For the first round of the Ukrainian Presidential election, the incumbent, Viktor Yushchenko, set up his press center and temporary campaign headquarters at the hulking Ukrainian House, in the center of Kiev. Formerly the Lenin Museum, Ukrainian House looks like a squared-off late-Soviet version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim and usually hosts cultural events. Before the press center moved in, it was home to a large exhibit, presented to the public by President Yushchenko, on the Holodomor, or “murder by hunger,” the name given to the catastrophic famine of 1932-33, when, as a result of Stalin’s drive to collectivize agricultural labor, millions of Ukrainians starved to death.
A young man named Sergey showed me around. The place was not crowded. Some election observers from Latvia and Poland milled about, drinking coffee; they were noticeably better dressed than the Ukrainians. A dozen computers on the second floor had been provided for journalists to file reports; they were only sparsely occupied. Down in the central atrium, a tall bank of television screens was set to one of the stations about to announce the national exit polls.
At 8 p.m., photographs of the candidates appeared atop the rising columns of their predicted percentages. Viktor Yanukovych, the failed vote-fixer of 2004, was expected to receive thirty-five per cent of the vote. Yulia Tymoshenko, the volatile, charismatic, and beautiful former Yushchenko ally and current Prime Minister, was slated to get twenty-five per cent. As for the current President, once the great hope of a Ukrainian democracy, he would end up with just five per cent of the vote. It was, by any measure, a humiliating result.
For the next four hours, we all waited at Ukrainian House for Yushchenko to arrive for his concession speech. Sergey, it turned out, was the press center’s Ukrainian-language copy editor. “I have perfect Ukrainian, which is very rare,” he said. In non-election times, Sergey is a translator of foreign films and TV shows. He did the entire Ukrainian run of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and also several episodes of “Miami Vice,” which helped explain his handsome two-day growth of beard.
A different Sergey, from Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine Party, said to me of Yushchenko, “I think he’s head and shoulders above everyone else in Ukraine—morally, intellectually, ethically. This country doesn’t deserve him.” The country agreed, in its way. Later that night, at the five-star Intercontinental Hotel up the hill from Ukrainian House, I watched Yanukovych supporters carefully drink mineral water and eat sandwiches as a young newscaster tried to file a report in Ukrainian, and repeatedly stumbled over some words halfway through. “I can’t do it!” she finally said, in Russian. “You have to do it,” her cameraman said calmly, also in Russian. She did it. Later still in the evening, I would be denied access to the Tymoshenko party at the even fancier Hyatt Regency, where, I learned, they were serving wine. For now, in Ukrainian House, we munched on ginger cookies and waited for Yushchenko.
The 2010 Presidential election was the first in which Ukrainians born after independence could vote. For them, it would be hard to remember that once upon a time Ukraine had not been in a hurry to leave the U.S.S.R. The western portion of the country, led by the city of Lviv, wanted out of the Soviet Union and into Europe. The traditionally more Russian cities of the east, like Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk, also had their reasons for leaving—they dug up much of the Soviet Union’s coal, and smelted its steel, and built many of its missiles and tanks. Why keep sending the proceeds to Moscow? But the countries were profoundly intertwined: a lot of Russians lived in Ukraine. What’s more, unlike Estonians or Tajiks, Ukrainians practically were Russians; and Ukraine stood to inherit more from the Soviet Union than it could easily swallow. The empire’s biggest natural-gas pipeline to Europe ran through Ukraine: who should own that? How about the weapons factories? With the Crimean peninsula—inhabited mostly by Russians and Tatars but handed to Soviet Ukraine in 1954 by Donetsk’s Nikita Khrushchev—the newly independent Ukraine would get the U.S.S.R.’s most beautiful beaches but also the enormous Soviet Black Sea Fleet. The Russians were not going to give up their aircraft carriers. It was also too bad about the beaches.
And so Ukraine’s leaders proceeded cautiously. The republic declared its independence on August 24, 1991, but for the next decade, as Russia lurched from one crisis to another, Ukraine tried to take things as slowly as it could. Especially under Leonid Kuchma, who was elected President in 1994, it was corrupt, backward, and repressive—and on pretty good terms with Moscow.
