Ukraine's Unreported Revolution: Viktor Yushchenko was swept to power by the forces of religious freedom
Aikman, David
Ukraine's nreported evolution VIKTOR YUSHCHENKO WAS SWEPT TO POWER BY THE FORCES OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. LARGE PART of what's at stake here is the future of Christianity in this part of the...
...4: David Aikman is the author of Jesus in Beijing (Regnery Publishing) and A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (W Publishing...
...1 VEN SO, IT WAS NIP AND TUCK whether the proYushchenko demonstrations that took place J in the 12 days between the November 21 runoff and the December Supreme Court decision to invalidate the election would be marred by violence...
...Cardinal Husar sent a letter of congratulations to Yushchenko immediately after the supreme court confirmed his election...
...The mafia connection would have been well understood by Yushchenko's wife, Kateryna Chumachenko Yushchenko, a Chicago-born Ukrainian-American who married Yushchenko in 1998...
...But Ukraine, though beset by corruption and the autocratic ways of its leader President BY DAVID AIKMAN 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR March 2005 Vladimir Kuchma, didn't seem so concerned about the Protestant evangelizing at the grassroots...
...Russia and Belarus soon reacted harshly, enacting laws that gave the Orthodox Church in each country virtual monopoly on religious activity...
...Churches provided tents for the protesters, as well as warm clothing and food, and overall helped create an atmosphere that one security official told a pastor was more akin to a revival meeting than a political protest...
...He often referred to a democratic revolution in one former Soviet republic that took place in November 2003, the so-called "Rose Revolution" in Georgia...
...A Uni- ersity of Chicago MBA, she worked as an offier in the State Department Human Rights Bureau in the 1980s, then as a political appointee in the Treasury Department in the administration of Bush 41...
...who knew little about the cultures they were seeking to evangelize...
...At this point, Yushchenko felt free to become the leader of Ukraine's democratic opposition bloc, "Our Ukraine," which won a respectable number of seats in the 2002 parliamentary elections...
...She first met her future husMarch 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 15 UK A NE'S 4REPORTED REV UT ON band during a business trip of Ukrainian bankers to the U.S...
...He thought that the "orange revolution" would in fact be good for Russia...
...Watching these pious young supporters, Yushchenko was confident they would carry the day...
...You certainly wouldn't have known this if you had relied on the old staples of American news distribution in the last few weeks of 2004...
...Particularly remarkable, given that Ukraine is ecclesiastically divided (the Greek Catholic Church dominates the west, the Orthodox Church the east), was that both Patriarch Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Cardinal Lubomyr Husar of the Ukrainian Eastern Rite Catholic Church appeared together with Yushchenko's supporters...
...The last thing they want is for the system to change and for the economy to be a free market economy where the general population benefits rather than a small group of people at the top...
...Adelajah told the U.S...
...The Yushchenko-Yanukovich election in many ways seemed a classic struggle for power through proxies of Russia and the West...
...Russia's intelligence organizations may or may not have been involved, but the heavy-handed effort to influence the election result by Russia's Vladimir Putin, who visited Ukraine twice and spent time with Yushchenko's opponent Viktor Yanukovich, and later said that Yushchenko would win "over my dead body," ended up helping Yushchenko rather than Yanukovich...
...Under the regime of President Kuchma, business opportunities became funneled through agencies and companies owned by oligarchs and mafia-led groups...
...About 400 or 500 pastors are there every day, praying with microphones to the whole square so everybody could come and join us in prayer, praying for Ukraine and fasting and preaching and giving the Christian alternative as the way out for the nation...
...magazine Christianity Today at the height of the demonstrations, "We have in the square hundreds of pastors from all over the country...
...At others, track-suited thugs actually assaulted election officials or stuffed the boxes with counterfeit absentee ballots, known to cynical locals as "dead souls...
...Those outrages came on top of the widespread suspicion—later confirmed by Austrian doctors—that Viktor Yushchenko had been subjected to a crude poison attack, probably by political opponents, using Dioxin, a component of the Vietnam-era Agent Orange (a touch of unfortunate irony there...
...What helped draw the couple together was a strong, shared faith in the Christianity of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in which each had grown up, Kateryna in Chicago, Yushchenko in Sumy, northeastern Ukraine...
