The Orange Revolution, One Year On

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On Nov. 22, 2004, the mass protests began that sparked Ukraine's Orange Revolution. One year on, has it all gone horribly wrong? Will historians come to withdraw the noun, and refer to the period simply as "Orange?" In the short term, the answer lies in the very different personalities of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and his former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.

Tymoshenko's key strength is that she understands the effectiveness of "anti-oligarch" politics in the former Soviet Union. There is no doubt that the Kremlin's campaign against Yukos in 2003-04 tapped into the strong popular resentments of the 1990s and served as a powerful loadstone to realign the political system, whatever the unexpected consequences. Tymoshenko thinks she can exploit the issue similarly in Ukraine. The length of the reprivatization saga under her premiership can only be explained by its function as election dramaturgia -- especially when set alongside her populist budget spending on pensioners and mothers. Ukraine may have had no dramatic arrests on airport tarmacs -- although as well as Kryvorizhstal, there have been some less-heralded steps, such as restoring the government's majority control of the Ukrtatnafta refinery. Ukraine has no equivalent of Khodorkovsky in jail. What it does have is Tymoshenko, the East European Evita, friend of the poor.

Tymoshenko, of course, if not herself a current oligarch, is at least a former highly successful businesswoman, which is her most obvious weak spot. Her vulnerability was shown in August when she was forced to sit through an embarrassing press conference while a brave journalist read out the price of her handbags, including a Manhattan PM Louis Vuitton at $1,280 and the pricier Le Talentueux at $2,140 -- after she had put her official income declaration at 65,667 hryvnas (just under $13,000), plus a mere 900 hryvnas in the bank. She also collected some strange allies while she was prime minister, particularly in the parliament, where her faction almost doubled in size. Three who swelled the ranks were Oleksandr Abdullin, former president of Intergas, who used to represent implacable Tymoshenko opponents like Ihor Bakay and Viktor Medvedchuk's Social-Democratic Party; Vasyl Khmelnytsky, the young businessmen whose empire includes Zaporizhstal and several oblenergos and who helped to set up the fake "Green" Party in 1998 and the fake "Women for the Future" Party in 2002; and Oleksandr Feldman, who represented the so-called "Kharkiv Group," UkrSibBank and AVEK. Beyond these strange parliamentary bedfellows, there is also the uncertain nature of Tymoshenko's relations with the Pryvat group, led by "orange oligarch" Ihor Kolomoysky.

With friends like these, Tymoshenko can fund the coming campaign, with or without her own money. On the other hand, some other new friends didn't stay in Tymoshenko's faction long: Several of the so-called "metallurgists," including Mykola Soloshenko and Enver Tskitishvili, jumped ship as soon as she lost office in September, followed by "agrarians" like Mykola Hopochka, who likewise left her faction -- but not the parliament -- in November.

Tymoshenko has a ruthless streak. The September crisis unleashed a vicious war of kompromat, from which she initially came out ahead. Her ratings have remained steady, while those of Yushchenko's party, People's Union-Our Ukraine, have fallen. Indeed, Yushchenko has to face the nightmare possibility that the People's Union is already fatally damaged, especially after he backed away from a purge of the so-called "business faction" at the party's pre-election congress on Nov. 12. He is being urged by some to head its ticket, but that may now risk both his own prestige and contradict the spirit of his pledge that the People's Union will not use "administrative resources" in 2006. And if reports that former Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun will end up in the Tymoshenko camp turn out to be true, it is likely Piskun will reload for Round 2 in the war of kompromat, with more assaults soon to come on the other side's integrity.

Yushchenko's great problem has always been an over-willingness to deal with the old guard. For the 2002 elections, for example, he took on so many turncoats from the Kuchma camp that he was forced to sack seven of them within two months when they voted for Kuchma's candidate as speaker of the parliament. Before November 2004, many of Yushchenko's supporters would have accepted a compromise of some sort with the old regime, but the Orange Revolution raised expectations dramatically. And on the campaign trail, Yushchenko himself had promised to repeat his policies as prime minister in 1999-2001, when carefully sequenced steps had successfully purged the economy of some of the more blatant schemes and scams. But apart from a successful push on tax revenues and the reform of some notorious cash sieves -- the state railroad management, at least, is no longer robbing the house blind -- nothing equivalent was even attempted in 2005 while the reprivatization controversy hovered in the political air. Beyond this, the failures to stamp out the Zvarych scandal when it first broke and to rein in the wheeler-dealer antics of Petro Poroshenko at the National Security and Defense Council were tactical errors that surely did not promote a Yushchenko-as-reformer message.

Yushchenko was sufficiently decisive in his response to the September crisis to raise hopes that the revolution could be restarted. He removed Poroshenko and all but one of the campaign financiers whom he had rewarded with ministerial seats. He sacked Piskun and appointed Serhi Holovaty, a respected reformer, as justice minister. But true to form, Yushchenko was not decisive enough. He claimed those he had sacked had done nothing wrong, leaving the door open for their potential return, and did nothing to probe the more damaging allegations, such as his chief of staff Oleksandr Tretyakov's supposed involvement in the ongoing exploitation of RusUkrEnergo, or Boris Berezovsky's claims of donating millions to the cause. Deputy Prime Minister Roman Bezsmertny's blas? comments about Berezovsky's useful "cooperation ... on public campaigns" betrayed a woeful ignorance of the effectiveness of yet another propaganda hit.

Arguably, Ukraine needs a combination of the better qualities of both politicians: Tymoshenko can reach the kind of audiences Yushchenko cannot, and Yushchenko can temper Tymoshenko's populist excesses. Ukraine needs a business-friendly government, but not a government run by business. Ukraine is still capable of reaching a much better deal with the oligarchs than has happened in Russia -- not a dividing wall between politics and business but forgiveness for past sins in return for the gradual conversion of the suddenly rich into honest citizens.

Ukraine now has a three-party system, consisting of the old opposition, Tymoshenko and Yushchenko's People's Union. Unless one or another receives a knockout blow in the March elections, a coalition government is likely. Neither Yushchenko nor Tymoshenko is going to go away. Can they cooperate again after so much blood has been shed between them?

Andrew Wilson is the author of "Ukraine's Orange Revolution."