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| New York Times Magazine
January 1, 2006 By ANDREY SLIVKA Andrey Slivka, a writer based in Kiev, has written for The New Yorker and other publications. One Thursday morning this past September,Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine's prime minister, came to work to discover she had been fired. It is rare that events conspire to nudge Tymoshenko off balance. In a photograph taken that morning, the heroine of Ukraine's Orange Revolution and, as prime minister, her country's second most powerful official, looks stricken, gaping at a television screen on which her former ally, President Viktor Yushchenko, announces his decision to dissolve a bickering and ineffective government. By the next day, Tymoshenko would be swinging a hatchet in the sort of political brawl at which she excels. But for the moment, the peasant-braided field marshal of mass protests in this ex-Soviet republic resembled that archetypal creature: a handsome woman wronged. Tymoshenko spoke not long after her firing of the "shock" of her dismissal, and she was not the only person in the world surprised by it. In the last weeks of 2004, she emerged in the Western media as the belligerently populist leader whose good looks, energy and anti-establishment rhetoric made her an icon of the demonstrations that incapacitated Kiev and resulted in the overturning of a fraudulent presidential election. In the aftermath, Tymoshenko's partner, the opposition candidate Yushchenko, assumed Ukraine's presidency. He promised to orient the country Westward, away from its traditional hegemon Russia, and to tackle its biggest problem: the near-total corruption of its official and economic life. Faced with Tymoshenko's cultlike following among the protesters, the newly inaugurated president, who was suspicious of her headstrong political style, was forced to concede her the prime ministership she demanded, choosing her over candidates closer to him. On a wave of optimism, Ukraine's "orange" government, so named for Yushchenko's eye-catching campaign color, got to work in February. Ruled for so long by jowly ex-Communists, Ukraine now had leaders with whom the West could do business. Everything seemed fine. By late summer, however, the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko alliance had become a disaster, with the two leaders' camps at war and with Tymoshenko's followers accusing the Yushchenko administration of corruption. Few of the Orange Revolution's reformist goals had been met. It had also become clear that the two pillars of the revolution had visions for Ukraine that were as different as their personalities. Yushchenko is a soft-spoken and conciliatory former banker, and his presidency has been characterized by an almost painfully deliberate approach to ending official Ukraine's robust criminal culture. In contrast, Tymoshenko is a passionate radical by nature, who made settling accounts with Ukraine's crooked "oligarch" class a central theme of her tenure in office. Tymoshenko, who is 45 but looks and acts younger, is also a brash custodian of her own celebrity. The difference between how the politicians use the spotlight, or don't, was highlighted in late November at a snowy mass rally in Kiev to commemorate the revolution's first anniversary. Yushchenko trudged onto the stage in a stolid overcoat to recite an overlong speech; Tymoshenko, a rather small woman, crashed onto the scene late, electrifying her constituency as she was carried down through the crowd on her handlers' shoulders, laughing and waving Ukraine's flag. Camera lights intensified the luxurious whiteness of her clothes; followers screaming "Yulka!" (the diminutive form of her firstname) jostled to get near her. Tymoshenko's emotional, to-the-barricades rhetoric, in which she calls down thunder on Ukraine's robber elites, was honed in recent years, when she threw herself recklessly against President Leonid Kuchma's regime. She spent time in prison under Kuchma and had a flair for confrontation as a parliamentarian: she once tried to stab a rival legislator with a stiletto heel and threatened to use her hunting rifle on law-enforcement "rabbits" who made noises about arresting her. She is fun to watch, and you're not surprised when offbeat things happen to her: when her 25-year-old daughter recently married the singer in a British rock band called the Death Valley Screamers, it seemed appropriate. In 2005, Tymoshenko achieved a new level of renown, being named the world's third-most-powerful woman by Forbes and staring from the cover of Ukraine's edition of Elle. She is even something of a sex symbol: a series of Russian porn videos star a Tymoshenko look-alike. In the months before Ukraine's parliamentary election, scheduled for this March, Tymoshenko has seized the mantle of the Orange Revolution, casting Yushchenko as its betrayer. This is a typically polarizing move by a politician who is as distrusted by large segments of Ukraine's fragmented electorate - Ukraine's Eva Perуn, she has been called - as she is admired by her own followers. At the November rally, she delivered an aggressive speech calling for the stalled revolution to go on. "Once again," she declaimed in a reference to the oligarchs she blames for her dismissal, "the clans beat me - temporarily!" When Yushchenko finally spoke, her supporters taunted him by screaming her name. "Shout 'Yulia' one