Strongman, The

how we might better coordinate to get the outcome we want. And the outcome was a free and fair election, not any particular winner.’ As in Georgia, the USAID contributed millions of dollars to promote civil society, free media and democracy awareness. Herbst says all parties, including even the Communist Party, were free to avail themselves of these funds and programmes. 2
    At one point during the campaign Herbst reached out to the Russian spin doctors to try to gauge what they were up to. ‘I invited Pavlovsky and Marat Gelman, who was his partner in this enterprise, to lunch. We had a pleasant lunch ... but a very restrained conversation. They really did not want to talk too much about what they were doing.’ Herbst says he made no bones about what the Americans were doing in Ukraine: ‘In a sense I had an advantage because everything we were doing was pretty much right out in the open. We wanted to encourage a free and fair election, and we said what we were doing publicly. I had no problem telling them that NGOs in Ukraine, and for that matter internationally, were trying to encourage this result too. They were more reticent to describe to me what they were up to, and I can understand why.’
    What Herbst described as merely supporting free and fair elections, Pavlovsky saw differently: ‘I could see consultants and a large number of NGO activists who were completely pro-American or pro-Atlantic.’ Pavlovsky was also reticent when asked what he had been trying to achieve. He acted as a ‘channel of communication’, he said, but found it hard to influence Kuchma, who insisted on running his candidate’s campaign on his own. ‘We never understood why Kuchma selected him. There were other governors much more acceptable to the electorate. As I understood it, Kuchma was expecting a conflict, and Yanukovych seemed like a tough man who could handle it. It was his mistake. Yanukovych’s rudeness, his coarseness, irritated voters. And of course Putin noticed that, and was unhappy about it.’ By the end of the campaign, Pavlovsky says he was reduced to writing sad reports back to Moscow about how the campaign headquarters had ‘lost command’. 3
    In an interview, Sergei Markov was more forthcoming about the advice Russian consultants gave to the Kuchma/Yanukovych team – and made some startling claims about the role the Russians believed Western NGOs were playing. Markov openly acknowledged – indeed stressed – that he and his colleagues were commissioned to do this work (to influence the election of a sovereign state) by the Russian presidential administration . Part of their work, according to Markov, consisted in providing Kuchma and Yanukovych with daily expert analyses of the developing situation, to enable them to respond better. Secondly, he said, ‘We saw that experts who were appearing in the mass media were by and large firmly under the influence of Western foundations. And basically these Western foundations forbade them to say anything good about Russia. If they did they were thrown out of the projects they were working on, lost their grants and ended up penniless. So we came and started organising seminars, conferences, joint media projects with them, to try to get around this “ban”.’ 4
    It should be said that this assessment is precisely the opposite of what the opposition themselves (and most Western observers) believed: that the media were totally controlled by the government, and served a consistent diet of pro-Russian views.
    Markov gave this outlandish assessment of the opposition candidate. ‘We were firmly of the opinion that Yushchenko was completely controlled by his wife, and she belonged to a circle of radical Ukrainian nationalists connected with the Nazi movement and with, not so much the American special services, rather with circles of various East European diasporas, especially the Poles, who hate Russia as only Polish nationalists can. I was certain that Yushchenko, as a weak person, would totally carry out the programmes of these radical nationalists, whose aim was to create the maximum conflict between Ukraine and Russia – even a small war. In order to cause a quarrel between these fraternal nations, the Russians and Ukrainians, blood had to be spilt. I am convinced that these people were determined that Ukrainians and Russians should start killing each other – and I mean killing each other .’
    These are quite astonishing claims, but they are important, for