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

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.

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.

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.

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...]