Ukraine is one of Europe’s great submerged nations. A thread of Ukrainian statehood can be traced back to mighty 10th century Kievan Rus, sovereign over all of the eastern Slavic lands, through to the 17th-century Cossacks, who briefly asserted their independence from Poland only to lose it to Russia, and on to flickers of national independence at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and the second world war. But to outside eyes, this iconic national narrative was overshadowed by the more obvious reality of Ukraine’s imperial overlords - Poland, Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union.
Yet beneath this cloak of invisibility, the idea of Ukraine as a separate state continued to germinate, emerging with particular strength in the 19th century among its proselytising, educated intelligentsia. Then, as now, Ukrainian identity was as much about making a personal and political choice as it was an ethnic or historical fact: this multi-ethnic and historically divided land did not lend itself to a single interpretation. With the Soviet takeover of central and eastern Ukraine, and then, with the second world war, of the formerly Polish territories that are now western Ukraine, choosing to be Ukrainian became ever more marginal and dangerous. The notion of Ukraine went underground, while abroad those Ukrainians who managed to escape Soviet rule nurtured their nation’s emblems - language, history, culture - with a zeal that often seemed absurd to outsiders.
In 1991 as the Soviet Union began to crumble, this secret history of opposition suddenly burst above ground. Ukraine’s national intelligentsia, inspired by the dissidents released from Soviet prison camps and armed with the histories and encyclopedias written by Ukrainian emigres, spearheaded a national protest movement that was one of the catalysts of the final collapse of the USSR. Those who had doubted Ukraine’s existence weren’t altogether wrong, though. Ukraine’s national identity, never certain and further blurred by decades of Soviet repression, was extremely fragile. To secure its emergence as a separate state, the leaders of Ukraine’s national democratic movement - people who shared the background and politics of the leaders of eastern Europe’s 1989 revolution - made a pact with the country’s Soviet-era communist elite. If the nomenklatura backed independence, it could stay in power. As one Ukrainian dissident, freshly released from prison, explained to me in the early 1990s when I asked him how he could make an alliance with his former jailers: “Let them be Communists, let them be dictators, let them build their own Ukrainian prison camps. At least they will be our Communists, our dictators, our prisons.”
Over the past few years, as outgoing president Leonid Kuchma’s administration became ever more mired in corruption and inclined to authoritarianism, that seemed to be precisely what was happening. Had Ukraine’s neo-authoritarian post-Soviet regime succeeded in entrenching its rule with the coronation of prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, its candidate in the November presidential elections, this is the Ukraine they would have created: nominally independent, explicitly unfree. That effort failed when opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko was elected on Boxing Day - Kuchma’s state was too weak to sustain itself and civil society was too strong to be denied.
Why was the Kuchma regime, for all its crudity and casual ugliness, hollow? First, the Ukrainian authorities inherited only the branch plants of the repressive machinery of the USSR, not the headquarters that are making their fury at the collapse of Soviet communism so powerfully felt in Moscow today.
Second, for all its corruption, Ukraine’s privatisation process dispersed economic power much more broadly than Russia’s. The difference is summed up by a single economic indicator: over the past two years, the engineering sector in Ukraine has been growing by about 30 per cent a year. In Russia, the rate is about 12 per cent. As Anders Aslund, an economist who follows both Ukraine and Russia closely, explained to me over breakfast in Kiev: “In Ukraine, the engineering business is owned by independent people who develop those businesses. In Russia, it is owned by the oligarchs.”
Third, the Ukrainian political elite was privately lukewarm in its support for Yanukovich - its official candidate - and not particularly hostile to Yushchenko, a popular former prime minister and central bank chief. Indeed, at a personal level, much of Kiev officialdom felt more comfortable with the cultivated and technically skilled opposition leader than with the rough, proletarian Yanukovich. This sympathy became apparent in the early days of the protests as swathes of the establishment, from the Kiev city government to the diplomatic service, defected to the opposition.
