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I was disappointed to see the article "A 21st Century Revolt" appear in the Guardian. Mr. Wolf was right to credit the Yushchenko team with distributing video equipment to its (volunteer) election monitors, but failed in almost every way to correctly describe the Orange Revolution.

To begin with, the article also shares a critical flaw with a January 17 New York Times article. In that article the NYT claims the Ukrainian Secret Service was a major force keeping the demonstrations peaceful based mostly on an interview with a Ukrainian Security Chief who was about to be fired for his ties to the old regime. In his article, Mr. Wolf attributes the Orange Revolution (OR) to a strategic plan carefully executed by the Yushchenko team based mostly on testimony from a longtime member of that team, Roman Bessmertny. (incorrectly referred to as Yushchenko's campaign manager; he was fired from that position for doing a poor job and replaced by Zinchenko) Has Mr. Wolf, as Mr. Chivers before him, never heard of the term "self-serving bias" ?

The "evidence of meticulous preparation" Mr. Wolf talks of would be more convincing if it had been there from the beginning. The soup kitchens and heated tents and much of the rest of the  accompanying amenities came later. I conducted a few dozen interviews with people living in the tent camp throughout its two month existence. Without fail, the people there said that the hardest part of the protest was the first few days, when they were living in ordinary camping tents, with little or no organization, and dealing with massive donations from everywhere in the city. It was too cold to sleep, so most of them didn't for a couple days. On the other hand, many of the protesters said they hadn't ever eaten as well as they did then. Those cold, sleepless, but well-fed first nights were what made the revolution, and during them the Yushchenko team was not leading but playing catch-up.

The "slickness of the concerts" is likewise ridiculous. They were not prepared in advance for an OR that no one expected (including Tymoshenko and Yushchenko by their own admission). Instead, Yushchenko had based his campaign strategy on doing an old-fashioned city-by-city tour to bypass the overwhelming negative media coverage. At least one reputable news source strongly questioned the cost effectiveness of this strategy at the time, but it had a pleasant side effect. Considering Yushchenko had the youth vote locked, and a number of big rock groups signed on with him early on his team organized concerts as part of the tour. The stage and the equipment later became leftovers from the campaign, happily available for the protests. In a sense they were part of the Yushchenko team's spontaneous contribution, just like all the other spontaneous contributors.

Not only did the Yushchenko team have little control over the "professionalism of media coverage" during the OR, they were villified by almost all media sources until after the OR had won over the people. Only one station reported on the OR from the start, and it jumped from a relatively little known (11th place) specialty channel to a much bigger contender (5th place) channel for doing so. The channel wouldn't even have been able to do that much if its journalists hadn't fought for a full year against at least three different attempts to shut them down and finally won after going on hunger strike. The rest of the channels ignored the problem until their own journalists revolted. (after the first week convinced them, too)

The people in the camp describe a sudden outpouring of good will in the first week. To give you an example, at one point a member of Pora (a key civil action group in the OR which was completely absent from Mr. Wolf's article) related to me with tears in his eyes the story of a little old grandma too poor to own a thermos, who carried a teapot covered in aluminum foil from her home so the protesters would have something warm to drink.

It was people like that grandmother who made the revolution, not Roman Bessmertniy.

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