, he explained later, ‘I disconnected it, so the public wouldn’t see me with it. I had about twenty minutes, no more. I knew that after twenty-two, twenty-three minutes I would pass out.’9
The first round of the elections went ahead as scheduled on 31 October. The official results, announced a whole ten days after the vote, put Yushchenko very narrowly ahead. On the eve of the second round, what appeared to be another assassination attempt against Yushchenko was foiled when police found a car full of plastic explosives parked outside his Kiev campaign headquarters. (Two men, both Russian citizens, were later arrested and convicted of smuggling and carrying false documents; who was behind them has never been established.) Undeterred by Yushchenko’s now immense popularity, or by platoons of indignant international election observers, Kuchma and Yanukovich rigged this vote too, arranging crude ballot-stuffing and multiple absentee voting in the pliant east and south. At dozens of polling stations, opposition observers were attacked when they made complaints, either by groups of thugs as the police stood by, or by the police themselves. In Donetsk, turnout was declared to have skyrocketed to 96 per cent; in Luhansk, to 90 per cent. Independent exit polls had given Yushchenko an eleven-point lead; the official results put Yanukovich three points ahead. Putin sent his congratulations on the Monday morning, before the official count had even been announced.
This blatant electoral robbery sparked the mass protests that became known as the Orange Revolution, after Yushchenko’s campaign colour. On the Monday morning after the second-round poll, the opposition called a rally in Kiev’s Independence Square – known simply as ‘the Square’ or Maidan. That day, numbers were estimated at 200,000–300,000, and within twenty-four hours the protest had turned into a well-organised camp, occupying the whole of the Maidan and spilling over into surrounding streets. Numbers swelled as more supporters arrived from the west of the country, and by the Saturday reached over half a million. Three large public buildings – the Trades Union Building on the Maidan itself, Ukraine House (once a Lenin museum) on next-door European Square, and city hall on Khreshchatyk – were peacefully taken over and used as collecting points for donated mattresses, food and clothing.
Like the even bigger Maidan protests nine years later, the Orange Revolution was an expression not just of party political allegiance, but of frustration with dreadful government and insult at being taken for fools. Though the government dominated mainstream media (hence the Orange slogan ‘Kill the TV within yourself’,) the protestors were far nimbler and funnier on the internet and social networks, circulating Yanukovich jokes – ‘Yanekdoty’ – prank videos, satirical animations and video games. Times and locations of rallies were communicated by text, as were reminders that no drinking was tolerated on the Maidan, and that demonstrators should not react to provocations. A sound stage hosted the country’s best-known pop and rock groups, and the revolution’s slogan Razom nas bahoto – ‘Together we are many!’ – was turned into a rap and released on MP3. Jackets embroidered with the words ‘Made in the USA’ mocked Yanukovich’s claim that the protests were paid for and organised by the West. Laughs were had by all when Yanukovich’s wife, beret askew, made an almost pathetically illiterate speech to a rally in Donetsk, in which she claimed that in Kiev she’d seen protestors eating their way through ‘nightmare mountains’ of drug-injected ‘orange oranges’, leading to a mass outbreak of meningitis. Perhaps the best moment in what Ukrainians now look back on as rather a gentle and innocent revolution was when the sign-language interpreter on state television’s evening news told her deaf audience not to believe a word that the Electoral Committee said, that Yushchenko was their rightful president, and that she was ashamed of having told them lies before and wouldn’t do so any more.
Despite all the fun, the Orange Revolution almost ended in violence. ‘From day to day,’ remembers Brinkley, ‘one didn’t know how things were going to work out. There were coachloads of thuggish-looking men parked up by the Caves Monastery, near my house. It was obvious that they were awaiting orders to go and beat people up.’ Kuchma nowadays claims that Putin leaned on him to use force: ‘Putin is a hard man. He dropped hints. But he never said straight out “put tanks on the street”. I said to him, “I will not use force to clear the Maidan. There are children there. How would it end?”’10 Interior ministry troops mustered in the suburbs, as did forty thousand Donetsk miners outide the main railway station. Though Kuchma claims the credit for turning them back, another version of events has it that he ordered the head of the security service, Ihor Smeshko, to attack, and that Smeshko disobeyed.
