Sullen defiance as officials pile on pressure

By Julius Strauss in Kiev
(Filed: 26/11/2004)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/26/wukra126.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/26/ixnewstop.html

At the entrance to the state's huge Antonov aeroplane factory on the southern outskirts of Kiev, there was a mood of sullen defiance yesterday.

Four middle-aged women sat in ancient glass booths controlling Soviet-era turnstiles that allowed workers into the factory.

The previous day Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition leader, had issued a call for Ukrainian factory workers to walk out and join the revolution.

But in the working class Svyatoshino district, they were signing in and out as usual.

One of the women said: "The factory is working." The head of security scurried away and refused to talk. Then, without warning, a woman in her fifties with red-painted lips who had worked at the factory for 16 years, spoke out.

"I will tell you the truth," she said. "We are all for Yushchenko but the director here is one of Yanukovich's relatives and everyone is too terrified to speak out.

"He told us that, if we so much as mutter a word of support for the opposition, we will be out of jobs.

"We thought we had got rid of this fear in 1991 but it's still with us today."

Around her the other women began to nod their heads in vigorous support.

Across Ukraine thousands were aying aside the fear of decades yesterday and joining the opposition's call to arms.

For some, it meant speaking out truthfully for the first time that they could remember. For others, it meant a trip to the capital Kiev to join the growing ranks of protesters.

Outside the Antonov factory, a small group of men from Lviv in the west of the country were preparing to march on the centre. Volodya Madyar, a 45-year-old university lecturer, said: "In my home town all the factories, schools and universities are on strike. It will spread to the whole country."

In central Kiev, opposition supporters had taken over Ukrainian House, a huge building that was formerly the Lenin Museum.

It provided a sanctuary from the cold as the temperature fell to minus eight degrees. Hundreds had spent the night in the building sleeping on the floor on cardboard mats. Volunteers brought large pots of jam and huge quantities of ham and cheese sandwiches to keep them going. In one corner, activists had set up little booths to organise social services. One was for volunteers to sweep the streets. Another was for those looking for accommodation in the capital with opposition sympathisers.

Sitting on plastic chairs were hundreds of exhausted men and women who had spent most of the last four days and nights on the streets.

In the city thousands of government supporters, brought from the east and the south, were starting demonstrations, moving in small groups, taunting opposition supporters.