By Dan McMinn

In November and December of 2004, Ukrainians overturned a fraudulent election. The key actors in the event were a group of 10,000 protesters living in tents in the center of Kyiv. These protesters were, in turn, supported by hundreds of thousands of Kyivians, and together they picketed all the seats of government until they had won over the police, armed forces, secret police, and Parliament. In that moment, with the forces of public will and momentum behind them, the protesters could have dispensed with voting and simply pushed Opposition Presidential Candidate Viktor Yushchenko into the presidency. Instead, they waited until the Supreme Court ruled the election void and then held a rerun of the election two weeks later. Some protesters remained encamped in the tents through the entire ordeal. And a small minority stayed on even longer, until Yushchenko’s inauguration on January 23, 2005.

“I’m here for the idea of good government,” and “I’m here for the idea of freedom, of independence,” and “I’m here for the truth and for a better life.” The protesters had a leader in President Yushchenko, a motivator in Yuliya Tymoshenko, and were able to keep a protest of hundreds of thousands of people peaceful. How had this happened?

Hope for better, get as always.

President Leonid Kuchma was the most stable entity in Ukrainian politics in the decade he held his position. Few of the parties in Parliament today were around in 1994, and those that were have often switched between opposition and pro-administration stances. In how many countries could the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs and the Labor Party be bound together under one leader? When voters were making their decisions, it is unlikely anyone mistook the goals of the Beer Lover’s Party, and little needs be said about the Fewer Words Bloc, but it must have been difficult deciding between the consistently pro-Kuchma Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united) (SDPU(u)) and the leftist opposition Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (SDPU).

The Socialists and Communists held relatively consistent ideologies and leaders, but the People’s Movement Party, the most consistent rightist political force, dissolved in internal bickering. The center was, and is, filled with businessmen and fraught with conflicts of interest. These wealthy businessmen-deputies, who not incidentally have immunity from prosecution in their political positions, are called the “oligarchs”, Ukraine’s unaccountable ruling elite.

As an extreme example, take Pavlo Lazarenko, Kuchma’s Prime Minister from 1996-1997. At the time he was elected to the position, Lazarenko was believed by Ukrainians to be the most corrupt man in the country. His greatest accomplishment was to organize monopolistic energy deals with Russia that are thought to have brought him millions in kickbacks. Upon being fired as PM, Lazarenko commandeered the opposition Hromada party, and worked to stall the actions of the Kuchma government until his immunity was stripped and he fled the country.

The Constitution changed twice. The Prime Minister changed six times. Other ministers changed more frequently. But Kuchma was always Kuchma.

In an article in the respected bi-lingual Ukrainian weekly Zerkalo Nedeli in 2003, journalist Dmytro Vydrin described Kuchma’s ideology as having been shaped during his time as director of a missile design complex. To Vydrin, Kuchma was a typical Soviet boss running a country: unwilling to allow any questioning of his policy, constantly fighting to extend his sphere of influence, and shrugging off restraints. I see his ideological pillars slightly differently:

1) Self-preservation before everything else: Kuchma was first elected on a pro-Russian platform in 1994. With this platform, he got over 90% majorities in the more pro-Russian Eastern Ukraine, while his opponent, incumbent President Leonid Kravchuk, running on a mildly nationalist ticket, got almost as high percentages in western Ukraine.

Almost immediately after the vote, Kuchma began tacking towards the EU and the US. (while Kravchuk worked his way to the head of the SDPU(u), Kuchma’s leading ally in Parliament. I don’t envy Ukrainians their 1994 voting choices.) Kuchma moved Ukraine into close partnership with NATO, dismantled Ukraine’s nuclear missile capabilities, allowed noted foreign donors to fund democracy promotion and gave up on promoting Russian as a second state language.

By the 1999 election, he was running on a pro-Western platform against Communist Party Leader Petro Symonenko. (I don’t envy Ukrainians their 1999 voting choices, either.) In the election, he was able to win the western parts of Ukraine with the same 90% majorities Kravchuk had won against him.

His shift between 1994 and 1998 shows Kuchma’s ideological fluidity. With a divided and quarrelsome right, but strong Communist and Socialist parties in the Parliament, Kuchma drifted away from his pro-Russian rhetoric and adopted pro-EU rhetoric in order to pursue moderate voters.

2) Distrust anything which you do not control: In the 1999 Presidential election, Kuchma won by almost 20%, in an election condemned by most observers, chief among them the OSCE and the Committee of Voters of Ukraine (an NGO partially financed by Western donors). The OSCE’s criticism was as strongly worded in its Nov 1999 statement as in its Nov 2004 one. It reported media bias, anti-opposition slander, harassment of opposition representatives, intimidation of voters, campaigning by state officials, illegal multiple voting, suspicious vote counting, and isolated incidents of violence.
Considering how much influence the direct falsification efforts had in this election (as a rough guide, the difference between the Nov 2004 vote and the much fairer Dec revote was 10%) Kuchma could still have expected to win in 1999 with a much cleaner game on election day. However, he was unwilling to let voters choose, even based on biased information. As the OSCE reported, 3 (of 27) heads of regional governments resigned between the two rounds of the election, all in areas with unusually low showings for Kuchma. Below them eleven district government heads resigned in the same period. The Kuchma government did not approach the election as an exercise in democracy, but as an exercise in management, complete with performance reviews.

