The Maidan coup of 22 February 2014 did not come from nowhere. For those who had watched the news in late 2004 the events of late 2013 and early 2014 were eerily reminiscent of an event which occurred 9 years before in Ukraine: the so-called ‘Orange Revolution.’
Fascism and ‘normality’: Why Banderism and neoliberal europhilia go together
As we have covered before the United States had long put its thumb on the scales for what kind of activity and ideology it fermented within the Ukrainian diaspora. This meant certain ideologies - particularly Banderism but also concurrent neoliberal capitalism - were well funded and given the seal of ‘normality’ by being actively promoted or in the case of Banderite fascism not censured by the West. The idea of ‘normality’ here is particularly pernicious as it was taken not to be certain morals, practices, and living standards, but whatever the West was doing and promoting at the moment. To be happier, post-Soviet societies needed to become more ‘normal’ and anything which completely shed any of the Soviet and Tsarist past identities was good. If it could help shed those identities faster and destroy them more quickly and comprehensively, this was all to the better. This informed and informs the embrace between neoliberal economics, vaguely progressive language, and fascism in Ukraine. The Soviet Union, by its official ideology and its experience in WWII was anti-fascist to the core. Soviet identity was centered substantially on a rejection of fascism. But what if the Soviet identity was supposedly being the thing preventing you from organizing your life and those around you from organizing their lives in such a way that you would be rich? What if the Soviet identity was not only keeping you poor but making you poorer and at the root of all your problems? Should you not destroy it? Should you not, as Natalia Novodvorskaya said “scramble out of our own skins” and “kill the dragon within ourselves”? So therefore embracing fascism would utterly negate and destroy the Soviet identity and in addition to providing a sense of superiority, of conquest over ‘them’ it would also allow ‘normality’ and therefore prosperity to prevail?
Confusing? Yes. But how else are we to explain liberal democracy and fascism aligning in Ukraine with aspirations for EU membership? And here, having established the intellectual framework of our villains, we get back to our story.
Viktor Yushchenko was an accountant who was appointed President of the Bank of Ukraine during the 1990s. Yushchenko met Katerina Chumachenko - who was a Ukrainian-American diaspora nationalist. She had started her career at the US State Department, spent some time at the Reagan White House and then moved to the newly established embassy in Kiev as an official of the State Department. She met Yushchenko in 1993 and married him in 1998 - and Yushchenko left his first wife for her. Yushchenko was presented in the Western press as being honest but in reality, as Gordon Hahn demonstrated in his book Ukraine Over the Edge, had involved the Bank of Ukraine in a series of pyramid schemes - which blew up and contributed to furthering Ukraine’s horrendous post-Soviet downturn. Yushchenko though was - as demonstrated by his marriage to Katerina Chumachenko - favored by the Americans. Shortly after then Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma was reelected in 1999, US Vice President Al Gore told Kuchma he should pick Yushchenko as his Prime Minister. Kuchma took the hint.
Ukraine without Kuchma: Maidan 0.5
In September 2000 a Ukrainian journalist Georgy Gongadze did not return home. Two months later his headless body was discovered in the forests north of Kiev. That same month one of President Kuchma’s own bodyguards, Mykola Melnychenko released a casette tape which included a recording of President Kuchma at least ordering that Gongadze be intimidated.
A few facts should first be noted about Gongadze. It is true he had reported on the corruption of the Kuchma administration and pro-Kuchma oligarchs. But he had not reported on the corruption and thievery of anti-Kuchma oligarchs or parties. Second as his name suggests he was not a ‘pure’ ethnic Ukrainian but rather born of a Ukrainian nationalist mother and a Georgian nationalist father. He had actually abandoned his first wife to go fight in the Georgian civil war against the Russian backed Abkhaz and Ossetians who had risen against Tbilisi out of fear that the ultranationalist regime of Zviad Gamsakhurdia was going to commit ethnic cleansing.
