The role of the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign in the growing socio-political crisis in Ukraine at the beginning of the XXI century

Naumov Alexander Olegovich ORCID: 0000-0002-8366-5934 Doctor of History Associate Professor at Moscow State University, Department of International Organizations and Problems of Global Governance 119192, Russia, g. Moscow, Lomonosovskii pr., 27/4, of. A817 naumovao@my.msu.ru Other publications by this author

In late 2004 – early 2005, the "orange revolution" took place in Ukraine. The emergence of a deep socio-political crisis, culminating in an unconstitutional change of power, was due to a number of factors, from the presence of purely internal political and socio-economic problems to the active use of foreign "soft power" technologies to change political regimes ^{[1, pp. 118-122]}. A significant role in the growth of crisis trends in the country was played by the campaign "Ukraine without Kuchma", launched by the opposition in December 2000 with the aim of resigning the incumbent President Leonid Kuchma.This topic is extremely rare on the pages of serious scientific publications.

Only a few domestic and foreign scientists have touched on this problem in recent years. Let us highlight the monograph of A.Yu. Naumova ^{[2, pp. 51-52]}, the collective work of G. Filimonov, N. Danyuk and M. Yurakov ^{[3, p. 41]}, the study of E. Wilson ^{[4, p. 58-60]}, as well as articles by A. Karatnitsky ^{[5, p. 32-34]}, M. McFaul ^{[6, p.. 54, 57]} and Yu. Nikolaenko ^{[7, p. 103-108]}. It is worth noting that these authors addressed the object of our research exclusively in the context of studying broader issues related, first of all, to the analysis of the "Orange Revolution" itself. At the same time, the role of the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign in the history of modern Ukraine as a whole is much more significant than it was previously imagined, and, of course, requires detailed research.

The immediate reason for launching the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign was the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze. The 31-year-old Gongadze was known for founding the online publication Ukrainska Pravda in April 2000 and publishing a series of investigations into corruption in the highest echelons of power. On September 16, 2000, he disappeared, and on November 2, Gongadze's decapitated body was found in a forest near Kiev.

Shortly after that, the leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, A. Moroz, presented to the Verkhovna Rada films allegedly recorded in the office of the President of Ukraine by his guard, Major of the SBU reserve N. Melnichenko ^{[8, p. 20]}. According to them, the head of state ordered Interior Minister Yu. Kravchenko radically solve the issue with Gongadze. "I'm telling you, take it out, throw it away. Give it to the Chechens, and then ransom... leave them without pants, let them sit," the Ukrainian president insisted. In response, Kravchenko, according to the tapes, assured that he "now has a fighting team, eagles are such that they do whatever you want" ^{[9, p. 36]}. In addition, Melnichenko's notes revealed numerous facts of corruption in the highest echelons of the Ukrainian government and the persecution of political opponents, which allowed us to conclude that Kuchma himself was almost at the center of the country's criminal empire ^{[5, p. 33]}. The Head of State strongly denied his involvement in the murder of the journalist, calling it a provocation by foreign agents. The Socialist Party called for the impeachment of the current President of Ukraine and the creation of a special parliamentary committee to investigate the "Gongadze case". So an acute political crisis broke out in Ukraine, which went down in history as the "Cassette Scandal", or "Kuchmagate".

The opposition launched a protest campaign under the slogan "Ukraine without Kuchma", the active phase of which occurred in December 2000 – March 2001. The campaign was supported by several public organizations and political parties, including the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People's Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO). Moreover, while the former mainly coordinated street actions, the latter dealt with security issues and patrolled the tent city created by the opposition in the center of Kiev.

On December 15, 2000, three months after Gongadze's disappearance, several former participants of the student hunger strike in October 1990, which went down in history under the name "revolution on granite", organized the first protest action. The date was not chosen by chance – it was at this time that a group of foreign journalists was supposed to arrive in Kiev on the occasion of the official closure of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.  "We decided that we need to set up tents on the Maidan, as we already did during the student hunger strike. We counted and came to the conclusion that we can connect about one hundred – one hundred and fifty more people, – literally on the same day one of the leaders of the campaign "Ukraine without Kuchma" V. Chemeris noted. – In the night I called the press secretary Yuri Lutsenko (at that time he was an assistant to the head of the Socialist Party of Frost in the Secretariat of the Verkhovna Rada - A.N.). It turned out that the idea "it's time to do something" was already with the socialists" ^[10].

