A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History

By Olena Wawryshyn

The book launch for journalist Askold Krushelnycky’s An Orange Revolution: A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History was held at the Frontline, a club in London, England, that supports journalists who risk their lives through the course of their work. It was a fitting venue as, given the revelations Krushelnycky makes and the fate of many reporters who cover politics in Ukraine, writing the book took considerable personal courage.

Krushelnycky offers a fascinating expose, focusing on many of Ukraine's most powerful politicians, businessmen and oligarchs, who muscled their way into top positions after Ukraine’s declaration of independence, starting with former presidents Leonid Kravchuk and then Leonid Kuchma. They are shown to be largely responsible for allowing Ukraine to descend into a lawless, corrupt Hobbesian society where the powerful stop at nothing, including murder, to obtain and keep wealth and influence. After all, “In Ukraine they say that a fish rots from the head downwards,” writes Krushelnycky.

Unlike media reports, which focus on one incident or sphere, the book compiles accounts of many scandals and crimes. Their sheer number and scale leave one reeling. There is so much information that the chapters dealing with post-independence Ukraine, alone, make the book a worthwhile read.

Krushelnycky outlines the backgrounds and interpersonal ties of men like Kuchma’s head of administration, Viktor Medvedchuk, a former KGB operative who in the ‘70s had a hand in sentencing poet and independence activist Vasyl Stus to 10 years in a labour camp, and the Donetsk-born tycoon Rinat Akhmetov and his business partner, Kuchma’s son-in-law Victor Pinchuk, who together bought “the lucrative Kryvorizhstal steel-producing company in a rigged privatisation auction that undervalued the complex by a staggering four billion dollars.”

There are also long passages explaining the corruption in the gas sector, including the role of Pavlo Lazarenko, who in 1999 fled to the United States where he was charged with “fifty-three counts of money laundering and mail fraud involving $114 million he had allegedly acquired corruptly in Ukraine,” and his ties between Russia’s Gazprom gas company and the links between Gazprom and the Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine, a company headed by Yulia Tymoshenko a decade ago.

A whole chapter is devoted to the case of Ukrainska Pravda journalist and democracy activist Georgiy Gongadze, whose grisly beheading  became a symbol of state corruption that galvanized the masses during the run-up to the Orange Revolution. Especially thorough is the overview of the saga centring around Mykola Melnychenko, the presidential bodyguard who revealed that he had tapes of secretly recorded conversations in which Kuchma indirectly put into motion Gongadze’s murder and the subsequent cover-up.

Krushelnycky writes for publications such as Britain’s The Independent and Sunday Times, and, as a journalist, interviewed Melnychenko as well as many of the other individuals mentioned in the book.  He recounts some of his most intriguing adventures, including his foray into Afghanistan to report from the mujahidin side during the war with Russia. Thus, the book is a unique first-hand account of events leading up to Orange Revolution.

It is also a highly personal one.  Krushelnycky, who was born in London, England, weaves his own family history into the chapters on  Ukrainian history. His father, Ivan, was born into a nationally conscious middle-class family. His mother, born in Ivano-Frankivsk, spent the last years of the Second World War as a slave labourer in Germany.

Krushelnycky’s parents met through the Ukrainian community in Britain. His father edited the community paper, Ukrainska Duma, and later worked for the BBC’s monitoring service where he was a Soviet affairs specialist. Through him, Askold got an introduction into journalism, a field he later “fell into.”

An Orange Revolution is the author’s first book. One gets a sense that Krushelnycky, who grew up in an era when knowledge of Ukraine among Westerners was scant and the Russian version of history dominated, poured into it everything he had always wanted the world to know about Ukraine. In his account of the events leading to the revolution, he starts at day one, with early settlements in 5000 BC. With his tight prose, the result is a quick and thorough summary that never lags.

Right in the first chapter, Krushelnycky states that, as a journalist he strives to “an honest reporter” and that when it comes to Ukraine, he is far from being a “dispassionate observer.”

For this, The Economist found fault with An Orange Revolution, stating: “The book suffers from the same thing that gives it authenticity: the author’s own background in the Ukrainian diaspora. Self-sacrificing and determined through they often are, East European йmigrйs can be excessively one-sided.” The reviewer points to Krushelnycky’s treatment of Russia as evidence of his partiality.

The criticism is unfair and unjustified. In fact, Krushelnycky maintains that “although Russia sought to constrain Ukraine’s independence, it was the Ukrainians who came to power that were most responsible for curbing the freedoms of its people.”

However, it would have been interesting had Krushelnycky provided a fuller explanation in the epilogue of Yushchenko’s motivations and actions; for instance: why under Yushchenko did Kuchma not have to account for past wrongs? Perhaps answers are beyond the scope of the book.

Also, one gets a sense that the publisher rushed the book's production because the book contains neither an index nor footnotes. Krushelnycky mentions several books in his acknowledgements, but footnotes would have made his own book more authoritative. Similarly, an index would have been beneficial as it is a useful tool for both readers and academic researchers. 

Yet, the book is geared to a general reader with little prior knowledge of Ukraine, and it succeeds in clearly explaining how centuries of history led to the Orange Revolution. For those well-acquainted with Ukraine, it compiles pieces of a complex political situation into a coherent whole, in a fresh way. It is an outstanding book that will remain as an important account of the momentous events in Ukraine that captivated the world.

An Orange Revolution: A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History, Askold Krushelnycky, Harvill Secker, Random House, 2006. $23.95, paper; available in Canada at the Chapters/Indigo chain of bookstores.