Irrespective it was used as a rallying cry for a series of demonstrations that took the slogan “Ukraine without Kuchma” in December 2000 - March 2001. As you can see it was a coalition of liberals and fascists and given the positive coverage they were given in the West, it was clear they were supported by the West. Yushchenko, despite being Kuchma’s Prime Minister, supported the demonstrators as did Yuliya Tymoshenko, despite her also being a minister in the cabinet. Kuchma used the ‘Berkut’ riot police to bring the demonstrators under control but he also understood from this that many oligarchs in the country had turned against him (who else was financing months long demonstrations?) and so had the West.
In response he hewed even more closely to the West in foreign policy by accelerating cooperation with NATO and by also sending Ukrainian troops to participate in the US led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Domestically though he consolidated around the one oligarchic clan that had not turned against him, the Donbass Clan, whose main political representative was Viktor Yanukovych.
Yanukovych, pictured above left with oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, was corrupt, had served jail time, and was known to rule Donetsk with an iron fist (but then again so did every oligarch politcian regardless of political affilitation). He therefore could be easily be made to represent everything wrong with the self serving, high on rhetoric, lower than low on performance, corrupt and venal political and business class in Ukraine whereas Yushchenko - irrespective of his own shadiness - could be and was presented as the opposite from the moment Yanukovych became Prime Minister. What this portrait leaves out about Yanukovych is that he was pragmatic, committed to restoring at least some of the Soviet welfare state, and genuinely committed to getting the Russian language official protection in Ukraine. Still, it was clear the two were heading to a confrontation in the 2004 Presidential election.
Yushchenko: the underdog?
In the way it would be told in documentaries and histories later Yushchenko was a brave, anti-corruption, pro-democracy candidate up against a murderous regime. This helps explain why he was consistently ahead in the polls, it is said. In fairness Yanukovych was never a strong candidate but neither was Yushchenko particularly charismatic even if he was, before September 2004, handsome. Strangely these same documentaries show that Yushchenko’s campaign functions were well financed and, as Gordon Hahn pointed out, always had more than enough orange swag to go around. This latter example shows the choice of branding which among other things was taught by the US National Endowment of Democracy either directly through Ukrainian activists or that great NED success story OTPOR which had helped bring down Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. The positive media coverage Yushchenko received was in non-state media, dominated mostly by oligarchs hostile to Kuchma and Yanukovych and also not coincidentally these same media outlets received small, but still helpful, US government grants.
But more importantly here for communicating just what ‘was up’ one of these same documentaries portraying Yushchenko as struggling against ‘the regime’ show his security detail roughing up and threatening the life of a plain clothes police officer shadowing them. threatening the life of a plain clothes police officer shadowing themThis is scarcely something one does to a ‘regime’ and instead demonstrates Yushchenko had the backing of very powerful people and he and his campaign felt a sense of impunity.
Even more telling is something demonstrated by Gordon Hahn, and that becomes fateful for unravelling just what was happening in the Orange Revolution. Yushchenko’s chief of staff was a man named Oleh Rybachuk (or Oleg Ribachuk to use the proper spelling), pictured below right.
Rybachuk was a former member of the KGB who had been involved in the export of weapons to non-Warsaw Pact nations, especially India. He had been trusted enough to learn English. After the fall of the Soviet Union he popped up as Yushchenko’s chief of staff at the Bank of Ukraine - and was involved in setting up the pyramid schemes Yushchenko ran. He also clearly retained excellent connections to both the main successor organizations of the KGB - the FSB in Russia and the SBU in Ukraine. It was Rybachuk who helped arrange for Yushchenko to dine with the leaders of the SBU on 5 September 2004.
The ‘regime’ tries to murder its opponent - or does it?
After meeting and partying with the heads of the SBU, Yushchenko fell ill with a catastrophic level of dioxin poisoning. It has been said since that Yushchenko was poisoned in an attempt to kill him by the SBU possibly with the connivance of the FSB and, it is implied, under the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But Yushchenko heroically powered through despite the horrible disfigurement and pain from the poisoning which left his once good looks in complete ruin. This same poisoning backfired on the ‘regime’ as it showed their murderous intent and the people rather than be cowed, the Yushchenko campaign, rather than be cowed were enraged and inspired to do what they did to stop the election later being stolen.