Then came the dramatic unravelling of the Kuchma regime. In 2000, Kuchma was caught on tape apparently ordering the murder of an opposition journalist (the journalist was found beheaded in a forest outside Kiev) and implicating himself in a host of other crimes. Immediate calls for Kuchma’s resignation came to nothing, but the scandal laid the foundation for what happened in 2004, when Kuchma chose his Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych, to run as his successor.
Yanukovych was from the east, having grown up near the tough old mining city of Donetsk. (“When you leave the house in Donetsk,” a businessman there told me, “you bring a knife, in case you run into someone you know.”) He was a familiar type: the late-Soviet apparatchik, massive and bullheaded, distinguished primarily by an ability to get along with the right people and do violence to everyone else. He’d twice been imprisoned as a young man, and though the exact nature of the crimes was hazy, it definitely wasn’t for writing anti-Soviet Ukrainian tracts— Yanukovych hardly knew Ukrainian. His candidacy for the Presidency in 2004 was strongly supported by the Kremlin, with President Vladimir Putin making several demonstrative trips to Ukraine in the run-up to the election.
The opposition was able to coalesce around an anti-Yanukovych. Although he, too, was large and broad-shouldered and a former servant of the Kuchma regime (he was the country’s central banker from 1993 to 1999, after which he served for a year and a half as a “reformist” Prime Minister), Viktor Yushchenko was mild-mannered, formal, and strikingly handsome. His Ukrainian was excellent, and as a matter of principle he avoided Russian wherever possible. For his political platform, he promised five million new jobs, lower taxes, less corruption—and Europe. Poland had just joined the European Union, and now the border between East and West, which had once run through Berlin, ran along the Ukrainian-Polish border. Why weren’t the Ukrainians invited? Wasn’t it because of Russia—and the Kuchma regime, which sometimes seemed more Russian than the Russians themselves?
As the election approached, polls showed Yanukovych and Yushchenko neck and neck. Then, two months before the vote, Yushchenko collapsed with a mysterious ailment and was rushed to a hospital in Vienna. The doctors determined that he had been poisoned—a specialty, as it happens, of the Russian secret services. Two weeks later, Yushchenko returned to Ukraine, his handsome face badly disfigured, and resumed his campaign.
A runoff between Yanukovych and Yushchenko produced a baffling result: exit polls had Yushchenko winning by eleven percentage points, while the official results had Yanukovych up by three. The disparity, plus a well-organized youth movement, sent Kievans to Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), in the center of the capital. There they set up a sprawling tent city bedecked in orange, in honor of Yushchenko’s party colors, and refused to accept the results. After a monthlong standoff that included the surprise release of phone conversations between people fixing the elections (“Did you see what we have?” one of them exclaims in a panic about the fake ballots that had been printed. “I mean . . . they’re completely different”), another round of voting was held. Yushchenko won handily. To the cheers of the crowd, he was inaugurated as President on January 23, 2005. This was the Orange Revolution.
“You had to see it, you had to feel what the energy was like on Maidan,” Leonid Shvets, the political editor of the newsweekly Focus, told me. “It was crazy. Everyone’s looking at you, saying, ‘Come on, muzhik, come on, do it. Just do it!’ After feeling that, you’d think you would just work twenty-four hours a day. It’s only five years, for God’s sake, you’ll catch up on your sleep afterward. And after all that—to end up with this? I’m sorry. Kuchma did more.”
Yushchenko had been elected to break the system of corruption and cronyism. But his Administration ran into trouble almost immediately. Yushchenko’s eldest son was spotted by the press speeding around Kiev in a very nice BMW; his American-born justice minister was caught lying about having a degree from Columbia. Yushchenko, in his desire to find people he could trust, put relatives and godchildren—he was godfather to a lot of children—in positions of power. “Once there, they used those positions to solve their own business problems,” Shvets said. “And, in turn, to put their own people in place. So the desire to find honest people—and he considered these people honest because they were with him, and he was honest, therefore they are honest—made him hostage to this same system. And nothing really changed.”
