Taras Kuzio’s Blog

Gender and Anti-Semitism Contributed to Yanukovych’s Election Victory

(Full Version. Shorter version published in Kyiv Post, http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/62040/)

Gender and anti-semitism were two important factors that probably tipped the balance in Viktor Yanukovych’s favour in the 2010 elections. Yanukovych won by only 3.5%, or approximately 900,000 votes, and became the first president to not win a majority of Ukraine’s regions or 50% of the vote.
The foremost expert on gender in Ukraine, Reed College Professor Alexandra Hrycak, believes that ‘traditionalistic attitudes’ towards women ‘are considered to be more prevalent within the ‘Orange electorate’. Much of this electorate originates in the country’s Western region and in rural areas of Central Ukraine’.
An October 2008 psychological portrait of Yushchenko published by Ukrayinska Pravda showed him to have patriarchal and traditionalist views of the role of women in society. Yushchenko’s inability to work with Tymoshenko is undoubtedly a product of her being a strong willed and self confident woman. Yushchenko surrounded himself with sycophants and motherly figures, such as his last chief of staff Vera Ulianchenko, and would never tolerate anybody talking back to him like Hanna Herman does to Viktor Yanukovych.
Anti-semitism was used against only two candidates in the 2010 elections: Tymoshenko and Arseniy Yatseniuk, but the campaign was more systematic and at a higher level against her. Marginal candidate Serhiy Ratshniak, Mayor of the Trans-Carpathian capitol city of Uzhorod, was openly anti-semitic against Yatseniuk. Ratushniak’s views did not win widespread support and Yatseniuk still won more votes than the mayor in Uzhorod. Ratushniak came in 16th out of 18 candidates with only 0.12% of the vote.
Anti-semitism was not a threat to Yatseniuk’s campaign as he was never going to enter the second round. He came in fourth with 7% of the vote. Yatseniuk, who is from Chernivtsi, has denied having Jewish origins.
The anti-semitic campaign against Tymoshenko presented more of a threat against her winning the presidency. I myself witnessed anti-semitic leaflets distributed throughout Galicia during the last week of the second round that called upon Galicians to not vote for Tymoshenko as she is allegedly ‘Jewish’.
Such spurious allegations had been around for the last 2-3 years but had come to the surface in the 2010 elections with the support of President Yushchenko. His allies in Lviv’s Rukh, such as Yaroslav Kendzior, who was expelled by Rukh leader Borys Tarasiuk, a supporter of Tymoshenko, had openly described Tymoshenko as the ‘Jew in the braid’.
The West Ukrainian branch of the Ukrainian Language Society ‘Prosvita’ had published booklets by the rabid anti-Tymoshenko former parliamentarian Dmytro Chobit which also claimed she had Jewish origins. Tymoshenko’s father had separated from her mother when she was three and his surname was Grigorian, suggesting an Armenian ethnic origin.
Regardless of Yatseniuk’s or Tymoshenko’s ethnic heritage they were both born in Ukraine and are therefore ‘Ukrainian’ as defined by Ukrainian legislation. The European norm is to use territorial and therefore civic criteria to determine citizenship, not ethnicity. The only exceptions who used ethnic criteria were Germany, Latvia and Estonia but all three have moved towards the civic norm.
Yushchenko stirred the issue of Tymoshenko’s ethnicity over the last two years by casting doubt on her Ukrainian patriotism. In August 2008 the presidential secretariat issued a 300-page dossier revealing her alleged ‘treason’. The dossier was returned by the prosecutor-general’s office as not constituting any criminal evidence of ‘treason’.
Although the dossier had been prepared by secretariat deputy head Andriy Kyslynskyi, who was then promoted to the position of deputy chairman of the Security Service (SBU), the allegations of ‘treason’ and ‘un-Ukrainian’ stuck to Tymoshenko. Kyslynsky was discredited and removed from the SBU after it was found that he had forged his University degrees on his CV.
Yushchenko repeatedly argued that Ukraine needed a ‘Ukrainian’ government indicating he did not believe that Tymoshenko is a ‘Ukrainian’. Yushchenko campaigned during the second round in favour of not voting for either of the two candidates, Tymoshenko and Viktor Yanukovych (see leaflet).
This served to dampen the ‘orange’ vote in Western Ukraine and reduce votes for Tymoshenko (Yushchenko’s call for a double ‘no’ vote would not have been listened to in Eastern Ukraine where he had no support). Tymoshenko received three million fewer votes than Yushchenko in December 2004 while Yanukovych won approximately the same number of votes in 2010 as he had in December 2004.
