#18 - JRL 9016 - JRL Home
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005
From: PAUL DE ZARDAIN <pdezard1@jhu.edu>
Subject: Sevastopol / election observers
hi David:
I was an election observer in Sevastopol, Ukraine, on the December 26 runoff. This piece is about Ukraine and the orange revolution, but also about why Sevastopol is so different from other parts of the country. It might be of interest to the recipients of Johnson's List. -Paul de Zardain
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January 13, 2005
Ukraine: orange revolution
Sevastopol is not flying the orange flag
There is no hint of orange in the city that is home to the Black Sea Fleet. On
December 26, district 224 in Crimea voted 88.52% in favor of Viktor Yanukovich.
Why is Sevastopol a special case within Ukraine?
By Paul de Zardain
Paul de Zardain works as an economics analyst in Moscow.
MOSCOW: On New Year’s Eve, Kiev’s Independence Square might as well have been Tibet. Snowflakes were falling on the Maidan as hundreds of orange banners fluttered in the wind. Children marched down Institutska Street with flags strapped to their fishing poles. Further down on Kreschatik, Kiev’s main boulevard, student protestors roasted chestnuts in an improvised tent city. Kiev was entranced by its commitment to a cause. Were these the architects of revolution? Yesand they could hardly believe they had won.
The Maidan, a popular name for Independence Square, has been at the center of Ukraine’s democratic revolution. Bright orange is the color of Our Ukraine, the party of Viktor Yushchenko. Since November, politicians have stepped onto a techno stage here to denounce the election fraud that would have handed the presidency to Viktor Yanukovich. After considering 11,000 election violations, Ukraine’s Supreme Court ordered a rerun on December 26. This time, Yushchenko managed a 7.8% lead over Yanukovich, an ample margin of 2.27 million votes. Homo Sovieticus was on his deathbed, said an analyst. With him, on the night table, was the ossified regime of Leonid Kuchma.
At dusk, the insignias of Georgia began to converge on the stage. The presence of Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s reformist leader, had been announced on large video screens. Yushchenko himself was due to address the crowd ahead of midnight fireworks. His name was already being chanted in bursts of spontaneity. Close to the loudspeakers, a group of Iranian teenagers soaked up pop music yelling at each other in Persian slang. Flags from several countries were captured by a camera panning the audience: Canadian maple leaves, half-moons from Azerbaijan, blue fields from the European Union, dragons from Wales and a grizzly bear from the California Republic.
Kiev had never been so hip. And yet, last November it taught the world a lesson. By rejecting a rigged election, it found a new national consciousness. Following independence in 1991, Ukraine’s 48 million citizens had been conditioned to think like a monolith. Bureaucracy was of the surrealist genre and payoffs for services were common from the polyclinic all the way to higher education. Neither East nor West, Ukraine was stuck with a template of oligarchic capitalism, followed by a plate of managed democracy à la Putin. Russians felt sorry for their southern cousins, casting them as rough-hewn peasants. A popular restaurant in Moscow displays Ukrainians in theme-park style, with a live granny caring for her chickens. Meanwhile, Kuchma presided over a fiefdom in which clans had a stab at policymaking in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament). Only in this environment of corruption could assets like Kryvorizhstal, a giant steel mill, be sold to his son-in-law. In 2000, a tape recording also linked Kuchma to the snuffing of investigative reporter Heorhiy Gongadze. His acid-laced body was later found by a roadside. Ukrainians rebelled against this model, best exemplified by the cult of the black Mercedes-Benz. Given a choice between systems, they opted for European liberal democracy.
This is a hard pill to swallow if you are a former naval officer from Sevastopol, Crimea. That is where I was posted with a group of seven other international observers. Sevastopol is almost 750km south of Kiev and far from the high-flying chants of the orange revolution. Founded as a naval stronghold in the days of Catherine the Great, it entered Russian lore for resisting an Anglo-Gallic siege in 1855. Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev transferred the whole of Crimea to Ukraine in April 1954. Today, 19th century limestone buildings grace the embayed harbor and tree-lined promenades. The strategic city has evolved into a balmy seaside resort despite its aura of secrecy. This is, after all, the main base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The population of 400,000 is predominantly ethnic-Russian, an anomaly in a peninsula long a melting pot for Greeks, Tartars, Jews and Genoese. What makes the city truly different, however, is its legal status. Sevastopol is an independent metropolitan district on a par with Kiev.