Tymoshenko was his first Prime Minister, but once the pressure of the campaign had lifted she and Yushchenko were unable to get along. And Tymoshenko was ambitious. She bad-mouthed Yushchenko to others. In a leaked phone conversation, the President pleaded with the Prime Minister, “What did I ever do to you? Where did I let you down?” In the end, Yushchenko fired Tymoshenko and her entire Cabinet in late 2005, making a deal with Yanukovych in the process. The Orange Revolution was over.
Then things got worse. In response to Yushchenko’s talk about Europe, the Russians started raising energy prices toward European levels. After Yushchenko supported Georgia’s President, Mikheil Saakashvili, during his short war with Russia, in August, 2008, the Russians lost their heads. They refused to have any contact with Yushchenko; the pro-Kremlin television channels became flooded with stories of Yushchenko’s perfidy. In late 2008, Russia presented Ukraine with a huge gas bill, which the Ukrainians, already reeling from the financial crisis, could not pay. Eventually, Russia cut off gas supplies; Ukraine responded by cutting off gas transit. Much of Eastern Europe was without gas for nearly two weeks. Russian television showed Bulgarians, Hungarians, and other real-live Europeans freezing, and it was all Yushchenko’s fault.
For the past few months in Kiev, election billboards lined the highway into town from the airport. Yulia Tymoshenko, who had started wearing her hair in an old-fashioned peasant braid in the wake of encountering the authentically Ukrainian Yushchenko, appeared on her posters dressed in white, with a splash of red in the form of a heart curving up in the right-hand corner into a checkmark—“Yu-kraine in your heart,” Yu-lia Tymoshenko said. Yanukovych’s posters were more sedate: against a soothing blue background (the color of his party), they showed the candidate squeezed into a suit and smiling uneasily. “Ukraine for the people,” Yanukovych said. Yushchenko, for his part, was philosophical: “Ukraine shall exist,” his posters declared.
The capital of Ukraine spreads out on both sides of the Dnieper River. Old Kiev rises along the western bank, a hilly city punctuated by old universities and older churches. To the east, the new city’s decaying Socialist-era apartment blocks stretch out into the flat expanse of the steppe. Kiev has mostly avoided the construction boom that has gripped post-Soviet capitals like Moscow and Astana in the past fifteen years. There simply hasn’t been enough money.
This is the third-largest Russian-speaking city in the world. Russian is spoken here with a slightly different accent than in Moscow—the hard Russian “g” becomes a soft Ukrainian “h,” and there is a euphonious Ukrainian lilt. There is more Ukrainian heard on the streets of Kiev than there used to be; menus and public announcements are in Ukrainian; but for the most part people still speak Russian, and read magazines in Russian, and watch Russian movies (which now come, a little absurdly, with Ukrainian subtitles). The post-Soviet process of de-Russification is complicated here by the fact that Ukrainian, while a distinct language with its own history, is very close to Russian. “Kids hear Russian around them, they talk in Russian but learn in Ukrainian, learn how to write in Ukrainian,” the literary critic Inna Bulkina told me. “The result is they don’t know the difference. They can’t spell. A few years ago, I saw a school exhibit at a bookstore, of letters that children had written to St. Nick. There wasn’t a single letter where each word didn’t have three mistakes in it. The children don’t really know the boundaries between the two languages.”
Adults, too, often struggle. Tymoshenko, who had grown up speaking Russian but who had to pick up the Yushchenko electorate if she hoped to win, conducted her campaign mostly in Ukrainian, and seemed uncomfortable doing so. Yanukovych, on the other hand, had been studying hard, and answered all questions in whatever language they were asked. Some even thought his Ukrainian was better than Tymoshenko’s. (“It was easier for Yanukovych to learn,” Bulkina hypothesized, “because at the start he knew no human language at all.”) The candidates used their linguistic skills to accuse one another of lying and cheating. Tymoshenko’s people warned that Yanukovych would once again try to steal the election. Yanukovych countered that Tymoshenko was sending her police to beat up pro-Yanukovych pensioners. Tymoshenko’s camp responded with a theory as to why Yanukovych was so quick to blame the police: “For Viktor Yanukovych, hatred of the police is now a reflex, which he developed in the late nineteen-sixties, when his contacts with this organization twice ended for him in imprisonment.”
