4

Two Dress Rehearsals: Gongadze, Melnychenko, and the 2002 Elections

The Ukrainian revolution could, and should, have begun in 2000, although it wouldn't then have been ‘orange’ – a branding idea that came later. On 5 September 2000, Hryhorii Gongadze, the editor of Ukraine's first muckraking internet website, www.pravda.com.ua, filed an exposé about one of President Kuchma's confidantes, entitled ‘Everything About Oleksandr Volkov’, which may not have been entirely comprehensive, but certainly added a lot of new facts to his published biography.¹ Gongadze had just complained to the interior ministry that he was being followed. He was right. But as he was being followed by a ‘special team’ from the interior ministry, as well as one from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and probably had been since the summer, his complaint fell on deaf ears. On the night of 16 September, Gongadze walked out to dump rubbish at about 10:30 p.m., and vanished. The president added his concern to that of Gongadze's colleagues. Parliament began an investigation. Fifty days later, on 2 November, Gongadze's corpse was found in a shallow grave in woods south of Kiev. His head had been severed, probably with an axe.²

On the same day, Major Mykola Melnychenko, an officer in President Kuchma's Security Service who specialised in communications and countering electronic surveillance (Melnychenko had also served Gorbachev in the last days of the USSR), received his passport. On 26 November he left with his family for Warsaw, and travelled on to the Czech Republic, where he was looked after by two businessmen acquainted with Oleksandr Moroz, the leader of the opposition Socialist Party of Ukraine and the aggrieved loser of the 1999 election, Volodymyr Tsvil and Volodymyr Boldaniuk. (Tsvil claims that Melnychenko and Moroz had been in contact since early 2000.) Two days later, with Melnychenko safely out of the way, Moroz made a sensational speech in parliament. Melnychenko had made hundreds of hours of secret tapes in Kuchma's office between October 1999 and October 2000, and had passed some recordings and summary transcripts to Moroz. The first date was in the middle of Kuchma's re-election campaign, when Melnychenko, who had worked for the president since 1994, claims his patriotic vengeance had been provoked by overhearing the president's order to fake the grenade attack on the puppet candidate Nataliia Vitrenko and to blame Moroz. The second date came after Melnychenko's most sensational discovery led him to wrap up his work. The tapes were presumed to end on, or shortly before, Melnychenko's resignation on 23 October 2000, although he has never to date provided any tapes dated after Gongadze's disappearance on 16 September.

Melnychenko claimed to have acted alone, using a digital recorder placed under Kuchma's settee. This aspect of his story was never convincing, conjuring up an image either of furtive crawling under the sofa or of repeated visits after hours. It was later intimated that his recording device was actually hidden in the air-conditioning system, or in the TV remote control. Some have hinted that he was helped by Yevhen Marchuk, who by 2000 was head of the National Security and Defence Council.3 Despite having headed the SBU in 1991–4 and, indeed, supported the 1991 Moscow coup, Marchuk was seen as relatively friendly to the West, or at least to NATO. He also had a long record of looking after his own interests, however. Others claimed the involvement of one or other domestic ‘clan’, painting a scenario of Lazarenko's revenge, Tymoshenko's skulduggery or the SDPU(o)'s naked ambition. It was alleged that the latter had arranged for Gongadze's body to be reburied where it could easily be found, to discredit Kuchma, replace him with Medvedchuk or Marchuk, and bring Yushchenko's reforms to a halt. There was no one conspiracy theory that commanded much common ground. Others were convinced of Russian involvement, both in the original taping operation and in Gongadze's death; that is, they believed that a Russian special team intervened to ensure that the kidnapping ended up as murder, to leave a weakened Kuchma more dependent on Russian help.⁴ Neither was Melnychenko able to make the most of his treasure trove, a reported seven hundred hours of recordings on thirty-five CDs. He had a new computer in the Czech Republic and a crib sheet, but was only ever able to transcribe some sixty hours. When he left for America in April 2001, the rest was allegedly left in the company of Tsvil and Boldaniuk in Ostrava, who placed it on safe deposit in Liechtenstein. Their offer to supply copies to the SBU was politely declined.

But the scandal Melnychenko detonated was big enough without them. Moroz was able directly to accuse Kuchma of ordering Gongadze's disappearance. On the secret tapes Kuchma, or a particularly foul mouth remarkably similar to the president's, can be heard in various episodes, beginning in June 2000, when Gongadze had already been a thorn in the president's side for some time.

EPISODE ONE, 12 JUNE 2000.

KUCHMA: This Gongadze, yes?

LEONID DERKACH, long-time colleague of Kuchma from the Pivdemash factory in Dnipropetrovsk, and head of the Security Service from April 1998 to February 2001: Yes, yes.

KUCHMA: You can take care of him?

DERKACH: The time for him to mouth off will come to an end. I'll crush this fucker.

EPISODE TWO, 3 JULY 2000.

KUCHMA: …This goes to the prosecutor, right?

VOLODYMYR LYTVYN, Kuchma's then chief of staff: No, let loose [the notorious interior minister Yurii] Kravchenko…

KUCHMA: Simply shit – is there any limit, after all, son-of-a-bitch – he needs to be deported – the scum – to Georgia and thrown there on his ass!

