Conclusions: Revolution Number 5
After the Warsaw Pact revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine was third in a new wave of revolutions, after Yugoslavia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003. The Yugoslav and Georgian revolutions were also against quasi-democratic or semi-authoritarian regimes, but were arguably unique in other respects. Both were war-torn and supposedly ‘failing’ states. Outside intervention was important in Belgrade and probably crucial in Tbilisi, where both the West and Russia accepted Shevardnadze had to go. Ukraine's Orange Revolution was of a different type. And, because it was much larger than Georgia, commentators could immediately talk of Ukraine as a new trend-setter, not just a one-off.
But was it actually a revolution? Was there a change of regime? Or was it just a ‘revolt of millionaires against billionaires’,1 a coup staged by ‘rentier democrats’ bankrolled by US dollars, as its critics suggest? Every revolution has its fellow-travellers. A split in the old regime is probably a sine qua non for a successful transfer of power. But this was no palace coup, and it took real people power to challenge the Ukrainian system, which was much stronger than the eleven-year Shevardnadze regime. There was certainly no bloodbath, no Terror, no set-piece storming of public buildings, though revolutions often have to be non-revolutionary in order to succeed. Ukraine's negotiated path to peaceful settlement stood in marked contrast to Kyrgyzstan or even Georgia – certainly in contrast to the bloody events and suppression of protests in Uzbekistan. Neither was it yet clear if the Orange Revolution would initiate a true social revolution, famously defined by Theda Skocpol as ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’.2 This book was written too soon after the events for the longer-term perspective to be clear. It remained to be seen whether the undoubted generational change and apparent initial sense of purpose in the new government would usher in long-term social and economic change.
Nevertheless, the self-proclaimed Orange Revolution can be accepted as profoundly revolutionary in several key senses, and I have been happy to use the term. First, there was a revolution of expectations. What was supposed to happen did not happen; the attempted election steal failed. Second, there was a real desire for regime change, not just for a new president. The mood in the Maidan did not just indicate support for Yushchenko or Tymoshenko personally; it was the articulate anger of a people finding their voice. It was often said that Yushchenko might disappoint, but that he could always be replaced after five years. If Yanukovych had become president, there might have been no such chance. The cross-class support that some bizarrely see as suspicious is exactly what regime change needs. Students wanted a change in political culture, the poor wanted a change in political culture, and small and medium-sized businesses wanted a change in political culture. As Anders Åslund put it after visiting Kiev at the time, ‘the demonstration didn't seem to have any class identity at all. Hardly any names of businesses, parties, or organisations were to be seen. No one talked about social or economic issues. This was pure politics.’3 The regime was split, so powerful governing interests wanted a change in political culture too. The key sentiment was ‘kick the bastards out’, and that is what revolutions are all about. Some in the new government were often guilty of fighting dirty (Tymoshenko), of empire building (Poroshenko), and, perhaps, of failing to define and police the hazy line between politics and business (Ihor Kolomoiskyi's Privat Group allegedly hoped to become ‘Orange oligarchs’), but the prospects for rapidly transforming the behaviour of the state and the relationships between the citizens and the state were good. The poisonous atmosphere of the old regime had gone. Perhaps the biggest test would be whether ‘political technology’ had really met its match, and whether or not its ugly methodology would be used again in 2006. A second key test would be whether the new authorities would refrain from using ‘administrative resources’ in 2006.
Thirdly, the epicentre of this change in political culture, for the first time in modern Ukrainian history, was in Kiev and in central Ukraine.4 Even in August 1991, Kiev had been relatively quiet (I was there). The Orange Revolution was neither led by the West nor by west Ukraine. Electorally, it was Yushchenko who rode this civic mood, winning broader support across Ukraine, uniting the west and centre, the Right Bank and the Left, and winning sufficient anti-regime protest votes in parts of the east and south, such as Mykolaïv (once again, there is a useful contrast with Belarus, where the opposition has just not been able to broaden its political and geographical base). It was Yanukovych who looked like the regional politician, and the Russian ‘technologists’ who had completely missed this change of mood. It wasn't just Yanukovych from Donetsk that they couldn't sell nationally, but Yanukovych's and their own authoritarian culture. Ukraine was therefore a profoundly different country in 2004 than it had been even in 1991. All previous elections had been ‘the west (of Ukraine) versus the rest’, with the west a natural minority. Now central Ukraine was on board, and at the wheel.