more time, and then I'll make my speech," the president sarcastically instructed. Tymoshenko, who likes to piously repeat that she bears Yushchenko no enmity, stood behind him wearing an expression of radiant innocence. Yushchenko, then, is on the defensive, harassed by a telegenic former partner who stands to represent those Orange Revolutionaries disappointed by the allegations of corruption in his camp and frustrated by his equivocations. (Three members of Yuschenko's circle have been accused of a variety of misbehavior, including extorting control of a Kiev luxury apartment building, helping business friends siphon money out of Ukraine's energy sector and trying to muscle in on media properties; the men were subsequently cleared by Ukraine's widely distrusted prosecutor general's office and by a special Parliament commission.) In the West, Yushchenko is considered a responsible leader who appropriately has done with revolutionary passions. But in Ukraine many are not convinced that the revolution was waged just to make Ukraine a safe place to invest. These Ukrainians yearn for the crusade against corruption and the elite bandits that the revolution promised them. Tymoshenko embodies that crusade. She wants, she says, to "justify the faith" of the Orange Revolution's supporters. And given the March parliamentary elections, as well as controversial changes to Ukraine's constitution, she may soon be in a position to do so. Under the revised constitution, Ukraine's Parliament - and no longer the president - will appoint and dismiss the prime minister. With this in mind, Volodymyr Polokhalo, a political analyst in Kiev, gives Tymoshenko an even chance of again becoming prime minister this spring. And if she doesn't, he gives her a 70 percent chance of becoming Ukraine's next president in 2009. Tymoshenko is a compelling mixture of ruthless calculation, iron will and sincere passion. After hijacking the November anniversary rally, she went on to weep onstage as Yushchenko, in his own speech, criticized her work as prime minister. In the spring of 2004, I watched Tymoshenko lead opposition forces to a huge parliamentary victory over the Kuchma regime. After a day of brutal politicking, she wandered into the Parliament lobby and, overcome by emotion, wept in the arms of a female journalist, a stranger to her. But only for a second. A moment later, as reporters noticed her, she had got control of herself, leaving my moved colleague in tears herself. In person, with her hallmark braids temporarily combed out and her honey blond hair hanging down around her face, Tymoshenko looks fresh-faced and soft. She speaks quietly, leaning over the table with a confiding air; an attentive listener, she often breaks into peals of laughter. On a warm September day in her offices in a shabby Soviet high-rise in Kiev, only the presence of her burly male handlers dispelled the impression that you are sitting with a charismatic grad student. She explained that Yushchenko made her prime minister because the people demanded it. The thesis is self-dramatizing, but like many of the superambitious Tymoshenko's gestures, it is charming in its very audacity. "Until the last day, I honestly didn't know whether he" - Yushchenko - "would put my candidacy forth as prime minister or not," she said. "When he arrived for the inauguration, the square simply started chanting my name, completely independent of my desires or his." The reference is to Yushchenko's inauguration day last January, on which an oceanic Kiev crowd greeted Tymoshenko by chanting her name louder than it did Yushchenko's. Soon after, she was indeed appointed prime minister and voted in by a huge parliamentary majority. The difficulties started soon after. Even beyond Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, the orange coalition was cobbled together from constituencies that often had little in common with one another except disgust with the Kuchma regime - the Kiev political analyst Dmytro Potekhin likens it to a group of people who converge to put out a fire. The administration broke down fast into mutually distrustful factions. If these were typical power struggles, other controversies spoke to Ukraine's new self-image. The question was, what kind of country was the revolution supposed to have created? For Ukraine's economic liberals and business community, and for the free-marketers in the West, it was expected that postrevolutionary Ukraine would be, in the first place, one welcoming to foreign capital, a place of liberal economic reforms. Tymoshenko defied these liberals immediately. First she offended their idea of property rights by making noises about seizing - in the name of the state - dozens of factories and other enterprises that had been acquired in the post-Soviet era by tycoons, Ukraine's so-called oligarchs. Many of these former Soviet properties had been auctioned off to insiders at very low prices, and what critics perceive as the effective theft of them from the commonweal remains a national sore spot in Ukraine. The moderate Yushchenko, for his part, favored seizing - and reselling cleanly - just a small number of the most flagrantly stolen properties, and perhaps as few as one. Next, faced with rising consumer prices, Tymoshenko intervened to control prices on meat and gasoline. This move raised the specter of socialism and embarrassed Yushchenko, who was talking of Ukraine being recognized