Lesya and I just got a letter from Grandpa Volodya. Grandpa is 88 years old. He is a retired teacher and schoolmaster who lives in a small village called Mala Strushka in Khmelnitsky oblast. His wife, Lesya’s dear old Grandma, died just a couple years ago.

Grandma had always been for Yushchenko, right from the first she started hearing about him and his work in the NBU. But Grandpa was not an opposition supporter. In the late 90s, the family even had to buy them a small second television so that Grandma could watch her small local opposition station and Grandpa could watch his 1+1.

By 2002, the year before she died, Grandma had won Grandpa over. Even more, Lesya’s mom gave them a copy of Yuliya Tymoshenko’s “Vecherny Visti” newspaper once, and the grandparents liked it so much they got a subscription. Grandpa still receives the newspaper.

Here is the political portion of Grandpa’s letter:

“…It’s good that elections are over, everything is settled, and that tomorrow after the inauguration Yushchenko will become the legitimate President of Ukraine. I understand that it will be far from easy to establish order in the country, and he will have to change all governmental structures. Even so, there will still be a large group of “unreliables” in government, but I think, perhaps, that Yushchenko’s true friends will help him—the friends who stuck with him till the end.[of the Oct and Nov elections] May the Almighty help him in this…”

kisses and hugs,
Grandpa Volodya

We've been in Kamyanets-Podilsky (the city has an amazing 11th century castle) and the trading city of Khmelnytsky visiting with Lesya's family and celebrating Christmas.

One anecdote I picked up about the Orange Revolution along the way:

In Kamyanets-Podilsky we met with the Ukrainian Orthodox priest that oversaw our wedding. He talked about the 22nd of November.

He said: "So there was that election [on the 21st of November], and it was obviously fraudulent. Clearly it had been falsified. So that day a number of local opposition deputies came to my door, they were all in a flurry but didn't know what to do, you understand."

"They wanted to talk to me because I'd taken part in the activism even before independence in the late 1980's. I invited them in, we all started talking right there in the kitchen. 'What shoud we do?' they asked me. "

"'Well,' I said, standing there in front of them in a tracksuit with a knife in my hands, 'first I'm going to finish chopping this cabbage, then we'll go take this up with the mayor."

"We went by the mayor, and even though he's corrupt as they get, we talked with him, people started shouting outside the central government building, and the next day he joined L'viv in stating that Yushchenko had won the second round."

***

Later we went and spent the evening with the family in Khmelnitsky, all but one of whom (that means 14 of 15 people including all aunts and cousins and grandpa) voted for Yushchenko. The last one has gotten into lots of arguments with the family, not generally of the angry sort, about his views. The rest of folks believe that he is against Yushchenko because his superior at work is also against him, and Uncle Vanya is just too close to his work boss. He usually points out that Yushchenko is not a saint, he's not perfect either, so this whole movement is wrong in that it is exaggerating his goodness.

I find that people pointing out that Yushchenko isn't perfect often comes up in discussions with those who voted for Yanukovych. Again, here was a case in which the ostensible Yanukovych supporter was, in actuality, an anti-Yushchenko man. I attribute this to Yanukovych's clearly illiberal character - one must spend all of one's attention on the weaknesses of Yushchenko in order to avoid comparing the two candidates, in which case Yushchenko would be, comparatively, the obvious choice.

The funniest moment is trying to imagine the incredibly frustrating conversations he's had with grandpa. Grandpa is 88 years old already and still full of energy. His wife just recently died, and she was was a wonderful teacher and mother and everything that the whole family always adored. Grandpa and her used to disagree about Yushchenko, with Grandpa being against and her for. (They each watched different television stations, the family explained, Grandpa the more pro-government station and Grandma the less pro-government one.)

Well, something in these events finally won him over and now he's a huge proponent of Yushchenko. He's also a man that will take any opportunity to start into a speech.

Must have been tough for uncle Vanya.

Just a slice of life for all of you.

A friend of mine named Andrey just called me from Maidan, where a huge crowd is gathered to hear Yushchenko and celebrate victory with him. He just got the news from the exit polls. He was the pessimist to match my optimism all through the election campaign, right up until the last couple weeks before round one, when I started to doubt my own optimism.

Here is what he said: "Hi Dan, have you heard the news, the exit polls are saying Yushchenko won!"

"Yeah, I have them on my computer in front of me, they're Razumkov 56% to 41%..."

"Aww, but the specific numbers don't matter all that much. The important thing is he won, he actually won. This is just greeeeat. I can't even explain it to you, you just don't understand how great this is. If you had told me six months ago that Yushchenko could actually win, well I wouldn't, I couldn't have believed it."

"But he's won," he continued, "This is the greatest thing, this is a happier moment for me than when I won [a scholarship to go study at an American University for a year]. This is the happiest I've ever been about living in Ukraine."

"Yeah," I said, "I hear Yushchenko's going to be going out on Maidan to celebrate. Are you there? Because I can hear a lot of noise behind you."

"I'm out on Maidan right now, and they have phones here that you can use to call anywhere in the world for just a couple griven a minute, I'm going to call every one of my friends in the US and tell them the good news!"

"You do that, buddy."

I don't think there was another person in Ukraine I would have been happier to see get excited about this vote. This is what the vote means.

Last week Lesya and I met with Andrey from the barricades again. He'd been to Kharkiv and back, and we'd been offering to put him up at our place for ages. (he is from Luhansk, and has no home in Kyiv aside from the tents).

When he came to our door he gave us a surprise. He arrived in a neat vest and slacks, both dark with pinstripes. His hair was combed back against his scalp with extreme care. As a matter of fact, as soon as we'd greeted one another he looked in the mirror in our entryway, pulled out a comb and spent five minutes putting the last two misaligned hairs back in place.

Then we sat down and chatted. "Get this," he said, "on my way back from Kharkiv, there was a woman who saw my Yushchenko ribbons and things. She was a young woman, probably not even in her thirties. We talk a bit, and she tells me she will vote for Yanukovych because 'Yushchenko will take the atom bombs from America and store them here."

"How do you argue with that? What can you say in response?" he asked in exasperation. "You get things like that a lot. When we were there, the Yanukovych people often shouted things like 'American sellouts!'"