The reasons for this were complex. Yushchenko was undoubtedly helped in the second and third rounds by the Socialists, who are largely a party of rural central Ukraine. The rural paper, Silski visti (‘Village News’), which had survived a campaign to close it, was broadly pro-Yushchenko in the second and third rounds, having also supported Moroz in the first. More fundamentally, rural Ukraine had changed culturally and socially since 1991. In the nineteenth century, the peasantry had been the main support base, or target constituency, of the national movement. But the Great Famine of 1932–3 and the imposition of the ruinous collective farm system had broken its back as a social force. In 2004, however, it responded warmly to Yushchenko's rebranding of the national idea, which mined older traditions, not of ethnonationalism, but of Christian rhetoric and traditional values. Cynics pointed to the presence of agribusinessmen such as Petro Poroshenko in Yushchenko's camp, who supposedly ‘delivered’ the rural vote, but the changing social conditions in the countryside since the reform of the collective farm system, which had begun in December 1999, were much more important. More exactly, the reform had been complied with most fully in west and central Ukraine, so that rural voters there were less dependent on what used to be the almost feudal power of the collective farm bosses. They were dependent on them to a certain extent, however. They still needed state money for the harvest and leasing payments for land shares, and, often enough, basics such as petrol for farm machinery. However, banally but crucially, the 2004 election was late, especially the second and third rounds. The Orange Revolution had been shrouded in snow. The harvest was already in, and payments had already been made. Rural voters could, for once, vote in relative freedom.5
In contrast to Yushchenko's value-based campaign, which helped consolidate a new version of the ‘national idea’, the Russian political technologists sold a largely negative message to eastern and southern Ukraine. The anti-nationalist and ‘Bushchenko’ campaigns attempted to play on the locals' sense of what they were not, but Pavlovskii, Markov et al. were captive to the myth of an ersatz Russia, and were incapable of selling east Ukrainians a positive sense of their alternative Ukrainian identity – one that might have better motivated them to collective action in support of Yanukovych or some other candidate. Yanukovych's alternative campaign colours of blue and white were all very well, but they carried little real symbolism. They were really only the colours of ‘The Party’, Yanukovych's Party of Regions. Southeast Ukraine remained sullen and alienated after the election, but, despite the publicity given to the regional split during the Orange Revolution, it was possible that Ukraine might come out of the election more united than before. Yushchenko had shown how to bring the west and the centre together (and if the authorities won again there was a real possibility of alienation growing in the former Habsburg west, which saw itself as trapped in a mire of post-Soviet corruption and unnaturally cut off from its central European past), and he had a potential message to sell further east. Commentators had always agreed that twenty-first century Ukraine was too ethnically, linguistically and culturally fragile to build a nineteenth-century Volksstaat, and that a ‘civic’ identity was the way forward. But under Kuchma, this had been an empty box. A civic identity might involve some pride in the cives for its political institutions (as we were taught in post-war Britain), its success in constitutional engineering and in building a stable democracy (post-war Germany), or for a generous welfare state (Scandinavia), the creation of a multi-ethnic melting-pot and land of opportunity (America), or for an active citizenry, building its own future. Under Yushchenko there was finally some real chance of Ukraine building some combination or selection of the five, of putting some real content in the empty box.