3) Avoid concrete statements; when accused, deny everything at first and then fall back from indefensible positions like a retreating army: An extreme example of this tactic is the Tu-154 affair.

On October 4, 2001, the Ukrainian military accidentally shot down a passenger airline during a training drill. All 78 passengers died. Shortly thereafter, the US government reported that a heat sensing satellite had picked up the missile flying towards the plane.

Kuchma started by denying everything, calling the US claims “groundless”. His Defense Minister, Sergiy Kuzmuk, said all missiles launched in the exercise hit their targets. When Russian investigators later voiced their agreement with the US report, the Ukrainian military said it wasn’t possible—the missile didn’t have the range. Later the generals showed a videotape, ostensibly showing that all the rockets were accounted for and none had hit the jet. Later still, Kuzmuk tried to resign, but Kuchma refused.

After a week, Kuchma backed off, saying he would accept the final results of the Russian inquiry, but then added, “We are not the first and will not be the last,” and then, “We should not make a tragedy out of matters if it was a mistake. Bigger mistakes have been made.”

On October 19, Kuzmuk said in an interview that he’d always been sure it was a Ukrainian missile that hit the jet. On October 24, the Russian inquiry revealed that the jet had been hit by a Ukrainian missile and Kuchma “expressed his sympathies” for the Russian and Israeli governments, thanking them for their understanding in “complicated circumstances.” Kuchma accepted Kuzmuk’s resignation in his second attempt that same day.

4) Work the system, don’t wreck the system: When he was more popular than Parliament, Kuchma repeatedly threatened to call referendums if Parliament did not vote through laws and Constitutional amendments that, in effect, gave him greater powers. This was a tactic he used to greatly strengthen his powers in 1995, and again in the 1996 Constitution.

In addition, in the lead up to each election in Ukraine, anti-administration media sources have been subject to numerous forms of pressure. Some were shut down by tax authorities, some by media licensing authorities, some because they encounter problems with local broadcasting partners. Their difficulties form an uninterrupted string, without a single election-period problem for a pro-administration media source to break up the streak.

However, while Kuchma often made use of “administrative resources”, his access to governing bodies and officials, to put pressure on those who opposed him, he did not resort to entirely extra-legal means. He prized power from Parliament but did not dissolve Parliament. His government ran terrible elections, but it did not abolish elections. He quelled dissent, but rarely with violence.

This combination of character traits was on display in Kuchma’s rocky relationship with Pavlo Lazarenko. When Kuchma took Lazarenko on in 1996, he was considered corrupt, but was also a wealthy businessperson from Kuchma’s native Dnipropetrovsk. He was a Kuchma supporter, and his excesses were tolerated.

While Lazarenko was PM, the economy was stagnating, but United Energy Systems, a company headed by a woman named Yuliya Tymoshenko, was working closely with him on oil deals with Russiaand making millions. In fact, this small business associated with him made revenues equal to a fifth of the Ukrainian GDP for that year. In an interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Kaminski (then with the Financial Times) in 1997, Lazarenko denied having taken advantage of his position for private gain. That same year he reported income of $5,000 with no business interests, but now, in exile in the US and on trial in California on charges of money laundering, he is living in a $6.7 million home in Marin County, in the wine country north of San Francisco.

Kuchma let Lazarenko amass these millions for a year without criticism, and when he finally dismissed him, no mention was made of corruption. It was only when Lazarenko commandeered Hromada as his own opposition party that the allegations started coming out in Parliament. In the meantime, media owned by Lazarenko engaged in a war of words, and not just words, with pro-Kuchma media. In 1997, Hromada contracted to have an offshore company buy up 500,000 subscriptions of Pravda, a Ukrainian paper with a 35,000 subscription audience, along with a similar deal for Vseukrainskiye Vedimosti. Not surprisingly, Lazarenko was favorably portrayed in the magazines.

However, now that the question was one of self-preservation, Kuchma’s government also began working furiously. Pravda was shut down for the offshore buyout deal and Vseurkainskiye Vedimosti was shut down in a libel suit just before the Parliamentary elections. Mikhail Brodsky, owner of Kyivskiye Vedimosti, joined the Hromada deputies in early spring and was thrown in prison for improper business deals just before the election. His newspaper was evicted from its building in October. United Energy Systems had its bank accounts frozen in the fall. With the Prosecutor General hunting him, Lazarenko fled to Geneva, was brought back to Ukraine, then was allowed to escape asylum in the US in February. The presidential election, in which Lazarenko had earlier suggested he might participate, was less than a year away.

While Lazarenko was an ally of Kuchma, he did not need to fear allegations of corruption; apparently Kuchma did not have ideological problems with his behavior. When he did threaten Kuchma, Kuchma struck back with instruments of state power. Regardless of the validity of the accusations, the timing of the attacks against Lazarenko, against Brodsky, and later against such Orange Revolution businesspeople as Tymoshenko and Poroshenko, coincided with Kuchma’s personal interest, not the interests of the nation.