"I'd think, 'well really--even if you're right, whom would you rather sell out to, the West or Russia?' I know what I want. I want to live in a normal Western European country. I want to be European. But there was no reasoning with them, they already knew Yanukovych was an oligarch criminal but they didn't care."

"They act like they don't want to change anything. They're unhappy about life, but they still support the guy who wants things all the same. It's like that old saying, 'Those who seek happiness rarely find it, but those who don't seek it never find it.'"

He chuckled, "There was this one old grandmother who came up to me in the Metro once, and she started getting worked up, told me 'You've sold us to America!', I said 'Please Granny, calm down, nobody's gonna buy you.'"

He had been in Kharkiv as part of a kind of intervention on the part of his Dad and a friend. He'd been working nonstop without a break for days, and they thought he'd seriously hurt himself if he stayed with the protesters much longer. They put him on a train to Kharkiv and when he got there he immediately slept for a day. "Then I got up and went to the Yushchenko camp in Kharkiv. I mean, how could I not? This is too important."

He drew up a picture of the camp for me, and it looked like this: [it really is the biggest square in Europe, so please forgive any problems of scale in my diagram; instead try to think of the two groups as facing each other across a very long distance]

Slava Vakarchuk of Okean Elzi came around to cheer the Yushchenko protesters while Andrey was there. While there he went across to the Yanukovych side with flowers. "They wouldn't even talk to him, except to swear and say things like 'you're sold to America!'" said Andrey, "He'd tell them, 'C'mon guys, I just want to talk with y'all, we're all brothers and sisters with you.' They just shouted at him. He eventually set down the flowers and walked back, looking sad."

That same Vakarchuk was on stage with Yushchenko yesterday for the month anniversary of the protest. He said again what he'd said before. "I've got a special word for all of the people out in Donbas, in Crimea and Zaporizhya and Kharkiv, all our brothers and sisters out there: We love you guys, I love you guys, and we're coming out to give concerts for you because together with you we're one Ukraine, one people." The people in Maidan shouted "Well done!"

We told Andrey about our visit to the tents and what the residents had said to us. We told him how all of them had agreed that the first day was the hardest.

"The first five days were all the hardest," he replied. "There was so much stuff. Kids were coming with trucks full of medicine. I eventually just told them to find the first empty tent they came across and dump everything in, we'd figure it all out later. What we really needed, what would have really helped, would have been if we just had maybe fifty guys who knew how to organize a camp. Fifty guys who'd seem combat experience and could just help us get some real order in the camp, like military order. But all we had was volunteers."

"There was a French journalist that came to talk to me, and he didn't know any Russian. But I was supposed to be helping talk with the press. So we didn't understand each other for a while, then he mimed taking pictures and I said, "OK."

"He took some pictures, asked me 'Doing your business?' in English, and I said 'Da,' and he said, 'OK.' That was it, we got along."

"The Kharkiv camp was a little better organized, because it was more dangerous. We had a commandant who told us if the Yanukovych people ever attacked, all the girls were supposed to move into the center of a circle, with the guys on the outside facing inwards. Then just let them beat at us, last man standing, you know? It was better organized. Dangerous, though. I once wanted to go home for a night, but had to sleep in the camp because my dad told me that a big bus full of people from Luhansk had showed up. You never know, forty people on a bus could be anybody, could be enough big guys to take on the whole group of Yushchenko volunteers, because lots of us were just small college women. In any case, I definitely couldn't go walking off to a bus alone in the middle of that night. I had to stay."

We started talking about how tenuous the first few nights in Kyiv had also been. "You know," he said, "the thing I keep thinking is that it must have been God that kept us safe. When I think about all the times they could have just sent in a bunch of thugs, sometime in the middle of the night, or when there might have been a big fight that turned into a riot. But everything stayed peaceful."

"And what about the weather?" we asked, "wasn't that something, too?"

"Yeah, two straight weeks warm with no snow, and clear days. It just doesn't happen."

Later on we asked him if they were starting to run out of things now that the situation had settled down. "Oh, when things started we had so much stuff. There was a ton and a half of apples just lying out. We tried to give it away before it spoiled. We gave stuff to orphanages and old folks home, and kept shoveling it. You know, there was this one homeless guy who took a bunch of shirts and things and then curled up in one of the piles of clothes. We didn't see him and almost shoveled him into the truck with the rest of the stuff."
 
"Now things are a little rough, because we're down to Mivina [like Top Ramen] and sausages. People aren't giving as much stuff. That first week, though, protesters were eating better than they did at home. Like I said about organization, if we'd just had some good camp organizers, we might have saved some of the stuff for now, less having to eat package soup."

We asked him about the accusation we sometimes hear that everything had been planned in advance. "Well Yushchenko, Pora and Maidan, they all knew something would happen, so they planned to at least have a rally or something. But nobody knew that many people would come out."

We talked into the night and then again the next morning. That morning we made up a CD of our pictures from the protest, so Andriy would have something to remember it by.

Before leaving, Andrey offered us some packaged soup and a book that promised greater peace through mystical enlightenment. "I've been reading this really slowly, even though I'm a fast reader, but I figure if I can really understand it, I'll probably be able to get control of my life," he said. We politely declined both.

On his way out the door Andrey borrowed our shoe polish. Kneeling down and repolishing his already immaculate shoes, he told us, "It only takes five minutes to shine your shoes. And you go out, people notice, even when they don't know it. A man's shoes say a lot about him." He finished and he walked out the door.

Watching the back of his pinstripe vest, I decided unseasonable weather was not nearly the most miraculous thing to happen during this protest.

On Monday Lesya and I got back from L'viv. It was a great trip. In addition to some relaxing and visiting of tourist sites, we also met with the people running the Yushchenko tent in the middle of the city and talked with a lot of people living there.

The most interesting points were these: in L'viv we continued to hear stories, most of them firsthand, about how Yanukovych supporters were seen manipulating the results of round two of the election. Ironically enough, the only guy we didn't hear these stories from was the fellow in charge of the Yushchenko tent, Vasyl.

He said that between 25 and 40 people lived in the nearby tents, but it looked more like a dozen people there when we visited. He simply repeated that everything was fine.

