Mark Almond to give Lecture on Ukraine

If possible I intend to get down to Central London to see the following talk by Mark Almond on Ukraine.

The title is Mark Almond: Ukraine - What is the Significance of the Orange Revolution?
20 Apr 2009 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM and will be held at Cafe Diplo.

The advert on VisitLondon states,

Mark Almond discusses the significance of the Orange revolution five years on and the geopolitical importance of the Ukraine. The crisis over gas supplies has shown the importance of the Ukraine in relations between Russia and the west and it remains to be seen whether Ukraine will join Nato. Almond teaches at Oriel college, Oxford and has spent time in the Balkans and the former Soviet bloc. He is a frequent commentator in the media on current affairs in Eurasia and is writing a book on the colour-coded or people power revolutions.

I will wait with eagerness for Almond's book on People Power Revolutions, as almost everything else has been written by neoliberal propagandists like Askold Krusheknicky's pathetic An Orange Revolution : A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History.

Now that the consequences of Yushchenko's economic policies of debt fuelled consumerism have almost bankrupted Ukraine, it will be interesting to see how hard the demonstrators calling for the removal of the Orange Revolutionaries will get treated and how the Western media elite will portray them.

For if there is popular resistance to governments operating pro-Western neoliberal economic policies then they tend to be smeared as right wing fascists, as were those in 2006 protesting against Gyurscany's admission he had' lied morning, noon and night about the economy'.

The crackdown in Budapest involved ski masked policemen without ID numbers using tear gas, baton charges and beating up peaceful protestors who were supporting the nations main opposition part Fidesz and not the neo-Fascist Jobbik.

None of that, of course, compares with Saakashvili's recourse to live ammunition when dispersing protestors in Tblisi in 2007, something that media conscious liberals payed almost no attention to at all compared with the much filmed and commented upon Rose Revolution-all funded by Western NGO's.

Almond also is one of the few historians who mentions the reality of how Western interest in the gas and oil pipelines influences the coalitioning of political forces within nations like Ukraine and how democracy is manipulated and micromanaged by the West as much as it is by Russia.

The only people who are not really considered important are the Ukrainian voters themselves who have their hopes of a future Ukraine without the corrupt kleptocracy dashed : the Orange Revolution was led, after all, by Yulya Timoshenko, a woman who made a fortune buying up gas companies at a fraction of their real cost.

Others historians of Ukraine like Andrew Wilson tend to just dismiss all that because it does not fit in with the cosy and reassuring Colour Revolution narrative. Such seems to be the case not only in Ukraine but in Britain with New Labour and the USA with Obamamania.

As early as 2002, Almond seemed to sense the futility of 'Our Ukraine', the party that propelled Yushchenko into power during the Orange Revolution. Almond wrote this article for the New Stateman after visiting L'viv ( Eddie George Takes Over Ukraine ),

'A decade of economic reform has produced unemployment and poverty. Even in collapsed societies such as Georgia or Moldova, I had never seen people not only rummaging in dustbins, but putting valuable scraps of food from them directly into their mouths. I saw two women do that in central Lviv. As for the beggars, they were too numerous to count.

Everybody has relatives working abroad, usually illegally. Pathetic columns of locals pour across the nearby borders into Poland, Slovakia or Hungary to do menial work and peddle their wares, often their bodies, in countries that seem poor to western Europeans but are beacons of prosperity to Ukrainians. Children are left in the care of elderly relatives, and run riot in villages where the working-age population has been plunged into unemployment by the collapse of the sole, Soviet-era employer.

Yet in this region, the absolute majority of voters are supposed to have trooped to the polls to endorse the coalition "Our Ukraine", which is led by a 40-year-old, US-trained former central banker, Viktor Yushchenko, who embodies "shock therapy" Ukrainian-style. His chief ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, is the formidable former boss of a privatised energy concern.

It is as though the voters of Scotland's central belt had spurned the Labour Party to back a new party led by Eddie George and the chairman of Scottish Power. Yet Ilia Semenov, programme director at Radio Lux, a local station, says that Yushchenko is like a "messiah" to western Ukrainians, despite being an easterner by birth.

Nationalist sentiment dominated the rhetoric of the election campaign, but bread-and-butter concerns will dominate the agenda of the newly elected MPs, a finely balanced mix of likely Yushchenko supporters and communists.

A key factor in Yushchenko's popularity was that he is not President Leonid Kuchma.......

Yushchenko was not always against the president, whose impeachment for abuse of office he now demands. Kuchma was Yushchenko's patron and appointed him premier in December 1999, only to recognise him as a rival and remove him less than two years later.

Ukraine's western creditors and the International Monetary Fund were unusually enamoured of Yushchenko, and indulgently allowed him to relax fiscal discipline enough to pay off some back wages and pensions that had gone unpaid for years.

That populist step was the basis of any economic appeal, but his future programme aims to make Ukraine meet western standards - which means more cuts. Many of the European Union's demands on any Ukrainian government would spell further social crisis, especially in the west of the country.

The west has shown little sympathy for nationalism elsewhere in the post- communist world. And the opinions of some of Yushchenko's vocal supporters, such as the paramilitary Unso (Ukrainian National Self-Defence) group, would normally lead to ostracism: they call for veterans of the Waffen SS to receive pensions comparable to those for Soviet partisans.

If Yushchenko and his allies come out on top in the forthcoming battle to replace Kuchma and take control of the next round of privatisation, Yushchenko's more florid nationalist rhetoric will be forgotten - at least by him.

Once the power struggle over the presidency is resolved, Our Ukraine's electorate is likely to find that the hardships of the past decade of transition were just the beginning. Time will tell whether they were turkeys voting for Christmas, but on Easter Sunday, the city that gave birth to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch voted for more pain with little hope of economic gain.

As the scale of Ukraine's economic collapse in the wake of the 'credit crunch' shows, the neoliberal policies of Yushchenko were flawed from the beginning and will have a terrible impact on ordinary Ukrainians.