The strangest of Tymoshenko’s schemes to insure a “fair election” was an invitation to Georgian election observers. The international community had agreed to send about three thousand observers to Ukraine. Tiny mountainous Georgia announced that it would send an additional two thousand of its own. What’s more, most of them were set to go to Donetsk. The Yanukovych crowd was in an uproar, and the clamor grew after a phone conversation on the subject between Tymoshenko and Georgia’s Saakashvili was published online:
It sounded as if the Georgian observers were going to storm Donetsk. Asked about the conversation a few days later, Tymoshenko explained that Saakashvili meant “effective election observers, not ninjas. For example, when I say that we have a battle-ready team, I mean that it’s a team that knows how to work together effectively, not that it’s a team that’s expert at carrying out pogroms.”
At this point, the papers announced a scoop: they had got their hands on an official document describing what Yanukovych actually did to land in prison. It made for great reading. Yanukovych was first convicted—and given a year and a half in a juvenile detention center—for beating up a drunk and stealing his coat, hat, and watch. A few months after getting out, Yanukovych was in trouble again when he and his friend Bubyr beat up a certain Panteleenko. According to the document, which was a statement of an appeals court overturning both convictions, Panteleenko wasn’t sure, exactly, who’d beaten him up. That is to say, he was sure that Bubyr had hit him from behind, but was it Yanukovych who then started kicking him? Panteleenko, the document said,
Throughout all this, Yushchenko’s campaign was barely visible. Occasionally, the candidate gave a press conference calling both the front-runners criminals. He had a particular animus toward Tymoshenko. At one point, he declared that she had huge offshore accounts on the Isle of Man. “This isn’t just the one hat that Yanukovych stole,” Yushchenko joked, a little uncharacteristically. “We’re talking about several trains full of hats.” But mainly he seemed passive and withdrawn. Then, four days before the first round, the Yushchenko camp came to life. A Kiev court had concluded that, for the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin and his ministers were guilty of genocide against the Ukrainian people. The case was then closed because the accused were dead. The head of the Ukrainian security service held a press conference to announce the verdict—a very odd thing to be doing in the midst of a critical election.
In fact, the move was typical of Yushchenko, who, once the 2004 election had been won, turned out not to be very interested in governance, after all. Instead, he was interested in history. Ukrainians had been denied the history of their suffering by the Soviets; Yushchenko would tell them about it. “Where are the Autobahns, where are the new airports, the technological breakthroughs, the five million new jobs?” Georgiy Kasianov, a historian at the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, said to me. “They’re not here. But the Holodomor is.”
In 1928, as every Ukrainian schoolchild now knows, Stalin announced his intention to collectivize the peasantry. Communist activists and N.K.V.D. men (some of whom, it was later pointed out, were Jewish) began an assault on Soviet farmers, many of whom lived in the fertile land of central Ukraine: the rich ones (“kulaks”) were exiled to Siberia or shot; the rest were forced onto collective farms. In response, the farmers began a campaign of passive resistance; rather than surrender what they had to the Soviets, they destroyed it. The Soviets expropriated what was left. In 1932, amid continuing paranoid accusations that they were hiding grain, the peasants began to starve. In the next year, millions died of hunger, some within sight of full, but well-guarded, granaries. It was Stalin’s most monstrous crime.
Yushchenko made the Holodomor the focus of his Presidency. He visited schools to tell children about the famine; he covered the country with Holodomor memorials; he ordered the state security service to open its archives about the Holodomor; he tried to get international bodies to pass statements condemning it as a genocide. In November, 2006, he signed a law declaring the Holodomor a genocide. It was left ambiguous whether it was a crime to say that the Holodomor was not a genocide.