"Did you see any falsifications?"

"Naw, everything was fine."

"How about the political reform package, what do you think of it?"

"Oh, it's fine."

"And the political situation in the country?"

"Fine."

We asked why he was personally there, and he said he and the other supporters were there "to protect our interest".

This was exceedingly surprising to me, as it was the first time I'd heard Yushchenko supporters talking like self-interested political players, rather than protesting based on moral grounds. It was only one guy, true, but I wanted to at least show you this interesting bit of conversation.

Later on we talked about the day after the election. Vasyl said that on that day the entire central plaza had been packed along its three block length. The protest had later closed down all business and school activity in the city.

The Yanukovych supporters had also been to the square. A couple days before they had showed up with their tents. They set everything up and the Yushchenko supporters chatted with them.

"They were nice enough," said Vasyl.

After setting up, the Yanukovych supporters took a couple pictures, and were gone again within about thirty minutes.

There was no sign of them when we got there.

On Tuesday the 14th of December, I finally met, actually sat down and talked with, a Yanukovych supporter. As I've mentioned both in the journal, and in my story about a trip to the train station, doing so was not easy. The supporter in question is Alex, who you may recognize from the over-a-dozen comments he's put up on the site. To his credit it was him, not I, that offered to talk.

Now, right off the bat, I am going to have to make a qualification. At one place on this site, he has referred to himself as "Alex, Yanukovych supporter", but at another he has stated that "I am not as much supporting Yanukovych as voting against our so-called democrats [Yushchenko and Tymoshenko]." I still count this as a Yanukovych supporter, though, because the vast majority of them seem to be voting like him: against Yushchenko rather than for Yanukovych. For example, take these Cossack militia members and villagers from Crimea, who think Ukraine's future is not with Europe and Lenin is more alive than people living today. Or these Donesk protesters, who would  prefer secession to "that fascist Yushchenko".

Prior to meeting Alex, the only two Yanukovych supporters I'd met personally were the sweet grandma living in my building and the Yanukovych supporter walking by Tent City one day. Both thought Yushchenko was the Antichrist.

As a result, I expected the discussion to be odd but manageable. I had a sense of foreboding, stemming from the fact that I am the worst debater in the history of mankind, but I dismissed the feeling. Certainly I could at least remain calm and put forth a rational argument, right? Sadly, no.

***

When I met with Alex I found him to be a fresh faced young man, with the earnest expression and pleasant lilting accent that I associate with many of best college students at the Business Institute I taught at in Kherson. His wife came, too. She was an extremely slender woman with light-brown hair and a nice, if somewhat worried default expression. His mother-in-law came, too. She had the standard Ukrainian grandma build, and familiar kindly aggressive demeanor. The type of woman who will require that you put on a hat because she is worried you will become sick otherwise. Two friends of his came, too, but I hardly registered anything about them other than a dark haired student and a stocky working man. The most I heard from them was when I left to go home. They said thanks for coming and told me not to be too frustrated.

We met in a pizza place over pizza and a beer, because if you're going to get agitated, you might as well have pizza and beer.

"I do not think Yushchenko and Yanukovych are so clearly western and eastern if you look at their actual records," I lead off with, "It's more a question of one candidate working by democratic means, and the other acting like a strongman.

"Ah, so you consider Yushcheko a democrat then?" he responded.

"Uh, yeah, why not?"

"No, he is no democrat. He is an oligarch like all the others. He stole money all through his term as Prime Minister. When he was in charge of the National Bank, millions of dollars that was supposed to go to the IMF went missing, but do you hear about that now? No. People are just speaking from emotions, they do not wish to listen to reason.

"I've never heard of this IMF thing, I've asked you to show me it. Show me this article."

"You've never heard of it because you are not looking for the information. It is all available online."

"Then find it for me!" I snapped.

"I will," he said. [And he did. He gave me this, this, this and this connection to an IMF report. The report references a PricewaterhouseCoopers audit which is sadly no longer available. The IMF report and PWC audit agreed: the Ukrainian government misreported assets to the IMF, and consequently gathered a significant amount of money in 1997-98. This occurred during Yushchenko's term in charge of the National Bank. More than that I don't know, back to the the pizza, beer, and argument.]

"Yushchenko was also in the frontier guard during soviet times, and it is a proven fact that the frontier guard was directly under the supervision of the Ukrainian secret police."

"What? Yushchenko was not some government spy, he was a banker--ban-ker."

"He was also a leader in his branch of Komsomol (The Communist Youth League) when he was young, just like Tymoshenko, and I guarantee you that all the people who were Komsomol leaders in Soviet times became mafia leaders afterwards."

"What is this crap! The man was a banker!" I cried, unable to keep my composure.

"Look, I'm telling you this as someone who's lived his whole life and seen the transition after the fall of communism. Are you telling me I don't know my own country?"

"No, I'm going to tell you that you are wrong about this protest and wrong about Yushchenko."

"You will not convince me that Yushchenko is less of a monster than Yanukovych. You will say that Yanukovych is mafia, and I will say yes, of course. But Yushchenko is more so than he."

"What? You're telling me that Yushchenko and Tymoshenko are just as bad as he, when he was a damn rapist?"

"Rape, huh, and caught under the Soviet system, which you then trust very well? They caught Yanukovych and put him in prison, but for what Yushchenko and Tymoshenko did, they never caught. Do you know he got two years for rape? Doesn't that seem a little... light, to you?

"Short. Yeah, so?"

"The usual term for rape was fifteen years, but he got only two, that's not a normal rape case, and definitely not normal under the Soviets. This does not sound like a rape case."

"What? Are you trying to convince me he was a political prisoner or something?"

"No, I am telling you the case was questionable, and all the Yushchenko supporters trumpet it like it was so important, when Yushchenko was stealing money and gathering his own mafia. Now he is much worse, because he has gathered people out on the street by pretending to be a new savior."

"People came out to protest against an election that was a fraud."

"For a spontaneous protest, right? Well, if this protest was spontaneous, who cleaned up the streets? Who paid for the tents, and the food, and the radio station and the portable toilets that people were using? All this was planned at set up by Yushchenko's campaign, and by Pora, an activist group which is paid for by the West and the US."