What is certainly true is that at 2 a.m. on Wednesday 24 November Kuchma made an agitated call to Polish president Alexander Kwasniewski, who immediately flew to Kiev to broker talks. On the Friday, under intense diplomatic pressure from the West, Kuchma and Yanukovich finally climbed down, agreeing that the legality of the elections be referred to Ukraine’s Supreme Court. On 26 December the second round of the elections was run again, Yushchenko winning by a comfortable 8 per cent margin. Checking out of his hotel, one of Putin’s ‘technologists’ wrapped an orange scarf around his neck for camouflage before making his way through wildly celebrating crowds to the airport.11
The Orange Revolution raised enormous hopes. ‘Yushchenko was treated like a Messiah,’ remembers Brinkley. ‘People were euphoric; their feet really left the ground.’ For a few months things seemed to go well. Yushchenko, his martyrdom for democracy etched on his very features, did a victory lap of Western capitals. In Washington, Congressmen cheered him with the same three-beat ‘Yush-chenk-KO!’ his supporters had chanted on the Maidan. One of Kuchma’s most notorious insider privatisations – of Kryvorizhstal, a Zaporozhiye steel-maker – was reversed. Earlier sold to Akhmetov and Kuchma’s son-in-law, Viktor Pinchuk, for a fraction of its market price, the company was renationalised and resold to India’s Mittal Steel for six times more. The proceeds, for once, actually went into the state budget.
But soon, things started to fall apart – in particular, Yushchenko’s relationship with his prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko. Nicknamed the ‘Gas Princess’, Tymoshenko was as striking a figure as the president – beautiful, charismatic and immaculately dressed, with her blonde hair coiled round her head in a trademark plait. She and her husband made their first money in Dnipropetrovsk, selling bootlegged video cassettes (pornographic, say the unkind). They went on to head the first of the gas-importing intermediaries, under the patronage of Lazarenko. Lazarenko having fled abroad with his millions, Tymoshenko reinvented herself as a pro-democracy opposition leader, her credibility greatly boosted by 42 days spent in custody on tax-fraud charges after she too fell out with Kuchma. In her new guise, she charmed her way into the hearts of the Western foreign policy establishment. Invited to meet her for dinner, British ambassador Roland Smith was surprised to find that she had booked the whole restaurant:
The only people there were a dozen waiters, an orchestra, and us. I should have asked, ‘If you’re so anti-corruption, how come you’ve got the money to hire this whole restaurant, and have all those cars with smoked-glass windows outside?’ But she isn’t, or isn’t only, an oligarch in a skirt. I was gobsmacked by how critical she was of Kuchma – this was when Kuchma was president, and she was a deputy prime minister in Yushchenko’s government. And she talked about corruption in exactly the same way I would have done. Basically, I wanted to believe her – she was the best hope I could see. Maybe she just knew how to talk to Westerners, but at least that was something. Not everybody did.12
Within months, she and Yushchenko fell out, and in September 2005 Yushchenko dismissed the entire government. The split was partly over policy – Tymoshenko a free-spending populist; Yushchenko an economic conservative. But mostly it was due simply to a clash of personalities, Ukrainians arguing to this day over who was most to blame. Rudderless, the Rada made a spectacle of itself. Yushchenko’s February 2006 state of the nation address turned into what the American embassy described in a cable to Washington as ‘circus-like farce’, interrupted by ringtones and loud private conversations, and preceded by a brawl during which one deputy gave another a bloody nose.13 The March 2006 parliamentary elections produced the usual mish-mash of small personality-based parties, independents available for hire, and out-and-out criminals for whom the chief attraction of a parliamentary career was immunity from prosecution. All through the spring and summer, Ukraine had no government at all, as mooted coalitions came and went.
