When history is being made, you focus on the mundane details, such as the snow that swirled down on election day in Kyiv. At the local voting precinct, the first representatives of the electorate to show up in the morning were, of course, retired women. I chatted with one, a former janitor, outside, in the snow. She grabbed me by the sleeve and helped me up when I went skidding on the icy, unkempt sidewalk.
“I voted for Yanukovich. I think there will be less chaos, with him.” She seemed a little doubtful. She also seemed like she didn’t think she had a whole lot of choice. Yanukovich, she felt, she could relate to. “He’s a simple man. That’s not a bad thing.”
Now that the Ukrainian presidential election is going to round two on February 7th, when Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko will be facing off against opposition leader Victor Yanukovich, Western observers are treating the fact that Victor Yuschenko’s presidential candidacy has been eliminated as some sort of news. Well, to be fair, it’s news for the outside world. It’s not news around here, though. For most people who lived through the economic and political turmoil that followed the Orange Revolution, Yuschenko has become a caricature of himself. His long-standing investigation into his own poisoning stopped eliciting sympathy a while ago.
“I voted against everybody,” Yaroslava, a 25-year-old translator living in Kyiv told me. “Because I don’t believe we have actual leaders in the country right now. If nobody can take care of the fallen branches in the street following the latest blizzard, and this is in the capital, what does that tell you about the state of the country?”
Eugene, a 28-year-old software developer, also living in Kyiv, told me about how he had made up his mind to vote for a certain candidate before he set out for the precinct in the morning. The road, however, struck him as so poorly maintained, that by the time he actually got to where he was driving, he felt obligated to cast a protest vote as well.
Victor Yanokovich’s main campaign slogan goes like this: “A Ukraine for human beings.” It may not be especially subtle, but it brings the point home. Ukraine, lately, has not seemed to be particularly hospitable to actual people.
“People shouldn’t give Yanukovich crap for having close ties to the Kremlin,” a friend from Donbass told me yesterday. “Why shouldn’t he have them? Living next to Russia doesn’t count for anything anymore?”
Both Tymoshenko and Yanukovich arouse suspicion in the West, some of it healthy, some of it not so much. Without getting into the interesting details of both candidacies, many people automatically brand the two as suspect due to the fact that the Kremlin is, indeed, not frothing at the mouth with hatred for either one. This is, of course, automatically a bad thing. It’s almost as if nothing short of an armed conflict with the Russian Federation would please certain people, at this point. Of course, the people in question would not stand to lose a whole lot should that, God forbid, actually happen.
Kyiv is often referred to as “the mother of Russian cities,” which is no empty phrase. Despite the devastating effects of both Russian and Soviet imperialism, there are many ties that do, in fact, bind the Russian Federation and Ukraine. To discount them is idiotic, and destroying them would pave the way for more unrest in Europe.
The people who prefer Yulia Tymoshenko, however, see her as both more independent, tougher and, let’s face it, classier than Victor Yanukovich.
“Just don’t try to tell me I voted for Yulia because she’s good-looking,” another friend of mine, who works as a builder in Zhitomir, said to me over the phone.
“Of course not! That would be sexist!”
“It would be stupid, because look at her track record. Yuschenko fell apart, Tymoshenko charged ahead. I don’t care what anyone thinks, you have to admire her for that, at least. And the white tiger in the campaign posters. I don’t care. It’s genius.”
He’s right. It is genius. Yanukovich may appeal to people with folksiness, but it is Tymoshenko who knows the true meaning of spectacle. While I would shy away from making sweeping pronouncements on Ukrainian culture, I have always believed that one of the things people really know how to do around here is having fun, and Yulia Tymoshenko is incredibly fun. She didn’t fall apart either, it’s true. She has, like the Bob Dylan song, kept on keeping on, blunders and all. People who seriously refer to her as the Ukrainian Sarah Palin have no idea what they’re talking about. Tymoshenko could school Sarah Palin on everything from international relations to media image to money to the art of the save. There is a lesson in the fact that Tymoshenko was not buried in the debris of the failed Orange Revolution.
For now, as I slipped and fell on the ice for the second time yesterday, in an unkempt courtyard smack in the city center, I did catch myself hoping that Tymoshenko’s tenaciousness will translate into actual stability. And do so sooner, rather than later.
Yes, she can and does keep on, leaving behind the corpses of her former companions. Ukraine will have to turn to authoritarian state when she is elected, because too many people don’t want to have former criminal as a head of state.
The only thing that scares me more than the folksy ways of Mr. Yanukovich are the duplicitous actions of Ms. Tymoshenko.