LYTVYN: Take him to Georgia and dump him there.

KUCHMA: The Chechens should kidnap him and ask for a ransom!

EPISODE THREE, 10 JULY 2000.

KUCHMA: So that I don't forget, did you find this Georgian? [Gongadze was born in Georgia, hence his Georgian surname.]

KRAVCHENKO: I'm, we're working on him, that is…

KUCHMA: I'm telling you, drive him out, throw out, give him to the Chechens, let [undecipherable] and then a ransom.

KRAVCHENKO: We, we think it over. We'll do it in such a way that…

KUCHMA: Take him there, undress him, the fucker, leave him without his trousers, and let him sit there.

UNKNOWN VOICE: The shit (I would…)

KUCHMA: He's simply a fucker.

KRAVCHENKO: I – today I was informed. We're learning the situations, where he goes, where he walks.

UNKNOWN VOICE: Well, yes, he is somewhere on holiday [‘Unknown’ was well-informed: Gongadze had returned from Turkey just two days before].

KRAVCHENKO: We are doing a bit, a little bit more has to be learned, we'll do it. The team – such eagles – that will do whatever you want.5

Kravchenko's ‘eagles’, who were actually from the Sokil (‘Hawk’) unit, apparently did exactly as he promised. Three years later, it would be claimed – though the information was obtained with no thanks to the official investigation – that they contacted the notorious Kiev gangster Kysil, who supplied the actual killer.⁶ Kravchenko agreed to resign in March 2001, but was soon back with a cosy job as head of the State tax administration in December 2002. The Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko, on the other hand, not only survived, but organised the cover-up alongside Kravchenko's successor, Yurii Smirnov. Potebenko was allegedly bribed $100,000 to look the other way during another election finance scandal,⁷ and was also rewarded with a seat in parliament, and therefore with immunity from prosecution, in 2002.

His successor, Sviatoslav Piskun, was appointed after international pressure to begin a proper investigation of the affair, and by ‘the summer of 2003’ therefore, a ‘new, more vigorous, investigation under Piskun … was well under way’.⁸ In private, Piskun's office had identified the likely killers: two men from the interior ministry acting under the alleged orders of Kravchenko and Mykola Astion, the head of Kiev's organised crime division, with Kysil's sub-contracted gangster, Yurii Nesterov, a notorious sadist from the ‘Werewolves’ gang, in tow. Nesterov allegedly tortured Gongadze before he died. Two whistle-blowers from the interior ministry, Liudmilla Levchenko and Anatolii Osypenko, named their boss Lieutenant-General Oleksii Pukach as the man who had overseen Gongadze's surveillance and stated that he had been present when Gongadze was bundled into his killers' car. It was even claimed that Pukach had strangled Gongadze with a belt. On 23 October 2003, Piskun's office had Pukach arrested on charges of destroying evidence. A week later, the president's inappropriately named commission on corruption met and came to a different conclusion, namely that Piskun was guilty of ‘large-scale corruption’. He was then sacked.

Ihor Honcharov, the key witness against the interior ministry men, died in police custody on 1 August, after what an investigation by the British newspaper the Independent later revealed to be a lethal drug injection. He had also been savagely beaten in the stomach.⁹ Honcharov had retired from the interior ministry in 1997, and had been arrested in May 2002, allegedly because of his own involvement arranging contract killings with the likes of the ‘Werewolves’. Some called this black PR, others claimed that Honcharov was now working for Marchuk (who in June 2003 was moved to be minister of defence). Whatever the case, Honcharov left behind a sheath of letters detailing the trail of evidence and the many threats against his life. But with Honcharov dead and Piskun fired, Pukach, the key suspect, was released and allowed to flee Ukraine. Kravchenko, meanwhile, was temporarily in Russia. Piskun's successor was Hennadii Vasyliev, who resumed Potebenko's policy of inaction – or, more exactly, of prosecuting all those who made their own accusations in the affair. Not surprisingly, Vasyliev was forced out during the Orange Revolution, when the reappointment of Piskun drew some faint praise.

The Tip of a Very Large Iceberg

The Gongadze affair was, unfortunately, entirely symptomatic of broader problems that had been developing for some time. As his prime minister Viktor Yushchenko set about cleaning up the Ukrainian economy in 2000, President Kuchma's authoritarian instincts were taking politics in an entirely different direction.

The Melnychenko tapes confirmed the extent of fraud during the 1999 election. They also record Kuchma's private vow to impose ‘the toughest possible order’ after it was over.10 In January 2000, Kuchma announced he would hold an ‘All-Ukrainian Referendum on Popular Initiative’ in April. There was, of course, no such initiative. Or, rather, the real initiator was one of the president's shadier allies, once again Oleksandr Volkov, the subject of Gongadze's piece on 5 September, which had detailed Volkov's links from childhood with none other than the gangster Kysil (which didn't preclude Volkov working as a police agent), and his pursuit by the Belgian courts, who were interested in $15 million of unexplained transit through his accounts in Belgium between 1993 and 1997. Volkov's version of ‘popular initiative’ was a spontaneous nationwide craving to strengthen presidential power. Two of his questions were struck out by the normally docile Constitutional Court – one on the grounds of sheer incomprehensibility. The other four were approved by ludicrous margins of 82 to 90 per cent, on a turnout of 81 per cent, higher than in the recent presidential election. All told, this was basically an exercise in telling voters that they just didn't matter. (Amongst my own sociologically unrepresentative sample of friends, there was not one who could remember actually having voted.) Neither did the Constitution matter much to Kuchma's men, except in that it required them to win an additional two-thirds' majority in parliament (300 out of 450 votes), which they couldn't get. Only 251 votes were forthcoming in July, and a second attempt was scuppered by the Gongadze crisis, after which the whole expensive charade was quietly forgotten.