Yanukovich, meanwhile, tried to clean up the image of his Party of the Regions, hiring Washington lobbyists for what the US embassy called ‘an extreme makeover effort’. At the same time, he was bribing Rada members onside – offering, according to Tymoshenko, $1m–$1.5m for each change of allegiance.14 In July 2006, when Yushchenko was away on one of his regular trips to Switzerland for medical treatment, Yanukovich scored a coup by persuading Socialist Party leader Moroz to abandon Tymoshenko in exchange for speakership of the Rada. On his return, Yushchenko finally did the unthinkable, and endorsed Yanukovich as prime minister. Predictably, the two Viktors immediately fell out in their turn, Yanukovich privately telling the US ambassador that ‘if he [Yushchenko] worked for me I’d fire him’, and that the president ‘owed the Americans his job’.15 In December 2007 Tymoshenko ousted Yanukovich again, having won snap parliamentary elections, and she and Yushchenko took up feuding where they had left off. Their rivalry reached what a cable called ‘grotesque proportions’ over privatisation. Though both in favour, they were so at loggerheads that they created two separate State Property Funds, the whole programme characterised, as America’s weary diplomats put it, by ‘duelling decrees, court battles, and mutual recriminations’.16
Amid the mess, almost nothing got done. Still ill and chronically disorganised, Yushchenko let reforms founder, wasting energy on second-order issues such as memorialisation of the Great Famine.17 His own ministers privately complained that he was passive, aloof and oddly detached.18 After Kryvorizhstal, no more insider privatisations of the Kuchma years were reversed. Pinchuk was able to hang on to Nikopol Ferroalloy, another steelmaker dubiously acquired during his father-in-law’s presidency.19 Dmitri Firtash, Putin-connected owner of the latest of the gas-scam intermediaries, was able to continue operating as normal – aided, it was rumoured, by Yushchenko’s brother.20 Yushchenko’s teenage son partied his way into the tabloids, double-parking his BMW outside Kiev nightclubs, flashing a platinum i-Phone and claiming trademark ownership over Orange Revolution logos. (Less predictably, Tymoshenko’s daughter married a middle-aged Yorkshire biker, frontman of a band called the Death Valley Screamers.) None of the high-profile crimes of the Kuchma years was properly investigated, not least Yushchenko’s own poisoning, which remains a mystery to this day.
The final nail in the coffin of the Orange Revolution was the 2010 presidential election, which Yanukovich won, reasonably fairly, in a narrow run-off against Tymoshenko, who was disadvantaged by having been head of government during the 2008–9 recession. As usual the country split, with Kiev and the west going to Tymoshenko, and Odessa and the east to Yanukovich. So thoroughly did Yushchenko loathe Tymoshenko by this stage that he tacitly connived in her defeat. Kicked out himself in the first round with only 5 per cent of the vote, he promptly approved an alteration to the Electoral Law that made ballot-rigging easier, and made the Nazi-sponsored OUN leader Stepan Bandera a posthumous Hero of Ukraine – a move that outraged and galvanised Yanukovich’s ethnic-Russian base in the east. In return Yushchenko was granted continued use of an official residence, which he only quit four years later.21
President at last, Yanukovich grabbed at power and money with the avidity of a mobster who knows that he too might be bumped off at any minute. His first move, in what amounted to a constitutional coup, was to give himself greatly increased control of the judiciary, completely subordinating it to the executive. His second was to begin criminal proceedings against Tymoshenko. Charged with ‘abuse of office’ over a gas deal with Russia, in October 2011 she was fined $188m and sentenced to seven years in prison, where she was joined by thirteen of her former officials. For the West she was a political prisoner; many Ukrainians quietly muttered that she was in the right place for the wrong reasons. Police, army and the security services were all brought firmly under the president’s hand, several Russian appointees being issued with Ukrainian passports for the purpose.22
At the same time, Yanukovich started making himself seriously wealthy. The basic mechanisms – the gas scam, insider privatisations, overvalued government procurement contracts, cheap loans from state-owned banks – remained the same as under Kuchma. But he took a bigger slice and ran the scams directly, instead of balancing competing clans. The proceeds went to a tight group of associates known as ‘the Family’. Yanukovich’s dentist son Oleksandr became an overnight multi-millionaire, valued by Forbes, prior to his father’s fall, at $510m. It has been calculated that just taking into account tax and excise fraud, overpriced infrastructure projects and the gas scam, the Family sucked $8 billion–$10 billion out of the state budget annually. Altogether, during the four years of Yanukovich’s presidency, as much as $100 billion may have been stolen, most of which went abroad.23
