The Observer profile: Viktor Yuschenko

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1361266,00.html

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Our man in Kiev

There's no doubt that the ravaged face of Ukraine's opposition leader is the one the West wants to see in power. But far from being a US stooge, the former Soviet banker is rapidly emerging as a genuine people's hero

Nick Paton Walsh
Sunday November 28, 2004
The Observer

Standing in the blowing snow addressing tens of thousands of Ukrainian, his face wrecked by an alleged poisoning attempt, Viktor Yuschenko does not seem to be anybody's 'patsy'. Certainly, the vast crowds who have joined Ukraine's opposition leader in Kiev, standing by him through a week of blizzards and political turmoil following the presidential elections, have made it clear they regard him as a hero.
Yuschenko casts himself as the accidental revolutionary. The epithet 'patsy' comes from Yuri Boldiryev, a former MP who knew the ex-chief of the central bank during his salad days in parliament. Leaning over a map of the Ukraine, he points at the tiny village near the north-eastern town of Sumi where Yuschenko was born in 1954.

'He has never been his own man. He has a village mentality,' says Boldiryev. 'Look how much closer he was in the Soviet Union to Moscow. But he never went there to study. Instead, he headed all the way here, to the west, to Ternopil, because his mother knew someone at the university.'

Boldiryev insists Yuschenko has always had a strong woman pushing him forward: his mother; his wife, Chicago-born ex-State Department official Katya, who introduced him to Washington; his deputy, Yulia Timoshenko. How, then, is this man with the ravaged face now threatening to overturn the Ukraine's corrupt political order? And, crucially, what does he promise?

A year ago, Victor Yuschenko was an uninspiring opposition politician in a largely ignored eastern European country best known for being one of the world's most venal. His movie-star looks made him the presentable frontman for the opposition, while his ritual patter was that of a prosaic fan of the free market.

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His own internet home-page reveals that woodwork, bee-keeping and archaeology are among his hobbies. His passion, he says, is volleyball. None of which seem the pastimes of a man challenging one of the most entrenched post-Soviet elites remaining in the former Soviet Union. These same, secure elites confidently put up the charmless but efficient Viktor Yanukovich - who had once been jailed - to face him.

Yet, in September, something happened to transform Yuschenko and the Ukraine. He fell victim to a mysterious illness that robbed him of his face but gave him the power of populist rhetoric. It led to the remarkable transformation of Yuschenko from nearly man to the visionary who is causing the crowds on Kiev's Independence Square to keep growing as the snow and threats of violence deepen.

At first Yuschenko dismissed it as a bout of severe food poisoning. But as the illness worsened he was rushed to the Rudolfinerhaus clinic in Vienna. Every organ was close to collapse yet doctors were completely baffled by what could have caused it.

The effect was staggering. He stood before parliament after his release from the clinic, his suntan now jaundice, his wrinkles transformed into the deep pock marks of chloracne that some experts say is consistent with ingestion of dioxins. With a new fury in his voice, he accused his government challengers to the presidency of trying to poison him.

'This is not a problem of food. I eat potatoes and pig fat, as do millions of other Ukrainians. What happened to me is not a problem of cuisine but a problem of the political regime in the Ukraine,' he said. 'I am not referring to the real cuisine, but to a political cuisine capable of brewing a politically motivated assassination. I want to know the names of the assassins very much.

'But even without any investigation the answer is simple - the [attempted] killer is the regime. I survived because my guardian angels were not asleep at the time. Every one of you is next, however'.

The government denounced it as a publicity stunt designed to attract sympathy towards a politician falling a few points behind in the polls. And while the state prosecutor did open a criminal investigation into the alleged poisoning, he concluded that Yuschenko had suffered a serious case of herpes.

Viktor Yuschenko was not born into the Soviet elite that retained control of the country after its independence in 1992. A teacher's son, he grew up in the tiny town of Khoruzhivka. After an education in Ternopil in western Ukraine, he returned home to take up a job his mother found him in the bank in their home town.

Yuschenko's account of his decision to head to Ternopil university rather than to Moscow is more colourful than that of detractors such as Boldiryev. It also suggests that there has been more than economics and number-crunching in the early life of this politician.