The opposition continued to be harassed. The Melnychenko tapes record Kuchma demanding in February 2000 that deputy Oleksandr Yeliashkevych, ‘a fucking Yiddish sprout’, should be dealt with. ‘Fuck him up! Let's [do it]! Let the little Jew be handled by Yids!.’11 Yeliashkevych was duly attacked and badly beaten. He was granted political asylum in the USA in October 2002. On 9 June, Oles Podolskyi, a former Rada deputy and associate of another opposition leader, Serhii Holovatyi (now part of Tymoshenko's bloc), was kidnapped.

EPISODE FOUR, 12 JUNE 2000.

INTERIOR MINISTER YURII KRAVCHENKO: Now about this gang, you remember, that distributed leaflets from Holovatyi?

KUCHMA: Yes.

KRAVCHENKO: I mean the day before yesterday he was located as far as Sumy oblast [north-east of Kiev], the one who was distributing them. They beat the hell out of him [laughter]. And he's yelling ‘it's Holovatyi’ [laughter]. When he gets home … the door burned out [unknown assailants tried to set fire to Podolskyi's friend's apartment moments after he had left, possibly getting the wrong one].

KUCHMA: Whose?

KRAVCHENKO: His [both laughing] … I have such a unit, their methods; they have no morals, no nothing … they have begun to silence things.¹²

Gongadze wasn't the only journalist Kuchma wanted silenced. Others to experience ‘administrative’ pressure after they were discussed on the tapes included Oleh Liashko of the paper Freedom, and Oleh Yeltsov, editor of another new website called ‘Criminal Ukraine’ (www.cripo.com.ua).

Virtually every conversation on the tapes indicates habitual abuse of the law. Kuchma at one point says chillingly: ‘If we are the power, then the procuracy is an instrument of our power.’¹³ In another conversation, Kuchma complains to no less than Viktor Yanukovych about his local patch in Donetsk, specifically stating that a local judge is not acting sufficiently harshly – Kuchma has a grudge against a certain Serhii Salov, who was Moroz's local election agent in 1999.

EPISODE FIVE, 30 MARCH 2000.

KUCHMA: … Your judges are the dregs. I am now obliged to come and testify! That's why you should take this fucking judge, hang him by the balls, let him hang for one night.

YANUKOVYCH: I understand. We will look into it.

KUCHMA: Judges, in general, are fuckers.

YANUKOVYCH: Well, they're the dregs. The boss of my [local] court there is hopeless. He's got to be changed.

KUCHMA: Well, I think now you'll look into it [in such a way] that he'll remember it his whole life.14

‘My court’ is, of course, a revealing expression. The tapes also reveal financial corruption to have been systematic and almost casual. Kuchma, who takes a cut on many things, is often referred to in private as ‘Papa’.

EPISODE SIX, OCTOBER 1999: Kuchma is talking to Ihor Bakai, boss of Oil and Gas of Ukraine.

KUCHMA: …You said to me Ihor, I looked you in the eyes, and you said to me, that I'll guarantee you 250 million dollars for the election campaign. We need it now!

BAKAI (to Volkov): 48 million hrivina [then $11.6 million] and fourteen million dollars, that you confirm…

VOLKOV: I only confirm twelve.

BAKAI: It's not worth talking about – twelve or fourteen!

KUCHMA: Well, fine – twelve or fourteen, I don't give a fuck.

VOLKOV: We need a minimum of twenty-five million now – we needed it yesterday.

BAKAI (to Volkov): I'll give you twenty-five million on Tuesday. On Tuesday – twenty-five for starters.

KUCHMA: We need that much to win in the first round. Get ready twenty for the second round.

BAKAI: I'll give my own. But I want you all to know that all the money, which is just, it's all mine…[Bakai means it belongs to ‘his’ state-owned company, Oil and Gas of Ukraine.]¹⁵

‘Ukraine Without Kuchma’: Kuchma Survives

The revelations contained on Melnychenko's tapes detonated a protest movement, but not one that turned out as either Moroz or Melnychenko intended. After an initially confused reaction, which was not helped by Rukh's compromised leaders condemning Moroz, or by inconclusive debates in parliament, a ‘tent city’ of protesters was set up in central Kiev on 15 December. The first demonstration was held two days later, by which time, fortunately for Kuchma, winter had already set in. The tent city was dominated by members of Moroz's Socialist Party and some Rukh rank-and-file, but few of the general public were present. The demonstrations pulled in a wider circle, but numbers were never large, and no more than 20,000 to 30,000 people attended, at most.16 A second wave began with warmer weather and the reopening of parliament on 6 February 2001.

