Well, drat. One of the conciliatory items I'd planned to put in the article I want to send to the Atlantic has just come out in the opinion section of the Kyiv Post in a beefed-up form.
Basically, lead editor (and owner, I think) Jed Sunden says Kuchma should be pardoned, even calls him a "Hero of Ukraine" only half-jokingly, for not sending in police to beat up protesters during the Orange Revolution. In the article he makes reference to the NYT article I talked about yesterday, which lauds the SBU top brass for working with the opposition behind the scenes, but also credits Kuchma for arguing down suggestions from Medvedchuk and Yanukovych that the police break up the protests the hard way.
The key passage:
But despite my concern over the failures of Kuchma’s presidency [detailed elsewhere in the article], I believe he should be regarded as a hero, and be allowed to go off to his retirement peacefully and quietly. Not simply because he is truly leaving Ukraine a stronger and better country than it was when he assumed office, but because he – as much as any one – ensured that there would be no bloodshed in Kyiv, and that the Orange Revolution would attain its goals without loss of life.
Maybe Yushchenko would still be the next president of Ukraine if the troops had been called out. Maybe the troops would have disobeyed orders. Maybe the protesters would have successfully resisted an attack. But I, for one, am glad these scenarios were never put to the test.
I have also been planning to get a couple words in about Kuchma's admirable restraint in this matter, and I must admit it's irksome that I'm going to give credit for the idea to someone else, even though I've been tossing it around in my mind for days. But I still think Jed gives too much credit to Tymoshenko's "small ruddy rat".
I'm very glad Kuchma didn't put Ukrainian troops to the test on the streets of Kyiv, but the next government should feel free to dig through all the mounds of corruption his government produced. In his first term in office, Kuchma behaved rather well, under the circumstances. He de-escalated the Crimean separatist issue without bloodshed, and hired the right reformists, Yushchenko foremost among them, who could sort out the inflation crisis.
But the fact that he hired Yushchenko does not somehow balance out that fact that he later fired Yushchenko and all the rest of the reformists to focus on four years of self-aggrandizement. Kuchma gets no credit for allowing the protest to "attain its goals without loss of life", because if Kuchma had not derailed the Ukrainian political system and his circle hadn't thrown all its efforts into Yanukovych's fraud campaign, there would not have been any need for an Orange Revolution at all.
The worst part of the argument is that it hijacks the protest the same way the NYT article does. The #1 reason the Orange Revolution achieved its goals without violence was that the protesters acted without violence. The ministries, departments, officers, and President that refrained from violence against the protesters didn't act rightly, they reacted rightly. There's a world of difference.