People Power: Unlikely Democrat Leads the Charge In Ukraine's Revolt

People Power: Unlikely Democrat Leads the Charge In Ukraine's Revolt --- At
Pivotal Moment in History, A Former `Oligarch' Takes To the Barricades in
Kiev --- Jail Hardens Ms. Tymoshenko

By Yaroslav Trofimov
2,221 words
6 December 2004
The Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2004, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

KIEV, Ukraine -- Yulia Tymoshenko climbed atop the stage, her blond hair
braided in Ukrainian folk style and her face beaming across central Kiev on
giant TV screens. More than a hundred thousand dejected protesters suddenly
came alive. "Yulia, Yulia, Yulia," they roared, waiving their campaign's
orange flags.
It was Nov. 24, and the central electoral commission had just ruled that
opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko had lost his bid for the presidency,
in an election that outside observers said was riddled with fraud. Ms.
Tymoshenko, 44 years old, issued her marching orders to the crowd: Blockade
the Council of Ministers. "Let all those nice people there go home tonight,"
she instructed, in scathing tones. "But tomorrow morning, don't let them
back in. They will be joining our strike, a tiny bit involuntarily."
Radical use of "people power" -- often personally led by Ms. Tymoshenko --
brought the Ukrainian government to the negotiating table. It also helped
pressure the Ukrainian Supreme Court Friday to cancel the results of the
Nov. 21 election. A re-vote is set for Dec. 26, and most independent polls
have Mr. Yushchenko beating the current prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych,
by a wide margin.
The display of popular anger with an autocratic regime reminded the world of
similar protest movements that ousted Communism across eastern Europe -- a
parallel underscored by Poland's Solidarity movement founder Lech Walesa,
who cheered Ukrainians last month as he stood side by side with Ms.
Tymoshenko on stage.
But, unlike Mr. Walesa or Vaclav Havel, a Czechoslovakian playwright who
rose to the presidency, the leaders of Kiev's "orange revolution" aren't
idealistic outsiders. Many stood at the helm of Ukraine's government and
business establishment just a few years ago under current President Leonid
Kuchma, whom they now decry as a dictator. Ms. Tymoshenko herself made a
fortune through political connections in the murky aftermath of the Soviet
Union. As a deputy prime minister in 1999-2001, she kept an office in the
same Council of Ministers building her supporters now block.
"Tymoshenko is posing as a folk heroine, but her history is a history of
oligarchic clans in Ukraine," says Stepan Havrysh, head of the
pro-government Democratic Initiatives faction in Ukraine's parliament. "All
these people in the opposition didn't just work for Kuchma, they got their
influence, their visibility, their importance thanks to him. They know very
well how this system works, and now they're simply trying to take it over."
Unlike other former Communist satellites, this nation of 48 million people
was slow in shedding the vestiges of the old system. Instead, it remained in
limbo between the West and its former overlord, Russia, after independence
in 1991. Many Russians to this day consider Ukraine to be part of the mother
country and assume it will be reunified.
Russian President Vladimir Putin fed these feelings by publicly campaigning
for Mr. Yanukovych, who pledged to press for dual citizenship between the
two countries and to make Russian the official language. Meanwhile, Mr.
Yushchenko championed integration with the West. Thus, for the first time
Ukrainians faced a stark geopolitical choice. Their passionate reaction to
election-day fraud suggested that a commitment to democracy has taken root
in a nation that, like Russia itself, had little democratic tradition
before.
One of the biggest unknowns of the Ukrainian revolution is what the
checkered record of many of its leaders portends for the future. In the 10
years of President Kuchma's rule, this has become an autocratic land where
politics and business intertwined in a web of corruption. Will November's
explosion of pro-democracy fervor on Ukrainian streets translate into a
truly democratic, accountable government? Or would a Yushchenko presidency
mean business as usual, with one group of power-hungry politicians and
moguls simply replacing another?
In a way, the answer may have been given by the sheer size and intensity of
the protests, says prominent businessman Aleksandr Rodniansky, who claims he
isn't a partisan of either side. "The Ukrainian people have proved that they
can no longer be easily lied to," he says.