as a market economy and entering the World Trade Organization by year's end. Tymoshenko's government also irked economic liberals when it hiked state pensions and salaries. Kseniya Lyapina, point woman for Yushchenko's faction in Parliament, says baldly that Tymoshenko "worked toward only one goal: to be liked." Lyapina went on to tell me: "She messed up the economics, because the economy is boring. It's not interesting; it's for the strategic future. But to be liked, that's necessary today, because the elections are tomorrow." And yet Tymoshenko's statism and populism do have appeal in a country in which even the young are not completely convinced of the need to jettison the entirety of their socialist inheritance. It is true that the youthful and heavily middle-class protesters of the Orange Revolution "didn't go out on Independence Square to ask for their pensions to be raised," in the words of Viktor Skarshevsky, an economic adviser to Anatoly Kinakh, a top member of the Ukrainian government. But neither did they take to the streets so that oligarchs could maintain their ownership of questionably obtained factories in the name of respecting property rights, or that known Kuchma-era hacks could stay in office, as they have in the Yushchenko administration. Tymoshenko's governance, then, may have been eclectic, ad hoc and counterproductive. But to that extent it was a reflection of the complications of the Orange Revolution. The protesters of 2004 were not simply young entrepreneurs in waiting, eager to embrace "freedom" and the global market. Those who took to the streets were guided in their revolutionary fervor not merely by aspirations of belonging to the W.T.O. but also by a conception of justice: as Skarshevsky puts it, they desired an end to corruption and "normal, simple, human rules." Yushchenko now appears to many a compromised figure, surrounded by supposedly corrupt allies and either unwilling or unable to strike the promised blows against Ukraine's criminals and corruption. He recently signed a political pact with his 2004 election opponent, the former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych - that is, he made a deal with the man in whose name the contest was rigged, and on whose behalf Yushchenko himself was poisoned in an apparent assassination attempt. Such alliance-making might be practical politics, but polls suggest that many Ukrainians want little part of it. All of this is significant because this poor, sprawling nation of 47 million people now matters in a way it has not since the Soviet Union's collapse. Bordered by the European Union on the West and by a newly fractious Russia to the north and east, Ukraine is today, as it has been in the past, a buffer space over which empires eye each other warily. "In Ukraine the stakes are incredibly high," says Oksana Antonenko, a senior fellow on Russia and Eurasia at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. New E.U. member states like Poland and Hungary that have traumatic cultural memories of Russian dominance, Antonenko says, see Ukraine as "a symbolic issue, for stopping Russia's post-Soviet neoimperialism." This is a neoimperialism that worries Ukraine - a place that even today many Russians have a hard time imagining as something other than the southern portion of their own country. Europe, for its part, has everything to gain from stability on its borders. Meanwhile, Ukraine has also become a vehicle for American ambitions. Washington, Antonenko says, would love to see a successful and populous democratic state on Russia's borders, and Ukraine is "the only candidate in the post-Soviet space" with a chance of becoming one. Then there's Ukraine's proximity to the oil- and gas-rich Caspian basin, over access to which China, Russia and the U.S. have begun to compete. If Caspian oil is to flow westward without passing through Russia, something Washington would like to see happen, then Ukraine, with its Black Sea ports and good pipeline networks, could play a role as a transit point. So Washington is not eager to lose Ukraine if Tymoshenko, whom Antonenko says the West considers a loose cannon, should grow more powerful. Her economic policies have market liberals and globalizers apoplectic. Anders Aslund, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has advised the Ukrainian and Russian governments on economic issues; he calls her "anti-internationalist" and "socialistic or statist and populist." He says "you have to go to Uganda" to find governance as bad as hers. Tymoshenko was not always a crusader. In fact, before she transformed herself into the scourge of Ukraine's tycoon class in the first years of this century, she was a member of it herself: the head of a well-connected company called United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) that made spectacular profits from 1995 through 1997, during Ukraine's "Wild East" days. Her rebranding of herself as a populist fighter, then, is one of the stranger stories in Eastern European politics. Based in Tymoshenko's hometown, Dnipropetrovsk - an industrially mighty river city southeast of Kiev - UESU was a trading company that sold Russian national gas in Ukraine. It was also a money machine that functioned under the protection of its patron, Pavlo Lazarenko, a powerful Dnipropetrovsk native son. Lazarenko, who was Ukraine's prime minister from spring 1996 to summer 1997 and deputy prime minister