Viktor Yushchenko - Kuchma’s Reformist

Between 1991 and 1999, the Ukrainian economy did not post a single year of economic growth; instead, it contracted over 60% (according to the World Bank). The massive fall in GDP was compounded by hyperinflation which wiped out ordinary Ukrainians’ savings by the end of 1992 and accelerated to a peak of 10,500% in 1993. Indiana University Public Affairs Professor Robert Kravchuk who has consulted for the Ukrainian government and written extensively on the Ukrainian political economy, said Ukraine achieved the dubious distinction of “most economically illiterate nation on earth” that year.

It was in this swirl of inflation and economic chaos that the government picked up a new, young National Bank Governor named Viktor Yushchenko. In his time there Yushchenko managed to issue a new Ukrainian currency, and keep it stable, even through the Russian currency crisis. His strict control of inflation, especially during the Russian crisis, established him as center-right politician, won admiration from economists and some Ukrainians, and made him the object of much leftist criticism. This criticism was reinforced by accusations of financial malfeasance made against Yushchenko by the Ukrainian Secret Service in October 1998. The central argument concerned an NBU deposit in a bank in Cyprus in 1997. The argument was that a 6% interest return was not worth the risk of keeping it in an unknown Cyprus bank, even if the nation’s GDP shrank that year.

However, even the limited Parliamentary inquiry found that the “unsafe” bank was a perfectly legitimate 100%-owned subsidiary of the multinational Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB). A 6% interest in a stable bank was no grounds for dismissal, and a Parliamentary vote against Yushchenko organized by leftist Deputy Viktor Suslov, who was angling for Yuschenko's job, failed shortly after the case against him collapsed. The issue of National Bank financial dealings with CSFB would come up four more times; three of them on occasions when Yushchenko or his allies seemed to pose a threat to the Kuchma camp.

Each time new allegations were introduced, the case became more farcical. After twice finding no misdeeds on Yushchenko’s part, prosecutors began pursuing his deputy governor instead. The inquiry moved on to an alleged loss Ukraine incurred on a $75 mn one-year deposit with CSFB. Viktor Suslov had originally claimed that all $75 mn was lost. The SBU said $28 mn. The expert commission that, in 2003, finally convicted Yushchenko’s deputy governor eventually reduced that number to $5 mn. This final figure was based on testimony from five “experts”, four of whom had no prior banking experience and had been given the title of “expert” the week before the trial began. No analysis of the case was done by professional financial or banking institutions.

In contrast to the trials Yushchenko went through for his reformism, Valeriy Pustovoitenko, Kuchma’s Prime Minister from summer of 1997 to December of 1999, suffered few significant attacks on his position. Not coincidentally, he posed little threat to Kuchma or other politicians, primarily because he did little of significance. In December of 1999, shortly after being reelected himself, Kuchma asked Parliament to re-approve Pustovoitenko. However, with economic problems still hanging over the country and being fed up with Pustovoitenko, the Parliament rejected his nomination. Shortly thereafter Kuchma acceded to their calls for Yushchenko as a reformist PM. Pustovoitenko’s greatest accomplishment was to hold on to his job longer than any other PM to date.

As Prime Minister, Yushchenko fist nominated a number of other politicians for Kuchma to approve as Cabinet members. The most significant of those turned out to be Yuliya Tymoshenko for Deputy Prime Minister for Fuel and Energy. Tymoshenko was the former head of United Energy Systems and former member of Hromada, and she had benefited greatly from her association with Pavlo Lazarenko. With Lazarenko exiled from Ukrainian politics forever, UES defunct, and the Hromada party likewise defunct, it is likely Kuchma approved her along with Yushchenko’s other nominees on the assumption that she posed no further threat to him. Perhaps he did not think much of her, as she was only one of many deputies with major business interests but no clear ideology floating around in Parliament.

Kuchma was also occupied with non-economic matters. In April he called for another national referendum on amending the Constitution to give him more power. He won the referendum with over 80% of eligible Ukrainian voters participating and over 80% of them approving each of the four measures involved. (suspicious numbers, considering only 74% made it to the polls in the 1999 presidential election). NGOs like the Committee of Voters of Ukraine and Equal Opportunities Committee questioned the conduct of the referendum, citing media bias and fraud, and the Venice Commission and Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe questioned its legal basis.

After the referendum, Kuchma began his criticism again. In late April he accused the Cabinet of overstating its gains, improvising too much, and conducting only superficial reform without addressing deep structural issues.

Shortly thereafter, Yushchenko had become embroiled in a new scandal, with a much stronger foundation than the earlier CSFB Cyprus cases. The problem started when certain individuals in the US, connected to Lazarenko, accused Yushchenko of laundering money for Kuchma through CSFB. The allegations were found to be baseless, but in the process of investigating them, PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted an audit that found the NBU had overstated its reserves in 1998. The overstatement had been by $713 mn, and had significantly influenced decision making on a $200 mn loan to the country—not a small matter. Yushchenko’s only excuse for the behavior of the NBU was that “the problem was with the old Soviet Union accounting system and the accounting system that we use now.” This excuse sufficiently underwhelmed the IMF that it held off on further loans. It did not resume those loans until after Yushchenko had submitted a formal apology and pledged that the act would not be repeated, and the economy had risen on a wave of reform. It is likely that the IMF was inclined to forgiveness by the responsiveness of the Yushchenko Cabinet to its suggestions and requirements, in sharp contrast to the intransigence of previous Cabinets.

