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added: 01-01-2005 20:10
Masha Gessen: Fireworks in Independence Square
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KIEV, Ukraine—A little over a month ago, my best friend called me from
Kiev, where he was on assignment. "I have never been happier in my
life," he screamed into the phone. "You can't imagine what I've seen and
what I've felt!" I could, actually: I've covered revolutions before. It
really is one of the best things in a journalist's life.

This is why I am here today. I came to cover the revote in the
presidential election. After the sitting president and prime minister
tried to falsify the results in November's election, millions of people
flooded city squares across the country. They also blocked access to all
the government buildings in Kiev, the capital. For a while, it looked
like there may be bloodshed, but then the Supreme Court ordered a
revote: The revolution won, peacefully. Victor Yushchenko, the candidate
of the revolution, won last Sunday's re-vote by more than 8 percent,
though the loser still refuses to concede defeat. I've stuck around in
case something goes awry—though it certainly doesn't look like it
will—but also so I can be around for the ultimate celebration: New
Year's in a country that believes it is entering a new era. New Year's
is the most important holiday on the calendar in this part of the world,
so my family has come from Moscow to join me. I want my 7-year-old son
to remember this revolution.

Giving his victory speech in Independence Square two days ago, the
president-elect said: "This year we are not going to celebrate New
Year's on the couch at home. We are going to celebrate it in the
square." He promises to be there just before midnight.

His speech was not yet over when the most spectacular fireworks display
began right over the square. It was a perfect metaphor for the
revolution: The fireworks exploding overhead would have been too close
for comfort if the people standing there hadn't felt invincible. But
they had come right up against confrontation, they had faced down
violence—and won. So it was right that what sounded like artillery fire
was merely a show.

A man standing next to me trained his videophone on the fireworks
display. The picture on his little screen reminded me of Soviet-era
postcards of fireworks at the Kremlin and Red Square. This was when I
finally felt what I'd expected would hit me sooner or later: an acute
pang of jealousy. A display like this in Moscow would inevitably occur
against the backdrop of symbols of the Soviet past. Same with the
language of revolution: In Russian, it's the discredited language of
Soviet ideology; in Ukrainian, it is the rhetoric of liberation. "We
have rehabilitated the word we," says Oksana Zabuzhko, a best-selling
Ukrainian-language author and one of Kiev's most prominent
intellectuals. And I think the reason Ukrainians were able to do that is
that their revolution spoke Ukrainian, a language that was, in a sense,
lucky to have been suppressed rather than hijacked during the Soviet
period. So now Yushchenko and his coalition partners can say words like
we, the people, or our future—and sound like they are talking about the
Ukrainian people and their future rather than recycling the
long-discredited symbols and promises of the past.

This is the advantage of politicians in former colonies: Nationalism,
which is always the easiest and most obvious choice of ideology for
uniting people behind you, actually has a chance of being progressive
and even enlightened in these places. The trick is to recognize how
briefly that can be true. Russian-speakers in Ukraine (these can include
ethnic Ukrainians, especially those living in the east or the Crimea,
while in the western part of the country, ethnic Russians are likely to
speak Ukrainian as their first language) are already on guard, wary of
becoming marginalized in their own country. The revolutionary
politicians are aware of these fears and have tried to calm them, but so
far they clearly lack the sensitivity to finesse the many cultural,
social, and linguistic pitfalls in a country where a large minority—the
Russian speakers—are all the more afraid of being trodden upon precisely
because they used to be the privileged part of the population. Following
Yushchenko's speech, for example, the organizers of the rally, which has
been going on for more than a month, played the Ukrainian national
anthem followed by an Orthodox hymn called "God Save Ukraine." Nearly 2
million Ukrainians are Muslims (mostly ethnic Tartars)—one of the
largest Muslim populations in any European country—and another half a
million or so are Jews; the number of Catholics in Ukraine is the
subject of endless debate, but 7 percent of the population seems a
reasonable guess. For now, the Orthodox Ukrainians at the helm of the
revolution are happy to include all-comers in the celebration, and the
minorities feel generous enough to accept, but, with issues of national,
ethnic, and language identity on everyone's mind, it may turn out to be
a very short honeymoon.

But for now this always-hospitable city is bursting with a welcoming
sort of joy. A few weeks ago, when I e-mailed a colleague—an opposition
journalist here who has gone through hell in the last few years—with a
question, she answered my query and added, "Just come. It's
unforgettable. The mood of the people has changed completely. They are
so proud, they all feel that they are individuals, a people. I am so
proud that I live in Ukraine. I dreamed of being proud of my country."

I think it's going to be a great party.

Masha Gessen is in Kiev for U.S. News & World Report.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111636/

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