Then I got to Khreshchatyk around noon last Thursday, I was feeling pretty obtuse. I had drunk a lot of cognac the night before. But even through the shroud of my hangover, I noticed something strange was afoot. The 30 tents and the hundred or so residents that had lined Kiev’s main drag for the last month were gone, and groups of cops were milling around everywhere.
    The tents had belonged to various factions of Ukraine Without Kuchma, a loose coalition of anti-presidential parties formed after President Leonid Kuchma got caught on tape ordering the disappearance of the obscure journalist Georgy Gongadze. Gongadze is now a headless corpse. The tents were, theoretically, above the law; Parliamentary Deputies had set them up, thereby conferring upon the shelters immunity.
    But now they were gone, and nobody seemed to know what happened. A group of fifty pensioners and undercover SBU (Ukraine’s answer to the FSB) agents was hanging around the spot where the camp’s headquarters had recently been. Otherwise, it was like a normal weekday lunchtime crowd on Kiev’s busiest street.
    This banal scene was typical of breaking news during the months after Gongadze’s disappearance. Everybody knew an event took place, but they were waiting until the evening news to find out what exactly the event was. Spontaneous action seemed to be a right reserved for the authorities.
    Reporters know the general pattern: the authorities do something outrageous and illegal, and then the opposition calls a press conference. With the current state of freedom of speech in Ukraine, the opposition’s side rarely gets beyond the press conferences into Ukrainian- or Russian-language media. Thus, the authorities hold the exclusive right to domestic spin, while Ukraine Without Kuchma complains listlessly.
    After the tent removal, the vaguely nationalist opposition group UNA-UNSO called a press conference around 2 p.m. I didn’t go to that. Press conferences don’t compliment hangovers. Besides, I had already seen enough of Ukraine’s uninspired protest movement. I had come to Kiev to see the February 25 protests against Kuchma, which were hyped at the time as the largest protests yet. For a brief moment, I even believed that Ukrainians might throw Kuchma out of office because of the overwhelming evidence implicating him in crimes ranging from election rigging to theft and murder. I believed that hundreds of hours of tape highlighting Kuchma’s gross abuses of power and grammar would awaken the moral outrage of a country with Albania-sized prospects.
    I believed that until I saw the protests. It is hard to imagine a more inept group of agitators. That they were forced to memorize Lenin in school year after year is an insult to the Soviet educational system. The evidence against Kuchma—recordings made by a former security officer Mykola Melnychenko in Kuchma’s office—shows him conspiring to take bribes, punish disloyal officials, disappear Gongadze, and rig elections. Virtually everyone familiar with the tapes is convinced they are real. From what I heard talking to drivers and other Kievians whose only exposure to the case was via the remarkably biased mainstream media, everyone else thinks they are real, too. And yet the opposition can’t mobilize popular support to unseat him.
    Ukraine Without Kuchma is an umbrella organization with its largest factions being UNA-UNSO (a marginal nationalist group from Western Ukraine), the centrist Socialist Party (headed by one-time Presidential candidate and political Mr. Clean Olexsandr Moroz) and Batkivshchina (the political party of former Energy Vice Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who became part of the opposition after Kuchma threw her in jail). The movement’s failure to disassociate itself from its various political members doubtlessly has hindered its growth.
    Then there is the problem of image. UNA-UNSO handles the security for the tent city and the demonstrations. Their guards are identifiable by their fatigues and black and red armbands featuring a wannabe swastika. They don’t really manage to inspire fear, though, because the average age of the guards is around 16. Rather, they just make the protesters seem like a collection of goofy kids with nothing better to do. The ragtag security is tough to take seriously.
    Organizers claimed that protest on the 25th would attract up to 15,000 people. However, they didn’t advertise the event; few fliers, bumper stickers or gimmicks were distributed to attract the masses. There is no single identifiable symbol that all protesters can display in solidarity. Although symbols like the red AIDS ribbon may be cheesy, every organizer should know their propaganda value. Simple visible identifiers allow movements to gain visibility and active participants who don’t have time for protesting. This time they promised performances by a couple of mildly famous rock groups, but they still didn’t do much to attract students, who should have been the backbone of any revolution.