In 2007, Yushchenko announced the creation of a “National Book of Memory.” Thousands of volunteers—schoolteachers, activists, local historians—would cover the country and interview people about what had happened in the early nineteen-thirties, and gather names of the victims. “It could have been a great project,” Kasianov said. “But instead it was done in a totally Soviet way.” Yushchenko had a plan for the Book of Memory, and he wanted it done in time for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Holodomor, in November, 2008. In mid-2008, he chaired a meeting of regional governors and historians to check on their progress. Some governors received praise for their work; others were yelled at and accused of shirking. According to a historian, Sergei Posokhov, who was at the meeting, it created an awful impression. “Watching him demand the numbers,” Posokhov, whose grandparents died during the famine, told me, “I realized that that’s what it was like in the early thirties when they were requisitioning bread.”
“Why did they choose the Holodomor?” Kasianov asked. “I agree it was a tragedy, it was bad, it was horrible, and it needs to be remembered. But to make it your central national symbol? To tell about how people ate their children? To tell about how you were destroyed and you just sat there passively and didn’t resist? Is that really how you’re going to create a citizenry?”
Yushchenko had another historical project, one that was even more contentious than the Holodomor remembrance. It was the promotion of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (O.U.N.) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (U.P.A.)—radical nationalists who operated in the highly contested and dangerous area of eastern Galicia (now western Ukraine) in the thirties and forties. Persecuted by Poles, Soviets, Nazis, and then again by Soviets, they kept alive the spirit of an independent Ukraine. Stepan Bandera, the political leader, and Roman Shukhevych, the military leader, were both eventually killed by the Soviets. In October, 2007, the Lviv city council erected a statue to Bandera, and Yushchenko posthumously awarded the country’s highest honor, Hero of Ukraine, to Shukhevych.
Yushchenko walked into a firestorm. The O.U.N.-U.P.A. was courageous, stateless, persecuted—and also Fascistic and anti-Semitic. It offered its services to the Nazis in the fight against “Jewish Bolshevism.” Shukhevych, a brave soldier, entered Lviv in 1941 alongside the Wehrmacht. In the next couple of years, the Banderovites, as they were called, patrolled the villages and forests of western Ukraine. Their activities included the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population, so that Ukraine would be for Ukrainians, but, when they came across the few Jews in the area who had survived the work of the Einsatzgruppen and the deportations to the camps, they murdered them, too. This story, in its general outlines, had been known for a long time, but Yushchenko seemed genuinely to believe that it was all old Soviet propaganda.
Yushchenko’s support of the ultranationalists was polarizing. As the argument heated up, Yushchenko’s father, a Red Army P.O.W. who had been interned at several of the German labor camps, including Auschwitz, got dragged into it. He was accused by people in Moscow and their fellow-travellers in eastern Ukraine of being a camp guard at Auschwitz, rather than a prisoner.
“All this business where you build national identity out of being a victim—first Stalin did this to you, then Hitler did this to you—it’s like you’re not a historical actor,” the journalist Leonid Shvets said. “But Ukraine was a historical actor, and how! I have a friend, one of his grandfathers was in the Galician S.S. and died fighting, and his other grandfather was in the Red Army and made it all the way to Berlin. What do you do with that? Politicians should stay away from it. They should look to the future. That’s what people wanted from Yushchenko—a future! That’s why they went out there.” We were standing, in the cold, a block from Maidan Nezalezhnosti. “Instead, we got these history lessons, from a history teacher who wasn’t very good.”
Kasianov, who specializes in the use of historical memory for nation-building, says that the government would have been much better off raising monuments to later anti-Soviet dissidents. “Here was a small group of people who refused to be quiet,” he said. “And they were persecuted, and sent to rot in labor camps, but they insisted on their truth. There. Put monuments to them all over Ukraine. Tell everyone about them. Instead, they have to find the most controversial, the most ambiguous figures, and give them hero status. Sometimes, you know, it’s necessary to think.” After Viktor Yushchenko accorded Hero of Ukraine status to Stepan Bandera, too, a politician in the Crimea burned his passport in protest. He had no desire to be a citizen of a state that considered a Nazi collaborator a hero, he said.