"But they didn't buy people to come here, the people just came!"

"Yes, of course, and what did they find when they came here: military tents, and food cooking units and heaters and a more. That wasn't just there, no, this was planned."

"This democracy you're talking about is also only for only one side," his wife interjected, "you are only allowed to express one point of view in Kyiv today. If you think otherwise, you're just supposed to keep quiet."

"What do you mean?" I said. "Just look, the opposition has just had a protest here which attracted over a million people, hundreds of thousands over 17 days and not one incidence of violence, the police say the crime rate dropped 30%."

"People are afraid to speak up."

"Oh, c'mon," I said, flustered, "not one incident. They had them in Donetsk..."

"One incident I know personally. My friend put a blue ribbon on her car a few days ago, when she got back she found all the windows and the headlights smashed. Is that what you call the democratic process," she said.

"Well I didn't know that," I said. "But still, no beatings, no killings..."

"Well, of course, no beatings..." said Alex, before I cut him off.

"Yanukovych supporters did that," I said.

"No, what are you talking about?" said his wife.

"Luhansk. A huge group of Yanukovych supporters beat up a bunch of Yushchenko supporters, and then there was a Canadian that got beaten up in Donetsk I think.

"I've never heard of this, where did you find this information?"

"In news articles!"

"Please find them for us."

"Fine!" [They are here, here, and here for Luhansk. The Donetsk articles I read from Kyiv Post and Jane's Intelligence Digest, both subscriber only, find an extract at bottom of page]

At this point Alex's mother-in-law weighed in. "I want to tell you the reasons why I will not be voting for Yushchenko," she said, "In 1998 [when Yushchenko was PM] they cut off all the gas and heat to our apartment in the Donetsk region. Imagine that! They cut off our gas and heat in the middle of winter..."

"Why is this Yushchenko's fault, do you think he just pocketed the money?"

"Wait," she said, "in contrast, when Yanukovych became Prime Minister, one thing he did was start paying back those energy debts from the regional budget, getting our gas back on. Which one helped us? Who do you think I will vote for?"

"KrivorizhStal. That's it, KrivorizhStal. The biggest, most profitable steel mill in the country and it was sold off to Yanukovych's buddy Akhmetov in a totally corrupt bargain."

"Well what about Odesa and KirovogradOblEnerho, two local energy distributors that were privatized under Tymoshenko?" said Alex's wife. "They were sold for the amortization value. Just the amortization value, that's pennies, do you call that a fair privatization?"

"I don't know. What were they worth? Lots of things after the collapse were worth nothing, the infrastructure was all collapsed and crumbling."

"These were just local distributors, they still had the networks, they didn't own any factories, they were still worth something. No, she didn't sell them for just the amortization value, she sold them higher and just pocketed the rest."

"And another thing," said his mother-in-law, "when Yushchenko was in charge the 'guest workers' forced into slave labor under the Nazis, they might have gotten their reimbursement in the center, but the ones outside of Kyiv, they got nothing. Those people had suffered terribly and Yushchenko did nothing...

"But what about Yanukovych?" I said.

"Please let me finish," said his mom. "Yushchenko also wanted to make Donbas into another Chernobyl. He wanted to ship all the nuclear waste from Western Europe here, he made a deal with them to dispose of all that nuclear waste in Donbas [the Donetsk/Luhansk area]."

"That was why he was fired as PM," said Alex. "He and the whole Cabinet were fired by Kuchma for trying that."

"I remember," said his mother-in-law, "the trains of toxic waste came right up to the border of Ukraine, and Kuchma said, "I don't know anything about this, and he fired Yushchenko and all the Cabinet. So I would never vote for Yushchenko. Even if Yanukovych were five times worse I would never vote for Yushchenko.

I sat there trying to think of what Yanukovych would look like if he were five times worse, trying and failing. Eventually I calmed down and asked Alex another question.

"Ok, on my site you agreed that the results of the election were fraudulent, but you said it wasn't worth what all the people were out there protesting about. Is that true?"

"Well the results were fraudulent..."

"And that means the wrong man won," I interjected.

"Well, that's not certain."

"What? But the exit polls, they caught Yanukovych cheating."

"Yushchenko got 80-90% in the west, just like Yanukovych got in the east, but people don't think that's suspicious. His side cheated, too, it's just that Yanukovych's supporters haven't been taking them to court like they have been doing to the Yanukovych supporters, and you don't see anything because you only get one side."

"But they tried in the OSCE and they said it was baseless..."

"And the exit polls are all bought. Russia has its interest and its exit polls and the US has its."

"What is this about the US!" I said, losing the last of my composure, "The US didn't know shit about Ukraine until the protests, we just don't have the attention to spend on Ukraine.

"Well maybe that's true, maybe certain people do think Ukraine is too important, that it should be important to America..."

"No, no, no! It's not about Ukraine. Ukraine is important, ask Poland. This is the US, we don't have enough attention for Ukraine. We didn't even know where it was, we knew about it like we knew about the Philippians, it was a country far away. We couldn't have been controlling this."

"But if Yanukovych is Russia's man, and Yushchenko has no one, how did he defeat Yanukovych? Do you think it was because of the will of the people, no! Do you think college kids sitting in the streets were able to get Yushchenko's way in Parliament? No, he needed a strong fist. That is how people win in the Ukrainian government; we have never had any history of democracy. In the last election I voted for Yushchenko, but I will not be in this election, and you cannot say it is because I was paid."

"Your problem," he continued, "is you think this is a choice between an oligarch and a democrat, but it is just between two oligarchs; only one says he is good. And you go and show only one side of the situation, you never show the other side."

"That's because there is not other side!" I screamed. And at that point Alex had to translate for his companions, and so I got a few seconds to try to get a hold of myself. It was enough that I was able to at least ask the next question in a controlled tone.

"Ok," I said, "so then, you say there is only one way to gain power in Ukraine--to have a stronger fist, but then, Ukraine would never be able to have... then it would have to always be evil."

"Excuse me?"

"Then nobody could win the government in Ukraine without being, evil. Is that true?"

"Well, yes."

I don't remember much else besides that. We finished our beers and went home.

