It's Time

National Review Online, November 29, 2004

New York City, Saturday—In Manhattan, they say, everyone wears black, but not this Saturday, not in this plaza just across from the U.N. The demonstrators, perhaps 500, perhaps more, have turned up on this briefly glorious late autumn day in orange hats, in orange scarves, in orange coats, in orange sweaters, draped in orange blankets, wearing orange ribbons; anything, however small, will do so long as it is orange. Baseball cap advertising Land Rover? No problem. If it's orange, it's fine. Sweatshirt proclaiming the virtues of Steinway pianos? Why not? It's orange. Orange flags flutter, orange balloons bob against a clear, lovely sky that matches the blue on the other flag, pale blue and yellow, which flies this day. Blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine, and orange the color of the movement that might, maybe, finally bring the people of that country the decent government they have awaited for far too long. "Pora". "It's time." Indeed it is.

Banners, orange naturally, proclaim the loyalties of the crowd:

"Yuschenko—Yes!"

"A Criminal Should Not Be President."

"Putin, Don't Mess With Ukraine."

"Boston Ukrainians for Yuschenko."

"America and Ukraine Together."

"Kyiv, We're With You."

"Ukrainians Deserve Freedom Just Like You."

Indeed they do. In the 20th century, the people of the Ukraine, a land of two genocides, the country of Hitler's Babi Yar, and the nation of Stalin's broken, emptying starving villages, went through the worst that two totalitarian systems could do to them, the raw death toll, millions after millions after millions, supplemented by decade after decade after decade of more selective, careful purges, a cull of the best and the brightest, generation after generation after generation.

And yet, somehow, Ukraine endured.

But Putin seems to feel little or no remorse for the crimes of his Kremlin predecessors. There have been no real apologies, and no trials of those butchers who still survive. As the Russian president looks at those other far, far larger crowds in orange, the ones gathered for days in Kiev's Independence Square, he sees, doubtless, only irritants, troublemakers, hooligans, obstacles to be removed, perhaps even dupes, according to some in Moscow, of wicked Polish plotters. What he should be seeing are the countless ghosts of those that went before, victims of that Soviet past that even now he seems curiously unwilling to confront. That, however, would take a conscience.

In 1933 (wrote the writer Vasily Grossman) "horses pulled flattop carts through [Kiev], and the corpses of those who had died in the night were collected. I saw one such flattop cart with children on it. They were just as I have described them, thin, elongated faces, like those of dead birds, with sharp beaks...Some of them were still muttering, and their heads still turning. I asked the driver about them, and he just waved his hands and said: "By the time they get where they are being taken they will be silent too." There was, we should remember, more food in Kiev than anywhere else in the Ukraine that year. Five, six, seven million died in that Soviet-made famine, the Holodomor, maybe an even greater number: no one knows for sure.

Standing in that New York plaza I talk to one of the demonstrators, Marko, about what's going on. We touch on the past. "My father," he says, "survived the Holodomor." I look around at some of the older faces in the crowd, and wonder what they had heard back then, what they knew, what they had lived through.

Not inappropriately, perhaps, there is behind us a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swede who rescued thousands of Jews from wartime Budapest only to disappear into Stalin's hands. A small plaque reads that on "January 17th, 1945 Raoul Wallenberg was detained by the Soviet government. His fate remains unknown." Fate unknown. Just another ghost. Not inappropriately, perhaps, someone in the crowd is carrying a placard showing Putin in a KGB uniform.

Someone else has a sign announcing that she is from Donetsk, the city that is the heart of the Ukraine's mainly Russian-speaking east, an area that is likely to come into sharp focus in coming weeks—exaggerated it may have been, but there is no doubt that Russia's candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, has real support in that part of the country. Taras, a friend of mine who's also at the demonstration, is more optimistic. His father, from Ternopil in western Ukraine (the city where Viktor Yuschenko had studied as a young man) had just returned from Kiev. While he was there he'd talked to a few of the miners who have been shipped in from the East to rally support for Yanukovych, the second-round "winner." They were O.K. guys, he said, enjoying an all-expenses, all-vodka trip to the big city with no plans to stick around for long. We'll see.

But Saturday is not a day for such worries. The likeable crowd, mainly twenty or thirtysomethings, a blend of recent immigrants, visitors, and the diaspora, were festive, optimistic, excited, cheering the speeches, the singers, and the sentiment, pausing only to chant the only name that counted, the name of their president:

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko."

He's their hero, their man, their champion, and their best hope for the true restoration of a squandered independence. In fact, like many politicians that emerged in the rougher corners of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Yuschenko is not free from awkward questions about his past, or the nature of some of his support, but this is not something that anyone wants to think about this day.

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko."

An older woman points to a poster, a standard politician-and-child image, the usual fluff, and shakes her head sadly. "It's terrible what they've done to him." The man in the photograph is healthy, good-looking, fortyish. It's Yuschenko, and the picture was probably taken less than a year ago. His face looks nothing like the terrible, cratered wreck that it has become, the product, almost certainly of a poison attack, an attack that has transformed him into a martyr for the cause, the real cause, he now leads.

The crowd starts to sing a lovely, enchanting tune, verse after verse. They know the words, and they sing them smiling. "The national anthem?" I ask. "No", two women say, "It's like a pledge." "What's it called?" Thought. Pause. Embarrassed looks. "We don't know." And then they start to laugh.

It's time.