Iwent to Lviv, forty-five miles from the Polish border, because I wanted to see the cradle of the resurgent and sometimes xenophobic Ukrainian nationalism. The far-right Freedom Party is based there; its leader has called for clearing Ukraine of its occupiers—Russians, Germans, and Jews. Lviv was also the place that had built a monument to Stepan Bandera.
But Lviv was so pretty that I forgot the Bandera monument as soon as I passed it, on the way into town. Lviv is a magically preserved example of Austro-Hungarian Baroque, a smaller Prague. It’s astonishing that such a city should have ended up in the Soviet Union, and, as you walk around it on a quiet Sunday morning while many of its residents are still in church, you can forgive them most anything.
I met an architecture student. “It must be great to be an architecture student in Lviv!” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “But unfortunately there is no Ukrainian architecture here. It is all Polish and Austrian.”
I was amazed. Where would one find Ukrainian architecture?
“In Kiev,” the student said. “Well, Soviet and Ukrainian.” He told me that he dreamed of going to Russia for a few weeks, to practice his Russian: he heard it on television all the time, but everyone in Lviv spoke Ukrainian.
Earlier in the day, in searching for some vestiges of Jewish Lviv (once, when it was known as Lemberg, it had been a center of Jewish life to rival Vilnius and Warsaw), I’d stumbled across a restaurant, Under the Golden Rose, next to what used to be the oldest synagogue in Ukraine. It had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1942. Now I went there to eat. Klezmer music played from speakers; pictures of menorahs, and bearded Jews in tefillin, hung on the walls. The menu had no prices—you were supposed to bargain—but included an impassioned plea for the resurrection of Jewish historical sites in Lviv. Instead of bread, the waitress brought matzo, though it was late January. The restaurant was theme-park kitsch. And yet what were they going to do? It’s not as if there were a thriving Jewish community in Lviv that could create this culture on its own. As the O.U.N. wrote in an internal memo in 1944, when it had a change of heart about killing Jews, “The Jewish issue is no longer a problem, there are so few of them left.”
Afterward, I went to the Kryivka beer hall, around the corner. The place has a slightly scandalous reputation, for its glorification of the old hyper-nationalist movements, and no wonder. At the door, you are greeted by a gray-haired man in an old Army uniform, brandishing an assault rifle, who asks for the passwords—“Glory to Ukraine!”—and then pours you a shot to welcome you. Downstairs, the entrance to the beer hall, which resembles a bunker, is framed by a huge red-and- black U.P.A. flag. The waitresses are also dressed in old military uniforms, and T-shirts with U.P.A. slogans are for sale.
Yet the menu, when I got it, looked suspiciously like the menu at Under the Golden Rose. And, sure enough, the same people who created the klezmer hall had created the nationalist bunker.
So it was all just a show, like Tymoshenko’s braid: performative ethnicity, as the scholars call it. But there were a lot more people in the bunker than had been in the Golden Rose, and after a while a large group of young men started singing old Ukrainian nationalist songs. Two young men at the table next to mine left their dates so they could join in. They knew all the words. I like Ukrainian nationalist songs as much as the next person, and I knew that the quasi-Fascist atmosphere of the place was a joke. It just wasn’t a joke I really liked. Nonetheless, I bought a number of T-shirts.
The night before the first round of the voting, the evening news showed the Georgian election observers deplaning in Donetsk. A local police official pointed out that the Georgians were all men between the ages of twenty-five and forty and were of “solid build.” (It was widely reported that the delegation consisted of “wrestlers, athletes, and policemen.”)