By the end of the year, the success of the Yushchenko Cabinet was readily visible. Ukraine had posted its first year of economic growth since independence – almost 6% according to the World Bank. (followed by 9% in 2001 and continued positive growth thereafter) The government posted its first (tiny) budgetary surplus. This was aided in no small part by Tymoshenko’s crackdown on energy suppliers that forced them to pay their taxes on time and in cash. Her crackdown is reported to have enriched the budget by the equivalent of two billion dollars, a large chunk of which went directly to pay energy and coal sector workers. The threats from Russia to cut off the gas petered out after a deal Yushchenko struck with the large Russian gas firm Itera in November. Finally, in December IMF the praised Ukraine’s strong economic growth and granted the country a new loan disbursement.

From the standpoint of the nation’s interest, therefore, Yushchenko’s dismissal four months later was a waste.

Ukraine With Kuchma, Like It Or Not

In September of 2000, a fairly prominent anti-administration journalist named Heorhiy Gongadze, best known for his work with Criminal Ukraine and Ukrainska Pravda (both profiling alleged government corruption) went missing. Opposition deputies accused the government of being complicit in the killing, and former coworkers reported the usual death threats and harassment leading up to the event. In October, an anonymous tip lead the police to a headless body in a forest outside of Kyiv. The body was later identified as that of Gongadze. The Prosecutor General vowed to find the killers of Gongadze, Kuchma vowed to give the case his “personal attention,” and the year continued on.

Then, in early December, Socialist Leader Oleksandr Moroz made public a collection of tapes passed to him by Kuchma’s former bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko. On the tapes, Kuchma is caught talking about Heorhiy Gongadze a few months before his murder. Kuchma is heard to say, among other things, “thrown him out, drive him out, give him to the Chechens.” This was taken as an admission of murder, and sparked what was, at the time, Ukraine’s biggest protests since independence.

The effect on Kuchma’s government was dramatic. Challenged by protesters, government dissenters, and international journalist organizations, Kuchma began lashing out at all potential threats. He stopped merely criticizing Tymoshenko and fired her in January. In mid-February, his compliant Prosecutor General threw her in prison for alleged misdeeds at United Energy Systems. She was released, and, a week later, sent back. She then spent a month and a half in jail before being let out at the end of March. In an interview with Zerkalo Nedeli, she spoke of being put in a filthy cell, next to a roommate working with her captors, forced to stand up with her hands behind her head at one hour intervals, day and night, being given rotting food, and so on. The harsh (but not explicitly tortuous) circumstances of Tymoshenko’s imprisonment disturbed her so thoroughly that she became modern Ukraine’s greatest critic of Kuchma.

More CSFB accusations were brought against Yushchenko. While Kuchma called for “dialogue”, his closest ally in Parliament, Viktor Medvedchuk, led his SDPU(u) party to join the Communists in a no-confidence vote against Yushchenko. Together they managed to push through the vote and Yushchenko resigned in response. Ostensibly, the vote was called because Yushchenko had not been reforming the government properly. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Communist Member Georgy Kryuchkov probably gave too much away when he said the Communists opposed Yushchenko’s “antisocial and antinational policy” such as leading “the first government that has sincerely announced it completely fulfilled the recommendations of the IMF.”

Once the reformists were pushed out of Kuchma’s government, they were never drawn back in. Over the next three years, talk of getting into the EU, NATO, and the WTO became less and less common. Almost by default this meant more interaction with Russia. A new Ukrainian oil pipeline became a source of contention. Instead of running the pipeline from Ukraine towards Poland (advantageous for Europe in providing an alternative to Russian oil), it was suggested that the pipe be used in reverse (to meet a supposed Russian need for European oil). When independent analysis determined that this would be less profitable, the pipeline was left empty for months, at the end of which Kuchma accused the Polish of backing off their promises. Renewed efforts were made to use it in reverse, and it is still empty. Kuchma also began to show much more interest in an ill-defined Russian international trade zone called the Common Economic Area. Though poorly defined, most analysts agreed that any final agreement would probably tie Ukraine closely enough to CIS countries that NATO entry would be impossible.

In comparison with his long-term shift, Kuchma’s smooth victory over the protests themselves seems like a minor detail. Firstly, he used stalling tactics. He denied the authenticity of the tapes and his appointed Prosecutor General claimed the body wasn’t even Gongadze’s. (It took them from October to February to determine that it was.) An analysis carried out in the US said the tapes were genuine, but a later one commissioned in Ukraine said the opposite. In the spring, Kuchma backed off and said that the voice on the tapes was his, but the tapes had been altered. He has maintained this stance to the present day, never explaining what changes were made.

Meanwhile the case ground on. A former police officer said to be linked to the killing died of mysterious causes in prison in 2003; his body was quickly cremated. His connection to the crime was only discovered after his death, when a letter of his arrived at the Kyiv Institute of Mass Information. It was discovered that the Ukrainian Secret Service had Gongadze under surveillance when he was kidnapped, yet no additional evidence was gleaned from these officers. In the end, a long succession of Kuchma-appointed Prosecutors General managed to filibuster the case for four years.

