Journalists and onlookers are wandering through the residence of the President of Ukraine, picking through the scattered remnants of a frantic flight—important and even compromising documents, along with personal items. Video cameras registered two helicopters, five heavy-duty trucks, and a couple SUVs carrying away materials from the Presidential palace. The scenes from the hastily abandoned seat of power bring to mind the events in Moscow that followed the failed Communist coup of August, 1991. Back then, journalists and democratic activists wandered around the Communist Party headquarters discovering amazing things: a collection of false beards, blank foreign passports.
The toppling, this past week, of statues of Lenin—unwanted reminders of Ukraine as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union—have added another resonance. In August of 1991, a Moscow crowd tore down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the monstrous, repressive Bolshevik machine. Dzerzhinsky’s iron figure, dangling off a crane with a noose around his neck, became the most memorable image of the victory of democracy over Communism—or good over evil, as the events of 1991 were commonly seen at the time.
The failure of the 1991 coup and the victory of Boris Yeltsin and his supporters were followed by a burst of decrees: Yeltsin was sealing his triumph by issuing legal documents that incapacitated and outlawed the Communist Party. Now the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, is hastily passing one decision after another: the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych, the scheduling of an early Presidential election for May, the initiation of a return to the country’s 2004 constitution, one that gave more power to the parliament and less to the President.
In 1991, people in Moscow were ecstatic: after the defeat of the Communists, they expected that Russia would become a “normal country.” Normalcy in those days was broadly seen as going the way of the West, toward democracy, prosperity, and justice. Very few people were thinking about whether Russia had the capacity to rise to this challenge. Subsequent developments showed that it did not. Moreover, before long, the majority of devoted democrats grew disappointed and cynical, ashamed of their naïve expectations. This experience of disillusionment explains why those of us looking at the dramatic developments in Ukraine from Russia—even those of us who sympathize with the Ukrainian people’s victory over their corrupt and immoral rulers—tend to focus more on risks and hurdles, rather than hopes for Ukraine’s democratic future.
If there is one thing that a solid majority of Ukrainians share, it is a loathing of their ousted President Yanukovych. From the nationalists in western Ukraine to members of his own party, they are condemning a leader who fled his capital after several days of carnage in which more than eighty of his compatriots were killed, leaving behind a luxurious residence and empty state coffers. Even in Russia, loyalists who until recently defended Yanukovych as Putin’s ally speak about his “inglorious end” and call him “pathetic.”
Beyond this consensus, nearly everything is uncertain and precarious. Moving toward normalcy will be a formidable task. Here are but a few of the uncertainties and dangers that lie ahead:
1. The authority of the decision-makers in the Ukrainian parliament is not entirely secure. At least some of their decisions may be questioned by regions in the east of the country that barely took part in the bloody struggle in Kiev. In the mostly pro-Russian Crimea, fifty thousand people showed up for a rally on Sunday where the governing force in Kiev was denounced as “Fascist riffraff.” They chanted, “Long live the great Russian city of Sevastopol!” Separatist sentiments are widespread in the Crimean Peninsula; Sevastopol, its largest city, is the home of the Russian Black Sea fleet, which makes Crimea even more of a problem for the new government in Kiev.
2. “Empty coffers” is not a figure of speech. That’s what the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament said on Sunday, adding that the economic situation in Ukraine is “catastrophic.” Europe seems willing to commit funds to help Ukraine out of the economic crisis. But financial aid is needed immediately, which could mean giving money to a government whose legitimacy may be in doubt.
3. Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former Prime Minister, who just got out of jail, is a likely candidate in the May Presidential election. She was Yanukovych’s main rival in the Presidential race in 2010, and he had her imprisoned soon after his victory. She’s a formidable and highly ambitious politician, and her natural charisma, combined with a sense of martyrdom, makes her the most popular political figure in Ukraine by far. But she has a mixed political record: her time as Prime Minister was marked by corruption and highly populist policies. In Ukraine, one already hears voices of those who, while congratulating her on finally being set free, raise doubts about whether she is the right person to become the new Ukrainian leader. “We did not stand for you in Maidan,” one such appeal, published on a Ukrainian Web site, says. “We did not die for you … Show your power of will, give up your ambitions.” Tymoshenko may enjoy the support of the European governments that had worked hard to persuade Yanukovych to release her, and in Moscow she will probably be seen as an acceptable figure. But, if she is indeed elected President in May, can she be counted on for badly needed financial discipline, economic reforms, and political integrity? Are the European governments prepared to look the other way and still grant economic support if Tymoshenko returns to her habitual political practices?
4. President Putin has suffered a second defeat with Ukraine, and he won’t be happy about that. The first defeat took place during the Orange Revolution, ten years ago, when Putin personally campaigned for Yanukovych and made it very clear that the other Presidential candidate was fully unacceptable. Yanukovych lost nonetheless. This time, Putin once again relied on Yanukovych to keep Ukraine in Russia’s orbit, but the President let him down again—and drove Ukraine to the brink of a civil war. How will Putin take this setback? He has not spoken yet, but the language of the Russian foreign ministry’s official statement on Monday was one of anger and exasperation: “The militants have not been disarmed … they de facto control the streets … their acts of violence have not stopped…. [The Ukrainian parliament] stamps decisions aimed at encroaching on the humanitarian rights of Russians and other ethnic minorities … the course in Ukraine is that of suppressing dissent by dictatorial and even terrorist methods.”
The tone of the statement may be too aggressive, but at least some of the criticism appears warranted. For instance, among the Rada’s first decisions has been a reduction of the status of the Russian language in a number of Ukrainian regions—an initiative that looks discriminatory and unfair in a country where Russian is widely spoken and roughly a third of the population names it as their native language.
The fear of a direct Russian intervention is often heard these days; the concern may not be justified, but Russia does have economic and political leverage over Ukraine. A discount on the price of gas that Putin granted to Yanukovych can be easily revised, and Russia’s backing of Ukraine’s southeastern regions can increase Putin’s bargaining power vis-à-vis the government in Kiev.
Many Ukrainians should be celebrating their hard-won victory over a corrupt, degraded, brutal government. They are duly proud of their resilience and self-sacrifice. But moving toward normalcy, democracy, and prosperity will require the art of statesmanship, and it’s far from clear whether Ukraine can muster the skills this would require.
Photograph by Davide Monteleone/Vll.