The story of the Orange Revolution has all the ingredients of a certain type of novel once thought out of fashion: corruption, political manipulation, murder, spies, secret tapes, secret dinners with members of the secret services, poison and power. It is also the story of a dramatic popular uprising, a belated rebellion thirteen years after the fall of Communism against an arrogant and corrupt elite in one of Europe's poorest countries. I hope to have bought some of this to life, but any book written so soon after the event will be provisional in many of its judgements. It will, it is hoped, be followed by many more.
Thanks are due to my parents, to Timothy Taylor, and at Yale to Robert Baldock, Candida Brazil, Ewan Thompson and Stephen Kent. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Whitmore, who read an early draft and supplied many of the pictures, and to Michael Hobbs for his insightful comments.