'As a boy I was a romantic,' he recalled in a recent interview. 'I read Jack London and Jules Verne. One day the former pupils who were studying in Ternopil arrived at the school-leavers' party and described the wonderful landscapes of Galychyna, about the caves, the Carpathians and the ancient forests. It was because of this I decided to attend Ternopil Financial Economic University, simultaneously joining three student groups: caving, mountaineering and tourism.'

This was a formative period for the young Yuschenko, and he established a lifelong love of sports that would feed into his later political ideas - ideas that would reflect the often vicious state of post-independence Ukraine.

'Sport is adventurous, unpredictable and sometimes violent,' Yuschenko has said. 'The same holds true for politics. It requires analysis and sober mind, devotion to the principles and ideas.'

But these were, perhaps, a later rationalisation. In his early career, Yuschenko would show little sign of being adventurous, moving into government under the tutelage of the then head of the USSR's central bank, Vadym Hetman, a powerful figure who went on to head Ukraine's first national bank and become Yuschenko's mentor as he rose to take his boss's old job.

Surviving a corruption scandal at the central bank, he impressed president Leonid Kuchma enough to be appointed his prime minister in 1999.

Two turbulent years would follow in which Yuschenko's free market ideas - his decision to pay off Ukraine's debts to Russia and try and regain the country's economic independence - would begin to rile the corrupt business oligarchs around Kuchma. A basket-case economy improved, but by 2001 he had upset too many interests and he was sacked.

It is this period that has led some at least to suspect Yuschenko's motives - most notably for his public statements of support for Kuchma in a series of controversies, including Kuchma's alleged involvement in the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze, that saw thousands of Ukrainians take to the streets in 2001.

But with his sacking, Yuschenko was suddenly on the outside and angry - his wife Katya becoming the catalyst for what would happen next.

Fervently anti-communist in her youth, Kateryna Chumachenko, had worked in the human rights bureau at the State Department, in the White House and the US Treasury - a devotee of free market economics described by one associate as 'one of the most dedicated conservatives I have ever known'. Katya took him to Washington, introducing him to senators as 'their man'.

While Washington has given financial backing to the growth of the opposition groups, it is not the whole story. Instead, it is Yuschenko's everyman appeal that keeps more than 100,000 people on the streets of Kiev in his support. When he addresses the crowd, he does not talk in ultimatums, or of bloodshed - harsh words that spark fear in a country whose history is wracked with conflict. Instead he jokes. He reads out figures about electoral abuse from a sheet of paper - a tiresome process that none the less appears to go down well with the placid people he seeks to lead.

Yet America's interest in his rise - and in the Ukraine - is part of the problem that is confronting the Ukraine. For as Russia felt threatened, and made blunter moves in retaliation, it turned an election race - initially a choice between two grey men called Viktor - into the last chapter of the end of the Cold War.

It is a chapter that in its final days has been dominated by that broken face. At first Yuschenko would sit for hours before a backstage mirror as an artist applied industrial strength make-up and fixing sprays. But since Sunday's allegedly fraudulent election, the foundation has come off, and now he addresses the crowd warts and all.

Gone too is a caution that - even in October - had led some of his closest supporters to wonder whether their man had the fire in his belly to go the distance. Now, as he addresses his supporters he tells them not to go home without 'victory'.

According to pro-opposition analyst Markian Bilynskyj: 'For a long time he sought constitutional and legal means to out-manoeuvre the government. Now he has become radicalised and is burning all his bridges.'

But even if he finally wins, he will inherit a country that is deeply divided. For all the allegations of attempts by the government to steal the election, it is also true that many - perhaps almost half of Ukrainians - did not vote for Yuschenko and policies that looked to a future with Europe and the West. Millions of Ukrainians in the east - who identify themselves as Russians - voted for a future allied with Moscow and the past.

Added to that, there are serious questions about what an 'orange revolution' - elements of whose Ukrainian nationalist coalition encompasses both anti-Semitic and anti-Russian sentiments - signify for the country's future.

For their part, his supporters say they are inspired by a hatred of the old regime, and a desire to see banished the former Soviet elite which stole the country's wealth. And it is with Yuschenko - the middle-man of the Soviet era, who many view as the quiet accountant and technocrat - that many see their future.

VIKTOR YUSCHENKO


DoB: 23 February 1954 (at Sums'ka Oblast)

Education: Economics at Ternopil

Jobs: Accountant; USSR State Bank; National Bank of Ukraine; Prime Minister; opposition leader

Family: Married to US-born Kateryna Yuschenko- Chumachenko