Fourthly, there was a dramatic revolution against the regional trend towards semi-authoritarian quasi-democracy, that began in Russia with Yeltsin's shelling of the Moscow White House in 1993 and with his deeply-flawed re-election in 1996, and, nearer to home, with the election of Kuchma in Ukraine and Lukashenka in Belarus in 1994. But the post-Soviet form of semi-authoritarianism is peculiar. The local states have inherited a formidable apparatus of ‘administrative’ control (though they do not always choose to use it), but are also paradoxically weak in many respects, even in terms of their conventional repressive capacities, even though these seem effective enough to journalists who have been imprisoned, or to demonstrators who have been beaten. Indeed, in the 1990s many of the successor states, Ukraine included, were expected to fall apart. What local élites have therefore rebuilt is in a sense a substitute for a workable state, a short-cut means of retaining power, an edifice of illusion – or what I have called elsewhere ‘virtual politics’.6 Unlike traditional authoritarian states, the point is not to trap the population in some kind of repressive box, but to trap them in the perception that they are trapped in some kind of box – in other words, to convince them that there is no alternative.
Ukraine's Orange Revolution was therefore the first revolution within and against this system of virtual politics. Post-Soviet states are not so much fragile, as vulnerable to key segments of the population turning off message, or switching channels to another message. In Georgia in 2003, a tired regime was unable to sell the population any dramaturgiia to justify its hold on power (Shevardnadze had previously twice arranged convenient victories against the pliable local Communist leader Dzhumber Patiashvili in 1995 and 2000). In Ukraine in 2004, the authorities' Russian ‘technologists’ tried vigorously to sell a particular myth of east versus west, and the nationalist ‘threat’. Enough of the population bought it to polarise the election, but not enough to guarantee victory. The key tipping point in the Orange Revolution was therefore not only Yushchenko's ability to shift the electoral balance between Ukrainian east and west, but also the emergence of a large number of people who rejected the idea that the election was about regional politics, and who simply stood up in the Maidan and said the real issue was something else. First of all, there was a protest against fraud, an attempt to prove that, in the words of the Orange anthem, Razom nas bahato, ‘We aren't beasts of burden; we aren't goats.’ Second, it was a protest against the rotten system of government that had implemented this fraud, and the hope that something better would take its place. And for all its bluster, and despite the fact that Yushchenko was poisoned to stop him winning, the state showed its real weakness when sufficient numbers defied it. In this sense, the Orange Revolution definitely could be exported in the future, although other neighbouring regimes were somewhat stronger, or just more authoritarian in their response to protest.
Finally, in a comparative perspective, the style and method of the Ukrainian revolution was genuinely novel. Most notable was the radical use of the internet and other alternative media. For ten years, parties and politicians throughout the world have used the net to advertise themselves, to raise money and to build a support base, such as Howard Dean in 2004, but in Ukraine in 2004, the internet was used to combat the hegemony of the official mass media (in Pora's words, ‘to kill the TV within yourself’), and to generate ideas, a style of acting, and a critical mass. As with ‘flash’ demos in the West, Our Ukraine, Pora et al. also used internet and texting technologies to coordinate action. The internet was not as well-developed as this in Belgrade in 2000. Access was limited politically and financially in Belarus in 2001, and by a comparatively underdeveloped network in Georgia in 2003. In Ukraine in 2004, however, the audience was larger and more attuned to multi-media possibilities. The NGOs all had innovative sites that interacted; there were a number of blogs that became well-read; and even official sites such as Our Ukraine's www.razom.org.ua helped the number of readers to rise enormously. Some estimates are that the total audience went up as much as ten-fold.7 Westerners who tuned in or logged on, including those looking for feeds for news reports, seem overwhelmingly to have visited opposition sites (several of which had English versions) rather than the Yanukovych alternatives, which was another factor in cementing Western solidarity against the fraud, and, often enough, for Yushchenko.