A record 12,400 international observers turned up in Ukraine for the rematch between Yushchenko and Yanukovich. Many were Canadians with family roots in Ukraine. Others were OSCE envoys from Sweden with experience at poll stations in transition states. My team was a handful of rugged individualists. Roman is a biomedical inventor from New Jersey who left Ukraine as a child refugee. Masha is a journalist working at Moscow’s last independent radio station, Echo Moskvy. Viola is a German agricultural economist specializing in Eastern European development. Donat is a Fokker pilot from Luxembourg with a second home in Odessa. Richard is a political science professor from Sacramento, with a hankering for Yalta. Ruslan, our team leader, is a strong-willed financial analyst from Edmonton. Then there was Robert, a resettled Manitoban with a love interest in Kiev. As for myself, I work as an economics analyst in Moscow. All of us flew to Crimea after two days of chaotic training.
On December 26, I was assigned to polling station #41, a public school outside of Sevastopol. District 224, formerly a string of villages on the road to Balaklava, has grown into a charmless housing project for former civil servants. The side streets are cratered and reflect the level of infrastructure you might expect in eastern Turkey, just south of here. The previous day, our team had decided to keep an eye on this precinct because of its group dynamics. Observers develop a sixth sense after visiting an average of three polls per hour. Some tip-offs include lukewarm welcomes or brusque movements, as when we stumbled into two commission members copying lists from a previous election. At my poll, the young secretary, Irina Sulimenko, seemed easy prey for Olga Zabyamova, a commandeering commission president.
Taras, our regional leader, had told us that election observing is like playing spy. I began E-day at 7:15am by checking the names of the first and last entries on the voting lists. No names can be added or marginal notes annotated. According to the list, 2,056 people were entitled to vote and the Territorial Electoral Commission had provided 2,092 ballots. I then tested the pens for invisible ink. Documenting each step on an official checklist can help back up an allegations of fraud. Part of my job was to remind the commission to stick to the regulations drawn up by the Central Voting Committee in Kiev. Checking ID is also important in Sevastopol, where 73% of the population retains Russian citizenship. Although technically illegal, dual citizenship has proven a useful hedge against post-Soviet insecurities. A local OSCE consultant, Liobov Bogdanova, says voters here see Yushchenko as a usurper of their inalienable rights. After years of scuffles over sovereignty, Moscow and Kiev agreed to grant Sevastopol de-facto autonomy from the rest of Crimea. “But people continue to tune into Moscow, not Kiev. Putin promised them visas and Yanukovich promised to make Russian an official language,” says Bogdanova.
During the day, people walked over to offer snacks and chat me up. The local marriage market was a recurring topic, but so was the amount of money I was being paid by US authorities to “secure” Sevastopol. I explained that I had paid my own way from Moscow. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) was covering meals and our hotel expenses downtown, but the rest was out of my pocket. Then I must be of West Ukrainian descent, they concluded. With a look at my last name, the conversation quickly reverted to capital flows. In the logical warp of post-Soviet democracies, election rigging is accepted as a way to counteract the power of money. Forget civil society or the human drive to adopt the innovations of others. Money is the kingmaker. Marina, a middle-aged Yanukovich supporter, wondered whether international observers should not be dispatched to Ohio instead of Crimea. She had a point, but her comments reflected Kremlin propaganda rather than reasoned criticism. Russian PR men like Gleb Pavlovsky have accused Washington of bankrolling agitators on the Maidan. Moscow has been rife with speculation about how much they get paid per hour. Fed ad nauseam through Russian-language TV stations, Sevastopol needed little convincing.
The only serious violation at Olga Zabyamova’s polling station was when I noticed she had not posted the campaign platforms of both candidates. According to Ukrainian Electoral Law (Article 74.5), the official material should hang at the entrance to each poll. A series of snapshots on my camera show the school janitor, a former naval officer, running away with the posters to cut them up in room down the hall. “We do things differently here,” he said. “Go back to America.” That was the only ugly incident during a day in which I visited 11 other precincts in district 224. The tedious process of counting unused ballots, control ballots, spoiled ballots and valid ballots lasted until 2:30am. Zabyamova developed a transitory speech impediment after pronouncing the word “Yanukovich” so many times. Yes, Yanukovich won in my district by 88.52%. The final tally at my polling station was 1,426 for Yanukovich against 107 for Yushchenko. Thirty-seven people voted against both candidates.
Exhausted after dragging a week-long sleep deficit, I found myself on the overnight train to Moscow. It pulls out of Kiev daily at 6:20pm. My compartment was empty on New Year’s Day and I sat back to read an article on a Ukrainian Olympic swimmer. Yana Klochkova, a 22-year-old from Crimea, is hoping to break her record at Sidney in the 400m international medley. It currently stands at 4:33:59. Let’s hope Ukrainian gold medals are not half as disputed as presidential titles.