A week
later the Kyiv Post reported that, according to experts, the opposition’s
campaign “Rise Ukraine” won’t bring serious results.
Why not?
This is not difficult to understand. Polls
show that, if presidential elections were held today, Viktor Yanukovych would lead
with 21 percent in the first round (Kyiv Post, March 15). The record of the last 20 years shows that
being in first place in the preliminaries indicates victory in the runoff.
There you have it.
There is
logic to the contradiction between this president’s widely perceived slide in
overall popular opinion and his hefty electoral attributes. This logic makes
sense from observation that Yanukovych’s base of political and electoral
support does not depend much on any objective or enlightened evaluation of his
performance as president.
The
mentality aspects of Ukraine’s population include democratic trends,
nationalism, amorphous indifference, as well as the seemingly ever-lasting
post-Soviet (“sovok”) syndrome. Only the last one has the cohesion, the numbers,
a peculiar undercover ethos, and subliminal attachment to the past that trumps
all notions of honest governance, and requires from its leader not much more
than steadfast preservation of its regimented way of life and russification
trends.
This is why
Yanukovych with his Party of Regions, despite all the corruption and disrepute
of his regime, will always stand as a strong presidential candidate who can win elections
by tipping the scale with somewhat less than flagrant manipulation of vote
count with the help of corrupted election officials.
To the
dismay of any well-intentioned observer, the democratic opposition apparently
has no one able to beat Yanukovych’s 21 percent in preferential poll! This by
itself has a debilitating effect on the morale of any organized opposition.
It also
reflects the political immaturity of the Ukrainian people — even when they have produced a majority
vote for the sum of opposition parties in the parliamentary election in October.
At the same time they were duped by voting for “independent” stooges of
Yanukovych in many single-mandate districts.
At least
three opposition leaders –Yulia Tymoshenko, Arseny Yatseniuk and Vitali
Klitscho — are qualified to be elected president by the strength of their
ability and demonstrated devotion to Ukraine.
In
preferential poll, Tymoshenko, legitimate and politically persecuted and
fraudulently imprisoned leader of the opposition should be acclaimed without
hesitation as democratic and national choice for president. Common sense requires
unity of purpose — which unfortunately
is in short supply. And what about empathy
vote for all her suffering in prison? It doesn’t look like it flies in Ukraine.
In his
immortal poem “Moses,” Ivan Franko, Ukraine’s poet on par with Taras Shevchenko,
sorrowfully described his people shortly before World War II as being like
“paraplegic at a cross-way, laid open to contempt.”
There seems
to be today an air of confusion and indecision in the democratic opposition. It
is not clear if anyone has thought through the likely response of the
government to a real popular uprising verbalized by the opposition.
There is a
school of thought that if the government’s response is violent — as it probably would be — the regulars will not obey orders, and the
Donbas commanders installed by the president in Ukraine’s Security Service and
in ministries of interior and defense would cut and run. If they would.
But by any
reckoning, such expectations don’t make a strategy. Without pretending to make
predictions — in which some pundits have habitually engaged (such as “The
Orange Revolution is irreversible,” “Vladimir Putin system’s days are numbered,”
“Russia is on the brink of collapse”) — the right approach may be learned from
history.
Opposition
leaders perhaps should check the facts about the Orange Revolution —
especially some obscure background details. Some of them were reported in The
New York Times (January 17, 2005).
And,
speaking of successful uprisings, Ukraine’s history offers interesting reading
about popular uprising led by
left-of-center Directory coalition against Hetman’s government in November 1918,
when the government was seeking support from western Entente powers against the Bolsheviks, and declared federation with future non-Bolshevik Russia. The West was willing to provide military aid
to anti-Bolshevik Russian generals, but not to an independent Ukraine.
Without
making judgment about Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky’s regime itself, it is a matter
of record that the key to the uprising’s success (and pre-empting the Bolshevik
takeover at the same time) was the military force of the Sich Riflemen led by
Col. Evhen Konovalets that sided with
the directory. Near the town of Motovylovka, 30 kilometers from Kyiv, they routed
Hetman’s troops that consisted mainly of officers of Russia’s former Tsarist
army. Kyiv was liberated in a few days.
More
military units and peasant insurgents soon rallied in support of the directory,
to form the army of Ukrainian National Republic. It lasted two more years,
fighting against Russia’s invading Reds and Whites.
Konovalets
later became the founding leader of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists). He was assassinated by Soviet KGB agent in Rotterdam in 1938.
The analogy
of the 1918 uprising with today’s Ukraine relates to Yanukovych’s toying with joining Russia’s Customs Union. When his flirtation with the
European Union comes to an end, as it will soon, his priority will continue to
be on his personal prospects, which are inseparable from his authoritarian
traits. If and when the people really will “rise up”, his political sweepstakes
will become tied to his subordination to Russia, although his acquired personal
wealth could end up elsewhere.
At this
time, the acceleration of economic and civic disaster sown by the Yanukovych regime has opened another downward
dimension – loss of population with emigration from
Ukraine at the rate exceeding 300,000 annually (“Why Ukrainian are moving
abroad,” op-ed, Kyiv Post, March 20). This is part of the sad commentary on the
consequences of the Regions Party accession to power and abusing it.
The sum of
the failures of the Yanukovych regime to live up to the standards expected by
the European Union as a condition for signing an association agreement is
striking. Nevertheless, those who argue that the agreement should be signed,
despite Ukraine’s backsliding, offer some good-faith points (“Attention EU,” op-ed
by Will Ritter, Kyiv Post, March 17).
One point
is that this agreement would arguably have positive long-range results beyond
the lifespan of the present generation. Such as precluding Ukraine’s accession
to Russia’s
Common
Economic Space (another name for a revived Soviet Union). A second point is
that it would buy time for some good luck even before the Agreement is (or is
not) ratified by all EU members.
The problem
with that argument is that, given the unbending behavior of the present
government, the short-range effect of the agreement would not change the
ongoing motion of the country toward the edge of the cliff and over. And the “long-range’’
effect would be an oxymoron. For instance, the present government is planning a
referendum (no doubt rigged) that would make election of president in 2015
decided in the bribe-ridden parliament, and not by popular vote as it is now.
The signing
of the agreement would also provide a psycho-boost for the present regime.
And so, the
country needs to deal with its nemesis the hard way, the way our forebears had
done it, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. From a historical
perspective, the opportunity to do it right this time was almost never better
than it is today.
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American
living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