["UKRAINE: BEHIND THE CRISIS"
Jane's Intelligence Digest, UK, Friday, December 3, 2004
...There has already been open intimidation of foreign election observers. On 29 November, a gang of thugs attacked a long-term observer deployed by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and a Canadian citizen working for the John Howard Society, a non-governmental organization working in Luhansk, leaving the latter in a coma...]

On 11 December, when Lesya and I decided to go talk to people in the tents, we didn't even get to the camp before we encountered something of interest. Standing across the street was a single, flag-wielding Yanukovych supporter, surrounded by at least twenty Yushchenko supporters. We'd seen one or two such supporters wandering around in the crowd over the course of two weeks, but had not thought to approach them about their reasons. It was evident we weren't going to be able to approach this one either, if only because he was completely surrounded by the Yushchenko supporters.

So far away, all we heard of his opinion was the first few lines, which he shouted over the crowd.

"Yushchenko is the American Antichrist!" he exclaimed. Then a Yushchenko supporter cut in, and we were unable to discern the rest of the conversation. Instead, we took a few pictures, trying to see if we could see any Yushchenko misbehavior.

At one moment we thought we'd caught something, as a Yushchenko supporter grabbed his friend and carried him above his head, bringing him to the ground only a couple feet from the Yanukovych supporter. But even then, as soon as he got close, two other Yushchenko supporters with badges had approached and warned the two to back off immediately.

In the end, nothing happened, and the man with the flag moved on and eventually walked away.

We moved on and talked with the people in the tents.

Spartak from Odesa and Alyosha from Vinnitsya: Spartak came up from Odesa because he'd seen or heard about lots of activity to falsify the elections. Alyosha was originally from Vinnitsya, but studied in a university near Kyiv. He was worried, he said, because the rector of his university was a Yanukovych supporter, and if he went back to the university he expected to be kicked out. About the recent political compromise they were noncommittal, "Politicians talk," they explained, saying they were just going to stick around until victory.

We asked them what day had been the hardest. "The first," they answered, just like everyone else. At the beginning they went two days without sleep. All the people they'd met with then had become close friends, just from having experienced that tough time together. The levels of excitement and nervousness were so high that another volunteer they knew had gone the first SIX days without sleep. They say the camp doctors were literally hunting him all over the camp, worried that he would have a complete breakdown. When they first caught him, they gave him sleeping medication but it did nothing. So they caught him again, gave him twice a normal person's dosage and put him down... for a full two hours. Spartak laughed that he didn't go crazy, but he was bouncing off the walls with excitement.

We asked about the homeless people who stumbled by occasionally; had they always been with the camp? "Well, of course nobody here ever drinks. [it was one of the strongest camp rules] You know," said Spartak, "the first week NOBODY around the camp was drunk either, nobody. Now, the bums have come out. We send them down to get some food, I mean, it's sad," he shrugged.

Had they interacted with any Yanukovych supporters, had there been any provocations? "Once a couple guys showed up, not in the camp but out in the courtyard after midnight, when things had quieted down. They were both wearing Yushchenko colors and badges like the people in camp have. After a little while they started fighting. Well, the camp security went out and broke them apart and tried to figure out who they were. Both were from Donetsk, and when the camp guys asked, they said they didn't know where they'd gotten the ids."

Both Spartak and Alyosha were coughing, showing the effects of the cold and wet. They'd been in the cold for almost two weeks; both had been there almost form the beginning. They said they both had colds, but they had plenty of medicine, and enough food to survive. What they were really looking for were cigarettes, apparently a tough donation to come by.

Pavlo: a talkative student from Kyiv State University. Pavlo said the rector of his University was keeping strict neutrality on the question of the protesters. He would not avow any support for Yushchenko, but he had stated he wouldn't kick students out for going to the protests. Pavlo was therefore going to school every day, then sleeping in the tents at night. He said it made it tough to keep up with classes.

When we asked him what stories he had, he told this one of some friends of his from Luhansk. "They both really wanted to come to Kyiv to join the protest then, [right after the election] but tried a couple times and were turned back by the police. Finally, on the last day they decided on a plan. Both of them got a whole bunch of Yanukovych support material and banners and things, put them on and drove out of the city. Once they'd gotten out, they switched into Yushchenko colors and took the Yanukovych stuff into the forest, piled it up and burned it. They got the whole thing on film."

Pavlo also told about a busful of forty Yanukovych supporters that had come into Kyiv. They'd each gotten 150 griven for coming up, but once they'd gotten to Kyiv, they'd just been left to fend for themselves. The forty had come and spoken with the people in tent city, and had been so surprised at what they'd seen that a huge number of them had defected. They were now working in the opposition kitchen.

As for provocations, the scariest time for Pavlo had been around 1 AM during the first week. By that time things started to calm down from the day, and fewer people were out by the tents.

If something had happened, he said he at least knew how to deal with problems, "if someone tries any sort of provocations, that's alright, let them. You just have to deal with any of that stuff calmly. Just let them say it."

Alyona from Donetsk, Sasha and Sergei from Kyiv, and Roman from L'viv: We met the four of them when we were looking for the Donetsk folks who'd come over from the Yanukovych camp. They said the tent the folks were staying in was right nearby, but it would probably be difficult to talk to them, because most of them were afraid to speak to journalists. All the tent city residents had recently attended a safety meeting in which the camp officials warned them about the recent rumors of people coming to the camp with hidden cameras to record all the Yushchenko supporters with. Many of the volunteers there were worried that their families might get in trouble for their actions, especially those from the east. All of them assured me the Donetsk people weren't just hiding, they were trying to help out, but it would be tough to talk to them.

"Not our Alyona, though," said Sasha, giving her a friendly shake.

"You've got to understand," said Alyona, "here you've got news, out in Donetsk there's no television, no Channel 5, no fair newspapers, nobody knows what's going on."

She said lots of the people she knew in Donetsk and Luhansk had voted for Yushchenko, but when the numbers had come out, they'd been afraid to speak up. The rest nodded. Roman from L'viv said a number of his friends had had their teachers take away their passports at University just before the election.

When we asked them for a story, Sergei spoke up. We'd told them about the Yanukovych supporter, and he said, "You know, it reminds me of the Zaporizhiyan guys."