About a hundred protesters gathered in front of the concert hall, where Kuchma was at the ceremony at that time ^[11]. The protesters pitched five tents on Independence Square (the site of the 1990 student hunger strike), demanding the resignation of the President, Interior Minister Yu. Kravchenko, the head of the SBU L. Derkach, the Prosecutor General M. Potebenko and conducting an independent examination of the case of the missing Gongadze.

According to Chemeris, "this was the first mass demonstration of independent Ukraine for civil rights, democracy and the fight against oligarchic capitalism" ^[10]. In fact, it was the first experience of active application of methods of nonviolent struggle against the regime in the history of independent Ukraine. Protest marches, thematic actions and "human chains" (this was also reported by representatives of the Russian Embassy in Kiev ^{[12, f. 886, op. 9, p. 44, d. 6, l. 21]}), the occupation of key locations, the creation of an organized tent city with its own hierarchy, information support of its own actions, etc. – such techniques were clearly borrowed from the notorious one hundred and ninety-eight methods of nonviolent resistance developed by the American political scientist J. Sharpe back in the 1970s ^{[13, pp. 109-110]}. One of the participants of the "revolution on granite" mentioned above, M. Svistovich, even created a separate website called "Maidan", which was extremely innovative for that time, and then turned out to be very popular during the "Orange Revolution".

During the campaign "Ukraine without Kuchma", for the first time in the history of the Independent, student youth came to the forefront of the socio-political life of the country – the striking force of any "color revolution". However, the involvement of this social group in protest actions was often limited only to participation in rallies organized by opposition political parties. On the other hand, it was in 2000-2001 that youth movements appeared, which would later play an important role in the events of the "Orange Revolution". In the wake of the campaign "Ukraine without Kuchma" on the initiative of Lviv students in December 2000, for example, the All-Ukrainian Public Resistance Committee "For the Truth!" was formed. This structure positioned itself as non–partisan and largely focused on the methods of struggle of the Serbian "Repulse" - a youth organization that played a crucial role in the overthrow of S. Milosevic during the "bulldozer revolution" of 2000. "Europe and democracy are natural values for us. We will not let the criminal authorities drive us into Asian backwardness and despotism, as they did with our fathers and grandfathers! Demand together with us to change and clean up the system of power in Ukraine," ^[14] said in one of the Committee's appeals to Ukrainian youth. And although his activities during the active phase of the campaign "Ukraine without Kuchma" were limited, in fact, only to the western regions of the country, primarily the Lviv region, the very creation of the Committee "For Truth!" became a trigger for the emergence of new youth movements and, in general, the growth of youth and student activity in the public life of Ukraine ^[15].

Of course, the ruling regime could not help but react to the situation that was becoming increasingly alarming for it, and a wide range of different tools were used to suppress protest activity. The Kiev City administration, for example, in order to block the access of protesters to Independence Square, began reconstruction work there, and later designated the territory of the tent city as "a danger to pedestrians and a threat to the health of citizens" ^[16]. On March 1, 2001, the police completely demolished the tent camp, after which the protesters set up their tents in Taras Shevchenko Park, located opposite the Kiev National University. The organizers obviously hoped to attract students from the capital to their ranks in this way, but they failed to do this thanks to preventive measures on the part of the university management. On March 7, this tent city was also dismantled on the instructions of the authorities, however, without the participation of the police, but through the efforts of public utilities. As the protesters themselves reported, "about 30 people of "sporty appearance in yellow jackets" approached the campus, carefully assembled tents and loaded them into ZIL. They did not show any documents" ^[17]. Moreover, the authorities have established their own alternative tent city in the center of Kiev and organized several crowded rallies in support of Kuchma with the participation of social workers and students. Also in early February, an Assembly of political parties and public organizations was held in support of the current president's reform course, which was attended by more than two hundred political parties and public associations ^{[12, f. 886, op. 9, p. 44, d. 6, l. 20]}.

Another response of the government to the actions of the activists of the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign was the inclusion of some of them in the lists of extremists. The president himself categorically described the protesters as a threat to the national security of Ukraine and "a destructive force consisting of left and right radicals, semi-fascists and anti-Semites who perform at demonstrations with swastikas" ^[18]. The regime really branded the protesters as "fascists", which, of course, did not fully correspond to reality, taking into account the fact that a significant number of participants in the campaign were members of the Socialist Party. In order to discredit the protest, the authorities also made efforts to incite a conflict between pro-government activists and oppositionists who were in tent cities located not far from each other, and provocateurs sent by special services to the ranks of the protesters, both of the extreme left and extreme right orientation, in turn called for "beating the police" ^{[19, p. 178; 4, p. 58-59]}.