    The Sunday protest began with four columns gathering at various points around Kiev’s center. The columns then marched to Khreshchatyk, where they united for the length of the presentation. I went to tag along with Tymoshenko’s party, which was gathering at the Palace of Sport. Unfortunately for Batkivshchina, that night a basketball game between BC Kiev and Moscow CSKA was scheduled at the Palace. This seemingly tangential fact made for the most exciting part of the rally.
    At around 3 p.m., just as the column was getting organized, a busload of Moscow basketball fans arrived. I got there too late to see the action, but the Muscovites started a brawl using various weapons, including a sock full of rocks, beer bottles, and steel-toed boots. The fight lasted several minutes and drew some blood.
    That was as violent as the protests ever got. Several Western reporters I was with seemed eager to find out that this was a provocation by Presidential forces. (During a previous protest, errant groups of self-proclaimed anarchists started fights with anti-Kuchma demonstrators. Some of them admitted that they had received a payment of Hr 20, or about four dollars, to disrupt the protest.) Unfortunately, this fight seemed to be much less nefarious; they were just a bunch of Russian basketball fans killing time before the game.
    By the time I got to Palats Sportu, the last suspects were getting hauled into a paddy wagon and only broken beer bottles remained as evidence. The column, made up of average-looking middle-aged Ukrainians, continued to gather. Soon, they began a half-mile march to the meeting point. Somehow, I ended up carrying a sign that read, “Yulia, we’re with you.”
    While that might be an overstatement—at the moment Yulia was rotting in one of Kiev’s pre-revolutionary jails—I certainly have some sympathy for her. A year and a half ago, she was appointed by Kuchma with a mandate to fix Ukraine’s hopeless energy sector. She was a close associate of Ukraine’s most famous corrupt politician Pavel Lazerenko (who is currently in jail awaiting extradition in California), which made her an unusual choice in the fight against corruption in the energy sector. However, as deputy premier she managed to significantly reduce the use of barter deals among regional energy companies, thereby cutting into a lucrative source of income for Ukraine’s oligarchs.
    As her popularity among Ukraine’s ruling class declined, she turned to the West for job security. She is relatively young, attractive and has a savvy hairstylist; this combination quickly won her associations with the good guys/ reformers in Western embassies. Before the tapes scandal broke, Tymoshenko’s job was guaranteed because of Kuchma’s need to present a reformist face to the West.
    After the scandal, though, she was fired, probably to make Ukraine’s oligarchs happy while simultaneously distracting attention from the President.
    Now, she has achieved a status not unlike Gusinsky’s; she is guilty as charged, but she is clearly being persecuted for political reasons.
    So, in the scheme of Ukrainian politics, I had no objections siding with Yulia. Or at least I was with her until the march got to Khreshchatyk, where I handed the sign to someone else and went off in search of blini and caviar.
    The thing was, the protest happened to coincide with the last day of Maslenitsa—the Orthodox equivalent to Mardi gras—a time when people traditionally eat blini to celebrate. For the first time since the October Revolution, the Kiev City Administration organized a giant street fair to celebrate the holiday. There were two separate bandstands blasting music, kiosks that lined the street selling blini, and clowns selling cheesy souvenirs on every corner.
    The tactic quite effectively disrupted the protests. The line between protester and reveler was fuzzy at best; even the diehard protesters would wander away for glasses of hot wine or some pirogi. Kids wearing Styrofoam bunny ears and their beer-drinking fathers would stop for a few minutes and watch, as if the demonstrations were just another part of the street party.
    Anyone standing on the edge of the protest found himself dealing with a cacophony of noise coming from street speakers that blasted horrid music, the protesters’ speeches, and a Ukrainian folk group belting out atonal drinking songs. All this sound came from within a space of 20 yards. It melted into a jumble of white noise.