Kuchma's regime adopted a cynical survival strategy. First of all, its shadowy advisers, the self-styled ‘political technologists’ (see pages 86–7), pushed what they artfully dubbed a ‘double object’ campaign, that is, projecting the regime's own failings on to the opposition. By encouraging the general cynicism of ‘they (politicians) are all the same’, they hoped to demotivate the protesters.¹⁷ The recent political cycle worked in their favour. After the fraudulent presidential election in 1999 and, even worse, the abortive referendum in 2000, popular willingness to protest was at a low ebb. (The 2004 election, on the other hand, would come after the opposition had won the 2002 Rada elections, only to see the fruits of victory stolen from them. The baseline of popular discontent would then be radically different.) Kuchma's advisers also benefited from a confused international reaction. As Yushchenko was still prime minister and still popular in the West, it was difficult to draw the line between criticising one set of authorities and backing another – which was a particular dilemma for the Ukrainian diaspora. Initially, most of the opprobrium came from the foreign press, foreign NGOs and individuals. Most foreign governments never made a formal break with Ukraine, but settled into a de facto (partial) boycott of the government's highest levels as time went on. The authorities and the oligarchs (especially Pinchuk) also paid for several technical analyses of the tapes to muddy the waters, deliberately multiplying versions of events so as to leave the average voter confused.

Secondly, the regime labelled the remaining protesters ‘fascists’. This made absolutely no sense whatsoever – most of them were Socialists – until it became clear that the authorities were busy infiltrating fake nationalists from government-funded parties such as Trident and the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), and equally fake ‘anarchists’ (most were students who had been paid a few dollars or skinheads keen for a fight) into the opposition's ranks. Even when they were viewed with suspicion, they dominated coverage on state TV, and an escalating series of provocations, carefully staged violence and confrontations with the police was eventually used to justify a crackdown. At the final showdown in Kiev on 9 March, the UNA caused most of the trouble. The authorities responded by arresting members of the rival UNA–UNSO (Ukrainian Self-Defence Force), hoping nobody would notice the difference.

Thirdly, the authorities sought to keep the protesters leaderless. The political system that Ukraine had developed in the 1990s had decapitated, eviscerated and recycled most of what were once the opposition parties. Most major politicians now worked within the system. The one exception to this was Yuliia Tymoshenko, who, after her expulsion from government on 19 January, had organised a National Salvation Forum on 9 February, which was intended to force Kuchma out of office. The government responded just as quickly, however. Tymoshenko was arrested on 13 February, allowing her barely a week to lead the protests. Yushchenko was still prime minister, but his protests on her behalf were muted. In any case, her leadership was contested by the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement (mainly a youth organisation), set up earlier in December 2000, and, more controversially, by the For Truth group formed on 13 February. For Truth was led by several of the leaders of Rukh who had allowed themselves to be enmeshed in Kuchma's schemes back in 1999. It was therefore exploited by the authorities to divide the protests, although its rank and file members were genuine enough. Rather disingenuously, For Truth claimed they couldn't work with the tent city protest this time, because it was controlled by the left (sic) – as if there was no question of greater good. The notorious ‘letter of the three’, ordered by Kuchma, but also signed by Rada chair Ivan Pliushch and by Yushchenko, was released the same day, accusing the demonstrators of ‘instigating an atmosphere of hysteria and psychosis’ and representing ‘a Ukrainian brand of National Socialism’.18

Signing this letter was undoubtedly Yushchenko's biggest mistake, although his then chief of staff, Oleh Rybachuk, would claim three years later that: ‘You ought to know what was signed, and what appeared in print. I was the chief of the prime minister's staff and I saw the text that Yushchenko had signed. I can state with all responsibility: the text had been changed by the time it got published. We know who, at which computer. This is the country we live in…’.¹⁹ A generous interpretation of Yushchenko's behaviour was that, thinking like a post-Communist banker, he wanted more time in office to allow his reforms to take effect. He did not get much, however; in April, only two months after the letter was published, he was ousted, though he at least recovered a lot of ground with one of his best ever speeches: ‘As a citizen, I am convinced that democracy in Ukraine has suffered a serious loss … I am not going to leave politics. I am leaving, in order to return!’ There was still plenty to play for. The next parliamentary elections were due in March 2002.

Despite much misguided talk of the West inspiring and even financing the Orange Revolution three years later in 2004, the key lessons were all local. As Dmytro Potekhin, head of one of the NGOs set up to promote a clean election, later put it, quoting his Serbian contact, Aleksandar Maric, ‘“Every success is preceded by a failure”. So I attribute what we achieved [in 2004] to lessons learned from the flawed protests organised by the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement [almost] five years ago.’20 On the other hand, Kuchma was certainly persona non grata in the West after 2001. When it was made clear that he would not be welcome at the Prague NATO summit in November 2002, he turned up anyway. So a decision was taken to list the countries in French, so that l'Ukraine would not be next to les États Unis or la Grande-Bretagne. (Normally, Blair of the UK and Bush of the USA would have sat right by Ukraine.)