In his personal contribution to change, Mr. Rodniansky, the founder of one
of Ukraine's biggest television networks, 1+1, went on air Nov. 25 to
apologize for following government orders to slant the news against Mr.
Yushchenko. He pledged honest coverage in the future. "True, many among the
opposition leaders have skeletons in their closets. I don't believe in a
democratic transformation of adult forty-somethings" like Ms. Tymoshenko,
Mr. Rodniansky says. "But now these people are likely to become hostages of
their own democratic rhetoric."
Unlike some of his allies, Mr. Yushchenko, a 50-year-old former prime
minister and central bank governor married to a Chicago-born former White
House staffer, wasn't involved in business and is widely considered honest.
He has garnered great sympathy with accusations that officials close to
President Kuchma tried to poison him in an assassination attempt that
severely disfigured his face. Ukrainian officials denied any such attempt
and medical tests have been inconclusive.
Mr. Yushchenko sounded all the right notes in a speech at Kiev's main square
this weekend: "We want a Ukraine where the law rules, where human rights are
respected, and where oligarchs don't exist," he said. "Prosperity is
impossible without democracy."
Shoulder to shoulder with him stood Ms. Tymoshenko -- a person whose
reincarnation as a paladin of democracy would have been hard to imagine just
a few years ago. Ms. Tymoshenko hails from the eastern Ukrainian city of
Dnipropetrivsk, a breeding ground for the old-style Communist elite. The
bleak and predominantly Russian-speaking center of Soviet industry is also
the hometown of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, of President Kuchma, and of
many leading oligarchs collectively known as the "Dnipropetrivsk clan."
An economist by training, Ms. Tymoshenko -- who says she'd like to become
prime minister under a Yushchenko presidency -- initially had to supplement
her income by taking a night job hauling tractor tires at a local tire
factory. Those were hard times. In the early years of Ukraine's independence
after the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse, the country's economy went into a
tailspin, with companies unable to pay for Russian gas and oil.
That's when another Dnipropetrivsk native, Pavlo Lazarenko, came up with a
plan. As deputy prime minister for energy, and then as prime minister, he
allowed select private companies to import gas directly from Russia and to
resell it to final consumers for barter goods rather than cash. Ms.
Tymoshenko's company, United Energy Systems, emerged from obscurity in 1996
to become one of the main intermediaries in this new market, successfully
reselling the barter goods it had received for the Russian gas.
The same year, Ms. Tymoshenko also secured a parliament seat, and became
deputy head of Mr. Lazarenko's Hromada party. "It was a fashion among
businesspeople to enter politics at the time. In all honesty, I was
completely apolitical then," she says. The following year, Mr. Lazarenko
stepped down as prime minister amid complaints about mounting corruption and
slow reforms. Ms. Tymoshenko's gas-trading business started unraveling as
the most lucrative contracts went to others better connected with President
Kuchma.
Applying her business brain to Ukraine's overall economy, Ms. Tymoshenko
says she decided to "totally focus on politics, which totally destroyed my
business." She became chair of the parliament's budget committee and, in
1999, joined the new reformist cabinet formed by Mr. Yushchenko. As deputy
prime minister for energy, Ms. Tymoshenko enforced prompt payments in an
industry where companies owned by oligarchs connected to President Kuchma
often failed to pay for energy themselves while collecting money from
consumers.
This energy reform is often cited as the biggest economic success of Mr.
Yushchenko's two years as prime minister. "She knew from experience how all
these schemes worked, and so for her it was easy to shut them down,"
explains Volodymyr Usatenko, a former lawmaker who worked with Ms.
Tymoshenko at the budget committee.
This was also the time when Ms. Tymoshenko's legal troubles began. She faced
a full-scale investigation into her gas-trading business and her dealings
with Mr. Lazarenko. It didn't help that her former mentor was by then in a
U.S. jail facing money-laundering charges filed in San Francisco federal
court.
Ukraine's attorney general accused Ms. Tymoshenko of siphoning off $2.3
billion in state property during 1996-1997. In the U.S., the indictment
against Mr. Lazarenko alleged that she had paid the former prime minister
over $150 million in kickbacks. The case was brought in the U.S. because
prosecutors argued that he laundered money through financial accounts there.