    About five thousand people came out for the protests; the crowd was about the same as the last large demonstration. Maybe a thousand cops sat in buses just off Khreshchatyk, just in case something gave them an excuse to start bashing heads. They needn’t have bothered, however; except for the basketball fight, there was no violence.
    The protest itself lacked inspiration. There were performances by a couple of Ukrainian bands, but the sound quality made them practically inaudible. Hearing the speeches from the back of the crowd was equally tough. The temperature hovered around -5 Celsius, making long periods standing in one place extremely unpleasant. I probably spent more time in line for food and hot wine than I did listening to any of the speakers.
    The demonstration lacked appeal beyond the narrow confines of the participating political parties. Since the general consensus is that popular political parties (with the exception of the Communists and their withered constituents) do not exist in Ukraine, it is likely that most of the participants are getting rewarded for their troubles. The Communists, who have always been a more or less pro-government party posing as the opposition, finally came out in support of Kuchma on February 22 when they abstained from five no-confidence votes against the Prosecutor-General Mykhailo Potebenko. Without the Communist block, the motion didn’t even come close to passing.
    Potebenko’s mishandling of the Gongadze case from the very beginning has highlighted his incompetence. Ukrainian law students regularly point out that he doesn’t know Ukraine’s laws or Constitution. Recently he refused to report to the Parliament about progress on the Gongadze case on the grounds that he doesn’t answer to Parliament. According to the Constitution, he does.
    Gongadze disappeared in September, and his headless corpse was found in late October. Potebenko opened a criminal case on February 27, claiming that it would have been irresponsible to start a case before the body was proven to be Gongadze. (In mid-January, after a long delay by the Prosecutor, DNA tests determined that there was a 99.6 percent chance that the body belonged to Gongadze. Furthermore, the corpse was found with jewelry belonging to Gongadze)
    After almost a half a year and mountains of evidence, the official investigation has yet to produce any suspects or leads. In spite of the circumstantial evidence of the tapes, in which Kuchma orders his Interior Minister to, among other things, “get rid” of Gongadze, Kuchma is not under investigation. Nor are there any investigations into the other issues in the tapes that implicate Kuchma.
    The tapes are considered circumstantial because their authenticity apparently can’t be proven. The International Press Institute in Vienna and the US-funded organization Freedom House were hired to assess the tapes in December. They promised the results by early March. However, on February 28th, they released a statement claiming that it is theoretically impossible to tell whether the tapes have been doctored, and therefore impossible to begin an analysis. It took them two months to say that they didn’t even look at the tapes.
    While Kuchma and others have admitted that the voices are real, Kuchma maintains that the recordings have been altered using sophisticated digital editing equipment. This is ridiculous, and the IPI’s bureaucratic report says as much; there are literally hundreds of hours of recordings. To edit that quantity professionally would take an unbelievable amount of time and patience. However, apparently anxious to avoid the political consequences that would follow if it were to deem the tapes genuine, the IPI concluded its report indecisively, absolving the organizations (and the governments that fund them) of any responsibility. Other respectable independent analyses have concluded that the tapes were not doctored, but these were not given the same amount of attention as the IPI/Freedom House test.
    IPI’s cop-out is fairly typical of the West’s response to Ukraine’s current political morass. While Western embassies repeatedly encourage a speedy and thorough investigation, they are loath to condemn Kuchma or seriously threaten to withhold any aid. The US alone provides Ukraine with over 200 million dollars annually.
    The Western response is based on two principles. The West sees Kuchma as the most pro-Western of all possible administrations, and they worry that the Socialists could take power, instantly turning Ukraine into another Belarus.
    Both of these justifications are more or less openly baseless, however. Since the beginning of the crisis, Kuchma has reversed his pro-Western stance and turned to Russia for political support. At a recent summit in Dnipropetrovsk, Kuchma and Putin signed several accords that allegedly give Russia still more ownership of Ukraine’s strategic industries.
