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Aspects of the Orange Revolution

Dr. Andreas Umland - 4/20/2008

Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election was falsified, spurring the Orange Revolution. To many observers, the Orange Revolution was a shock, and the stolen elections a recent development. However, both the election fraud and the effort to topple the government of Leonid Kuchma emerged from political dynamics that had appeared in earlier Ukrainian elections.

In these six volumes, both established and younger scholars place Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution in the longer perspective of Ukraine’s post-Soviet electoral politics as wells within a comparative framework. The volumes draw upon extensive field research and participant observations by various social scientists specializing in democratization, regime politics, political transitions, electoral studies, and the post-communist world.

Among the questions the volumes try answer are: Why had blatant election fraud not generated mass protest before 2004, but, in that year, did? How was Viktor Yushchenko able to collect enough votes to defeat the establishment candidate Viktor Yanukovych, and become the new President of a socially, geographically and culturally divided country? How did Ukrainian voters break through the barrage of propaganda so as to deliver their ultimate verdict? Was the divide between Eastern and Western Ukraine fact or PR fiction? How was it possible to prevent large-scale violence, and which role did the judiciary play during the quasi-revolutionary events in autumn-winter 2004? What legal foundations and court decisions made the repetition of the second round of the presidential elections possible? Which campaign instruments, and “political technologies” were applied by various domestic and foreign actors to activate the Ukrainian population? How did the internet and music become factors in the emergence of mass protests involving hundreds of thousands of people? To which degree and how did external influences affect the Orange Revolution?

Covering both presidential and parliamentary elections over the entire post-Soviet period, the first volume clarifies the manner in which earlier elections had emerged as part of the battle for power in Ukraine well before 2004. In the second volume, scholars from two continents examine various aspects of the elections that turned into the Orange Revolution focusing on electoral campaigns and attempts to manipulate results. The third volume provides historical background on, and analytical insight into, the events at Kyiv in late 2004 with contributions ranging from electoral statistics to musicology. The fourth volume provides, apart from scholarly analyses, first-hand accounts that not only investigate, but also gives voice to, some of those involved in the events of 2004. The fifth volume collects not all, but some of the most widely discussed official reports on the three rounds of the elections, including English translations of selected sections of the reports produced by the CIS International Observers Mission. The last volume compares the Orange Revolution to similar events in Slovakia (1998), Croatia (1999-2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003) and Kyrgyzstan (2005). It explores different regime types and opposition strategies in post-communist states, the diffusion of opposition strategies between states in which democratic revolutions were attempted, the strategic importance of youth NGO’s in mobilizing oppositions towards democratic revolutions, the use of non-violent strategies by the opposition, path dependent, theoretical and comparative explanations of the sources of successful and failed democratic revolutions, and the factors that lie behind divergent post-revolutionary trajectories.