Best symbol of Yanukovich’s reign is Mezhihoriya, the private home he built himself just outside Kiev. By the time I visit, on a sunny Sunday in April 2014, Yanukovich has fled and it has been thrown open to the public. Walking through the gates is like stepping inside a crazed lottery-winner’s head. The grounds – once those of a monastery – are enormous, spread over a wooded hillside overlooking the Dnieper. Amid ornamental lakes and flowerbeds, a variety of buildings are dotted about, connected by curving pink paths. Wandering round, it takes a bit of time to work out what’s what. This one – ropework railings, Art Nouveau windows, an umbrella-stand made out of crossed oars – seems to be a barbecue lodge. That one – boulders, a glass dome, a mosaic-lined plunge pool – is a spa. There are rockeries, rotundas, wrought-iron bridges picked out in gold, a giant hexagonal cage – for pet squirrels, a visitor tells me – and a full-sized mock-up of a classical ruin, complete with shattered frieze and tumbled horse’s head. In one direction the gardens morph into a golf course; in the other, into an orchard, high-tech glasshouses and enclosures for a variety of exotic birds and animals. One man is amusing his children by feeding grass to an antelope; a woman crouches to admire a pair of elegant Japanese cranes, who stare back disdainfully out of tiger-orange eyes.
In charge is a senior keeper from the Kiev zoo. Turning up the morning after Yanukovich’s departure, the first thing he had to do was clear out the crowds: ‘One man was beating up an ostrich – I said to him, “It’s not its fault that it belonged to Yanukovich.” Some guys had AK47s – nobody really knew who they were or where they came from.’ Now things have settled down, and some of the original staff have returned. According to them, he says, Yanukovich
had the mentality of a child. He had six different species of sturgeon in the lake. They’d bring him a new one, a big fish far too large for the space, and of course it would die. And he’d go right ahead and order up another. When he walked by you had to get out of his way, vanish from sight. Nobody can remember a single time when he called someone up, said thank you, or congratulations. He behaved as though he were a tsar. All those bosses, they were wolves. The rest of us were the sheep.
Now, the menagerie is dependent on donations to keep going. Any publicity I can rustle up would be much appreciated. Handing me his business card he carefully crosses out the Russian spelling of his name – Sergei Grigoryev – and turns himself into Serhiy Hrihoryev, a proper Ukrainian.
Former anti-government protestors are in charge of the main house. Our guide wears combat trousers, a folkloric shepherd’s jacket, and a red-and-black flag (banner of the wartime Ukrainian Insurgent Arm) draped like a cloak over his shoulders. Trophies from his days battling Yanukovich’s police – a baseball bat and a plywood shield painted with the word ‘Narnia’ – stand next to the bench where we sit to slip elasticated plastic bags over our shoes.
The tour lasts over two hours. We take in a cocktail bar; a three-lane bowling alley; a gym and boxing ring; indoor tennis courts; a swimming pool with an artificial waterfall; a basement rifle range; a conservatory containing palms and a stuffed lion; a relaxation room lined with stalactites made of salt crystal; a neo-Gothic cinema decorated with reproduction suits of armour; two dining rooms – one Empire, the other Tudor; two billiard rooms and an Orthodox chapel. I tick off five white pianos before losing count. Everything that can be is tasselled, gilded or otherwise embellished. A single lift boasts engraved glass doors, walls inlaid with six different sorts of wood, and a wreath of roses in a mosaic on the floor. A bill for chandeliers – rescued together with thousands of other torn-up documents from one of the lakes – came to €39m.24
I ask our guide if anyone has measured the house’s floor area. ‘You’re welcome to try. We haven’t even managed to count the rooms!’ He is proud of how disciplined the protestors’ takeover of the property was – no damage was done, and almost nothing looted. For his grand finale, he shows us into the matching bedrooms Yanukovich shared with his girlfriend, reportedly the sister of his cook. Each the size of a spacious hotel lobby, they contain the only personal items to be seen in the whole place: a Lladro figurine of rearing horses, a cross-stitch picture of two little girls dressed as angels, and an empty fish tank. In one the bathrooms, we all take photographs of each other sitting on the presidential toilet – not, contrary to legend, actually gold-plated.