The culmination of the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign was a violent clash between protesters and police in the center of Kiev on March 9, 2001. The leadership of the opposition tried to block the president's participation in the annual ceremony in honor of the birthday of Taras Shevchenko, which was guarded by more than two thousand law enforcement officers. The first skirmish occurred when several radical activists tried to break through the police cordon and prevent Kuchma from laying a bouquet of flowers at the monument of the great poet. As soon as the head of state left, the protesters threw away and trampled the presidential bouquet, explaining this step as a symbolic "cleansing of Shevchenko from Kuchma." Another violent clash took place later in front of the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; the reason was the demand of the campaigners to release several UNA-UNSO members detained during a morning clash with the police. Finally, the third outbreak of violence occurred during the march of the political opposition and youth movements to the Presidential Administration building ^{[7, p. 106]}. In all three cases, the security forces managed to cope with the unrest. Several hundred activists were detained (two dozen of them were subsequently sentenced to various terms of imprisonment), and the protests themselves gradually came to naught.

The failure of the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign, in our opinion, is explained by a number of reasons. Firstly, the protesters lacked a popular and charismatic leader who was able to unite the diverse mass of those dissatisfied with Kuchma's rule and lead her. Yu could have been quite suitable for this role . Tymoshenko as the brightest opposition figure of the Ukrainian political class. And, indeed, on February 9, largely on her initiative, the "Forum of National Salvation" was created, which aimed to remove L. Kuchma from power and transform Ukraine from a presidential republic into a parliamentary-presidential or parliamentary one. The coordinating council of the movement included fifteen people, among whom, in addition to Tymoshenko herself, was the leader of the Socialists A. Moroz ^{[12, f. 886, op. 9, p. 44, d. 6, l. 21]}. However, the authorities worked ahead of the curve, already on February 13, taking the future "orange princess" under arrest and releasing her only two months later, when protest activity finally choked.

Secondly, it is necessary to note serious miscalculations in the organization of anti–presidential speeches in late 2000 - early 2001. Representatives of the youth wing of the protest movement, for example, considered their main mistakes to be a departure from the methods of nonviolent struggle against the regime, on the one hand, and the transfer of campaign management levers into the hands of political parties, whose leaders primarily sought to solve their own narrowly egoistic and opportunistic tasks, on the other ^{[19, p. 179-180]}. However, they themselves, first of all the movement "For Truth!", for ideological reasons, were extremely reluctant to cooperate with the socialists who headed the political wing of the protest ^{[4, p. 59]}.

But, perhaps, the main factor in the failure of the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign was the lack of truly massive support among the population. Russian diplomats in Kiev, for example, reporting to Moscow about opposition speeches, never recorded more than five thousand participants there ^{[12, f. 886, op. 9, p. 44, d. 6, l. 20, 22, 23, 77]}. And the British researcher E. Wilson, an eyewitness to the protests, writes in his work that from twenty to thirty thousand people took part in anti-government demonstrations in the winter of 2001 ^{[4, p. 58]}. In any case, these figures cannot be compared with the number of protesters during the "Orange Revolution". It was not possible to win broad support in society precisely because of the above factors – the absence of a strong leader and the monolithic nature of the movement, and the manifestation of open violence in the center of Kiev on March 9 finally alienated representatives of the middle class and intelligentsia from participating in such radical forms of protest. Anyway, the campaign "Ukraine without Kuchma" can hardly be called truly massive and nationwide, its leaders have not managed to mobilize a significant number of citizens of the country to fight the regime.

However, this campaign had several major consequences for the development of the socio-political crisis in Ukraine, which eventually led to the "Orange Revolution". Largely on the wave of "anti-Kuchmism", the opposition managed to win half of the seats in the Verkhovna Rada during the 2002 parliamentary elections and thus create a springboard for systemic opposition to President Kuchma and his associates. In addition, there was a kind of symbolic transfer of the "baton" in the use of technologies to combat power from the organizers of the "revolution on granite" to the activists of the "orange revolution". This was especially true of young people, who were much more involved in the political struggle in the country than before, while acquiring the skills of advanced Western methods of nonviolent struggle against political regimes.

Thus, the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign can be considered as a rehearsal for the use of "soft power" technologies to dismantle the ruling regime in the country, a kind of prologue to the "orange Revolution" of 2004, which, in turn, caused the development of a permanent systemic socio-political crisis in the Square.