Fourth, unlike Russia, Ukraine has no lost empire to mourn. In the end, despite the urgings of his prime minister, some of his security chiefs and some of his regional henchmen, Kuchma did not turn his tanks on his people. With no glorious imperial restoration to tempt him, he chose to go down in history as the midwife of Ukrainian democracy, however reluctant, rather than the butcher of Kiev’s Independence Square.
He bowed to the will of the Ukrainian people whose collective strength - so obvious now, barely suspected before the vote on November 21 - was the main reason the “Orange Revolution” succeeded. Neither a national struggle, nor an economic one, Ukraine’s revolt this autumn was the uprising of a people at last secure enough in their identity and confident enough about their material welfare to demand to be treated like citizens, not serfs. For the first time in Ukrainian history, the big and traditionally divisive question of statehood was resolved. Ukrainian civil society was also bolstered by what has been dubbed the “distance to Dusseldorf” factor - shorthand for geographic proximity to the west. With EU enlargement last May, the west arrived at Ukraine’s border, and it has acted as a powerful model and lure. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young Ukrainians are now travelling west to work and study. With each of the letters home accompanying their cash remittances, and with their eventual return, they bring back knowledge of a different way of life.
This way of life - described by Ukrainians as “European” but really the relationship between state and individual that underpins all western democracies - inspired the Orange Revolution. Aslund calls it “Ukraine’s 1848 - a true bourgeois revolution.” A member of that petit bourgeoisie is Oleksandr Tkachenko, who over the past decade and a half of our friendship has risen from being a lowly fixer for Reuters to a prosperous television executive. He saw the protesters as the modern incarnation of a Ukrainian national archetype, the kulak peasant small-holders who historically formed the backbone of Ukrainian provincial society and whom Stalin had tried to wipe out. “This is the revolution of good burghers, of the well-dressed, well-spoken Kievites. They already have money. What they need is freedom for themselves, their businesses and their children,” says Tkachenko.
Ukrainians are now busily creating a new set of myths to define and sustain the transformed nation they believe their protests have forged. In his speeches to the crowds during their 17-day vigil in Independence Square, Yushchenko often spoke of democratic episodes from Ukrainian history, including Pylyp Orlyk’s constitution of 1710 limiting his powers as Cossack ruler. An odd choice of topic, it might seem, for a 21st century political campaign whose unofficial anthem was a hip-hop song and which was co-ordinated by internet and mobile phone. But Yushchenko’s discourses were part of the larger democratic reimagining of Ukraine as a free, liberal and “European” nation. The 44 per cent of voters who backed Yanukovich in the December 26 run-off shows that not all Ukrainians buy into this vision. Some, especially in the east, still cleave to a more Soviet, Russophilic identity. But Russia’s aggressive role in backing the outgoing regime has produced an explicitly pro-Ukrainian backlash that is strikingly audible on the Russified streets of Kiev. Since November 21, the capital has suddenly started to speak Ukrainian - a language everyone in Ukraine understands, but may not be accustomed to using. Like the ubiquitous orange scarves and arm-bands, the language, at least for the moment, has become a symbol of democracy.
For countries to Ukraine’s west, the Orange Revolution represents both an opportunity and a challenge. The Poles, in particular, have been swift to grasp the significance of developments in Ukraine and to offer moral and practical support. Solidarity veteran Lech Walesa joined protesters in Independence Square; Polish president Aleksandr Kwasniewski was one of the leaders of the international mediation effort that helped avert a violent crackdown; Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland’s first independent newspapers, produced a special edition, in Ukrainian, devoted to the Orange Revolution. Their enthusiasm was recognition of the fact that Europe’s dividing line between democracy and authoritarianism is moving from Ukraine’s western border to its eastern one.
The best way to secure that border, from Poland’s perspective, is to put Ukraine on the path to EU membership and eventually to bring it fully into the union. That is a project sure to send a chill down the spines of some Eurocrats and politicians further west, for whom the prospect of a democratic Ukraine eager to join the European club is less delightful. It is not so long since Romano Prodi, speaking as president of the European Commission, declared that Ukraine had as much reason to be in the EU as New Zealand. Europe is still struggling to absorb the 10 eastern European accession states, is riven by the emotional debate over Turkey and is scrambling to establish a secure post-war order in the Balkans. For many European leaders, the sudden emergence of Ukraine as a credible, democratic European state seems more like a problem than a solution. This view is particularly strong among countries such as France, Italy, Spain and possibly Germany, for which the project of deepening ties between core members of the community is more important than broadening European values ever further east and south - and which fear antagonising Russia.