...That is, until Kuchma's sliding poll figures, in contrast with Yushchenko's steady popularity, brought about Yushchenko's dismissal in 2001...
...Looking back on the astonishingly peaceful demonstrations in Kiev late last year—petty theft and alcohol consumption actually declined in Kiev during the 12 days—Kiev Bible College Director Shevchuk commented, "It was God who did it...
...We're strong believers in God," Kateryna said, "and we strongly believe that God has a place for each one of us in this world, and "We're strong believers in God," Kateryna said, "and we strongly believe that God has a place for each one of us in this world, and that he had put us in this place for a reason...
...These might have scored points with voters in western Ukraine, traditionally more comfortable withthe idea of Ukraine's being part of Europe, but they would have profoundly antagonized eastern Ukrainians, some of whom were muttering about splitting the country in two if Yushchenko were to win...
...The result: By the time of the first round of the Ukrainian election last fall, there were some 13,000 Protestant churches or organized communities in Ukraine as opposed to 12,000 Orthodox ones...
...THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW EVANGELICAL constituency in Ukraine was a direct consequence of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991...
...Some churches had a 24-hour prayer chain going throughout the stand-off...
...But what happened in Ukraine was not just a struggle of pro-democracy, pro-West forces against the corruption and repressiveness of the old heirs of Soviet-style autocracy...
...A Ukraine whose business practices followed Western-style rules of transparency and accountability would not be a team player in such a structure...
...As in Ukraine, protests in Georgia against a fraudulent election led to the ouster of Eduard Shevardnadze's government...
...The demonstrators themselves were primed by two daily prayer meetings of no less than two hours in the morning and an hour at night and reminded of their Christian duties by nuns clad in orange sashes, seminarians, and priests-monks...
...An accountant by profession, and in fact a native of the eastern part of Ukraine where Yanukovich had his greatest support, Yushchenko rose to prominence as head of Ukraine's central bank, overseeing policies that tamed inflation and spurred economic growth...
...In short, if Marty was right, what drew hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets after the first crooked run-off vote between the two Viktorspro-Moscow prime minister Viktor Yanukovich and pro-Western former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko—was not just outrage over election fraud...
...Yushchenko, for his part, was hardly an outsider to the political establishment of Ukraine...
...Well, okay...
...KvATERYNA IS NO ORDINARY CHICAGOAN...
...STILL, NOT EVERY RUSSIAN bemoaned Yushchenko's victory of 52 to 44 percent in the December 26 second run-off, observed by a veritable army of 12,500 international poll-watchers...
...It's impossible to do business in Ukraine unless you are connected to the mafia," said Viktor Shevchuk, director of the Kiev Bible College, many of whose students were active in the 12 days of demonstrations that followed the original election on November 21, before the Ukrainian Supreme Court declared it invalid...
...Perhaps...
...There were no demonstrations in favor of Yanukovich...
...that he had put us in this place for a reason...
...Americans of Ukrainian Catholic heritage demonstrated in Chicago and outside the U.N...
...But it wasn't until the egregious ballot-stuffing and intimidation that took place in the first run-off election of November 21 that protesters took to the streets of Kiev in the thousands...
...Repression in Russia is still continuing, with the authorities in one Russian town, Chekhov, disallowing even the showing of the evangelical "Jesus" movie, the Campus Crusade for Christ production that has been dubbed into some 500 languages and shown to millions worldwide...
...Ukrainian Catholic support for Yushchenko was overwhelming...
...That limited, though important, neglect of control—which Viktor Yanukovich vowed, if elected, to end—had profound consequences when the "orange" movement of his opponent found itself facing the massive election fraud perpetrated by the Yanukovich team...
...There are, after all, several parallels between Kuchma's Ukraine and Putin's Russia: an autocratic executive, a cowed legislature and media, and a business culture dominated by regime cronies...
...Some] people are making a lot of money off the current system," she told ABC News...
...in New York on Yushchenko's behalf...
...He was named prime minister by President Kuchma in 1998 and gave every indication of being a loyal soldier...
...Many have suspected that Putin's heavy-handed support of Yanukovich stemmed from his fear that the Ukrainian democratic contagion might spread to Moscow...
