#16 - RW 12-24-05 - RW Home
Moscow Times
December 23, 2004
U.S. Can't Buy Revolution
By Greg Bloom
Greg Bloom was editor in chief of The Kyiv Post from 2000 to 2003. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

"The United States financed and organized the Orange Revolution." This theory has been popular in Russia and among American and European leftists ever since the protests in Kiev started. Now it has gained traction in the mainstream Western press. This week most of the big U.S. dailies revealed that the United States and the European Union have spent millions of dollars on democracy-building programs in Ukraine that indirectly aided opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko. And two U.S. congressmen angrily alleged that U.S. funds had been used to help instigate the street protests.

There is a problem with the theory that the United States was secretly behind the Orange Revolution: It's wrong. Not only that, it insults the Ukrainian people by implying that they were mere bit players in their own revolution.

The United States does give a whole lot of money to Ukraine, but that is hardly a secret. One of the core missions of the U.S. Agency for International Development is to promote democracy in Ukraine and in dozens of other developing countries around the world. Since President Leonid Kuchma took office in 1995, USAID has dumped close to $1.5 billion into Ukraine. The destination of every penny of those funds is a matter of public record. Most of that money has gone to support reforms within the Ukrainian government. Only a few million dollars a year has gone to support a free press, free elections and other civil society-building initiatives. The bulk of USAID funding definitely did not end up with the opposition. Rather, it ended up with Kuchma's corrupt government. One could thus argue that the United States did more to prop up the Kuchma regime than it did to support the opposition.

If USAID's goal was to encourage economic and democratic reforms in Ukraine, it failed miserably. As U.S. funding to Ukraine increased throughout the late 1990s, the state of democracy got progressively worse. Kuchma met any action Western donors took to support democracy with an equal and opposite reaction to repress democracy. Ukraine's three previous elections were no less egregiously manipulated than the current campaign. The authorities began shuttering independent media outlets in the run-up to Kuchma's re-election in 1999. Foreign investment remained a trickle as Ukraine failed to introduce meaningful protections for investors. The courts and law enforcement agencies remained hopelessly corrupt.

Denying Yushchenko a free and fair vote in the 2004 presidential election was Kuchma's boldest affront yet to the West. Think about it: Suddenly the end result of $1.5 billion in USAID funds flowing into Ukraine over the past decade was yet another rigged election and the installation of Viktor Yanukovych, an unrepentant strongman, into power. Only this time Kuchma didn't get away with it. One million people took to the streets to protest the fraudulent election. The Supreme Court overturned Yanukovych's victory. And somewhere along the line the opposition got a whole lot stronger.

It sure did, but it was not primarily U.S. money that got it there. To be sure, a small fraction of the tens of millions of USAID dollars flowing annually into Ukraine did end up assisting groups that were sympathetic to the opposition. But there is no evidence that these contractors favored opposition groups at the expense of government-supported groups. Rather, the government-supported groups simply failed to take advantage of these programs. They had zero stake in building democratic institutions, and plenty of stake in maintaining the murky status quo.

The strongest indictment one could make about the effect of U.S.-funded democracy-building programs on the Ukrainian election is that they leveled the playing field for the opposition. Considering the Kuchma administration's track record of suppressing democracy and manipulating elections, that's hardly a strong indictment. Indeed, to criticize the use of U.S. funds in this way is to criticize the very idea of a pluralistic civil society.

The Orange Revolution was, at its core, a spontaneous, emotional outburst by the Ukrainian people. It required no Western whip. It required only a principled leader and courageous people who were fed up with the antics of their quasi-authoritarian leader. With a Yushchenko victory on Sunday, the people of Ukraine will reap their reward.