There are a few problems with this narrative. The first is that, to spoil the story, the proof the Yushchenko campaign obtained that Yanukovych and Kuchma had conspired to fix the vote totals in the second round of the Presidential election came from …. the SBU. That’s right. The SBU. Officers of the same SBU came onto Maidan Square during the November and December ‘Orange Revolution’ protests and vowed they would never serve under a convicted criminal, Yanukovych. Recall also that Rybachuk retained excellent links in the SBU. As former SBU officer Vasily Prozorov bitterly tells through his novel Point of No Return through providing funding and training the Americans had gained much influence in the SBU. Lastly, the poisoning galvanized and radicalized Yushchenko’s supporters. As Igor Lopatonok pointed out through Oliver Stone’s film Ukraine on Fire, to galvanize crowds and unnerve the opposition a martyr is needed. In this case it was Yushchenko himself.
Yushchenko has claimed ever afterwards he knows who poisoned him but he cannot talk about it. Strangely all the Kuchma era officials who could have answered this question - and also on what happened to Gongadze -were murdered after Yushchenko became President. Yushchenko had a chief of staff who was SBU, and his wife’s (pictured left) past meant she was very, very well connected with the US government.
My suggestion? Yushchenko knew he would be poisoned by the SBU but accepted it as the price for power and winning and those who poisoned him were very much on his side.
Voter fraud and Maidan 1.0
When the second round of the Presidential election was held on 21 November 2004 there is little doubt that considerable voter fraud was used against Yushchenko by the Yanukovych campaign in Oblasts that were controlled by politicians aligned with Yanukovych and Kuchma. Given the positions of the respective candidates in the polls and who voted for who and supported who in the first round there is no way Yanukovych could have won in such a strong way. Albeit, this is not to necessarily say Yanukovych did not win. Given the brutal and ruthless people who support Yushchenko it is almost certain that Yushchenko benefited from ballot stuffing. Let us analyze the vote totals, courtesy of Wikipedia:
The starting place to determine “how many votes should Yanukovych have?” is to consider three columns from the First Round. First the Party of Regions vote. The Party of Regions was the main pro-Russian (or more accurately Eurosceptic and non-Russophobic Party) Party in Ukraine and was the creation of a series of oligarch/political elites who wanted to combine such a position into a political Party. It was approximately analogous to United Russia. The second vote to consider is the vote for the Communist Party of Ukraine. Though to the left of the Party of Regions the Communist Party of Ukraine understood it would always be kept out of power, and so worked and aligned almost always with the Party of Regions even as they complained from the political Left. As a spoiler to both the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Communist Party was the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine. Those two parties pledged their support to Yanukovych and urged their members to vote for Yanukovych. Given how Communist and PSP voters both despised what they thought Yushchenko stood for far more than rank and file Party of Regions voters it is reasonable, for our purposes, to assume no defections from the Communist Party and PSP vote total to Yushchenko. Adding up their vote totals should give Yanukovych 12,834,660 votes.
For Yushchenko in addition to his votes you should add the vote of the Socialist Party of Ukraine which, after 1998, had aligned against Kuchma and with the opposition to Kuchma. Given however that Socialist Party voters were bleeding out of the Party and their leaving would soon make it defunct there is no particular reason to assume they all went to Yushchenko. Socialist Party voters were angered and jaded by Moroz’s constant playing for political favours which meant that far more so than most Ukrainian political parties of the 1990s stood for nothing other than its top Party officials holding elected office and all the perks that came with it. Even if we award all the Moroz votes to Yushchenko the vote total for Yuschenko should be 12,820,773, or slightly less than Yanukovych’s.