In contrast to Kuchma’s skill, the protesters were few and disunited. Only a few thousand people gathered in Kyiv, only a few hundred in the tents. Their leadership structure was a hydra-like monstrosity. Some protesters were avowedly for Socialist Oleksandr Moroz, some for Tymoshenko, and some even for Yushchenko. But Tymoshenko was thrown in prison, the Socialists failed to get the whistleblower, Melnychenko, to release more than twenty hours of the seven hundred he had taped, and Yushchenko signed a joint statement with the President pledging to use "all legitimate means" to quell the current political unrest and "destructive forces" in Ukraine.

With no real leader, protesters became more influenced by a well-organized and frightening ultra-nationalist group called the UNA-UNSO. In early March, police swept out the tent city, Kuchma called on all public officials with opposition sympathies to resign or declare loyalty to the government, and then, in a tense confrontation, protesters started a fight. A group of around fifteen thousand protesters, lead by the UNA-UNSO, threw eggs, bottles, and even a Molotov cocktail at buildings and police. A thousand of them were arrested, many of the UNA-UNSO protesters going to prison with heavy bruises and broken bones. After this, foreign condemnation of the protesters was inevitable, though it was usually tempered by similar condemnation for the excesses of the police and calls for calm.

Kuchma’s victory over the protests was not without losses. The Gongadze case would remain a permanent stain on his government, mentioned repeatedly by foreign governments and international agencies. After Melnychenko released a few more hours of tape implicating Kuchma in the sale of missile defense systems to Iraq, the US and Europe became still colder towards him. At home, according to some polls, Kuchma’s approval rating fell from the low twenties to single digits. The Razumkov Center, a respected Ukrainian research center, polled Kuchma as having an 11% approval rating by June of 2001.

The Gongadze affair changed Kuchma’s stance not because it radicalized him ideologically. Kuchma’s shift was the natural response of someone who had sought popularity and Western praise only as two of many tools that might help him maintain his power and defeat opponents in government. When this scandal finally tipped his popularity below that of Parliament he was not ideologically inclined to try to win back those voters. He instead drifted away from the activists and towards the friendlier centrist businesspeople in Parliament. Of course this also alienated Parliament’s most reformist members.

Alienation

Viktor Yushchenko, now President of Ukraine, was among the least radical and least willingly oppositionist men in government. Throughout his career he demonstrated, simultaneously, the economic intelligence of a national banker and the fiery oppositionist character of… a national banker. For the first two years after he was pushed out the government he tried many times to reach a compromise with Kuchma and his government. He frequently met Kuchma for one-on-one discussions. He rarely criticized the government, and his criticism was often moderated. And when he created the Our Ukraine (OU) bloc shortly before the March 2002 parliamentary elections, he officially registered it as neither a pro- or anti-government bloc.

Tymoshenko, in contrast, spent much of her time railing against Kuchma, and oppositionist would be the first word to use when describing her Motherland party and eponymous Yulia Tymoshenko Parliamentary bloc. She and Yushchenko agreed very little, and it would have seemed unlikely that they would unite in the way they did in 2004.

A parliamentary election was held in 2002, and the results were surprisingly positive. The OSCE emphasized progress in its assessment, saying “Despite shortcomings, these elections brought Ukraine closer to meeting international commitments and standards for democratic elections.” The organization noted the usual media bias, as well as two murders of candidates and some election-day problems, but nevertheless seemed quite pleased that many of the transparency promoting suggestions from 1999 were followed. Similar talk of improvement came from the Equal Opportunities Committee it its report on the media situation.

The OU bloc was expected to win big, and it did. By their calculations, with the seats they won, they expected to be joined by enough of the 93 local independent candidates to easily ensure a majority. When those candidates, and other OU allies, instead overwhelmingly joined the pro-presidential bloc, the results were astounding. An assistant to an OU deputy described the effect this way: “On the day the results were announced, the [OU] deputies decided to throw a party since we had clearly won a majority. Everyone got together to share a drink, but by the time we’d gotten up the next morning, the majority has disappeared.” By whatever means the various independents and minor parties were enticed or intimidated into joining the pro-Presidential group, Kuchma’s significant political loss was turned around, and a pro-presidential majority was reformed by the end of the month. To OU deputies, this was the result of bribery and extortion, and the theft of their legitimate majority.

From 2002 on, OU was faced with a sequence of laws so clearly against their interests that they practically fell into the opposition. In 2003, Kuchma promoted a law that would mean the Parliament, rather than the people, would elect the President. Of course voters loathed the idea (80% were against it and 6% for it according to a poll conducted by the Academy of Educational Sciences) and European governments and the US cried foul. But in Parliament it was only defeated by a small margin. Having been unable to take the vote from citizens, Kuchma and his allies then attempted to push through reforms that would strip the new President of most of the powers Kuchma had enjoyed. Considering Yushchenko’s stable rating as the most popular Presidential candidate, this would likely nullify any victory he might achieve by rendering him largely powerless. The first attempt failed in Parliament. But then the Communists and Socialists broke ranks with OU to support an alternative reform measure slightly less extreme than Kuchma’s original. On this bill, the voting was so tense that at times OU deputies physically blocked the speaker’s podium to prevent votes from going through.

