www.exile.ru/2004-December-10/feature_story.html
I'm not using this term in the chea p way that it gets bandied around at a dinner table discussion between R epublicans and Democrats. There is one part y, people get beaten for opposition views, information is controlled, na tionalist sentiment is enflamed with insane rhetoric about America/NATO plots to enslave Ukraine, and fear is the main motivating factor. It's n o coincidence that this is the side which Putin and the Russians are sup porting. The "objective" Western press reports from there hide this fact by trying to "present both sides," but I was just there, and there is n o "other side." Just look at some examples of the fascist haze descending on Donetsk. Cab le TV operators have actually stopped broadcasting opposition Channel 5 Media suppression of opposing views is so intense that it's been driven literally underground -- like the paper Ostrov that is being produced s ecretly. One local Yushchenko supporter told me about how her 9-year-old 's gym teacher asked the class who their parents voted for. "When the te acher found out that we were Yushchenko supporters, he made my son kneel in a corner for the entire class," she told me. When Salon, a Donetsk paper, reported two Sundays ago that a pro-Yushchen ko rally was broken up before it even started, readers called to accuse them of printing lies -- everyone here believes that it's the Yushchenko protesters who have violent tendencies, even though there's been a 30 p ercent drop in crime in Kiev since the protests started. What happened a t that rally was that a well-organized group of men in track suits beat several people, including a Reuter's photographer, and stole film and ca meras -- but officially, that simply didn't happen. According to a spoke sman from the Yushchenko headquarters, even an SBU operative (Ukraine's FSB) recording the event for his own nefarious purposes was roughed up a nd had his video camera stolen. This is part of a broader thug culture of Donetsk, part of a movement wit h Brown Shirts/Idushchii v Meste overtones. After a large rally last Mon day, a group of 100 drunken thugs stood for hours shouting themselves ho arse and by 11pm, with no Yuschenko supporters to beat, several of them turned to fighting each other. While plenty of drunken people can be fou nd among the protesters in Kiev (perhaps the most ecstatic participants in the revolution are the train station's bomzhi, gorging themselves on free food and feeling safe now that the militsia has virtually disappear ed), they aren't aggressive or intimidating. In Donetsk, they are frightening, unpredictable and above the law. Of cou rse, that might just be Donetsk people acting normally. For example, the re was a rumor that FT correspondent Tom Warner was beaten up by politic al thugs. As it turned out, he was simply robbed of his computer, phone and several hundred bucks by some common thieves. The Western and t he Russian press both play up the issue, albeit for different reasons. O thers, like my good friend Olya, who is an editor at a respected Ukraini an magazine, claimed everyone in Donetsk was just brainwashed. What's happening in Donetsk is the real key to figuring out what's going to happen in Ukraine. The general situation in Ukraine has gotten plenty of coverage, but a brief outline of the facts is in order. Basically, U kraine has always been divided into east and west, with the east Russian -speaking, heavily industrialized, and Russia-friendly; and the west Ukr ainian-speaking, agrarian, and nationalist. Yanukovich is the east's can didate, Yushchenko the west's. Almost all of Ukraine's oligarchs are from the east or Kiev, and they alm ost exclusively lined up in support of Yanukovich, a Donetsk native. The re are a few exceptions, notably Petro Poroshenko, the owner of car and candy factories and a ship-building yard. He also owns Channel 5, which was an invaluable tool in helping Yushchenko compete. In recent weeks, C hannel 5 is the only Ukrainian channel to show news and propaganda 24 ho urs a day. A large part of the programming consists of watching Yanukovi ch's team make asses of themselves. They often repeat a speech Yanukovic h gave where he was gesturing with his fingers in the air, "paltsami," a classic bandit gesture. Another favorite clip of theirs is of Yanukovic h ally and Kharkov governor Kushnyarov gesticulating wildly and declarin g, "I'm not for Lviv power, not for Donetsk power, I'm for Kharkov power !" Still, the biggest and most powerful clans are still behind Yanukovic h, who is their man. Most Ukrainians agree that if a more palatable candidate had been given the nearly unlimited access to "administrative resources" that Yanukovich had, he would have won handi ly. But Yanukovich twice served jail time in the Soviet Union, he has no charisma, and is obviously a tool of powerful Russian and Ukrainian int erests. Yushchenko, on the other hand, is considered by most western Ukr ainians to be something between Gandhi and Christ, while many people in the east worry he has it in for everyone who speaks Russian. Many people who voted for Yanukovich did so out of suspicion of Yushchenko, not bec ause they like Yanukovich (except perhaps in his home turf, Donetsk). While the country is relatively evenly divided, it's a fact that Yushchen ko would have won the election if it had been violation-free. Anyone who claims otherwise is either a fool or getting paid by the Russians. Even Putin, who called Yanukovich to congratulate him before all the votes w ere counted, recently said he'd be willing to work with any elected lead er and seemed to acknowledge that there'd be a re-vote. Thanks to ballot -stuffing, Donetsk and the neighboring Lugansk oblast had by far the hig hest voter turnout in Ukraine (Donetsk had 97 percent turnout, of whom 9 7 percent voted for Yanukovich, and Yushchenko actually lost votes in be tween the first and second rounds of voting) and it's on the basis of th ousands of violations that the Supreme Court recently ordered a new roun d of voting. Channel 5 has plenty of footage of election observers getti ng the shit beaten out of them, and Yushchenko observers weren't allowed anywhere near the polls in the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. The blatant falsifications, combined with an extremely well-funded and co ordinated protest movement, have brought us where we are today, gearing for another round. The protests have come under fire as an American-fund ed coup, particularly in the Russian media. And there's some truth to it -- the US has been bringing in Serbs and Georgians experienced in non-v iolent revolution to train Ukrainians for at least a year. One exit poll -- the one finding most heavily in favor of Yushchenko -- was funded by the US. The smoothness and professionalism of the protest, from the ins tant availability of giant blocks of Styrofoam to pitch the tents on to the network of food distribution and medical points, is probably a resul t of American logistical planning. It's certainly hard to imagine Ukrain ians having their act together that well. The whole orange theme and all those ready-made flags also smack of American marketing concepts, parti cularly Burson-Marstellar. But the crowds in Kiev, which can swell up to a million on a good day and are always in the hundreds of thousands, are there out of their own hom egrown sense of outrage, not because some State Department bureaucrats w illed them there. The meetings that happen every day in virtually every city in Ukraine (and in literally every western Ukraine village) are not the result of American propaganda. Rather, they are the result of the d emocratic awakening of a trampled-on people who refuse to be screwed by corrupt politicians again. While you wouldn't know it by watching Russian TV, maybe the only two cit ies in Ukraine where there are not Yushchenko rallies that outnumber the Yanukovich rallies are Lugansk and Donetsk. According to my friends in the heavily Russian Kharkov, for example, active Yushchenko supporters o utnumber active Yanukovich supporters four to one. One reason why Lugans k and Donetsk are an exception is because every time Yushchenko's people try t...
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