| 摘要 | It’s a freezing winter’s night. Standing between the tents of the revolutionary encampment on Kiev’s equivalent of Regent Street is Svyatoslav Smolin, a tough-looking, pasty-faced man in a khaki jacket, whose usual job is checking the radiation levels at Chernobyl. He tells me how, on that fateful Monday just over two weeks ago when he heard the news that the opposition candidate had supposedly lost the presidential election, he turned to his wife and said: “I just have to go.” He came to Kiev, joined the vast protesting crowds on Independence Square and, seeing the tents going up, offered his services. Now he’s in charge of the guards in this well-organised section of the “tent city”, which stretches for perhaps half a mile down the broad city boulevard. Warming himself by one of the braziers of burning timber is Vasil Khorkuda, a stocky, clear-eyed countryman from a rural area near the Carpathian mountains, where he runs a small travel agency. He has never, he says, been active in politics before. But that Monday he, too, decided he simply must go to Kiev. He’s been here ever since and he’ll stay until “success”, which, he explains, means a president chosen in a free and fair election.
Further on, giggling by an all-orange synthetic Christmas tree – this is the orange revolution, so even the Christmas tree has to match – is Elena Mayarchuk. Clad in fur and the obligatory orange scarf, she’s the owner of a beauty shop in a small town in central Ukraine. Again, the same story: she heard the news. She knew she had to come. And she’ll stay till the end. Or there’s Vova, a worker from an industrial city in the north-east, who, striking a heroic pose with both black-gloved, ham-sized hands raised in V-for-victory signs, declares: “The country called me!”
These are the so-called ordinary people who, by their spontaneous reaction on that Monday, November 22, made history. First it was the Kievans, taking ownership of their own city. Then it was the outsiders. All the well-funded campaign for the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko; all the carefully prepared student activists of the resistance movement Pora (“It’s time”); all the western support for NGOs, exit polls and the like; all the international election monitors; all the telephone calls from Washington or Brussels – none of them would have prevailed over President Kuchma’s vicious regime with its manipulated media, Russian advisers and electoral fraud were it not for the Svyatoslavs and Vasils, the Elenas and Vovas, coming on to the streets of Kiev in such numbers that they changed everything.
So much is still obscure, corrupt and inauthentic in Ukrainian politics, but at the very heart of this change is something very authentic: human beings hoping to take control of their own destiny. Mere objects of history who become, however briefly, active subjects. Subjects who will be citizens.
Great outside interests are at stake here – Russia and the US struggling for mastery in Eurasia, the shaping of a new European Union – but that is not the story you hear on the streets and the square. Even the most pro-European intellectuals admit that the attractions of turning from a post-Soviet union towards the European Union played only a small part in the campaign.
No. The story you hear is of a country that was handed independence on a plate in the break-up of the Soviet Union 13 years ago, but only now is creating the social reality of a sovereign, would-be democratic country. It’s the story of a post-communist regime under President Leonid Kuchma which has been so manipulative, bullying and corrupt that even sober analysts describe it as “gangocracy”. What they call the “blackmail state” has worked by the president controlling most of the top positions in public life, guaranteeing his placelings’ loyalty by holding compromising material – people use the old Soviet secret police term kompromat – on their illegal activities. Government by kompromat.
If collaborators did step out of line, their businesses were closed down, or they were put in jail, or they were beaten up, or worse. Those monstrous carbuncles on the once-handsome face of Viktor Yushchenko testify to what may well have been a deliberate poisoning. As Yushchenko himself says, his is the face of Ukraine today.
But not, the powerholders hope, tomorrow. In the end, they overplayed their hand. They proposed for president an apparatchik, Viktor Yanukovich, who as a young man served two prison terms for theft and causing grievous bodily harm. (One of the many jokes circulating in Kiev quips that, unlike the incumbent president Kuchma, Yanukovich doesn’t want a third term.) The lies on the main television channels and the election-rigging became too blatant. And then the Moscow godfather, Vladimir Putin, who presumably holds his own kompromat on Kuchma, acted as if Ukraine were still a satrapy of Soviet Russia. That was the last straw.
Probably for the first time in Ukrainian history, the democratic and the national aspirations are marching together. In places such as Bosnia, East Timor or Iraq, western occupiers talk implausibly of “nation-building”. Here you see how nations are built, in the solidarity of chanting crowds and the brandishing of new symbols. “I feel more Ukrainian now than I did three weeks ago,” says a young man of Russian origin. There, in a single sentence, is the essence of true nation-building. In this still largely Russian-speaking country, just 42% of those asked in a nationwide survey this February identified themselves as “above all” citizens of Ukraine. (An amazing 13% answered “Soviet citizen”.) One of the survey’s designers bet me that next February it will be 50% or more.
Nation-building includes the invention of tradition. These days, that’s done not by bards or historians but by television. Already I see, on the more independent TV channels here, stirring photomontages of the orange-bedecked demonstrators in the snow, with beautiful girls, crying grandmothers and patriotic music. Oh yes, and that great white-and-gold column on Independence Square, which looks as if it must date back to the early 19th century, was erected in 2001.
Now parliament has cleared the way for the corrupted second round of the election to be repeated on December 26. I have just returned from hearing Victor Yushchenko declare “victory” after “17 long days” to a flag-waving crowd beneath that column. “In these 17 days,” he said, “we made this country democratic”. But he hasn’t even won the election. There will be many twists and turns ahead. Even if, as seems most likely, he is now elected, disappointment will follow under a president Yushchenko. Touchingly, I see the father of Prague’s velvet revolution, ex-president Vaclav Havel, on Ukrainian television with an orange ribbon in his lapel and warning, precisely, of post-revolutionary disenchantment.
Romantic idealisation is certainly not what we should offer here; but clear-sighted respect, yes. Would you leave your job and your family for several weeks to go and live with strangers in a crowded tent on a dirty street, in temperatures plunging to minus 10 degrees? I was so frigging cold after two hours, I had to go back to my hotel at midnight for hot tea and first aid. They’ve been living there for two weeks. These so-called ordinary people, now doing an extraordinary thing, have at least earned the right not to be treated as the objects of outsiders’ ideological fantasies or fetid conspiracy theories. Instead, we can simply listen, with critical respect, to their own story of why they are there. |
