Taras Kuzio

Ukraine has begun its transition to the post-Kuchma era. The "velvet revolution," which began nearly two years ago with the "Kuchmagate" revelations of corruption and other executive misdemeanors, has served to galvanize popular consciousness, paved the way for a victory by opposition forces in the March parliamentary elections, and is now moving toward its climax. Ukraine currently resembles the USSR in the late 1980s when CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev struggled to keep pace with developments, instead of controlling them.

The situation since the March elections has changed the balance of forces in favor of the opposition, and the executive is now in a state of panic and disorientation. In Our Ukraine leader Viktor Yushchenko's words, Ukraine is in the depths of its worst political crisis since independence. Prosecutor Svyatoslav Piskun has promised to resolve within six months the murder of opposition journalist Heorhiy Gongadze and his office has now admitted for the first time that it was a "political murder." The opposition chose September 16 , the second anniversary of Gongadze's abduction, to launch major protests.

The actions of the authorities since "Kuchmagate" have radicalized moderates in the opposition camp, particularly within Our Ukraine, whose business group Razom now supports a referendum on early presidential elections, something backed only by the more radical Forum for National Salvation (FNS) last year. Yushchenko's open letter to President Leonid Kuchma on August 29 and the September 14-15 "For the Democratic Development of Ukraine" congress organized by Our Ukraine also reflect a growing frustration and radicalization of opinion among the moderate opposition, which is threatening to completely join the radicals if the authorities continue to turn down dialogue.

The executive and its oligarchic allies have no candidate to succeed Kuchma as president in two years' time, as a viable candidate could have been only found prior to "Kuchmagate." Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Semynozhenko and oligarch Oleksandr Volkov, a former presidential adviser, have openly spoken of the need for Kuchma to run for a third term. They argue that his first term should not count as it began two years prior to the adoption of the 1996 constitution, which bans an individual from holding that office for more than two consecutive terms. Our Ukraine recently asked the Constitutional Court to rule on this question, hoping it would rule against, but even if the court ruled in favor of Kuchma being allowed to run for a third term, it seems beyond the realm of the imaginable that he could be re-elected in a free vote.

A key indication that the Kuchma regime is slowly disintegrating are defections from the former pro-Kuchma For a United Ukraine election bloc to Yushchenko. At the September 14-15 congress, the Dnipropetrovsk (Kuchma's home base) clan's Party of Entrepreneurs-Labor Ukraine led by Serhiy Tyhypko, Stepan Havrysh's Democratic Initiatives faction, and Ukraine's Agrarians all defected to Yushchenko.

The opposition is feeling increasingly emboldened despite all manner of repressive action taken against it, including arrests and interrogations conducted throughout Ukraine over the last few days and threats by the Internal Affairs Ministry to dissuade the public from joining the protests planned for September 16. Despite a Kyiv court ban, the protest in central Kyiv attended by 50,000 people went ahead with Our Ukraine's participation, something the authorities had not expected.

Despite the similarities with the late 1980s, Ukraine's velvet revolution is slower than those that engulfed the outer Soviet empire. The Ukraine Without Kuchma movement had already called for a roundtable with Kuchma at the height of the "Kuchmagate" crisis but the authorities refused. Nevertheless, Yushchenko, never comfortable in the role of an oppositionist, has continued to call for a "dialogue" with the executive in the form of a roundtable, hoping that the authorities will now agree to this proposal.

After the manner in which the authorities reacted to the demonstrations, with mass arrests and the tearing down of tents in central Kyiv overnight, a roundtable is becoming less likely. Kuchma was demonstratively outside Ukraine on September 16, the day of opposition protests. Another problem is the widespread lack of trust in Kuchma's word. Kuchma shows no signs of interest in "dialogue," despite his claims to the contrary, and his actions are pushing Yushchenko into the radical camp.

The Polish roundtable in September 1988 took place because of many events and factors that are lacking in Ukraine. Specifically, it followed seven years of mass clandestine opposition under martial law, mass strikes, and protests that year. Gorbachev also rejected the "[Leonid] Brezhnev Doctrine," thereby removing the threat of Soviet intervention. Poland's Solidarity was also a nationwide movement, unlike the Ukrainian opposition, which draws its main strength from the more nationally conscious Western-Central regions (with the sole exception of the Communists who have now for the first time joined the largely national-democratic opposition).

The National Executive Commission (NEC) created by Solidarity in October 1987 included the majority of the underground opposition. In Ukraine the Forum for National Salvation (FNS), created in February 2001, included only the radical wing of the opposition and never Our Ukraine. The ruling authorities with whom a roundtable is to take place are also different (Communists in Poland, postcommunist oligarchs in Ukraine).

But there are also similarities. The demands made by the NEC and FNS/Our Ukraine both include an end to repression and censorship as part of a radical program of democratization. Both in Poland in the late Soviet era and today in Ukraine, national democrats continue to lead the struggle for democratization.

After the successful Polish roundtable, Tadeusz Mazowiecki headed Poland's first postwar noncommunist government in 1989, and free parliamentary and presidential elections were held the following year. The attempt to create an "artificial majority" composed of pro-presidential forces in Ukraine failed and negotiations are underway to replace it with a "democratic majority" grouped around Our Ukraine. As in Poland, the main objective is to appoint a reformist prime minister, which in Ukraine's case would be Yushchenko. In such an eventuality, with 18 months' grace during which the government could not be brought down, Yushchenko would be in the best position to be elected president in 2004.

The major loser in such a process would be Viktor Medvedchuk and his Kyiv clan's Social Democratic Party-united (SDPU-o), which Yushchenko has said will be barred from joining the parliamentary majority. Both Medvedchuk and his SDPU-o clan are feared and disliked by Eastern Ukraine's oligarchs. Radical anti-Kuchma oppositionists Yulia Tymoshenko, against whom politically motivated charges of "corruption" would be dropped if Yushchenko became premier, and Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz could also be losers unless they agree to join the new "democratic [parliamentary] majority" led by Yushchenko and Tyhypko.

Dr Taras Kuzio is a resident fellow at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies and adjunct staff at the department of political science, University of Toronto.