There were some volunteers in the camp from Zaporizhiya, and they'd been invited to church by some passersby. Sure enough, he said, as soon as they got to the service, the Zaporizhiyan guys found the church was trying to convert them.

Andrei from Kyiv and Sergei from Bravari: Andrei was a talkative thirty-year old, Sergei a nearly silent recent graduate.

We asked Andrei to tell us which had been the best, and which the hardest day. Andrei said the first day had been the worst, because there had been lots of people coming with nothing, needing boots and tents and everyone running around with little or no direction. "All these people were coming," he said, "and can you believe, there were families, and kids, and there was one couple who brought their six year old child with them. They were here all through the protests, and only left a couple days ago to help with Yushchenko's campaign."

The happiest day for him had been the 26-27th, whenever the Supreme Court decision had come through, though of course everyone had been excited when the Parliament had given their vote of non-confidence.  We asked him what he thought of the recent package reform bill that had passed, and which would reduce the powers of the President starting in September. We'd heard some of the volunteers were disappointed, not to mention Yulia Tymoshenko.

"Oh, I'm for Constitutional reform," he replied, "one person shouldn't have unlimited powers. And Tymoshenko, yeah, she's a radical or course," he chuckled a little.

Sergei, Sergei, and Bohdan, all from Sumi: We were only able to trade a few words with the three from Sumi, Lesya and I were both shivering, not from the cold, but from the wet rain seeping through our clothes.

The Sumers said they were feeling alright, though they coughed a little. The camp was pretty quiet, and they were going to be there a while longer, but all of them were signed up to be Yushchenko observers in Donetsk.

Two Maxes from Gorlivka: Both of the two of them spent most of their time talking about how they got out of their small city in Donetsk oblast. Both of them had had troubles getting out, they'd spent three days before they'd finally made a break for it.

One of the Maxes had been in a particularly difficult situation, he said. He'd been able to catch the town mayor taking part in the falsification of the vote in the town on video tape, and the tape had been his reason for coming to Kyiv. When he finally tried to get away, he'd been chased and had to lose his pursuers by running across a field into the forest.

When I took their picture and asked for his email address to send him his picture, he joked that his only address now was: Kreshchatyk, Tent City. Since he was worried they might even kill him if he went back to Gorlivka, he said he'd been in tent city a while, probably until about the 8th of March.

Katrina from Shapiyvka: Katrina was a sweet fifty-something year old woman with children in high school. She had been a member of the election committee in her town in Kyiv oblast representing Yushchenko. According to the rules of the election, each of the twenty-four candidate from the first round of the election got a representative on the committee. (this was true even though only about 6 of those candidates had had any hope of even winning a percentage point of the votes in round one, and only two of the candidates remained by round two)

Katrina had been the committee member bringing around one of the smaller mobile ballot boxes to the voters too sick or physically challenged to be able to make it to the polling station. When we asked her about why she'd come, we got a great deal of explanation, but first of all we got a story from collecting the votes.

The older people in the village were intimidated. She spoke of one woman. "This grandmother was ninety-two," she said, "and when I first came to her she asked me who everyone was voting for. Well, I had to tell her I couldn't say, because it was against the rule to tell her anything about the candidates."

"'Just vote for the candidate you want,' I said. But she kept asking, and I had to keep repeating myself. Eventually she said to me, 'You know, I want to vote for Yushchenko, but I'm frightened. A bunch of people came to me recently and said they'd beat me if I didn't vote for Yanukovych.'

"'Look,' I told her, because it had already been almost an hour, 'you don't fear about anything, you can choose whomever you want, this is secret, nobody's going to come after you. You vote how you want, because I have to move on to a lot more houses today."

"And she said to me, 'Well, I know you, and I know you're honest. And I also know you are for Yushchenko. So Yushchenko is probably honest, too.' And so that was that. That was just one person! They had lots of people scared, and I know that they were buying votes, too! Some people they paid twenty griven, fifty griven for votes. People would get cigarettes or bread and cast their votes, thinking they'd get something more for it. They didn't even know what they were selling." She went on to say they even had blank vote count protocols floating around that she didn't trust. Instead, she made up her own protocol and brought it to Kyiv to check against the results. It was from that protocol that she knew there'd been falsifications, and that was why she was here.

In the camp Katrina had of course immediately become a mom to the many young people there. She worked in the kitchen and had been in the camp since the very beginning. As with all the people who'd been there the first day, she said that day had been the hardest. The weather, which has been wonderful for most of the protest, was swirling with snow and ice on those first couple days. Katrina said there'd not been enough tents, not enough valyenki, the people were sleeping in cold, wet tents and wearing cold, wet shoes.

"On that first day I remember listening to Yushchenko in the square, and he said 'Look everyone, its snowing today, it's cold, please go find homes for yourselves for the night.' And we said "NooOOo. We're staying to the end. My kids tell me to come home, too, but I'm not going until victory. I want them to be able to live in a peaceful, right world. I want them to be able to start their own businesses, not work for crumbs at some big business owned by someone else."

She finished with these words: "I know Ukraine's a rich country, but that's all been wasted by bad leaders. But I trust Yushchenko and I think he's honest."

Discoshaman (from www.postmoderclog.com) and I, wielding our journalistic credentials, (I get all giddy just thinking about my new credentials) went searching for Yanukovych supporters today, Friday December 3rd.

We headed straight for the train station, because the word was they were there. "Thousands of Yanukovych supporters have come to Kiev to rally outside the city's main train station," said a Los Angeles Times article of a week ago.

When we got there we asked a station security guard how to get to the Yanukovych camp. He said, "go straight in the front doors of the station and turn left," the Yanukovych supporters were meeting inside the building! No tents for these folks, it seemed.

When we got inside, this is what we saw:

Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko, nothing but Yushchenko. His supporters had a whole wing of the train station. This was particularly surprising to me, as I had traveled by train in the run-up to the election, and had seen Yanukovych campaign material in every ticket selling booth in the building. (and, as I've pointed out at least a half dozen times, anti-Yushchenko material on the trains)

Not only were Yushchenko supporters everywhere, they'd set up a table with free medicine. They had another table where they served free tea. (about 7,000 cups a day) They had stacks of water and medicine and food all piled up in a corner, and one of the fellows said there was a whole contingent of supporters staying there.

