Strongman, The

between Orthodox and Catholic Christians; there are those who pine for the old days (more security, less tension, less corruption, little ethnic strife) and those who want to move on (openness, democracy, free enterprise); there are Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians – distributed across an imprecise geographical ‘east–west’ divide. Opinion polls did not show an overwhelming desire across the country for NATO membership, although joining the EU was more popular. The family ties of which Putin spoke were real. But at the same time this was not the same Ukraine that was once part of the Soviet ‘family’; it had developed for 13 years already as a separate entity, and a new identity was growing. The use of the Ukrainian language was far more widespread than it was in Soviet days when I once embarrassed the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, by asking him what language was used at Ukrainian central committee meetings. There was a new pride in the nation, and an awareness that economically, at least, they would be far better to tie their future to the West than to the semi-reformed and corrupt economy of Russia.
    It was these sentiments that prevailed when the 2004 election was finally re-run, following a Supreme Court decision, on 26 December, under new rules to tighten up procedures and reduce fraud. Viktor Yushchenko was declared the winner with 52 per cent of the vote, to Yanukovych’s 44 per cent. International observers declared the ballot had been run fairly.
    The result was a humiliation for Putin, who had staked everything on preventing what he saw as the ‘loss’ of Ukraine to a Western conspiracy.
    The Orange Revolution was like a door slamming on Russia’s and the West’s efforts to understand one another. It is hard to think of any event that could be interpreted in such diametrically opposed ways. The West saw it as a triumph of democracy. Here is what the Washington Post wrote, looking back a few years later: ‘Ukraine’s Orange Revolution erupted in 2004 because of an attempt by Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his proxies to impose on Ukraine a version of Russia’s corrupt authoritarianism – beginning with a fraudulent presidential election.’ 10
    In Russia, it was seen as essentially the work of US special operations. Gleb Pavlovsky described the Orange protestors as ‘Red Guards’, trained and funded by American consultants. ‘But this isn’t rocket science. There are plenty of local specialists who’ve been working on the “Destroy Russia” project since 1990–91, ever since the Chechen project.’ 11
    Sergei Markov said it was a coup aimed at breaking Ukraine away from Russia, and that Yushchenko triumphed only through falsification. ‘The Orange never came to power as the result of free elections. They came to power as the result of an anti-constitutional coup, being supported, of course, by the American administration and the Western observers. No matter how many American senators say that it was legal, it was anti-constitutional.’
    Pavlovsky, the Kremlin’s main operator during the revolution, had to sneak away in disguise. ‘My departure from Kiev was quite funny. I was living in a hotel right in the centre of the city, in the middle of the orange crowd which was blocking the presidential administration. I was forced to change clothes – like Kerensky [Russian prime minister overthrown in the 1917 revolution], who our Soviet textbooks say escaped dressed as a female nurse. I went out through the crowd wearing an orange scarf and hat.’
    The backlash
    Few people can say they know very much about Vladislav Surkov, even though for more than a decade he has been one of the most influential people in the Kremlin. Hiding behind the innocuous title of deputy chief of staff to the president, he is in fact the architect of Russia’s political system – changing chameleon-like at his master’s command, thinking up ever new structures and ideologies to justify whatever twist or turn Vladimir Putin required. His most notorious coinage – the notion of ‘sovereign democracy’ – essentially meant that Russia would decide for itself, as a sovereign state, what kind of democracy it needed. If today it meant that parties needed 7 per cent of the vote, not 5, to get into parliament, Surkov was on hand to explain why. If a few years later, it was decided that 5 per cent was, after all, better, Surkov would justify that too. If governors