Another factor was the explosion in humour. The Orange Revolution was possibly the first Situationist revolution, as Situationists have normally amused nobody but themselves. The Maidan's rules of (non-) engagement helped create a non-violent but aggressive opposition stance. Humour and a festival atmosphere also helped to express the population's loss of fear, and served as a prophylactic against provocations. These were frequent and potentially serious, but, unlike in 2001, they were now easily recognised and ignored. In 2001, a cynical regime had triumphed over a protest movement that, perhaps naively, assumed the Gongadze-Melnychenko scandal was so damning the regime would simply collapse or fall on its sword. In 2004, the crowd was now more sophisticated than the regime, which ‘relied on primitive people for its provocations’.8
Future Scenarios
So what next? An immediate political revanche was extremely unlikely given the pseudo-legalistic nature of Yushchenko's takeover of power, the extent to which Yanukovych's fraudsters had so obviously been caught in the act, the disarray of the new opposition, and some local élites' habits of defering to new leaders. Politicians from Donetsk, who defended their ‘boss’ until the end, now hailed the new boss. Russia's role in 2006 was likely to be more exploratory than vengeful. Neither was a covert revanche likely, as with the Yugoslav old guard's complicity in the assassination of Zoran Djindjic in March 2003. Even if Tymoshenko was supposed to play Djindjic to Yushchenko's Koštunica, despite Pavlovskii's dark hints that he wouldn't wish to see Tymoshenko meet the same fate as Zhurab Zhvania,9 the Georgian premier who was supposed to have died by accident, from a kitchen gas leak in 2004. The irreconcilable opposition still talked of stealth tactics, such as encouraging protests over rising fuel prices and plotting to reintroduce the majoritarian voting system, but clearly it lacked the strength to tackle the new government head-on.
Nor was it likely that Yushchenko would end up like Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, with no opposition and hardly any independent media. Yushchenko's opponents were in short-term disarray, but had too many resources and too big a potential electorate. Unlike Georgia, Ukraine is a big country which will always be relatively diverse. Yushchenko was not a natural autocrat – indeed, he used to be criticised for being too timid. Nor were there more ruthless figures behind him, preparing to seize power. There was no October Revolution round the corner. Tymoshenko might have behaved differently in the same position, but that is why Yushchenko is president and she isn't.
More prosaically, the new authorities might do just what they promised, so that Ukraine might settle into a normal politics of struggle and setback. Given how bad the old regime had become, Yushchenko would retain popularity for a while just by standing still. But his advisers were already daring to talk of a two-term presidency, and of what they would need to have delivered by 2009.
And what of Yushchenko's health? Medical experts had no real previous cases to draw on. One school argued that Yushchenko looked as bad as he did because the body deals with poisons of the type used against him by forcing them out through the skin, and that this showed that his defences had done their job. With treatment, they said, his facial ‘acne’ would disappear within two to three years. Another school of thought argued that the internal damage to his organs was likely to be considerable, especially as dioxin's half-life is seven years. On the other hand, Yushchenko the president now seemed a stronger man than Yushchenko the candidate. Some attributed this to his surviving the poisoning, but it was also the more general redemption of a man whose personal cavalry had symbolised the nation's rebirth. Ukrainians did talk in these terms – but they were also reluctant to place all their hopes in one man. Yushchenko faced the challenging job of bridging the contradiction. His time-keeping was still woeful, but he seemed more dynamic. When he faced big initial choices, he often went for the more radical option, particularly in appointing Tymoshenko, but he also slapped her back down on occasion. The division of labour between the two would define the future. It had worked well in the past. In the 1999 to 2001 government, Yushchenko fronted the reforms and international negotiations while Tymoshenko acted against the oligarchs. During the 2004 election, Tymoshenko took the radical role and allowed Yushchenko to appear more presidential. The relationship was now potentially unbalanced by the secret deal and by Tymoshenko's rising popularity. Keeping her ambition in check might prove Yushchenko's most difficult task to date. A Ukraine more dominated by Tymoshenko would certainly be revolutionary, but would also be more populist, like Evita without Péron. Poroshenko and Tymoshenko also constantly rowed, but represented different aspects of the same problem: excessive compromise with the old regime and the excesses of ‘anti-oligarchic’ populism. Yushchenko normally took the middle ground, but the middle ground needed to be stronger.
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Some old habits died hard. It was unrealistic to expect political culture to be transformed overnight. But it was also crazy to start claiming that nothing had changed, or to write off Yushchenko and Tymoshenko's efforts after only a hundred days.10 Despite some tactical missteps and necessary compromises, the new leadership has at least tried to put its policies into long-term focus. In ten years' time, Ukraine could have become a very different country indeed.