The Yushchenko people were just dying to talk to us. They told us about all the medicine and food they'd given away. They talked politics. One man was exceptionally excited; he was a big, plump forty-something looking fellow with a long-whiskered mustache. He was from out west.

"I asked to take a picture of some of the Yanukovych supporters once. They got suspicious, asked me why, I think they could hear my accent. So I told them I was taking their picture to show my friends in L'viv that they don't have horns," he said, then laughed heartily at his own joke. We tried to keep the conversation on the Yanukovych supporters. Had they dropped in then?

"Oh they came by a few times. The last couple days they came here to eat because they don't have anything over there. The government gave them some money when they got here, but nothing since then."

Had there been any problems? "No, not at all. We just invite them in. Sometimes we talk politics. You know, they'd tell us that America - it's just trying to eat up everything. Bite off pieces of the country, or just swallow up the whole thing."

"Of course, I ask them why - they don't really know," he said, then got a mischievous look on his face, "I tell them, if America's trying to eat up everything, then why does your Akhmetov keep his money in American banks? Why isn't he afraid they'll just gobble it up? And you know, their eyes just got big. 'But they just don't have [banks] like that around here,' they say. Well of course!"

We chatted for a bit longer; our new friend did most of the talking.

"Sometime we'd shout slogans back and forth, for fun. 'Yushchenko!' we'd cry. 'Yanukovych!' they'd cry. 'East and West together!' we'd cry. And they wouldn't have anything, they'd just cry 'Yanukovych!' again. They didn't have any other cheers."

A bit later we thanked the man for his help and headed out to look for the Yanukovych camp. He said he thought it was on the second floor. We went up there and asked the women guarding the pay lounge. No Yanukovych supporters here, they hadn't even heard of any being there. The same was true of the lounge on the other side of the second floor. The same was true at the other end of the station. The cleaning lady didn't know, the train station security guy didn't know, even the Berkut officer patrolling the place didn't know.

So we went back to the Yushchenko people, and none of them knew either, the guy we talked to originally figured they must be gone. We went outside and looked around; one cabdriver suggested going to a sports stadium where they'd had a rally once. Finally, as we walked away from the station down the street looking to see if maybe they were just nearby, we walked by some women who were cleaning the sidewalks on the way to the station.

"Oh, I don't know of any Yanukovych supporters being here," they said. Two of them turned to the third, and she thought for a minute.

"There were some here before though," she said.

"Really?" both of us said at once.

"Yes, they used to be set up over there on the left side of the station. They got in here about Thursday or Friday last week. They were here a couple days, they left again... oh Sunday, would you say?" she asked her two coworkers.

"Yeah, I think it was Sunday, one of them said."

We thanked the woman profusely for her help and walked away. Discoshaman and I have decided we're going to have to look a lot harder if we're going to find Yanukovych supporters in this town.

Meanwhile, the tents on Khreshchatyk remain. I hear they have even more than last Friday.

The biggest, or at least most well-attended, parts of the Kyiv protest have been the rallies. They started when tens of thousands gathering to witness the results of the election vote count, then snowballed into an enormous landslide of winter activism. Starting on Wednesday, and for the remainder of the week, rallies gathered together over a million people in the center of Kyiv.

The attendance at the rallies seems to have leveled off, but I think it was still above a million at the rally Lesya and I joined on Sunday.

To get to Maidan (Independence Square) we walked down along the central part of Tent City. The tent residents were there, of course, but around them was a mass of people heading to or from Maidan. There were occasional clusters of friends meeting up, or young people gathered around a stereo playing "Razom Nas Bahato". Game day noisemakers sounded off continuously, as did the horns on cars headed away up side streets.

A carful of kids was almost keeping pace with us, trolling along the sidewalk and playing rockabilly music. The older people in the crowd seemed a little uncomfortable in the rock festival atmosphere, but a lot of the older people I know here have impressed me with their ability to jump into an energetic event and hold up. They were doing just fine.

Independence Square was packed. The stage was surrounded by people all the way around to the back. More people flowed away in front and up the stairs and throughout the plaza. They broke at the ring of tents surrounding the towering monument that dominates Maidan: a pillar topped with a golden statue of a woman in traditional Ukrainian dress.

One of the bands giving free concerts for the protesters was warming up the crowd before the politicians started giving speeches. The middle-aged lead singer said "Get your hands up and wave them with us; everyone now!" People waved.

"We're here for peace, and the whole world is with us!" he said. Of course we were!

Lesya and I joined in the good old-fashioned love-in.

After the love-in, Socialist Party Leader Oleksandr Moroz got up and gave a hard-nosed speech on what the government was up to. Lesya and I worked our way through the crowd, in search of a better vantage point. The people were packed in tighter than on Independence Day or New Year's, maybe tighter than both combined. We worked our way around by the statue and went up to search for a place on the bridge connecting the second floor of a flashy aboveground/underground mall to October Palace. It provided a perfect view out over the people to the stage, so I was surprised we were still able to find places.

We got to the bridge just as Yuliya Timoshenko stood up to speak.

Timoshenko is great; she's a former big time businesswoman who made somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million bucks during the crazy post-Communism days, then got into Ukrainian politics. This wouldn't be particularly significant next to the big oligarchs, most of whom also have lots of political ties, or are politicians themselves. However, when Timoshenko became Vice PM in charge of the Fuel and Energy Complex, she started taking her job seriously: by applying the law to punish corrupt businessmen. The oligarchs didn't like that much, so they made a fuss and Kuchma let her twist in the wind. This is something he will probably regret for the rest of his life.

Timoshenko has been imprisoned, hunted, and repeatedly subject to investigations, despite the fact that imprisoning deputies is illegal. (one of the main reason there are so many oligarchs in Parliament) She has responded by becoming the fieriest political activist in the country. Ukrainians either love her for what she says about the "bandits in power," or hate her for the ten million she made (and the government has repeatedly pilloried her for since she started cracking down on corruption).