The difficulty for the deepeners is that Ukraine, undeniably geographically, culturally, religiously and historically a part of Europe, is now claiming political and moral membership as well. Kuchma’s Ukraine had been easy enough to dismiss. As Yushchenko admitted to me in a conversation before the final ballot: “Europe had some real and understandable reservations about Ukraine. Can Europe co-operate with a criminal regime and call it a partner? Can Europe work with a country dominated by a black-market economy? Can Europe work with a country without the rule of law?” But now, Yushchenko continued, “we are walking the not-very-easy path to democracy... we have shown we are a different country, we are a different people. It is a unique demonstration that here we have a civil society. The nation has paid a high price to be able to say that this is a European country.” Soon, he said, it would be up to Europe to take “real, concrete steps in response to our democracy”.
Europe’s broadeners can see Yushchenko’s point. For them, by exerting the seductive force of its own example, Europe has inspired the shift of a country larger than France and with 48 million inhabitants from authoritarianism to democracy. This is the vision of those who see the EU as a democratic, voluntary empire, expanding through the lure of membership. Ukraine, never offered that lure but determined to become worthy of it, is the latest example of its power.
”It is very exciting, it is very uplifting, to see Europe’s unquenchable desire for freedom,” says Denis MacShane, Britain’s Minister for Europe. “I don’t see how anyone under any circumstances can deny that Ukraine is a European country. If Ukraine announces that it has European ambitions, we ought to welcome it.”
The Orange Revolution has also subtly influenced relations between Europe and the US. In their surprisingly robust and concerted defence of Ukrainians’ right to a fair election, the Bush administration and the EU, in political scientist Robert Kagan’s lovely phrase, “committed a flagrant act of transatlantic co-operation”. As MacShane put it: “The crisis in Ukraine has helped to reconnect Europe with the US. It has made us understand that our values are a lot more similar and more profound than the Iraq crisis may have made us think.”
If the west is (generally) welcoming, the east is sour. Russia’s leadership bet heavily on the loser in Ukraine’s political contest. For the Kremlin, a Yanukovich victory was important for philosophical, political and geopolitical reasons. Philosophically, a triumph for “managed democracy” and state capitalism in Ukraine would have been a validation of Russia’s own renunciation of open democracy and free markets in favour of president Vladimir Putin’s increasingly overt neo-authoritarianism. Politically, installing the Kremlin’s man in Kiev would have been a victory for the neo-imperialist vision that Putin and his supporters increasingly have been propagating to shore up domestic support. Geopolitically, the Kremlin made its traditional calculation that vassals make better neighbours than independent states.
Guided by this logic, Russia backed Yanukovich with tremendous zeal. Putin visited Kiev twice in what essentially were campaign trail appearances for Yanukovich. Kremlin political consultants, relying on the same arsenal of techniques that had twice secured Putin’s election, were so central to Yanukovich’s election drive that even officials within the Kuchma establishment were enraged. Vasyl Baziv, the president’s deputy chief of staff, told me: “It hugely angered me when I walked through the presidential administration and saw how citizens of another state were lying on the divans and brutally forcing themselves into the state life of Ukraine.” Anders Aslund, the economist, estimates that Moscow spent $300m on the Ukrainian elections, a figure confirmed by a leading Russian oligarch. At a summertime meeting, Putin explicitly forbade Russia’s oligarchs, some of whom have democratic sympathies and strong connections with Ukraine, from contributing to Yushchenko’s campaign. Ultimately, Russia’s candidate failed because Russia’s example has lost its appeal for most Ukrainians. On a visit to London a year ago, my friend Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Kiev television executive, described to me the worldview of his teenage daughter. Like him, she spoke mostly Russian with her friends, though she listened to Ukrainian rock groups and studied at Ukrainian schools. But Russia, the country, held absolutely no interest for her. She had spent summer holidays travelling through Europe with her parents. Next on her wish-list was New York. Moscow, the dream destination of Oleksandr’s Soviet childhood, did not figure in her aspirations.