In contrast to the drawn-out stalemate over who would elect the President and what powers that President would have, the media situation was clearly worsening. A kickoff event occurred in December 2003, when an editor in Eastern Ukraine named Volodymyr Karachentsev was found strangled to death in his apartment. Despite the fact that he’d received death threats, his death was listed as suicide, and the explanation given was that his sweater collar had become caught in the refrigerator door handle and strangled him. The pro-Socialist paper, Silski Visti, was subject to inquiry again. Before the previous election they’d been shut down for allegedly failing to pay a fine. During the 1999 election, they’d had to contend with a slanderous false edition of the paper that had somehow managed to achieve a countrywide distribution. This time they were shut down for allegedly promoting hate, because one of the ads in one magazine was for an anti-Semitic history book. This was the only time the anti-hate rule has been used. The pro-opposition 5th channel was subject to a long investigation, shut down, the staff went on hunger strike, and finally the station was turned back on just before the election. Even non-partisan Radio Liberty was pushed off the air. First they lost their local broadcaster for “economic reasons” despite being a profitable channel. When they went to negotiate with a new channel, the manager with whom they were negotiating died in a car crash.

The situation worsened in other ways, too. In February alone, the second attempt to reform away the President’s power began, a number of business networks in which OU leading deputy Petro Poroshenko had major shares came under tax inspections, a Secret Service General in German accused the government of ordering his agency to spy on the opposition, and Kuchma’s government showed their obvious lack of interest in the EU by snubbing and sidelining the “Ukraine in Europe and the World” conference.

On top of all this, the 2003 election in the city of Mukacheve, which dragged on for almost a year, became a fiasco that the opposition feared was a foreshadowing of the Presidential election. In the city, a clearly unpopular pro-presidential candidate managed to lose despite what the VR committee investigating the matter called “massive vote buying…blackmail, threats, and the spreading of slander.” The results were canceled, un-canceled by a different body, then re-canceled. The house of a judge who had ruled for the opposition candidate was firebombed. In the end, the pro-administration candidate was pushed into office by administrative fiat.

Pushing Yanukovych

By the summer Kuchma had finally settled on Yanukovych as a successor. The choice was not an auspicious one. Yanukovych had twice been convicted of assault during his youth, and had spent time in prison. His Ukrainian was extremely poor. On his application as a presidential candidate, he made 40 grammatical mistakes, including two in his title of “professor”.

The most likely reason for Kuchma’s choice was that Yanukovych was the head of the strongly pro-presidential Regions of Ukraine party, and also had ties to the business elite of Donetsk, where he had been mayor. Kuchma had the backing of allies from his native Dnipropetrovsk, but without a candidate like Yanukovych, able to bring in the east, pro-administration voters might be split between candidates.

An indication of the distance of the relationship between Kuchma and Yanukovych is given by the rapid increase in the pace of privatization in the lead up to the campaign. The best example of this was the sale of the Krivirizhstal (Kriviy Rig Steel) plant. The tender included a requirement that the bidder own a certain amount of coal business in Ukraine, for which only one bid qualified: the bid placed by Kuchma’s son-in-law, Viktor Pinchuk, and Donetsk Businessman Renat Akhmetov (the richest man in Ukraine). Pinchuk and Akhmetov subsequently won the bid despite offering less than half the amount offered by the highest bidder.

That the Kuchma government was willing to allow this privatization to be so clearly fixed reveals a lot about Kuchma’s election calculus. Predictably, the opposition immediately stated that this was illegal and vowed to overturn the decision. (which they subsequently did when they came to power) Kuchma was willing to endure the international outcry to push through a privatization that would clearly be overturned if the opposition for two reasons: 1) he was certain of a Yanukovych victory, and 2) his distrusted Yanukovych, and desired to aggregate assets to his closer allies quickly, before the man came to power.

Near the beginning of his campaign, Yanukovych pledged to promote Russian to the status of a second national language and pursue greater ties with Russia. This bit of news was short enough to be quotable, but Russia had already signaled its approval for Yanukovych. He had been invited to Moscow in his capacity as Prime Minister on numerous occasions over the course of the year, and had adopted a pro-Russian stance on both the Common Economic Area and Odesa-Brody.

Yushchenko’s campaign, meanwhile, was plagued by problems. The lights went out at a number of his events, his plane was denied landing rights by six cities, and billboards picturing him as a Nazi were posted in Donetsk before his visit. Journalists from the pro-opposition Channel 5 television station went on hunger strike after months of being threatened with closure. It was only after this that they were able to keep the station on the air.

Near the end of September, Yushchenko was unable even to continue campaigning. On his way home after attending a banquet at the house of the head of Ukraine’s Secret Service, Yushchenko became violently ill. In the next few days, his face swelled up in a blistered mass and he was stricken with extreme pain. He was rushed to a special clinic in Austria, where he was diagnosed with an unknown ailment and required to stay in bed for two weeks. When he did finally return to campaigning, his attractive features had been obliterated by swelling pustules, and a morphine drip system had been put in along his spine to keep him from collapsing in pain.

