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Monday, March 26, 2001
By Sam Greene, Special to the Post-Gazette
KIEV, Ukraine -- For Igor, everything is clear. A 19-year-old revolutionary, he is not deterred by prison, freezing rain or the intransigence of his foe, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. The police and plain-clothes agents who keep tabs on him only stiffen his resolve.
Igor stands at the vanguard of the broad movement that has united right-wing nationalists, left-wing communists and virtually everyone in between under the slogan, "Ukraine without Kuchma." He is among a handful of students who have volunteered to brave the wet waning days of Kiev's winter, to sleep in tents and live on handouts, to make a point.
"When they tore down our first camp on March 1, they arrested me and put me in jail," Igor said, proudly, as he hammered a stake for a new tent camp a few days later. "But that was unconstitutional, so they had to let me go. Now I'm sure they'll try it again, but it will still be unconstitutional."
Igor was right. Early on March 7, sanitation workers cleared away the small protest camp, nestled under a statue of Taras Shevchenko, the country's patron poet. This time, there were no police, no arrests and no international outcry.
Igor and his comrades vowed to come back, and two days later they did. On March 9 -- Shevchenko's birthday and a national holiday -- Kuchma planned to lay a wreath on the poet's statue. Protesters planned to stop him.
"We're ashamed to have Kuchma honor our national hero," Igor said.
A pitched battle ensued, the protesters armed with rocks and bottles, the riot police with truncheons and tear gas. As many as 18,000 people took to the streets of Kiev that day, more than at any of the protests set off in January when a former bodyguard released tapes implicating Kuchma in the murder of Heorhiy Gongadze, a muckraking journalist whose headless body had been discovered in November.
The Ukrainian government has not hesitated to break up the protests or intimidate ringleaders. Popular opposition politician Yulia Tymoshenko has been jailed. Kuchma has demanded that all government officials swear an oath of loyalty to him.
Igor and his fellow students have been told that if they are seen at anti-Kuchma rallies, they will be expelled from their universities. For most of the young men, that could mean conscription into Ukraine's army.
If Kuchma hoped that tearing down the protest camps would break the opposition's momentum, he was mistaken. To the contrary, it has only increased the anger that most Ukrainians seem to share and has raised the stakes. Kuchma's ouster is only part of the goal now. The ultimate aim is a democratic revolution.
"We want Kuchma to go," Igor said. "And then we want a strong democracy for Ukraine. We have no real democracy now. We have repressions, and one man has died for the truth. First, Kuchma must go. And then we must have real, contested elections."
That is the one thing the protestors can all agree on.
The people fighting side-by-side against police were at each other's throats only a few months ago. Some want democracy, market reforms and membership in the European Union. Others seek to end private enterprise and return to state socialism. The loudest protesters, whatever their political bent, are Ukrainian nationalists, and their rhetoric has ethnic Russians, Jews and other minorities feeling uneasy.
"Anyone who doesn't speak Ukrainian is not a patriot and does not belong in government," exclaimed one woman at a recent protest, to a chorus of hurrahs. Only slightly more than half of Ukraine's 48 million citizens, however, consider Ukrainian their native language.
Among those who don't is President Kuchma, whose halting Ukrainian is delivered in a Russian accent and with frequent recourse to Russian words when he can't think of the Ukrainian equivalent.
"It's not enough for Kuchma to go, we need major changes right now," announced one white-haired protester to a crowd gathered around him. "Look. If Kuchma resigns, power falls to parliament. And who is in parliament? Jews!"
As Igor and the other students were setting up their tents, two protesters in their 40s were debating the causes of Ukraine's economic stagnation.
"Take vacuum cleaners, for instance," one said. "We used to make vacuum cleaners in Ukraine. But is your vacuum Ukrainian?"
"No, it's German," the other answered.
"Exactly," said the first. "We can't even clean up after ourselves without someone else's help. And why do you think that is?"
"We simply haven't reformed enough," the second said. "No one wants to invest."
"You're crazy," said the first. "It's the bankers in New York and Tel Aviv who control everything and hate the idea of a free Ukraine."
Intolerance is by no means pervasive. Within the protest camp, Igor insists, "There are no parties, only people who love Ukraine." And while Igor talks to strangers only in Ukrainian, with friends he jokes in Russian.
Igor and his friends have become idols for their elders, who have come to respect their fresh point of view. Serhiy, a retired farmer from Poltava, 185 miles east of the capital, said the young protesters are pointing the way forward, while everyone else gets mired in age-old squabbles.
"Since this all began, my wife and I have been taking turns coming to Kiev to show our support," he said. "People say we're nationalists. Yes, I suppose I'm a nationalist. But all that means is that I'm Ukrainian and I live in Ukraine with my childhood friends, who are Poles and Russians and Jews and Tatars, and we all need to believe in ourselves and in our country."
When he's not in Kiev seeing the protests first hand, he keeps track of them through broadcasts on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, as does Oleg, who lives on the outskirts of the capital. Oleg has become so enamored with the U.S. government-funded news service that he's come up with a radical proposal: Ukraine should become the 51st state.
"Why not?" he said. "If we put it to a referendum here, it would pass, no problem. I even checked the U.S. Constitution, and if we can become a state before my son is born, he can grow up to be president of the United States."
Sam Greene is a freelance journalist based in Moscow who writes for the Post-Gazette.
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