Frontline Journal

My Revolution — Ukraine

By Tatyana Goryachova

"When it became clear, on the eve of the second round of voting, that the authorities had given the command to move special armed subdivisions into Kiev, I knew I had to go to Maidan.

There was a particular aura there that cannot be described in words. You could only sense it. People—children, youth, the elderly—everyone was seized with the desire to stand ground and defend the independence of the country."

The Orange Revolution introduced the Ukraine to the world. Today people on every continent applaud the courage of my compatriots. But the true price of freedom is known only by the Ukrainian citizens who fought to defend their country, in spite of threats, intimidation, and terror from the Kuchma regime.

Reporting had never been so terrible and compelling for me as it was during this time. Looking back, it's hard to imagine how we could physically and morally manage to continue working under such conditions of overwhelming stress and extreme fatigue.

I understood that these elections would be cruel, but I didn't anticipate that they would be so dirty. Fearing that they could lose everything, the government authorities began an information war against their own people.

I remember watching news broadcasts that were filled with flagrant falsification of the events and aimed at discrediting Viktor Yushchenko. I turned to another channel, and it was the same situation; on a third, the same. Suddenly I became very afraid because I knew that millions of people would interpret these lies as the truth.

This disinformation campaign in the state-controlled media lasted for several days. Unbelievable things were deliberately suggested to people about Viktor Yushchenko's connection to fascist ideology, about his desire to re-divide the country into West and East Ukraine, and about the prohibition of the Russian language and the closing of churches. With the exception of Kiev residents, Ukrainians were isolated from the truth.

Then came the repression of independent and local media. However, they did not begin pursuing me personally until three months before the pre-election campaign.

It was then that they tried to physically eliminate me, just as they did in 2002. During the 2002 pre-election campaign for local offices, an unknown person sprayed me in the face with a solution of hydrochloric acid. The offender still has not been caught.

In July of 2004, as I was driving along the coast, another car began forcing me into fast-moving oncoming traffic. I nearly lost control of the car and had to turn into the reeds to avoid hitting a moving minibus. Coming up alongside me, the driver of the attacking car sprayed me in the face with water from a child's water pistol, warning me that I risked the same thing I had gotten in 2002.

After this, I left the Ukraine. I returned in September to continue the struggle in the campaign season. Not two months later, at the height of the campaign, the bank accounts of my newspaper, Berdyansk Delovoy, were frozen. This also happened to the accounts of Ukraine's only independent television channel, Channel 5. But both we and Channel 5 kept on working, even under the most severe financial pressures.

At this point, the only way for the people to find out the facts about events in Kiev was through the online newspaper, Ukrainian Truth, to which the majority of Ukrainian citizens do not have access since they lack computers.

I was extremely upset during this time, knowing that some sort of solution was necessary and not understanding how journalists at all the television stations could surrender to the government propaganda so easily. I wasn't the only one who stood in opposition to the lies. In a watershed moment, around 150 employees of the country's television companies rose above their fears of being fired and signed a letter refusing to work in news and other information programming as long as it was controlled by the authorities. For several days after that, not a single information channel functioned.

And then Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned. I remember how my mother cried. I remember watching a banned documentary about the barely living Yushchenko being unloaded from the plane in Vienna and that all travel rules were broken in order to get him to the Rudolfinerhaus Clinic as fast as possible. We looked into the eyes of his wife, Katerina, who accompanied him with their 6-year-old son in her arms. Can you imagine what that woman was going through during these moments?

I suffered through Yushchenko's tragedy as though it were my own. The maimed face of this formerly handsome man was unrecognizable, and it reminded me of my own face after the acid attack in 2002. He was treated and then returned to continue fighting. We were very afraid for him because he was our flagman—the person who carried everyone along. And they wanted to break him. We were afraid that they would kill him. Simply and crudely, just like everything the authorities did during the campaign. But every day he appeared in Maidan—Independence Square, the main square in Kiev, Ukraine's capital—telling growing crowds of protesters that we must fight for our freedom, that we had to stand firm, that he believed in us, that we would win.