Upon his return, he stood up in front of Parliament and asked the deputies why they were supporting the men who’d poisoned him. In the following weeks, pro-administration deputies ridiculed him for flying off to a foreign country for treatment and attributed his ailment to various factors such as bad sushi and complications from extreme alcoholism. It was not until after the protests had overturned the second round of the election that doctors at the clinic determined he’d been poisoned with dioxin, one of the main elements in Agent Orange. He’d been given the second largest non-lethal dosage in history.

Yuschenko’s popularity ratings were falling somewhat, and Yanukovych’s ratings were rising, but a Razumkov poll still put Yushchenko ahead 34% to 28.9% in round one.

The pro-administration press went into overdrive. The OSCE reports that according to data collected by its media watchers, in the final month and a half of the election, the main government channel gave Yanukovych 64% of its coverage, 99% of that either positive or neutral, while Yushchenko got 21%, 46% of which was positive or neutral. The two biggest non-government stations had coverage almost as biased; one gave 50% of its coverage to Yanukovch, the vast majority positive, and 26% of its coverage to Yushchenko, most of it negative. In addition, forty journalists from the top five stations signed a petition against state censorship, and seven journalists from one of the stations quit, citing pressure to distort their reporting. Their resignations provided evidence supporting opposition claims that major networks were being given instructional briefings on what to report and how to report it. (also supported by the alleged copies of the briefings the opposition received and showed in press conferences, and by the OSCE’s finding that much of the news was reported in a “conspicuously similar manner”.

With less than a month to go before the election, Yanukovych began making big promises. He promised new cars to all [combat veterans], first those injured in battle. And then he and the Cabinet summarily increased pensions fourfold, starting in October. No cuts or additional sources of revenue were suggested to find money to pay for the increase, it was merely stated that the government had the money to do so (prompting the question “Why not earlier?” since Yanukovych had been Prime Minister for a year). When the opposition later decided to make the pension increases permanent, they had to pull the budget out of a deficit equivalent to 10% of GDP, and get it up to the (legal) lower limit of 2.2% of GDP.

The Central Election Committee, meanwhile, was voting on a draft that would increase the number of polling stations in Russia from low double digits to over four hundred. (Poland would have the second-largest number of voting booths with fewer than thirty). The measure eventually failed after an outcry in Parliament and after it was revealed that over 300 of the potential new stations did not meet the minimum requirements of election laws. Eventually they settled for establishing 41 extra stations in Russia (the week before the election), but did so in a way that was so non-transparent, the Supreme Court voided the action.

The last legal polls of voters in mid-October put Yushchenko and Yanukovych essentially even.

With three days to go before the first round of the election, Putin visited Ukraine for a celebration of victory over the Nazis in WWII. To give him a reason to come down and celebrate on Thursday October 28, the parade was moved up a week from the official date of the holiday. There weren’t very large crowds with Putin, as the parade route was closed off to spectators without special identification. As the Financial Times reported, after the parade Putin went on Ukrainian national television to say that in the last year “The Yanukovych government managed to achieve not only a high pace of growth . . . It managed at the same time to concentrate financial resources on solving the main social tasks such as increasing pensions”.

With that Ukrainians went to the polls.

Grand Larceny

Somehow, between a 2002 election the OSCE had considered a significant improvement over previous elections, and the October 2004 vote, the lists of voters had become a mess. As many as 10% of the people who went to the polls in October may have been turned back due to errors in those lists.

Despite the troubles this caused, Yushchenko and Yanukovych advanced to the next round, with Yushchenko in the lead. However, it took the Central Election Committee a full ten days to verify this. Within two days of the election, the vast majority of ballots had been counted, with the exception of about 3.5%, all of which in heavily pro-Yushchenko areas. As a result, the results showed Yanukovych in the lead for ten days, before it was quietly admitted that Yushchenko had actually won. Around the end of that period, Putin showed up again with more nice things to say.

The only debate of the election (before the rerun) was televised on the state news channel. During the debate Yushchenko’s lips moved like they had been shot with Novocain, and he repeatedly brought a handkerchief to his mouth to blot at his mouth. Yanukovych limped through a Ukrainian set-speech without too many grammatical errors, then gave his closing remarks in Russian. According to the rules, neither candidate was able to directly question the other, only give set statements on a sequence of talking points. The "debate" was followed by a round-table discussion biased in favor of Yanukovych.

Meanwhile, Kuchma fired fifteen high-level local election officials throughout Ukraine, all in areas where Yushchenko had done well in round one. In the media, the anti-Yushchenko bias continued, and an additional three hundred journalists held a protest against government censorship and the instructional briefings handed out to news agencies.

The second round of the election was even worse than the first. While the errors in the lists of voters had been corrected, new problems arose. First off, over 4% of voters used absentee ballots, compared with 0.5% in most elections in which the option is available. Suspiciously, absentee voters were concentrated in the pro-Yanukovych south, and the fewest were registered in the pro-Yushchenko west. These absentee voters may have contributed to the massive spike in voter participation that occurred in the pro-Yanukoyvch cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. To put this increase in perspective, in no pro-Yushchenko areas did voter participation increase more than 3% between any two rounds, even between this fraudulent second round, and the much less fraudulent rerun. But in both Donetsk and Luhansk, a huge number of extra voters came out for round two and disappeared again during the rerun. In one town in Luhansk oblast, so many voters participated that it had a 114% turnout.