before that, employed crude Soviet-style administrative fiats to award UESU more than 50 percent of Ukraine's energy imports. Andrey Zolotaryov, a political consultant who worked with UESU, says that the corporation combined "the spirit of a capitalist enterprise" with "the smell of a regional Communist Party committee." UESU, he explains, was less a business than "a rod with which to catch a golden fish in the murky water of the post-Soviet economy." Tymoshenko and her husband and business partner Aleksandr (they married when she was 19) made the most of these circumstances. (The couple are now amicably separated but still married.) By her mid-30's, the daughter of a single mother who had toiled on Dnipropetrovsk's trolley system had become Eastern Europe's one and only "lady oligarch." Whether UESU dealings were "illegal" by the Wild East standards of the ex-Soviet Union in the 1990's - the political analyst Volodymyr Polokhalo speaks of the "total corruption" of the era - is a difficult question. In 1996, Tymoshenko was elected to Parliament with Lazarenko's support. But her patron's star was on the wane, and three years later, she left his party and started her own, which was called Fatherland. Lazarenko embarked on a downward spiral that led to his 2004 conviction, in California, on money-laundering charges. He is arguing for the reversal of his conviction. Tymoshenko, meanwhile, would at the end of 1999 take what was for her and Ukraine a fateful step. President Kuchma, now eager to curry favor in the West, hired as prime minister Viktor Yushchenko, the former head of the National Bank. Yushchenko was young, uncorrupted and, above all, internationally presentable. Tymoshenko joined Yushchenko's cabinet as deputy prime minister for energy issues. Because she knew its tricks, Tymoshenko proved an effective reformer of Ukraine's lucrative and filthy energy sector - perhaps too effective. Her brash reforms brought a huge tranche of Ukraine's shadow economy into the light. But her assaults on the prerogatives of Ukraine's crooked energy titans, her former peers, made her an irritant to the regime. She had to go. In mid-January 2001, Ukraine's top prosecutor accused her of having engaged in extortion, money laundering and other crimes while heading UESU. The charges, Polokhalo, the analyst, says, had an obvious "political character." "You could bring such charges against all the big businessmen of the 1990's," he explains. Kuchma fired her that same month. After Tymoshenko left the cabinet, she became head of the National Salvation Forum, a new civic coalition dedicated to forcing President Kuchma from office. The pressure on the Ukrainian leader was growing. Secret audiotapes implicated him in the disappearance of a muckraking journalist who ended up murdered, prompting a series of street protests aimed at toppling him. (The tapes also show Kuchma threatening to destroy Tymoshenko.) In February 2001, Tymoshenko was arrested at her house outside Kiev and spent six weeks in the city's notorious Lukyanivka prison. Later, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe found that Tymoshenko had been denied necessary medical treatment and kept in solitary confinement. Jailing Tymoshenko in the hope of silencing her turned out to be a strategic mistake. She was already a high-profile critic of Kuchma. Now, as she emerged from prison - poised, emaciated and fragilely beautiful - she had acquired a new glamour. It was then that people started calling her Ukraine's Joan of Arc. The sincerity of Tymoshenko's conversion is widely accepted by Ukraine's public. She has paid for it not only with jail time but also with years of harassment by the Kuchma regime and its allies. Chief among them was the Kremlin, an aggressive opponent of Ukraine's orange movement. At the height of the revolution in December 2004, Tymoshenko was briefly listed as wanted on the Interpol Web site in response to a Russian warrant connected with UESU-era charges. Early in her tenure as prime minister, there was media speculation over whether Tymoshenko could visit Moscow without being arrested. At home, too, she has until recently been dogged by what Polokhalo calls politically motivated investigations into long-past supposed misdeeds. The last of the investigations were closed only six weeks ago, when a Kiev court dismissed them for lack of evidence. More relevant, perhaps, than her old business dealings are the charges that Tymoshenko is at heart a state socialist. Skarshevky, an adviser to Anatoly Kinakh, a top Yushchenko administration member, called her, economically speaking, a "pure Bolshevik." Volodymyr Kulyk, senior research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev, says Tymoshenko is apt to exploit a blunt credo: "Take it away and share it." One thing that bothers people who would like to see Ukraine run by Western-style liberal technocrats is Tymoshenko's intensely personal political vision. It is a vision, indeed, of a female martyr figure keenly exploiting what Kulyk calls a "trope of betrayal." Kulyk glosses her stance this way: "Because I fought for you, I suffer for you. They persecute me because I'm dangerous, because I fight for you." When she spoke with me about her dismissal as prime minister, Tymoshenko, smiling tenderly and with her dark eyes softening, sketched out a narrative in which she played the abused spouse who was trying to keep it together with a bum