Holland Park is an unlikely place to witness political history. But those genteel streets with their white stucco mansions have recently been filled with an unusual breed of visitor – people with no intention of dropping in on the organic butchers for a stuffed quail or watching the bunnies and peacocks in the park.
They cross the road from the Tube to stand by the small squat statue on the corner of Holland Park Gardens, where the police have put up riot-control barriers. They gather at eightish every night, wearing bits of orange silk round their necks or orange anoraks or orange carnations and waving orange flags and calling out slogans. Some are a bit raucous and nervous when they arrive, though they go quiet and intent as they join the crowd. And almost everyone looks poor.
These are the Ukrainians of London, and the statue they’ve been gathering round, and standing on, and waving their banners at, commemorates Saint Volodymyr, who converted their country to Christianity a thousand years ago. Far from home, they’ve been meeting in support of Victor Yushchenko, who officially “lost” the presidential election in Ukraine to the pro-Russian Prime Minister, Victor Yanukovych.
The protesters say the election was stolen (like many things in Ukraine, which, over the past century, has turned from the breadbasket of Europe to one of its worst economic basket-cases). Back in Kiev, where the Londoners are phoning all the time on mobiles with their Eastern Europe pay-as-you-go cards, the streets have been full of hundreds of thousands of pro-Yushchenko protesters. And, as parliament and the supreme court argue over whether or how to run the election again, it looks, against all the odds, as though the resilient protesters in Kiev (and in London) might just win out.
Demonstrations can be exhilarating, adrenaline rising with the scent of revolution in the air. But they can turn aggressive, and there’s every reason for the mood here to be nasty. This election was supposed to decide the fate of the country on Europe’s easternmost edge. If Yanukovych won, Ukraine would turn back to its old imperial master Russia. If it was Yushchenko, Ukraine would move closer to the EU (something Ukrainians working in London are naturally especially keen on). So the standoff has had a Cold-War-reborn feel, and every kind of outlandish theory has been circulating.
While western commentators focussed on the possibility of civil war between the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine and the Ukrainian-speaking west, Ukrainians were more interested in wondering how dirty Yanukovych’s team (he is the preferred candidate of the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, as well as of Russia) might play. Kuchma’s reputation has been tarnished since newspapers linked him to the murder of a corruption-busting journalist four years ago. The crowds call Yanukovych a “mafioso”.
The film-star looks of Yushchenko have, since September, been coarsened and disfigured in almost Elephant-Man style; he and his supporters believe he was deliberately poisoned (though his opponents sneer that he probably just ate some “bad sushi”). The Yushchenko-ites in this crowd worry that their hero will die in a car crash, or vanish in the woods, or fall under the wheels of an oncoming train.
Yet there is no venom. Hushed dads carry small children on their shoulders, showing them a piece of their country’s history in the making. As I approach the two or three hundred people assembled for the evening, the first thing I hear is prayer, led by the London head of the Greek Catholic Church and an Orthodox priest. Then there’s a national anthem, and folk songs.
The two policemen watching the crowd smile as they fill me in on numbers. “You want to say that they’ve had more people than this on other nights,” one says, “six or seven hundred at least, and every night it’s been a good old sing-song. The nicest demo I’ve ever been at. Good luck to them.”
The crowd is buoyed by stories from Kiev of officials and state TV journalists going over from the Goliath team to Yushchenko’s Davids. There’s a London rumour, which Antonina, a 30-year-old interpreter, passes on, that although the demonstrators hadn’t managed to get the Ukrainian ambassador to accept their petitions officially, he did quietly join the demonstrators when they marched to Downing Street (even if he melted away when someone recognised him).
I start asking Antonina about all the possible political solutions - recounts, re-elections, rethinks. She shakes her head. “I don’t mind how they work out the details. What we know is that we want the man most people voted for to become president. The people should be allowed to choose,” she says.
If Yushchenko does win, it will be because of the calm certainty of hundreds of thousands of Antoninas, looking for real democracy after more than a decade of post-Soviet cant about bringing power to the people. He may not deliver what they hope for, but the people I saw at the nicest demo I’ve ever been to deserve someone who will at least try. Good luck to them.
Slices of London: e-mail Urban Fox here
