(AP) – She fought her way through the crowd of opposition supporters last fall to kiss Viktor Yushchenko’s hand, but he didn’t even notice her. A year later, the Ukrainian president and the rest of the country are on a first-name basis with this 66-year-old milkmaid.
Praskoviya Korolyuk, affectionally called Baba (Grandma) Paraska, is the most recognizable veteran of the Orange Revolution – the massive protests that challenged last year’s fraud-riddled elections and led to Yushchenko winning the presidency. She regularly captures headlines for her tireless travels around the country to bolster support for Yushchenko, whose popularity has fallen as the esprit of the protests has faded.
“She is a pure soul, very naive. … She worries about Ukraine’s future so sincerely,” said Yushchenko’s spokeswoman, Irina Gerashchenko.
Korolyuk says her adventure began when stories of election fraud filtered into her village – so small the residents share one phone line – in the Ternopilsky region of western Ukraine. She left her three daughters and their children and boarded a train to the capital, Kiev, to defend Yushchenko.
“I felt sorry for him and pledged not come back home without victory for him,” Korolyuk said in a recent interview, a tiny portrait of the president pinned to her dress and her hair covered in a flowery orange scarf.
She joined the hundreds of thousands massing in central Kyiv and spent her nights in a tent with 20 others, braving freezing temperatures.
“I almost did not feel cold and had no time to be sick,” she said. “I rallied with young people and felt I am young.”
While Korolyuk had to squeeze through a crowd last year to get close to Yushchenko, now she marches right up to the presidential administration’s big, metal gates and waits for a word with her hero – though that technique doesn’t always work.
After the Supreme Court annulled the vote and ordered a rerun election, Korolyuk remained in the tent camp on Kyiv’s main avenue until the inauguration two months after the protests broke out.
As the country became increasingly disillusioned with the new president amid rising prices, slowing economic growth and corruption scandals, Korolyuk came back to help.
She took her one-woman cheerleading show around the country, traveling by community trains, which are free for pensioners in Ukraine, and often catching a night’s sleep on a railway station bench before heading into meetings with regional leaders.
Korolyuk has denied that any political force pays for her trips, and the idea of a retiree staying for two months on Kyiv’s main square in protest against unfair elections, along with her unfailing belief in the revolution’s ideals, has attracted a lot of attention by the media and ordinary Ukrainians.
“Many of our politicians should follow the example of our revolution’s symbol, Baba Paraska,” said Mykola Shvets, the governor of Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine who welcomed her when she came to town.
Korolyuk is eager to unite the ruptured Orange Revolution team, which split up in September when Yushchenko sacked Yuliya Tymoshenko as prime minister.
“I am even ready to spend the whole of my 600 hryvnas ($120; 100 euros) pension to make small gifts to all of them,” she said.
Her main goal, though, is to keep alive the revolution’s pro-democracy ideals.
“I am ready to give my heart and health for Yushchenko,” she said. “I just ask people to give him a little more time.”
