In November 2004, The Globe and Mail’s then Moscow bureau chief, Mark MacKinnon, was in the thick of it as Ukraine experienced its remarkable Orange Revolution. After almost two months of massive demonstrations and a historic supreme court decision to rerun the contested presidential election, Viktor Yushchenko and his comely but fractious sidekick, Yulia Tymoshenko, took power as president and prime minister respectively. It was one of the turning points of the post-communist era. Massive infusions of Russian money (the figure MacKinnon gives is about $600 million) and influence had not been enough to turn the tide in Moscow’s favour. Putin’s ambitions to bring Ukraine firmly back under Russian control before it got entangled in the encroaching western alliances such as NATO and the European Union had been, for a time at least, thwarted. Many Ukrainians were jubilant.
But according to MacKinnon, not everything was as it seemed. As genuinely grassroots as...
Paul Wilson is a writer and translator who lives in the Town of the Blue Mountains. His most recent translation is Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, a collection of short stories by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, published last year by New Directions.
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