    Fears about the Socialists are likewise just silly; they are centrists and their policies don’t differ noticeably from Kuchma’s (with the possible exception of their relative intolerance of corruption). Besides, if the President is willing to have the opposition disappeared to maintain power, isn’t Ukraine already exhibiting Belarussian tendencies?
    The protests featured a mock trial in which Kuchma was convicted of corruption, murder, and controlling the media. The show was pretty boring, though. They lacked the flair that pro-Kuchma forces often display. For example, after an earlier protest, a state TV channel spliced pictures of the protesters with images of Hitler rallying the masses. It made for good entertainment.
    I ended up watching the fringe group Shchyt Batkivshchyny (a Ukrainian organization similar to Limonov’s National Bolsheviks) put on a spectacle of their own some distance down the street from the larger protest. The rest of Ukraine Without Kuchma excludes them as too radical. I was counting on them to get in a fight or two. But their protest also ended peacefully.
    A group of about 20 teenage patriots holding flags walled off a small area of Khreshchatyk. They all had green bandanas covering their faces to add to the drama. Their leader, Dmytro Korchinsky, sentenced Kuchma to beheading and then lit a guillotine on fire. Two 12-year-olds dressed up like Napoleon stood guard while the chintzy structure burnt and, as its remains smoldered, the whole group marched off to the beat of a bass drum. Actually, none of it made much sense.
    Over the months, only a few heads have rolled. Former SBU chief Leonid Derkach got sacked, but presumably that is because he let Kuchma get taped in the first place. The Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko is on indefinite leave for health reasons, but that is also Kuchma’s version of damage control.
    Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, who is a favorite of the West, has managed to maintain his grip on power. In recent weeks, however, he has come out in support of strengthening Presidential power and has repeatedly defended Kuchma’s (and even Potebenko’s) handling of the situation. In short, he has sold out to keep his job.
    The only remaining mystery is why Kuchma chose Gongadze. By all accounts, Gongadze was a solid but completely insignificant journalist. Furthermore, everyone who knew him say he was very charming and a talented womanizer. As one of the few muckrakers in Ukraine, he was confined to an obscure Ukrainian language website called Ukrainska Pravda. The eXile, compared to Ukrainska Pravda, has Readers Digest-like distribution. Now, Ukrainska Pravda is in three languages, gets USAID funding, and is by far the most popular website in Ukraine. Killing him, even if Kuchma was never brought under suspicion, would have done little except intimidate other journalists. But before he disappeared in September, Ukrainian journalists generally fell into line without any intimidation. In all likelihood Kuchma, who reportedly never reads newspapers (let alone ventured onto the internet), was put up to the hit by somebody.
    Kuchma seems to be secure in his position. He has even begun to loosen his grip on the media a little. According to a friend who works as a news editor for a non-state TV station, blatant censorship has eased up slightly. When the tape scandal was breaking, the station’s manager was called to the Presidential Administration. After the meeting, he personally read every filed story. His censorship tactics included halving all estimates of turnout for the demonstrations and eliminating all mention of various Kuchma opponents, including Moroz. Now that the administration is breathing more easily, my friend’s texts do not need to get reviewed every time.
    The only tangible result of this scandal is that a referendum that Kuchma rigged last spring now has become irrelevant. It would have turned the Ukrainian Presidency into an all-powerful position that would officially subordinate the courts and Parliament.
    But the President is now comfortable enough to break up the tent city. It was done in broad daylight, with militsia men outnumbering the residents by four to one. The militsia showed a court order that later turned out to be a fake. There were a few minor scuffles, and the whole operation only took 20 minutes.
    More notable even than the destruction of the tent city was Ukraine Without Kuchma’s reaction. They didn’t do anything. The organization seems to be suffering from a hangover. Everything they do is reactive, and their reactions are always delayed and clumsy.
    The next protest, as planned before the tents were removed, will take place on March 9. It is the birthday of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko. No doubt city hall will organize some festivities in Khreshchatyk as well.