Yushchenko claimed that both candidates were allegedly ‘Moscow projects’, a view that he has stuck to. On a visit to Lviv on March 10, Yushchenko said that the Tymoshenko bloc are ‘not the kind of patriots who form the Ukrainian viewpoint’.
In the second round of the elections, nationalist groups in Lviv and the diaspora rallied to Yushchenko’s call to vote against both candidates. Yuriy Shukhevych, son of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander whom Yushchenko had honored in 2007, was a leading supporter of the ‘no’ campaign.
So too were nationalist parties, such as Oleh Tyanybok’s Svoboda (Freedom), the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN), as well as the Andriy Melnyk (OUN-m) and Stepan Bandera (OUN-b) wings of the émigré Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. All four political forces supported Yushchenko’s double ‘no’ vote campaign.
Appeals to vote against both candidates were published widely in the Galician media. I was shown evidence that these were paid for by the Lviv branch of the Yanukovych election campaign, without, I was told, authorization from the central headquarters of his election campaign.
Views of Tymoshenko as ‘unpatriotic’, sometimes tinged with anti-semitism, had moved during the last two years to the Ukrainian diaspora. A senior member of the Congress of Ukrainians in Canada (KUK) lambasted Tymoshenko as a ‘Jew’ to myself last year.
I pointed out to him that mixed marriages, like those of my parents, was the norm for Ukrainian men in Britain who came from the military or slave labor camps, like my father, to Britain in the late 1940s because there were few Ukrainian women available to marry. The émigré OUN-b had a strong base in Britain which provided proportionately the largest financial contribution of any Ukrainian diaspora to that organization. How ironic that this was a diaspora composed of mixed marriages and therefore not ‘pure Ukrainian’ in Yushchenko and the KUK leader’s eyes.
The Ukrainian diaspora stayed very silent during most of the 2010 election campaign, unlike five years earlier, because it had partially bought into the Yushchenko view about both candidates lack of ‘patriotism’ who would enter the second round. Tymoshenko had successfully established herself with the diaspora during her speech and meeting with World Congress of Ukrainians (SKU) leaders at its August 2009 Lviv congress.
But, the SKU had entered the elections late in the day with a statement only issued on February 2, five days before round 2, that indirectly called upon Ukrainians to vote for Tymoshenko. Had the SKU been on holiday since the August 2009 congress and only woken up in February to the Yanukovych threat?
Former SKU head Askold Lozynsky issued strongly worded support for Tymoshenko. Lozynsky, as with SKU leaders, are from the OUN-b milieu and had therefore broken with the ‘no’ campaign initiated by Yushchenko and supported by both wings of the émigré OUN.
The supreme irony of the 2010 elections is that anti-semitism in Western Ukraine directed against Tymoshenko and fanned by Yushchenko could have been one of the factors that led to the election of the pro-Russian autocrat, Yanukovych. In a 50:50 election where every percentage point counts the ‘no’ vote could have proven to be decisive in Tymoshenko’s defeat.
A second conclusion is that the Ukrainian diaspora cannot hope to counter charges of anti-semitism against Bandera or itself unless it condemns such views within its ranks. When Yushchenko fanned the flames of Tymoshenko’s ‘un-Ukrainianess’ and his supporters went further and unleashed spurious anti-semitic allegations of her ‘Jewishness’ no Ukrainian diaspora organization issued a protest.
Suspicions about Yushchenko’s ‘patriotic’ motives should have emerged over the intentional timing of the decree to honor Bandera on the eve of the second round. This was undertaken to undermine Tymoshenko’s campaign by mobilizing Eastern Ukrainian voters against the ‘nationalists’. Nothing could have stopped Yushchenko issuing the decree any time during the last five years.
And yet diaspora Ukrainians and Galicians still have sympathy for the ‘patriotic’ Yushchenko. A majority of Ukrainians on the other hand, see him as the worst of the three presidents to have ruled the country and who did more than anything to bring about Yanukovych’s election.
Yanukovych’s thank you was not to make Yushchenko Primer Minister, as he had hoped, but to make the non-Ukrainian speaking Nikolai Azarov his Prime Minister and the Ukrainophobe Dmytro Tabachnyk the Minister of Education in the new Kuchma-2 government. Thank you Yushchenko.