Ukraine’s public rejection of the Kremlin model is playing in Russia in two very different ways. For Putin and his neo-imperialist confreres, it is an enraging humiliation. They are insulted and angry: Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the architects of Putin’s rise to power in 2000 and a leader of the Russian political consultants sent to Ukraine, described the opposition’s orange as “the colour of children’s diarrhoea”. This fury has real cause. The triumph of western values in Ukraine is a significant check on Russia’s neo-imperialist ambitions: historically, the Russian empire has never existed without Ukraine. If Ukraine secures its position in the European political space, Russia’s post-Soviet sphere of influence shrinks to Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asia - not much of an empire, even for a Russia that has accepted it will never regain its cold war super-power status.
Nor is it only the Russian elite that mourns the loss of imperial might. As Yegor Gaidar, the father of Russian market reforms and one of the country’s staunchest liberal democrats, admitted to me over breakfast in London: “It is a complex of the lost empire. This is a huge difference between us and all the other post-communist countries, apart from Serbia. Everyone else lost socialism and gained independence. We lost socialism and lost an empire.”
But Gaidar and other Russian democrats are also hopeful Ukraine will inspire another reaction. As he put it: “This is the first stone thrown at the edifice of Russia’s managed democracy.” He argues that the example of Ukraine will give Russians, particularly the younger ones, faith that their society, too, might prove capable of mustering the collective will to stand up for democracy.
The danger is that Putin - piqued by his personal humiliation in Ukraine, stung by the loss of empire and legitimately worried by Kiev’s democratic example - will pursue personal vengeance rather than national interest. Gaidar warned that the Kremlin’s reaction could be, “everyone has betrayed us, now we are a besieged fortress.” He hoped that the west could play a valuable role in averting this sort of “hysterical” reaction.
Insulating eastern Europe from Russian expansionism, securing democracy and free markets along Europe’s eastern arc, encouraging the erosion of the neo-authoritarian regimes that had seemed the inevitable successors of the Soviet Union, and all without unduly provoking a wounded Russia still bristling with nuclear weapons - that is the vast geopolitical agenda that the Orange Revolution has opened up for the world. Gaidar worries that the west may “sleep through it”. In contrast with made-in-America political projects such as Afghanistan or Iraq, he fears the western response might be to say, “we didn’t make your revolution, you did it yourselves, so now you figure it out.”
There is an alternative view. A recent essay in The New Yorker positively compared the success of America’s own soft power in Ukraine - the lustre of its example, a dribble of support for local NGOs - with the shambles its exercise of hard power has made of Iraq. You don’t have to buy into the contrast between the two to accept that homemade velvet revolutions can make as legitimate a claim on the world’s attention as violent regime change imposed from abroad.
The accidental hip-hop anthem of the Orange Revolution is an apt embodiment of what has been a spontaneous and united assertion in Ukraine:
We are not swine,
We are not goats,
We are Ukraine’s daughters and sons.
No, to falsification!
No, to manipulation!
No, no, no to lies!
Together we are many,
We cannot be overcome.
Its putative composers are Roman Kalyn and Roman Kostyuk, two thirtysomething would-be musicians - Kalyn has a day-job as a TV anchorman, Kostyuk as a sound engineer - from the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk. After the falsified November 21 vote, they recorded the slogans they had heard at their town square to a hip-hop beat and were soon singing it with their friends and fellow protesters. Someone - they don’t know who - sent it out on the internet and it was soon picked up by those singing and chanting in Kiev’s Independence Square.
”The Yushchenko people said they had been thinking that they needed such a song and then it just appeared,” Kalyn recalled. The pair haven’t earned a kopek from writing their country’s wildly popular new hymn, but they don’t seem to mind. “We wrote this song for the people,” Kostyuk explained. “Let them use it.”
Chrystia Freeland is deputy editor of the FT.