When it became clear, on the eve of the second round of voting, that the authorities had given the command to move special armed subdivisions into Kiev, I knew I had to go to Maidan. Everyone was going to Kiev, then to Maidan. Day and night there were crowds of 500,000 to one million people in the square. There was a particular aura there that cannot be described in words. You could only sense it. People—children, youth, the elderly—everyone was seized with the desire to stand ground and defend the independence of the country and their chosen leader, Viktor Yushchenko.

By this time the freezing weather had begun, and Kievians tried to feed and warm people who arrived from the outlying areas, even letting them stay in their apartments. My childhood friend lives in Kiev, in one of the most prestigious regions in the capital. She is a rich woman with a 450-square-meter apartment. During the Orange Revolution, she took 11 students from Maidan into her apartment—complete strangers—and bought them warm clothes and shoes and fed them. She also stood at Maidan herself, quitting her own business because everything else had suddenly become secondary—everything besides the desire to win.

All of the people in Maidan wore an orange ribbon as a symbol, and on the children, orange hats and warm scarves bearing the phrase "Yushchenko—Yes!" Parents went out and bought their children orange overcoats and jackets. At school and at home, children carried around little orange flags. The entire country was overcome with revolutionary spirit, and orange became the symbol of Ukrainian freedom.

A small team from our newspaper traveled to other areas of Ukraine, to see what the mood was there. We went to the home of Viktor Yanukovych, Yushchenko's rival and the other candidate, in the city of Yenakievo, in the Donets region. In Yanukovych's hometown, in addition to his dilapidated childhood home and the neglected building where he attended school, we saw destitution and felt human animosity.

We tried to talk with people, but aside from confirming their hatred for Yushchenko, we could achieve no constructive exchange. Yanukovych supporters nearly beat up my husband in a city market in Yenakievo. They broke the camera of the operator of our film crew when they found out that he had personally voted for Yushchenko in the first round.

In the Donets Region, people did not want change, in spite of their squalid existence. Instead, they supported "their own Vitya." Every third man in Donets has a criminal record. Gangster law prevails there. And a candidate with these same notions nearly gained power over Ukraine.

Then we traveled to Yushchenko's hometown, where everything was different. It is a small, tidy village with a nursery school and a church built with Yushchenko's money. At his mother's home we found a snowball tree in the courtyard and people with kind hearts. Two worlds, two different sets of ethics. We witnessed this, photographed and wrote, and then told our readers. I remember so well the words of one middle-aged woman from Khoruzhevka: "You know, we want you to understand us correctly. Here we really are all for Viktor Yushchenko, but not just because he is from our district. If Viktor Yanukovych was ours, we wouldn't vote for him. We cannot have a criminal as our country's president."

One evening after Viktor Yushchenko's inauguration, my daughter took a piece of paper and wrote in big letters, "Yushchenko is our president, and we love him very much." It was so touching. No one asked or forced her to do that. She did it herself. It was wonderful because in my entire life I could never write or say that about the president of our country. And at five, she can. And I can too now. I know exactly what it means to love your president and to be proud of him. And it's a great feeling—the feeling of pride in the person who leads us.

Yulia Timoshenko, Ukraine's Ambitious New Prime Minister

"It's uncomfortable for me to talk about this because I may lose authority among women if I say how little I sleep and that, unfortunately, I have no time for physical exercise. There is no time left for socializing with my family. But I am convinced that these things will change with time. We still have roughly half a year to sort through the fundamental problems. We don't fail in the essentials—we believe in the end result and we have risked everything for it."
YULIA TIMOSHENKO, three months after her appointment as the Ukraine's first female Prime Minister

Regardless of how you view Yulia Timoshenko, our new Prime Minister, it is impossible to deny the strength of her spirit and mind. She—Maidan's beloved—worked for nine years in opposition to the ruling authorities, was imprisoned on account of her political convictions, and now has become a symbol of the nation. When the authorities put Timoshenko behind bars a year ago, she not only survived, she stood her ground. In prison they left her without water, then brought her poisoned water disguised as clean from the medical clinic. She didn't drink it. They put poison in the prison food. She didn't eat it. They took her on walks underground, where there was no light. Each time, she had no idea where they were taking her and whether or not she would return to her cell. They crushed her morally and physically. But they didn't destroy her. Today she not only sets the tone of contemporary Ukrainian fashion but heads the country's government alongside President Yushchenko.

By Tatyana Goryachova