There are some other categories we need to consider – others, against all, informal. Against all was obviously neither for Yanukovych or Yushchenko and between October and December this category grew. There is no reason to assume these were all Yanukovych voters except if we buy into Orange and Western propaganda. The informal category fell by nearly half in the same period. For the sake of argument let us assume all those who voted for others or informal all for some reason voted for Yushchenko and not Yanukovych, so that is 988,363 plus the fall in the number of informal or 346,401 over to the side of Yuschenko. That gives us a vote total for Yushchenko of 14,155,537. This matches almost exactly what he got in the second round of the Presidential election, but this is to assume that all of the voters in those categories shifted to Yushchenko and not at all to ‘Against all’ which grew and none at all to Yanukovych. This patently makes no sense. We can also see that between the November round of elections and the December round that the number of voters dropped by about a million while Yushchenko’s vote grew by 900,000 even as the vote total dropped by a million. Clearly there is discrepancy here and not just for the Yanukovych vote totals.
My suggestion? Oblast administrations which supported Yushchenko and Yanukovych both committed ballot stuffing and electoral fraud. The rage which brought the Orange Revolution out was the rage of the Yushchenko campaign – and more importantly the people behind it in the Ukrainian oligarchy and the West that they had been outdone in their cheating.
Still, the obvious nature of the fraud in Yanukovych’s favor combined with the poisoning of Yushchenko and the lingering anger about Gongadze’s fate created a fertile soil for the seeds that were immediately planted. US National Endowment for Democracy trained activists in the Yushchenko campaign immediately called people to Maidan Square. Hundreds of thousands turned out. This was not mere popular enthusiasm. Ukraine was and is a desperately poor society. GDP per capita in real terms was still approximately 40% smaller in 2004 in Ukraine than it had been in 1989 despite the population shrinking by almost 10%. Two things kept people there. The first is that same striving for normality mentioned above. Escaping poverty and living like western Europeans were imagined to live and with the kind of honest politics and business western Europe was imagined to have and Yushchenko was seen as the man who would get them there, or at least much closer. And that normality is suggested by that very distinctive red over black flag in the image.
Yes the Nazis were there. They’ve always been there.
Unlike Maidan in 2013/2014 there were very very few violent clashes with police. The atmosphere was mostly a carnival one albeit as the days grew colder and the snow fell heavier the mood turned more foul.
The second thing which kept them were the people backing Yushchenko providing the funding to put up a stage on Maidan, to provide food and organized logistics for feeding and housing hundreds of thousands in Kiev day in, day out in the cold winter, as they would 9 years later. People who could afford to have bands compose and play this particular ear worm. They were the infamous oligarchs. The most prominent, but by no means the only ones among them, were Yuliya Tymoshenko and Petro Poroshenko.
Poroshenko had grabbed much of the confectionary factories on Ukraine’s territory shortly after the Soviet Union broke up - albeit many of his businesses were managed not just by himself but his entire family. He had entered the Rada in 1996. He was therefore a powerful businessman and a powerful politician. When the second round of the Presidential vote was being counted at the Election Commission he appeared at the Commission hurling abuse at the Commissioners. In view of his economic and political power this went beyond dramatic theater to outright intimidation of government officials as they knew one of the most powerful men in the country was screaming at them.
Yuliya Tymoshenko despite doing her best to adopt a ‘simple peasant girl’ appearance with her highly stylized (and dyed) hair was anything but. She had married into the Soviet Party-State elite and used her connections to get ahead in the rough and often violent world of business in Dnepropetrovsk. She was a protege and ally of Pavlo Lazerenko, Kuchma’s one time Prime Minister, and with him she monopolized much of the Russian gas flowing into the country, deciding who would get what. She rose where other early would be oligarchs were either cast upon the ash heap or even outright murdered, but she rose to the top by being the best at what the Dnepropetrovsk gas business did. This included arbitrage, creaming sums off the top, and siphoning off the gas - in effect stealing it. Lazarenko went down for his crimes when he, inexplicably, fled to the United States and was charged by the FBI. Though Tymoshenko’s name appeared in the indictment she was never charged herself.