for the sake of the kids. "I appealed to the president that he not create such a risk and shock, and that he not dismiss the government, because it's not logical, and it's very cruel to Ukraine and those people who stood out on Independence Square," she told me. "We haven't the right to rip apart the hearts of the people," she said, adding that she "wasn't planning to wage war with the president. It's not my war. I didn't go out for it." It's odd to hear state politics so reduced to the emotional. Similarly curious was her assertion of the inevitability of her free-market commitments. "As a person who worked for a period of time as a very big businessman, I can't be illiberal," she said. But United Energy Systems of Ukraine was a crony operation with at best a glancing relationship to the liberal economy. It is also often charged that Tymoshenko evinces a certain paranoid streak. This came up in our conversation, too. "From the moment I was made the prime minister," Tymoshenko told me, "they hired the most powerful P.R. agencies all over the world, the goal of which was simply to discredit me as prime minister." The themes of this negative public-relations campaign, she claimed, were her renationalization policies, her social program and her clothes. "They say that maybe I have too fine dresses for a prime minister," she said with a laugh. At the rally in November, Yushchenko's new prime minister, Yuriy Yekhanurov, was greeted with shouts of "shame, shame" when he took the stage. Shame, one of the shouting men explained, because he had had the temerity to replace Yulia. It may or may not be shameful, but it is a fact in Ukraine that there exists frustration with the Yushchenko team's abdication of the idea that the revolution was significantly meant to exact justice from a criminal elite. In a narrow political field - there is almost no one else approaching Tymoshenko's or Yushchenko's stature in Ukraine - Tymoshenko, despite or because of her quirks, is the leader who can channel that frustration. Nestor Shufrych, a colorful legislator in the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, which was loyal to the Kuchma government, says that Tymoshenko's firing was the birth of an "orange opposition" to Yushchenko - even though a crafty Tymoshenko has not ruled out reconciliation with the president. The Orange Revolution "was supported by two pillars," Shufrych says. "One was Tymoshenko, a granite one, and the second was Yushchenko, and that one was clay. It's probably not an accident that Tymoshenko began her career developing granite quarries, and Yushchenko likes to make whistle toys out of clay." The reference is to one of Tymoshenko's pre-UESU enterprises and to Yushchenko's well-known enthusiasm for Ukrainian peasant crafts. Shufrych is correct in pointing out that there can be "no competition" between the former allies when it comes to political skill. Nikita Poturaev, a political consultant who worked with Tymoshenko in the past, theorizes that she is a scientific adept of hypnosis and secretly charms the followers over whom she holds such powerful sway. In a talk-show appearance after her firing, Tymoshenko, demure in mauve, spewed forth a stream of humiliating allegations against Yushchenko's circle - and with an eyelash-batting innocence that in Parliament the next week earned her a sarcastic nomination to the ranks of Ukraine's official state actors. As Ukrainians approach the parliamentary elections that are widely expected to put Tymoshenko back in the Legislature and strengthen the representation of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, the question comes up: What, finally, does the political dynamo that is Tymoshenko want? When I asked what her Ukraine would look like, she answered vaguely that it would "look like a country where every person wants to come and live and invest money." She added, "It will be a country that will be able to be an example of how a country should look after a revolution." Her Ukraine would almost certainly be one less inclined toward economic liberalism and less concerned with the West's opinion. It would not always be a team player, as regards either its historic patron Russia or the West. It would be, possibly, eclectic in its policies and allegiances. But to that extent it could be expressive of the complicated allegiances of its population - caught between Russia and Western Europe; between the dreams of its socialist past and the specter of its market-capitalist future; between a desire to be part of the action of the West and a sense that the West is perhaps foreign. Finally, it would be a country in which the effort to eliminate dirty money would be on some level a principle of governance. But would it be a country led by a crusader - a country once again thrown into turmoil? "It's possible that if today I went out on the square," she told me, "then on the square there'd stand possibly twice as many people as stood during our revolution." But, she quickly added, "I'll never do that." She smiled warmly and brought up a production of "Joan of Arc" that was mounted several years ago at a Kiev theater. It was "a colossal success," she told me. "But the ending differed, the plot differed. No one burned anyone in a fire in it, they kind of changed it." She laughed. "Everyone stayed alive and healthy, and everything in general was all right." |
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