Back in Kiev, the National Gallery is displaying some of Mezhihoriya’s contents, taken into safe keeping by gallery staff soon after Yanukovich fled. Many items, the exhibition’s curator tells me, were found crated up in the garages, next to his seventy classic Soviet cars. Bemused Ukrainians wander from room to room in silence, taking photos on their mobile phones: of inlaid cabinets, candelabra, gold-plated caviar sets, a dried crocodile skin, a carved mammoth tusk and a Hermes dinner service, still in its orange boxes and bubble-wrap. Showroom stickers identify some of the furniture as from Baldi – a Florentine firm which boasts, I discover from its website, of being able to veneer a Bechstein grand with malachite, or carve a bathtub out of rock crystal. There is a whole roomful of Yanukovich portraits – in beaten metal, dried beans, tapestry, porcelain and amber. An oil painting shows his prosecutor-general, Viktor Pshonka, as Napoleon on the field of Borodino, in tight white breeches and thigh-length boots. Surrounding him are his real-life staff, dressed as Napoleon’s marshals. Next door, holding orb and sceptre and showing lots of bust, hangs Pshonka’s bottle-blonde wife – ‘Empress Elizabeth’ says the curator. When photos start appearing on the internet, diaspora Ukrainians coin a new word for the mixture of hilarity and dismay they produce – it’s called ‘being Pshonked’.
Less entertaining is how much it all cost. Two Baldi tables (one sporting winged lions, the other pointy-breasted goddesses) retail, the firm says, for £75,895 and £36,200. For two of several giant cut-glass urns on show it quotes £28,315 and £17,490. A large reproduction ormolu clock sports a cream auction tag, identifying it as Lot 177 in Christie’s ‘Opulent Eye’ sale, held at the firm’s South Kensington showrooms in September 2013. It sold, according to Christie’s website, for £20,000. Further on, another Christie’s tag hangs from the ankle of one of a set of four fake-bronze neo-classical statues – £265,875. From earlier sales came an Aivazovsky seascape (June 2008; £301,250), and a radically out of place Picasso vase (Les Danseurs, June 2012; £265,250). The other London auction houses have not neglected the Ukrainian kleptocrat market either. Maples at Abramtsevo, by Cézanne imitator Pyotr Konchalovsky, fetched £240,000 at Sotheby’s in May 2005. A large turn-of-the-century history painting, Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery, by Vasiliy Polyenov, went for £4.07m at Bonhams in November 2011. Aptly, the English version of its title is ‘Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone’.
Not everything, the curator explains, was bought by Yanukovich himself. Many of the items were bribes from fellow politicians and businessmen: ‘I give you a million-dollar picture today, you give me a good contract tomorrow.’ She and her colleagues know who gave what, having found the details among the president’s abandoned paperwork. But they don’t want to name names, for fear of ‘problems for our museum’. Some names she was relieved not to find – including, she says, that of the new president, Petro Poroshenko. What about Firtash and Pinchuk? ‘I don’t remember.’ A rare sixteenth-century book was a present from the head of the tax office. ‘A lot’, she lets slip, came from Akhmetov. One of the few really lovely objects on view, a large Bronze Age terracotta jar painted with a bold design of interlocking spirals, came from Viktor Yushchenko. She smiles at my surprise: ‘Of course. They all did it. And Yushchenko loves archaeology – he’s got a whole museum at home.’ What’s the most valuable object in the collection? She leads me back to the room full of presidential portraits. Among them, slouched on a velvet-draped chair, sits a life-size dummy of the president, dressed in a Formula One driver’s suit. ‘Him. But not the most valuable. The most expensive.’