Yanukovych was not sitting idly by. Some thirty-odd tents, in Yanukovych blue, had been set up in front of the Central Electoral Commission, in Kiev. Each of the tents was inhabited by one man—also between twenty-five and forty, also solidly built, but not Georgian. Yanukovych’s people were taking no chances. If there was an initiative to be seized by taking to the streets, they were going to be the ones to seize it. The next day, the square filled up with Yanukovych “supporters.” A television crew on the scene conducted interviews. Many supporters were drunk, and men in Yanukovych jackets began cutting off the interviews before they began. But they didn’t manage to reach one angry young woman in time. “We’ve been here since 5 a.m., and they still haven’t paid us!” she said. “It’s outrageous!” It was an interesting moment in post-Soviet life: a paid participant in a street action meant to fool the media was appealing to the media for justice, because she had not been paid.
On Election Night, Yushchenko never did show up at Ukrainian House. Nor was he heard from the next day or the day after that. I spoke with Sergey, the Yushchenko copy editor and “Miami Vice” translator, to see if there was any activity. There wasn’t. “This morning, I woke up drunk,” he admitted. He invited me to the tiny two-bedroom apartment he shared with a couple of old friends, both named Sasha, in a decrepit Brezhnev-era apartment block on the east side of the Dnieper. We drank beers until four in the morning. One of the Sashas explained that they would never give up the Crimea. Where was a Ukrainian to swim? “The Odessa beaches are dirty,” he said. In the early nineties, Crimea had elected its own President, set its clocks an hour ahead to Moscow time, and seemed poised to split off from Ukraine. There was still unrest there, but it no longer troubled Sasha very much.
The next day, three days after his hopes for reëlection were dashed, Yushchenko finally appeared and delivered a short but remarkable speech. It contained all the hope, pathos, and delusion that had marked his Presidency. He stressed that the elections had been exceptionally fair and equal and democratic, that they “set an example for the entire post-Soviet space.” The Orange Revolution had triumphed, he said, by giving people the right to choose their President. And yet, he continued in his quiet, almost melancholy voice, “Ahead of us lies a very difficult second round of voting. It is difficult because Ukraine has a free choice, and at the same time does not have candidates to choose from. As the past performance of both indicates, national, European, and democratic values are foreign to them, and unfamiliar, and very distant.”
Yushchenko, having declined to use his position as President to advance his prospects as candidate for President, accepted his rejection by the voters of Ukraine with difficulty, but he accepted it. The free press that he’d helped foster had been ruthless in its criticisms of him. He had martyred himself and his Presidency for democracy, to show that it could be done. Yet one could not help feel that he had done so without a sense of the danger involved. Now that danger was coming into view.
The campaign that developed in the run-up to the second round of voting was not an edifying spectacle. The voting in the first round had fallen along regional or identity lines rather than on ideological ones, forming an orange-and-blue map that made the American red-and-blue electoral map look happily integrated by comparison. The pattern for the second-round vote would probably be similar, and it was now a matter of energizing the base. Tymoshenko aired an effective commercial (“Ukraine will be with Europe”) that showed her looking comfortable, and glamorous, with Angela Merkel, Donald Tusk, Nicolas Sarkozy (but not with Putin); Yanukovych answered with an even more effective commercial (“Ukraine for the people,” still) that showed photographs of coal miners, pensioners, workers, and families.
Accusations of foul play continued to fly back and forth. Thirteen days before the voting, a group of men invaded the Ukraine Printing Plant, in Kiev, which was about to print thirty-seven million electoral ballots for the second round. They said that they were there to carry out a court order about the installation of a new director for the factory. Yanukovych’s party accused Tymoshenko of involvement; her staff denied it. Eventually, security forces loyal to Yushchenko took control of the plant and promised to watch over the fair and free printing of the ballots.
In a televised interview, Yanukovych referred to Anton Chekhov, who spent many productive years in the Crimean city of Yalta, as a Ukrainian and Russian poet. The Ukrainian press started laughing and couldn’t stop. For days, they competed in digging up the most sophistic Yanukovych supporters to claim that Chekhov was indeed Ukrainian, and a poet. “His stories are poetry in prose,” one said. Chekhov is certainly Ukrainian, another said, quoting one of his letters, and “every Ukrainian is, in his heart, a poet.” So Yanukovych was right.