The opposition would also learn from its attempts to revive the protests on successive anniversaries of Gongadze's disappearance. Tymoshenko spent two months in the squalid Lukianivskyi prison before being freed by one of Ukraine's few remaining independent judges, Mykola Zamkovenko, in March 2001 (Zamkovenko was dismissed in July 2001). The protest in September 2001 was therefore fairly muted, but in September 2002 Tymoshenko led a protest campaign dubbed ‘Stand Up, Ukraine!’, which, although unsuccessful, debuted many of the ‘theatre of opposition’ methods that would be used in 2004, including mock trials of the authorities, an attempted revival of the tent city (though this was cleared away after one day), and the uninvited arrival of protestors to demand air time on official TV. Moroz joined in, as did even the Communists, albeit briefly. Yushchenko, meanwhile, attended the first demonstration, but generally kept his distance. The protests continued through October, but then petered out.

The 2002 Elections

Kuchma may have survived the Ukraine Without Kuchma campaign, but he still had to face the elections for parliament that were due in March 2002. Yushchenko, who had committed himself to politics in his resignation speech, would now be his main opponent. Yushchenko sensibly sought to build as broad a coalition as possible. As a natural centrist, his first great achievement was to get most of the traditional right to support him as well. His sometime friend, sometime rival, Yuliia Tymoshenko, was left to run on a more radical ticket, and pick up some of the more nationalist elements, but almost everyone else went with Yushchenko, mainly because they were fed up with losing. Both main parts of the now divided Rukh were included, as was its liberal offshoot Reforms and Order. If anything, Yushchenko was a little bit too inclusive, adding some far-right elements such as Oleh Tiahnybok of the paramilitary Social-National Party, who would provide ammunition for his opponents, and the émigré-based Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, the direct descendant of the OUN (known by its Ukrainian acronym, KUN, ‘K’ for ‘Kongres’). After their role in undermining the Ukraine Without Kuchma campaign, however, the fake right, including Bohdan Boiko's Rukh, the UNA and Trident, was sensibly kept at a distance.

On the other hand, Yushchenko campaigned with a radically different message to the traditional right. Cultural nationalism, and the language issue in particular, was downplayed and replaced by a pragmatic emphasis on his economic achievements in office, and a value-based emphasis on regeneration, respect for the citizenry and clean government. Yushchenko also pushed his own image, including his faith and family values, to the fore (see plate 6). In one small but telling example, he reworked the traditional nationalist rallying cry of ‘Glory to Ukraine!’, which in OUN circles was followed by ‘To [its] Heroes Glory!’ Yushchenko now finished most of his speeches with ‘Glory to God!’ first. The new bloc was called ‘Our Ukraine’, and its skilfully constructed propaganda contrasted the real, ‘our’ Ukraine with ‘their’ Ukraine, the foreign country of the Kuchma government and the oligarchs. Its adverts reprised Ronald Reagan's campaigns of the 1980s, with a sunny, optimistic ‘morning in Ukraine’ feel. This was the first step towards the highly successful rebranding of the opposition as ‘orange’ in 2004 (see pages 72–3). In 2002, at least, the opposition had already left behind the one-trick national movement of old. The Our Ukraine ‘brand’ was now an eclectic mix of patriotism, pragmatism, folklore and folksy, and traditional religious rhetoric, but it was no less effective for that.

Although several of his advisers were opposed to the idea, Yushchenko wanted to reach out as far as possible to the centre. He even toyed with the idea of running both a right and a centre bloc. He negotiated long and hard with various elements of the regime, including many offshoots of Donbas politics, such as the Liberal Party and the New Generation youth movement, and even talked with controversial figures such as Rinat Akhmetov and Mykola Azarov. But only the Liberals joined in the end, and they didn't do so for long. Yushchenko's one big catch was Petro Poroshenko's Solidarity Party, even though Poroshenko had been in the SDPU(o) from 1998 to 2000, and then the Party of Regions until December 2001 and had even at one time been a serious candidate to lead the latter party. Solidarity was much more important for its social base in rural Ukraine, particularly in Poroshenko's home region of Vinnytsia, and for Poroshenko's financial resources.

Yushchenko also included almost two dozen businessmen on the list; including some serious potential financiers. Initially, this was, of course, good news, a sign that the governing elite was losing unity, and a means of challenging their massive advantage in ‘administrative resources’. It was also a sign that the Kuchma regime had less than total control. Yushchenko's key business supporters would later set up the faction Razom (‘Together’) within Our Ukraine, but there were initially three main groups of separate interests: namely the business empires of Petro Poroshenko and Yevhen Chervonenko, and a looser group consisting of Davyd Zhvaniia, Mykola Martynenko and Oleksandr Morozov. Interestingly, given later events, at least six of the Our Ukraine businessmen made up a so-called ‘Russian bloc’, which was linked to companies such as Lukoil (Dmytro Sandler) and Russian Aluminium (Oleksii Yaroslavskyi and Ernest Haliev).