She brought that same use of threats to the Orange Revolution protests. As the crowds grew angrier she kept them whipped up into a fever pitch. She sometimes whipped the crowd up with threats to storm the Rada or the Presidential Administration building if they did not get their way. Wild rumors were spread that Russian Interior Ministry troops have been flown in and a violent crackdown was being prepared which, as liberal Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar concluded, had no substance to them whatsoever. They did however frighten and intimidate Yanukovych, and Kuchma threw the question to the Supreme Court.
Here was a chance for the Yushchenko campaign to present its evidence. Here it would be laid out, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Except what they presented was often utterly laughable. One witness Andriy Mahera swore that he received an anonymous call from someone who told Mahera that he was involved in monitoring elections in Donetsk and that he said, to Mahera, that he saw ballot stuffing and election fraud being committed. One of the justices, as can be seen in the clip, cross examined Mahera who admitted he saw none of the fraud himself, had not visited Donetsk to verify any of the information and that he had based his testimony in part of things he had seen in the media.
Still with the growing foul mood of the crowd and Tymoshenko intimating from the podium that the crowd would take matters into its own hands if the Supreme Court did not vote a certain way the Supreme Court was hardly operating in an environment free from pressure. Furthermore when on 3 December 2004 annulled the election results and ordered a rerun for 26 December 2004 the US State Department highlighted that 3 of the judges had received judicial training in the United States and accordingly had been expected to vote for the rerun. Rather than a demonstration of judicial independence the decision of the Supreme Court was merely another example of administrative chicanery but being turned against the authorities of the day rather than in their favor.
Yushchenko won the rerun election handily, but even here there was a catch.
“Donbass Arise!”: The Donbass rebellion version 0.5 – the Severodonetsk Congress
Even as the Orange Revolution crowds were celebrating the other half of Ukrainian politics was not silent. The fact that the heaviest complaints about voter fraud – or the supposed element of the false voting which was clearly most illegitimate for the Yushchenko campaign – were about the voting in Donbass deeply rankled local sensibilities. Donbass had very heavily voted for Yanukovych. He was not well liked at all in Donbass but people had voted for him, as far as they were concerned he should have been President. Unlike the Orange crowds they could not directly pressure the government by going to Kiev, something some would attempt 9 years later during the Maidan, but instead they convened a Congress in Severodonetsk on 28 November 2004. Many delegates at the Congress demanded outright secession from Ukraine – that Lugansk and Donetsk Oblasts vote to become independent republics. The idea of Novorossiya was born.
Yanukovych had no intention though of splitting the country. The politicians of the Party of Regions and the Communist Party of Ukraine prevented any such resolutions from being translated into any kind of direct political action to initiate a separation and instead negotiated with the Yushchenko camp. They would not fight the second round of the Presidential election that even by then looked set for a rerun too hard. In return Yushchenko would cede many of the powers of the President in a modified constitution in January 2006. To the outrage of his voters and his western backers Yushchenko agreed. On 26 December 2004 Yushchenko won the Presidential election winning 51.99% of the vote to Yanukovych’s 44.2%.
Transition to Democracy and European normality?
A brief post-script is in order. Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and Poroshenko fell out among themselves and undermined each other. They proved so ineffective at governing that in 2005 economic growth dropped from 11.8%, where it had been under Kuchma, to a measly 3.1%. The spectacle of infighting and continued corruption meant Yanukovych won the parliamentary elections in 2006. This so enraged Yushchenko he did two things. He began promoting the OUN and UPA, along with their leader Stepan Bandera, as national heroes of Ukraine and began efforts to systematically rewrite history at all levels and teach OUN slanted history at all levels. US Human Rights groups barely raised a peep in protest. The second was that he dissolved the Rada and threatened it with troops, so put out was he by Yanukovych’s victory. When the Constitutional Court ruled Yushchenko’s actions unconstitutional, he fired three of the judges. Therefore, none of the things said about how the Orange Revolution showed the way forward were true. Everything noble it ostensibly stood for was shown to be an utter sham. It is no wonder then that in 2010 Yanukovych won the Presidency promising, among other things, to “end the Orange nightmare!”
-JM