The Central Electoral Commission set a date for the Presidential debates, and Yanukovych failed to show up. (Declining an earlier invitation to debate Tymoshenko, he had said, “I’ve never in my life lowered myself to competing in circumlocution with a woman.”) Standing across from an empty lectern, Tymoshenko proceeded to talk for the entire ninety minutes. “I’m sad that this happened,” she began. “I’m forced to stand here and look at an empty space and see this empty space, perhaps in order that this empty space not become the President of our country.”
On February 7th, however, the empty space managed to edge out Tymoshenko in the second round of voting by 3.5 percentage points. Tymoshenko pledged to fight on, even managing to get a court order temporarily suspending the results, but, given that the exit polls tracked almost exactly with the final tally, she seemed unlikely to find much support. More than four per cent voted “against all.” Yushchenko, casting his ballot, said that Ukrainians would be ashamed no matter whom they chose.
Yushchenko’s Presidency was, by all accounts, a colossal failure. His effort to turn Ukraine into a European country meant trying to recast it as an ethno-nationalist state. But it turned out that there are too many other people in Ukraine, and their memories are too good. Ukraine is not Russia, as Leonid Kuchma once said—but neither is it Poland. In Kiev, I had met people like Sergey, who felt themselves pulled toward Europe and the West (“You’ve seen the film ‘The Secret.’ You haven’t seen ‘The Secret’? What do you mean you haven’t seen ‘The Secret’?”); and in Donetsk I had met tough-talking businessmen, who felt the pull of the capital, Kiev, and power; and in Lviv was a young man who thought of Soviet architecture, and of Russia. If one pictured their desires as ropes, thrown across the body of the country, they would intersect—perhaps, rather than pulling it apart, they would end up pulling it together. Yushchenko’s vision of a culturally unitary people had been flung back in his face.
One of the last things I did in Kiev was visit the Holodomor memorial, which Yushchenko had inaugurated on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the famine. The memorial is wedged between the gates of the eleventh-century Monastery of the Caves, where a number of mummified saints are entombed, and the Soviet Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, from 1957. It is in a combination of the two styles: similar to the Soviet obelisk in size and form, but white and covered in tiny little crosses, with a flamelike decoration on top. Four black metal tangles in the shape of crosses surround the structure at its base, trapping and protecting it.
Underneath the memorial is a museum. It consists of one large circular chamber. The National Book of Memory, in nineteen volumes, stands on lecterns around an inner perimeter; behind the volumes is the main exhibit, consisting of old Ukrainian farming tools and quotation after quotation from Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky: “Without Ukrainian iron, ore, bread, salt, the Black Sea—Russia can’t exist, she’ll choke, and with her the government will choke, and you and I.” Lenin: “Against the kulaks, our inveterate enemies, we have but one weapon: force.” The purpose of the exhibit is not to bring up facts but to establish the intention, at the very start and at the very center of the Bolshevik project, to subjugate the Ukrainian people. On one portion of the wall, a documentary and a docudrama about the famine play in succession. When the films are silent, the room is filled with an Elton John-like hymn called “Candle,” recorded by Oksana Bilozir, a pop diva turned parliamentary deputy from Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine Party. At the center of the chamber is an altar, but this is not a place for quiet contemplation. The museum is, in manner, pure Soviet propaganda, and the most purely anti-Soviet memorial I have ever seen.
“Someday, people will know how much he did for this country,” one of Yushchenko’s staffers had said to me on the night that Yushchenko didn’t show up at his campaign headquarters. And that may be true. He spoke endlessly of “Ukraine,” of himself as “the President of Ukraine,” and of the history of Ukraine, as if by invocation of that magic word he could create a country. He raised demons and made terrible mistakes. He was unequal to the job—but at least he had a sense of what the job could be. Jeered and whistled at by a crowd of fifty thousand at the opening of Donetsk’s magnificent new soccer stadium, last year, he’d still got a cheer when he concluded with “Glory to Ukraine!” Now, at last, he’d managed to unite the country in its rejection of him. ♦
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