Poroshenko, who in the past had enjoyed close business ties to Our Ukraine's enemies such as Volodymyr Lytvyn, then head of Kuchma's presidential administration, was Ukraine's Willy Wonka, the ‘chocolate king’ who ran the foodstuffs company Ukrprominvest, five confectionary factories and the Etalon brewery, which produces a rather fine Ukrainian version of Weissbier. He also controlled the Lutsk car plant, part of the magnificently named Leninska Kuznia (‘Leninist Blacksmith’) shipyard, which makes gunboats, and was on the board of Mriia (‘Dream’) Bank. Crucially, he also owned the one opposition TV station, Channel 5, which had been set up in 2003. As Russia was his number one export market, Poroshenko was a pragmatist who supported good relations with the north. His diverse holdings, some acquired from the Kuchma ‘privatisation’ programme, made Poroshenko the one Yushchenko supporter who looked almost like an oligarch.

Yevhen Chervonenko founded the drinks company Orlan (although allegedly he started by smuggling red caviar and then by selling Ukrainian beer in more desirable Polish bottles) and was one of Ukraine's leading freight operators. Davyd Zhvaniia owned the energy company Brinkford, a machine-tool construction plant in Luhansk, and, in Crimea, the Kerch-based shipbuilders Zalyv and the Bakhchisarai factory Bundindustriia. Zhvaniia was also vice-president of the bank Glomain Holding Ltd, registered in Cyprus – which raised a few eyebrows. Martynenko had interests in the power sector and Morozov headed the European Insurance Alliance, one of Ukraine's biggest new insurance companies. Yaroslavskyi ran Techproject Ltd., and, like Haliev, was part of the ‘Kharkiv clan’ based around Ukrsibbank.

Yushchenko's businessmen were mostly younger than the oligarchs of old. Poroshenko was born in 1965 and Zhvaniia in 1967. Some could call themselves self-made men; while others had been made only with external help. The most crucial difference between them and those who supported the established regime was, however, perhaps not age or business culture, but the fact that none represented the type of cash cows (monster steel plants, oblenergos) won by the likes of Akhmetov and the SDPU(o). Nearly all ran active businesses, which would benefit from a less active state.

Even more controversially, Yushchenko gave key roles to several former members of Kuchma's innermost coterie, whose conversion to the opposition cause occured at the very last minute. Roman Bezsmertnyi, mocked behind his back as ‘Little Medvedchuk’ (after Kuchma's notorious new Chief of Staff), had been a member of the nationalist Republican Party in the early 1990s (he wrote a dissertation on the neo-fascist OUN ideologue Dmytro Dontsov), but had defected to Kuchma via the National-Democratic Party, where he met Yushchenko, occupying the strange constitutional position of Kuchma's ‘representative’ in parliament and helping plan Kuchma's 1999 election campaign. Even more controversially, he had been ever-present on TV during the early days of the Gongadze scandal, competing to be Kuchma's most ardent public defender. Bezsmertnyi, whose name means ‘immortal’ in Ukrainian, was now parachuted in as campaign manager, where he spent much of his time excluding ‘radicals’. Yushchenko also took on board Yurii Yekhanurov, despite his closeness to the head of the presidential administration, and Volodymyr Lytvyn, as he had worked well with the former as a deputy prime minister in 1999–2001. The businessmen and the arrivistes, moreover, had more places on the Our Ukraine list: Rukh had twelve seats in the top forty, the liberal party Reforms and Order four, Solidarity five, and the business bloc ten. Yushchenko's men were lower down than the former ‘Kuchmisty’: Bezsmertnyi was at number thirteen but his chief of staff, Oleh Rybachuk, was at twenty-nine.

Yushchenko's association with some of these people may seem surprising, but he needed the money. He wanted to demonstrate his moderation, and his willingness to cooperate with politicians of any origin. Ultimately, he also hoped to split the governing coalition (although in the short term the boot was mainly on the other foot) and gain some share of ‘administrative resources’ and some shelter from negative campaigning. Creating a moderate image was also crucial to his plans for selling Our Ukraine. To Yushchenko's more radical critics, however, he was simply inviting too many obvious cuckoos into the nest.

Tymoshenko also set up her own bloc in December 2001. It was again a mixed bunch, held together by the force of her personality. In addition, she had changed her image. In the 1990s she was post-Soviet superwoman, but since 1999 she had busied herself learning Ukrainian and patronising more right-wing causes, while remaining politically a social-democratic populist. She still dressed in Dolce and Gabbana, but now did so with a more Ukrainian touch. The election bloc named after her therefore contained some strange bedfellows. There was her old party, Fatherland, and some other remnants from Hromada, including the historian Petro Tolochko, an advocate of close and friendly ties with Russia, but also some right-wing parties like the above-mentioned Republicans (Ukraine's oldest political group, set up in 1990) and right-wing mavericks such as Stepan Khmara. The bloc also provided a home for some independent-minded deputies, for example, the former justice minister Serhii Holovatyi and the ‘Anti-Mafia’ crusader Hryhorii Omelchenko. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Tymoshenko was happy to sell the coalition as the ‘Bloc of Yuliia Tymoshenko’, therefore BYuTy, and even happier to campaign as a one-woman band. On the other hand, the Tymoshenko bloc had a striking campaign symbol–a box with a small opening and an arrow as an exit sign, with the simple slogan ‘There is a way out’.

