ABSTRACT
What was the Orange Revolution? Was it a ‘revolution’ at all? And, if so, why did a coloured revolution take place in Ukraine but not Russia or Belarus? Five years on from the dramatic events in Kiev’s Maidan square in 2004, and as another presidential election in Ukraine approaches, it is worth returning to those events and asking what actually happened in the context of regime change in the post-Soviet space as a whole. At the time, Ukraine’s coloured ‘revolution’ was, of course, hailed by many within the country and many more in the West as a decisive break with the past, with kleptocratic Kuchma-ism, with ‘managed’ or ‘virtual’ democracy (Wilson, 2005a): a sea change for the Ukrainian people that would lead them to the sunny uplands of liberal democracy, greater prosperity and swift integration into the Euro-Atlantic alliances. Some political scientists went a step further and implied that the promise of these glittering prizes could be a factor in explaining how the coloured revolution came about in the first place (Bunce and Wolchik 2006, p. 294). A significant part of Ukrainian society – the ‘blue camp’ that supported the defeated presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych – and commentators from the rest of the former Soviet space, particularly Russia, were derisive about the hubristic claims of the ‘orange camp’ and its Western supporters, and argued that the revolution was simply a Western coup d’état, masterminded by the US and its allies. Neither claim was entirely valid, but it is safe to conclude that for most Ukrainians, of all political persuasions, the Orange Revolution’s principal legacy was five years of disappointment, as the political elite sunk into a drawnout feud punctuated by parliamentary elections that produced perpetual instability and inertia. When tectonic political shifts take place, through popular protest, the ballot box, by violent means – or indeed a mixture of these – disappointment always follows, which of course is only to be expected when there is so great a weight of public expectation.