Ukrainians had accepted the status quo, despite their dislike of the government, for years. Opinion polls showed no politicians with any great advantage, and the lack of a leader undoubtedly contributed to their passivity, as it contributed to the failure of the Ukraine Without Kuchma protest. As long as Kuchma held sway in the center, with the right dominated by poets and dreamers, and the left by no less dreamy proponents of a return to Communism, Ukrainians did not have a real choice.

But by pushing Yushchenko and Tymoshenko from his government and thereby clearly rejecting reformism, then continuing to reject reform for the next four years, Kuchma gave Yushchenko no choice but to become an opposition politician.

In those four years, Kuchma and his allies made a number of attempts to render the election unimportant, first by trying to have the Parliament elect the President, then by trying to strip the presidency of power after 2004. They failed to do so by the slimmest of margins. In the meantime, though, they eliminated any final chances Kuchma had of maintaining friendly relations with Yushchenko.

Finally, Kuchma chose Yanukovych as his successor, in an appeal that was ultimately aimed at major political and business figures, not Ukrainian citizens. He needed to choose Yanukovych and win over these businesspeople because he’d alienated so many deputies with his anti-reform stance of the last four years. But in doing so he rejected men, such as his son-in-law Tyhypko, who were more competent, less prone to gaffes, and arguably more popular in the nation as a whole.

As a result of these three actions, the 2004 elections were, for Kuchma, the kind of elections he had least wanted. They involved a clear pro-administration candidate and clear opposition candidate, who were nearly evenly matched, and the eventual winner would be as powerful a President as Kuchma himself. In short, Kuchma had a real chance of losing all the political power he had successfully defended for the last decade.
That is why he and his allies and Yanukovych and his allies teamed up to steal the last ten percent of the vote they needed to win.

And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you darn kids

The attempt ultimately failed because Kuchma and Yanukovych underestimated the popularity and the resolve of the opposition and overestimated their own powers of subterfuge. The opposition gathered in Kyiv on the day of the election, set up the stage from Yushchenko’s campaign and waited.

A number of civic action groups, mostly comprised of college-aged activists, prepared to set up a camp in the center of the city to protest against the fraud they were expecting. The primary groups among them were Pora, a youth organization both modeled on and in consultation with the anti-Milosovic OTPOR group from Yugoslavia, and Maidan, a protest group that had been formed during the Ukraine Without Kuchma protests. They settled down to wait beside the opposition.

Starting election day and continuing throughout the following week, supporters poured in. Instead of the couple hundred protesters of the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement, their city of tents grew to ten-thousand. A large number of Yushchenko representatives from polling stations streamed into the city carrying evidence of misdeeds by their opponents. Other young opposition supporters came with stories of being pressured by teachers and school administrators to vote for Yanukovych. Kyiv college students set up tents for their departments and stayed in shifts. When Yushchenko and Tymoshenko gave speeches in Independence Square, they did so not to thousands of people, but hundreds of thousands. The popularity of the protests overwhelmed even the opposition and activist leaders. The opposition spent much of its time providing a sequence of events and activities for supporters to participate in, the youth activist groups. Applying the lessons from the Ukraine Without Kuchma protests, the youth activists rigorously maintained the peace and sobriety of the camp. Their efforts were the greatest factor in ensuring the amazing bloodlessness of the protests.

From that first week onward, the protest achieved a nearly unbroken string of successes. First a large group of journalists from the major news stations joined police and secret service agents on the stage to pledge their support for protesters. Shortly thereafter, clandestine tapes of Yanukovych’s team as they carried out election fraud step-by-step were released by the Secret Service. The tapes include many conversations between members of Yanukovych’s campaign team, as well as an update given to the Head of the Office of the President, Viktor Medvedchuk.

The Parliament cast a vote of no-confidence in the Central Election Committee, and the Supreme Court overturned the results of the election, at which point Yanukovych’s victory had been officially undone.

Yushchenko called for a rerun of the election. In order to push through measures to ensure the validity of a rerun, Yushchenko and his party allowed a bill to pass that would also reduce the powers of the President as early as September of 2004. With new oversight measures in place, (including a 0.5% cap on absentee ballots) the new round of the election took place with far fewer problems, and Yushchenko won by a comfortable 8% margin.

In this same period Kuchma almost disappeared from the political picture. He repeatedly put off firing Yanukovych, even after Yanukovych accused him of betrayal and, absurdly, conspiring with Yushchenko. He stalled halfheartedly. But his era had ended already; he was no longer able to impose his authority on the country. The undecided centrists in the government drifted away from the pro-administration coalition.

In the Orange Revolution, Yanukovych faced a truly centrist candidate forced into the opposition by Kuchma, aided by an opposition firebrand incensed by Kuchma, whose supporters were working from experience gained in protests against Kuchma. For these reason, he is partially right to say that Kuchma had undone his campaign. But Kuchma had not brought about the failure on purpose, he had done so by refusing to take any side but his own, by rejecting reform, by turning to powerful businessmen against Ukrainians, and by ultimately condoning a terrible election. Kuchma pushed Ukrainians beyond their limits of tolerance, and in this he pushed them to peaceful, democratic uprising.