...Parallel to the political speeches that are going on, we have a little stage there at the end of the stage in the square where we had fasting and prayer...
...At some polling places supporters of Yanukovich, predominantly Russian-speakers from the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, poured acid into ballot boxes...
...What he wanted, more than anything else, was a change in the entire climate of governance and business in Ukraine...
...Last summer, members of Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party collected signatures from 150 national deputies for a letter asking the Pope to recognize the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church as a patriarchate...
...It has planted more than 200 "daughter and satellite" churches in Ukraine, as well as over 100 mission churches from Egypt and Israel to Russia and the United States...
...Andrei Illarionov, Putin's top economic adviser, is the rare Putin aide who speaks his own mind...
...Yushchenko, however, never lent any support to this concept in his public utterances, always speaking with some circumspection of Russia, Ukraine's neighbor and longtime overlord in the Soviet period and earlier...
...And, he's publicly stated that the only church he would recognize would be the Russian Orthodox Church and he would not tolerate others...
...Russia has aspired to construct a "common economic space" of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, a concept that would probably depend greatly on cooperation among the oligarchs who are well connected with the regimes of each of those countries...
...Today, Adelajah's church claims to have more than 2,000 home groups...
...If the election goes toward the pro-Russian candidate," said Marty, who actually lives in Ukraine, "then a lot of the policies of the country are going to follow...
...Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, however, she was sent by the U.S...
...0 NE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE manifestations of the "orange revolution" was the major role played by members of what may be the largest church in Europe, Kiev's 26,000-member Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations...
...Here is where the overwhelming presence of members of evangelical Protestant churches in Kiev contributed to defusing that danger...
...It was, in large part, the spontaneous uprising of Ukraine's new evangelical Protestant churches against the threat that a Russian-style clamp down on non- Orthodox Christians might be one of Yanukovich's first orders of business...
...This Pentecostal church is led by none other than a Ukrainian-speaking Nigerian, Sunday Adelajah, a 37-year-old former journalism student who experienced "an encounter with the Lord" in 1993 and began a ministry to Kiev's multitudinous alcoholics and down-and-outs...
...Now if Vladimir Putin were to adopt the views toward Ukraine of his own economic adviser, that would indeed be a chudo, a miracle...
...In one remarkable example of "love thy enemy," they provided refreshments and overnight accommodation for busloads of Yanukovich supporters who came to Kiev intent on disrupting the pro-Yushchenko demonstrations...
...With their vote, the Ukrainian electorate has not only helped themselves, but also the Russians...
...Only one Orthodox organization issued a sour note, the pro-Moscow Union of Orthodox Citizens of Ukraine, which declared that those who didn't vote for Yanukovich were "traitors...
...Even TV's cable networks seemed colorblind to what was going on in Ukraine—despite the unusual nature of its "orange revolution"—as did the prestige dailies and the newsmagazines...
...Protestant missionaries flocked into Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine by the hundreds and thousands, many of them mom and pop teams from the U.S...
...That open expression of faith, rather unusual for political figures in the world of Orthodoxy, seems to have persuaded Christians of other faith backgrounds that Yushchenko held the key to reform in the economy and true freedom in culture and religion...
...international auditing company KPMG to Kiev to help train the country's fledgling Western-oriented economists and to introduce the Ukrainian business community to free market practices...
...It was desperation over the possible imminent suppression of freedom of religion...
...Severely harassed during 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR March 2005 IK MAN the Soviet period, Ukrainian Catholics well understood that the Orthodox Yushchenko supported religious freedom for all religions...
...Aside from aspiring eventually to join both the EU and NATO, Yushchenko eschewed any demagogic appeals to Ukrainian nationalism...
...LARGE PART of what's at stake here is the future of Christianity in this part of the world," said Paul Marty, president of a Pennsylvania-based NGO called HOPE International, to the Mission Network News...
...Russia," he said, "will be able to become a modern, democratic and dynamically developing country only if is stops being a formal, and informal, empire...
...March 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17...
...in 1993...
...Adelajah's congregants, along with members of other evangelical churches, took part in the feeding, clothing, and even housing of the demonstrators in Kiev's Independence Square...
Vol. 38 • March 2005 • No. 2