Yanukovych, meanwhile, was preparing for the election in a rather different way. One of the Melnychenko tapes records him describing to Kuchma how he is setting up the Party of the Regions in the Rada. ‘We're raising payments [bribes] to the ceiling!’, he states, in the manner of a technical report, and boasts that deputies of every party are queuing up to take the bribes, including various Communists.21

EPISODE SEVEN, 31 AUGUST 2000.

KUCHMA: Well, at the same time you must pull Fatherland to pieces, the fuckers, and the Communists of course.

YANUKOVYCH: And the Communists.

KUCHMA: Well, the fuckers, and take about three from Moroz, and he'll fall to pieces.

…

YANUKOVYCH: There are also those, who are [already] today in the factions, in the majority [the pro-Kuchma forces] as it were, who will behave themselves just right [i.e. will toe the line once they join].

KUCHMA: Yeah, fucking right!

…

YANUKOVYCH: They feed on you, the vipers, fasten on to everything!

Bribes and threats came naturally to the authorities. This was how they had first set up a temporary ‘majority’ in parliament in January 2000, how they had forced Yushchenko out of office in 2001, and how they would install Yanukovych as his successor in 2002. The regime now tried to stitch together the various clans for the election in the same way. The Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Donbas and rural clans had all created virtual parties with nice-sounding labels. Viktor Pinchuk's party, Labour Ukraine (Trudova Ukraïna), from Dnipropetrovsk, went by the initials TU. The National-Democratic Party (ND), having once been a broad party of government, was now just a vehicle for the Kharkiv clan. The Party of the Regions (R) represented the business elite of one region, the Donbas, and the Agrarian Party (A) represented collective farm bosses in the countryside. For a time, the authorities seriously thought of running them together under the truly awful name ‘TUNDRA’ (the same in English and Ukrainian); but quickly thought better of it and decided to bury their differences under the name ‘For A United Ukraine’, which was a bit better. The Kiev clan ran their own party, the SDPU(o) independently.

The authorities also set up a range of fake ‘clone’ parties to steal the opposition's votes. None was constructed with particular subtlety. Two fake Communist parties were set up to keep the official Communists in line. Because Yushchenko was supposed to be a liberal reformer, a favourite among the young, the authorities set up a fake liberal party, Yabluko (a copy of the Russian ‘Yabloko’),22 and a fake liberal youth party, the bizarrely-named KOP (even in Ukrainian, Komanda ozymoho pokolinnia, or ‘Winter Crop Generation Team’, it wasn't clear what this meant).²³ Because Tymoshenko was a woman, a fake women's party was set up, and covert support was given to another female firebrand, Nataliia Vitrenko. Vitrenko, leader of the ‘Progressive Socialists’, was also expected to take votes off the Socialists. All these parties were privately funded by the authorities and the oligarchs, and were given extensive coverage on official TV.

The result was a triumph for both Yushchenko, whose ‘Our Ukraine’ bloc came first on 23.6 per cent, and Tymoshenko, with 7.3 per cent, while Moroz's Socialist Party made a good comeback performance on 6.9 per cent. By comparison, the old opposition, Rukh, had won only 9.8 per cent of the vote at the previous parliamentary elections in 1998. The reinvented Tymoshenko scored best in more radical regions in the West. Yushchenko won most of his extra votes in central Ukraine, vindicating his rebranding strategy. The Communists dropped from 25 per cent of the vote in 1998 to 20 per cent. Despite very expensive campaigns, the two governing parties were not a success. For A United Ukraine won only 11.8 per cent, and the SDPU(o) only 6.3 per cent.

The results of the 2002 elections – the proportional vote

	Vote (per cent)	Seats
Opposition
Our Ukraine (Yushchenko)	23.6	70
Tymoshenko bloc	7.3	22
Socialists (Moroz)	6.9	20
Communists	20.0	59
Authorities
For A United Ukraine	11.8	35
SDPU(o)	6.3	19
Fakes
Vitrenko bloc	3.2
Women For The Future	2.1
KOP	2.0
Communists	1.8
Greens	1.3
Yabluko (‘Apple’)	1.2
Others*	1.9

* New Generation, Workers', Christians, Rukh for Unity, Against All, New Force, Justice, Ukrainian National Assembly

Source: www.cvk.gov.ua

The three-headed opposition still won 112 seats out of 225, only one short of a majority. The authorities had been caught out by the degree of international supervision, and by the innovative use of an exit poll largely funded by Western embassies on voting day. The point of the exit poll was not to predict the outcome with speed to bolster TV ratings, as it is in the West, but to create a background of expectations that would make fraud more difficult. Moreover, in Ukraine it normally took at least several days to produce official results, so an early exit poll on election night itself would provide a marker which would make it harder to corrupt the counting process. The exit poll had Our Ukraine on 25 per cent (1.4 per cent higher than the eventual official result), the Communists on 20.5 (+ 0.5 per cent), For A United Ukraine on 10.6 (− 1.2), the Tymoshenko bloc on 7.9 (+ 0.6), the SDPU(o) on 7.1 (+ 0.8) and the Socialists on 6.1 (− 0.8).24 The parallel count organised by the ‘For Fair Elections’ NGO estimated that For A United Ukraine won only 9.4 per cent (− 2.4 per cent), with the SDPU(o) unchanged at 6.3 per cent and the opposition parties consistently up, with Our Ukraine again on 25 per cent (up 1.4 per cent); the Communists on 21.2 (+ 1.2); the Tymoshenko bloc on 8.6 per cent (+ 1.3) and the Socialist Party on 7.9 per cent (+ 1).²⁵

