The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

Insane in the Ukraine

by Matt Taibbi

I've been trying to avoid the subject of Ukraine, not only in this column, but in general. Like anyone with strong ties to Russia, I have a whole range of feelings about Ukraine and Ukrainians, not all of them generous.

These are people whose idea of a snack is a big lump of fat. The Ukrainian fat-snack—a fiendish thing called salo that is virtually indistinguishable from suet—has played a significant role in my life, and I'm reminded of it every day. The problem began in 1994, when I spent a summer playing with the CSKA Red Army baseball team in Moscow.

Our team had an unusual fitness drill. We would divide up the team into pairs, in descending height order, and line up on the third-base line. Then each player would put his partner on his back, and, carrying that person, run wind-sprints to the right-field fence and back. Whichever pair won got to sit down. The losers continued, and the process was repeated, until there were no more pairs left.

I was the second-tallest person on the team. The tallest was a Ukrainian. Our ace starting pitcher, this Ukrainian subscribed to the David Wells school of fitness, only he was even bigger in scale: six-five and about 240 pounds. The Ukrainian was this fat because all he ate was salo. In fact, he ate so much salo, we all called him "Salo." I don't even remember his real name. All I remember is that I always had to carry "Salo" on my back for these wind-sprints, and naturally lost every single race, which meant that I had to run about 10 wind sprints with this kid on my back every day for two months.

I have a bad back now. I can't sit on stools or benches. So fuck the Ukrainians and their Orange Revolution.

That was my initial reaction to the Ukrainian revolution story. Petty as it is, I'm not sure it's any dumber than any of the other takes on the revolution that we're hearing in the Western press.

At first, the storyline coming out of Ukraine was suspiciously simplistic, with the "pro-Western" candidate, Viktor Yuschenko, heroically standing up for the freedom-loving population against the evil revanchist "Kremlin-backed" candidate, Viktor Yanukovich—a bloodless sadist who brazenly tried to steal an election and inject his horrible haircut onto the world stage.

When the likes of William Safire stood up and painted the Putin crowd as a gang of KGB thugs in trench coats and Yuschenko as the second coming of Gandhi, this sent a signal to some people that perhaps the Orange Revolution was not the festival of unambiguous wonderfulness it was being made out to be. When William Safire starts holding his lighter in the air and waving his hand to the sunny tune of humanist revolution, you know it's usually time to place your bets on the other guys.

And indeed, last week, a counter-spin on the Ukraine election started to creep into the Western press. Traveling by way of the Russian press, to such outlets as Al-Jazeera, and finally to British papers like the Guardian and the

Independent, the news started to reach America last week that certain of the Ukrainian oppositionist political groups had received funding from American organizations. Specifically, it is said that the youth-opposition group "Pora" (meaning "It's time"), with its slick marketing campaigns and impressive organization, had received money from such groups as the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House. Moreover, many of these stories pointed out that the same organizations had helped fund and found similar "pro-democracy" movements like the Serbian "Otpor" (resistance), the Belarussian "Zubr" (Bison), and the anti-Shevardnadze Georgian group "Kmara" (Enough is enough).

This reporting inspired this new spin on the Orange Revolution. The Guardian put it most bluntly, calling the revolution "an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing." The paper also said that the ascension of Yuschenko was a "postmodern coup d'etat" and a "CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days, adapted to post-Soviet conditions."

Here in the States, this line of reasoning has begun to be parroted by a number of liberal analysts, including some friends of mine, like Katrina Van Den Heuvel of the Nation. These articles, in turn, have inspired conservative denunciations on the part of people like Anne Appelbaum of the Washington Post, who described folks like Katrina and the Guardian crew as "freedom haters" for espousing these opinions. Here's how Appelbaum put it:

At least a part of the Western left—or rather the Western far left—is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States.

This whole debate, it seems to me, is ridiculous.

Of course the U.S. is improperly influencing the domestic politics of places like Ukraine, Georgia and Serbia. It has been shamelessly injecting its proteges in ex-Soviet governments ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, and it has used groups like Freedom House and the NDI and USAID to funnel money to all sorts of unsavory characters. That's why the reaction of certain people familiar with these mechanisms has been to balk at the Orange Revolution—because it's seldom failed to be true that anyone described in the New York Times or other major American dailies as a "pro-Western politician" has ever turned out to be anything other than a scumbag of the highest order.

Hell, just look at this quote from Alessandra Stanley of the Times a few years back:

Under the leadership of President Leonid Kuchma, elected last July, the once isolated and economically ruined Ukraine has turned pro-Western and pro-economic-reform...

Within a few years, Kuchma would be chopping off the heads of journalists, and a few years after that, he'd be stealing elections. Next thing you know, this same pro-Western president is showing up in the news as the "Kremlin puppet," and his successor's opponent is being hailed as the Thomas Jefferson type. It should be noted that Yuschenko's chief pro-Western quality is that he opposes the government of the old pro-Western guy, Kuchma.

Anyone familiar with ex-Soviet politics has seen this script repeated endlessly over the last decade or so. It has always been next to impossible to identify the "pro-Western" politician by his politics alone, as he, too, steals elections (see: Boris Yeltsin's theft of the 1993 referendum), represses the media (Kuchma, lately the bad anti-West guy, beheaded Gongadze; Yeltsin, at the time still the good pro-West guy, whacked Dmitri Kholodov), and commits gargantuan acts of thievery (too numerous on all sides to detail).

The difference in this case is that the guys who tried to steal this election didn't have our support, and were too stupid to pull it off. That doesn't mean they don't still deserve to lose. I mean, they tried to kill Yuschenko. They put dioxin in his soup, for Christ's sake. (Soup! In Ukraine! Is nothing sacred?) There have to be some standards.

But does that mean Yuschenko is the next Tom Paine? I'm not holding my breath. My old colleague at the eXile in Moscow, the writer/politician Eduard Limonov, put it best:

The choice between two swine-looking bureaucrats is not so exciting. Ukrainians have not choosen between say, Che Guevara and Yanukovitch, between capitalist development and Revolutionary way of life... Coal miners better to drink their Ukrainian vodka "Goritka," stay home and fuck their huge wives.

Who knows, maybe that was in the first draft of Safire's piece. Now that would be thrilling.