Ms. Tymoshenko, who wasn't herself indicted in the U.S. case, strenuously
denies any wrongdoing. "I and my family are victims of political reprisals,"
she says about all the legal cases against her.
In 2001, after leaving Mr. Yushchenko's government, she was jailed for
several weeks. A district judge in Kiev threw out the charges against her,
setting her free; he was subsequently removed for exceeding his discretion.
A U.S. judge in the Lazarenko case dismissed in mid-trial the charges
relating to Ms. Tymoshenko on the grounds that prosecutors didn't show the
alleged transactions directly damaged the Ukrainian state. Mr. Lazarenko was
subsequently convicted on 29 felony counts relating to another business
venture.
While Ukrainian authorities still want to put Ms. Tymoshenko on trial, she
remains free because fellow legislators, accepting her claim of political
persecution, have repeatedly refused to lift her parliamentary immunity.
(MORE)
Weeks behind bars turned the once "apolitical" Ms. Tymoshenko into a
hardened foe of President Kuchma, then in the middle of a scandal around
recordings allegedly made in his office. The tapes, whose authenticity
President Kuchma denied, seem to implicate him in the killing of independent
journalist and frequent critic Grigory Gongadze. Ms. Tymoshenko quickly
seized on a wave of popular revulsion over the Gongadze murder to stake out
a role as the standard-bearer of popular discontent with the regime, leading
an unsuccessful campaign to impeach President Kuchma in 2001.
"She survived such a strong pressure from the authorities that, even though
she herself was an oligarch, she now has the image of a martyr, and an
oligarch-buster," says Anatoly Grytsenko, a leader of Mr. Yushchenko's
campaign who, before this fall's election, headed Kiev's Razumkov Center
think tank.
Ms. Tymoshenko insists that she's virtually broke. "I no longer have the
financial means to support the revolution," she says. "I can only provide
spiritual support."
Seeking to stake out a political base of her own, Ms. Tymoshenko cultivated
a passionate nationalist image, an unusual choice for someone who, by her
own admission, learned how to speak Ukrainian only four years ago. As part
of this makeover, Ms. Tymoshenko started wearing a folk braid hairstyle that
evokes the look of Lesia Ukrainka, a 19th-century nationalist poet idolized
by many Ukrainians. Her parliament group, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, has
united hard-line Ukrainian nationalists, including such gray-haired veterans
of the Soviet Gulag as Levko Lukyanenko and Stepan Hmara.
This turnaround has made Ms. Tymoshenko a bete noire of Russia's
establishment. In September, a month before the presidential election's
first round, Moscow issued an arrest warrant against Ms. Tymoshenko,
accusing her of bribing Russian defense-ministry officials in the 1990s. Ms.
Tymoshenko dismissed the charges as yet another effort by President Putin to
scuttle Mr. Yushchenko's campaign, and refused to travel to Russia for the
trial.
"I'm surprised that Putin is stooping so low," she says, and then issues a
warning of her own. "This orange mood that we have in Kiev, and that will
triumph here, will spill over to Russia, too. Vladimir Putin should think
about this."
In Kiev last month, Ms. Tymoshenko exploited anti-Russian resentment to
transform electoral protests into an existential battle for Ukraine's very
independence. She personally led a column of protesters to President
Kuchma's headquarters, guarded by rows of riot police. There, after pinning
carnations on the troops' shields, she negotiated her way into the building,
just to emerge with sensational news: Russian special forces were allegedly
ensconced inside, ready to fire on protesters, because Ukraine's own troops
were supposedly reluctant to support the regime.
Ukraine and Russia denied Ms. Tymoshenko's claim, and Western diplomats were
skeptical. But this report of Russian military presence in Kiev did wonders
to raise the campaigners' determination -- and to bring to their side
Ukrainian policemen and soldiers outraged by reports of foreign meddling.
"Finally, Ukraine is rising from its knees," says Ukrainian Army General
Vitaly Radetsky, surveying tens of thousands of demonstrators, an orange
Yushchenko button pinned to his uniform. "Tymoshenko's past? All we know is
what the authorities say. They've been trying to get her for three years,
using all possible means, and still haven't been able to."
---
Gregory L. White in Moscow contributed to this article.