By local standards, this was fairly limited fraud. The mere threat of the exit poll had forced the authorities to limit themselves to small-scale, but still significant, abuses, such as the crude manipulation of local voting protocols (‘1’ vote altered to ‘19’ and so on); the resurrection of ‘dead souls’ (28,000–30,000 of the undead were brought back to life in Luhansk alone), often inhabiting whole invented buildings. In the Donbas, local voting ‘technology’ was no more sophisticated than thugs patrolling polling stations,²⁶ or the ‘directed voting’ of entire workforces. Volodymyr Boiko, director of the giant Mariupil Illich steelworks in southern Donetsk, for example, was reputed to control 100,000 to 200,000 votes in return for his fourth place on the party list.²⁷ Overall, ‘administrative resources’ delivered between 5 and 10 per cent of the official count.²⁸ Moreover, the opposition would have won outright without the fake parties. None of these won the necessary 4 per cent to win seats in the Rada, but they did their job as ‘clones’; collectively, they won 13.5 per cent, the majority of which would otherwise have gone to the real opposition.

The Steal

The opposition celebrated on election night. Their victory in the general popular vote was only one half of the story, however. The other half of the Rada's 450 seats were elected in local territorial constituencies, on a first-past-the-post basis. Here, ‘administrative resources’ could be much more effectively deployed; various unsavoury oligarchs found a refuge, and the regional clans could clean up in their own back yards. The opposition only won 54 of these 225 extra seats, and the Communists another seven. The authorities, on the other hand, both by electing their own under various labels and by pressurising independents to join their ranks, won 161. In Donetsk, the new ‘Regions of Ukraine’ machine swept up nineteen out of twenty-three seats. The other four were easily persuaded of their affront to the local monopoly and soon joined ‘The Party’ as well.

This was still not enough for a ‘majority’ when parliament assembled, however, so the establishment began to put all sorts of pressure on opposition members to defect. First, several ‘cuckoos’ were persuaded to leave Yushchenko's nest. These were mostly leading business ‘sponsors’ that the nationalist right had always distrusted, including Dmytro Sandler, Oleksii Yaroslavskyi, Ernest Haliev and the governor of Sumy, Volodymyr Shcherban. Second, loyal Our Ukraine businessmen came under intense ‘administrative’ pressure: Yevhen Chervonenko (trucking, soft drinks) and Volodymyr Shandra (roofing) claimed political measures cost their businesses millions.29 In March, the offices of Petro Poroshenko's Ukrprominvest were raided ‘by mistake’. In May, it was the turn of Shandra's rubber factory in the western town of Khmelnytskyi. Nine different companies in five different cities associated with Brinkford, Davyd Zhvaniia's joint stock company, were also paralysed as a result of two raids on 13 and 16 August, which had been ordered by the prosecutor's office. By August, Oleh Rybachuk claimed twenty businessmen in or linked to Our Ukraine had suffered from the authorities' attentions. In December 2002, Oleksandr Stoian, leader of the official trade unions, changed sides to save his job from an opponent backed by the SDPU(o). In October, the authorities in Kiev arrested and roughed up Konstantin Grigorishin, head of the Russo-Ukrainian joint venture Energy Standard Group, which then controlled eleven oblast energy companies coveted by the SDPU(o) (at the time he had $370 million invested in Ukraine). Grigorishin immediately blamed Medvedchuk, who was angry that Grigorishin had refused to finance the SDPU(o) instead of Our Ukraine.

Carrots were also used alongside the sticks; bribes were commonplace. Yurii Orobets claimed he was offered $500,000 to defect.³⁰ In all the ‘operation’ to create a majority cost an alleged $15 million.³¹ Once it was over, For A United Ukraine split back into its constituent parts, but persistent pressure meant they continued to grow. By January 2003, the authorities had another twenty-five members in their swollen ranks, the opposition had lost another twenty-two and the Communists another six. Only in this way did the authorities ‘win’ control of parliament – a crucial resource in the key battle to come. And, of course, the dress rehearsal would profoundly affect the way the much more important presidential election was fought in 2004. On the other hand, the Gongadze and Melnychenko scandals had weakened the authorities before the re-match in 2004, which was therefore notable for a big extension in both domestic NGO monitoring and international involvement. Ukraine had a real opposition again for the first time in ten years. The earlier 2002 elections were also a huge psychological breakthrough. Having cowed the population with the 2000 referendum and the suppression of the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement in 2001, the authorities had suddenly shown their vulnerability. Their largely Russian advisers, however, claimed they had not been allowed to play dirty enough, and would demand carte blanche in 2004.