She was at full burn in Maidan on Sunday. Every once in a while she would throw in a bit of "Kuchma Ghet!" (Kuchma Out!) or "Bandi Ghet" (Cabal Out!) as she told us Yanukovych was on the run and Kuchma was being pushed back. She had lots of material to work with, Yanukovych's press secretary had recently announced he'd run away to Luhansk, and the rumor was that he was meeting the Mayor of Moscow there.

"Here are our demands before another round of the election," she said.

"First, fire Yanukovych for his obvious election fraud, and for supporting separatist groups!" she cried.

"Hoorah!" We cried.

"Second, fire the officials in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv for agitating to break apart the Ukrainian state!"

"Hoorah!"

"Third, fire the Central Election Committee, and elect new members who will not take part in falsifications!"

"Hoorah!"

She went on, condemning the efforts of Kuchma and other senior government figures to divide up the country between them, or barring that, to steal off pieces of the country for themselves.

"Bandi ghet!" she cried.

"Bandi ghet!" we all cried.

Watching Timoshenko flame the government, especially her arch-enemy Kuchma, was a refreshing contrast to Yushchenko. One of the best things about Yushchenko is that the government's accusation that his is a radical is so wrong. He is a mild-mannered moderate. He hardly even seemed to raise his voice until someone tried to assassinate him. He's an accountant. This makes him a good, intelligent presidential candidate, but much less fun to watch. Timoshenko talks like a populist. Or shouts, rather.

"Don't forget that the whole world is with you!" she cried at the end, the only time she resembled the hippie-sounding rock star. "Will you stay with us until the end?"

"Yes!" we all cried.

Timoshenko stepped back, and the band struck up the national anthem, "Ukraine is Not Yet Dead", a nice rousing piece of music, if not exactly an upper.

Then one of the less senior politicians got up to talk about details with the audience: when to be at the President's office to lend support to Yushchenko in his talk with Kuchma, when to be at another location to make sure the government can't attempt any "manipulations"... We left after they started discussing details, but some of the people stayed much longer.

Each evening brings a new high wave of activity around 6-10, and then long lulls until the next night, but the protesting never truly stops.

On Friday, after waiting a few hours, my wife and I got to visit with one of the organizers of Tent City.

Walking through the mass of people and tents to the big forest green headquarters tent reminded me a little of military movies, especially walking by the four fellows hanging around the entrance before ducking through the final tunnel of fabric. But if this was a military movie, it was one of the zany comedy ones. The bustling of people was too chaotic for true military order.

Inside the tent was one small card table surrounded by people. The rest of the tent was occupied by a huge mounds of clothing, electric teakettles, boxes of medicine, and jars of this and that. Throughout the time we were there, volunteers were constantly walking in and asking for equipment or clothing, then slogging into the mountain of stuff or going off to look elsewhere.

"Here is the director," we were told, and pointed to a man sitting at the table.

"E...se .e," he tried to apologize. After that he gestured towards another fellow standing by, who came up and introduced himself in an only slightly less tortured voice. All of the men in the tent either spoke in horse whispers or not at all, and every five minutes one of them would pour or squirt medicine down his throat.

His name was Andrei. He was wearing fatigues, with two orange scarfs wrapped tightly around his throat to try and keep it a little warmer. He had a little nametag that said "Narodna Varta" on it - People's Watch. It was not an official title, the Tent City organizers had creating the nametags for the ad-hoc collection of people with management experience who are trying to run the camp. Officially Andrei worked in the Ukrainian equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security in Luhansk. He said his whole family for three generations had been protesting against the government, since his grandfather fought against the Communists in WWII (as well as against the facists).

My wife and I wondered if, coming from Luhansk, he had horror stories from the election. After all, Luhansk and Donetsk form the center of Yanukovych's power, and the place where there was an obviously fraudulent 88% voter turnout, with 95% support for him as the administration candidate. Andrei said no, there was no actual intimidation, though they were astonished he was actually wearing Yushchenko colors to the polls.

However, in his grandmother's little town, one of those in which everybody knows one another, there were large numbers of people turned away because they were told they'd taken out absentee ballots, which was news to them. At his own polling station, he had witnessed a man standing around the ballots during the count who had leaned over and dumped out forty more from inside his coat when few people were watching. At another station he knew about, the whole polling commission had gotten up and gone to a government-prepared feast at the closing of the polls, leaving the ballots untended.

Andrei's voice would often fail as he said this, and he would try to drip medicine in his throat from a broken squirter every few minutes. He also mixed apologies into the conversation every couple of minutes.

"I'm sorry for the way my mind is wandering," he said, "I've just had no time to sleep. I had two hours yesterday morning, but that's been about it since Saturday. I've been talking to journalists and people at the rallies, and new people with tents since then."

"Do you need anything?" we asked, hoping we could add something critical to the hills of stuff behind him.

"Nothing, really. People have given us everything we could ask for. It's been overwhelming. I mean, look at this," he reached into a random bag and pulled out brand name Fila ski pants. "This isn't knock-off, it's expensive," he put it back. "We try to give all the extra stuff to orphanages, but it just keeps coming."

"The other day, a little old grandma came up to me and made me cry. She didn't have a thermos, sho she was shuffling along with a 3 liter pot of tea, wrapped in aluminum foil, and black bread with butter on it. I'm used to thinking of Ukrainians as usually just getting by giving the minimum required, these people are giving everything they can. A little grandma."

"How long can you hold out here?" we asked, thinking that it took Georgia 2 1/2 weeks before the people overturned a fraudulent election result with their mass protests.

"Well, we've got heaters and tents enough. And you've got to think, 'the Eskimos off in Siberia live out their whole lives in worse cold than this'. What we really need now is not stuff, it's discipline. Maybe 70% of the folks here are just kids with their friends, celebrating their birthdays, or just having fun. If the government ever starts to really follow up on their intimidation tactics, they'll scatter, or their moms will come drag them home by their ears. They've got lots of energy but they're not a real revolutionary camp. 

"The last 30% is solid, but we're really tired and we need to get better organized," he finished.

Shortly after that we thanked him profusely and headed for the door, a little embarrassed at how much we'd made him talk.

"You couldn't use any food could you?" he asked hopefully, eyeing an enormous garbage bag stuffed with loaves of bread. Before we managed to escape out the door, Andrei pulled one of the scarves from his neck and thrust it into my hands.