MOBS ARE mesmerising. Yesterday’s crowds in Kiev appeared on the brink of a remarkable triumph in their week-long revolt against the Ukrainian election result. A U-turn by the outgoing President, Leonid Kuchma, and a hearing of the supreme court seemed to presage new elections, or at least the engineered coronation of the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko.
The world’s media has supported this revolt to the hilt. Front pages are adorned with pictures of pretty girls inserting flowers in police shields and dancing to rap music. Seas of orange banners support Mr Yushchenko and his deputy, the “oligarch” tycoon, Yuliya Tymoshenko. The parliament and presidency buildings have been surrounded and government business and banking brought to a standstill. There is no violence, largely because mobs have no need of it. They imply it by insisting that those who oppose them must incur “the odium of violence” to disperse them. This the authorities in Kiev have mercifully been reluctant to do.
The Kiev mob is thus a good mob. It is like the Tiananmen Square mob in 1989, or the Leipzig mob in the same year, or the Belgrade mob in 2000. It is youthful and easy to contrast with the “bad” mobs demonstrating for the election winner, Viktor Yanukovych of east Ukraine, in Donetsk and elsewhere. The latter have been little reported. They are not in Kiev and are mostly old, male, working-class and described as “bussed in”.
Kiev is therefore in thrall not to a mob but to a “crowd”. It is the voice of the people, the masses, public opinion, democracy. When such crowds take to the streets and barricade buildings we cheer them on, and do not apply to them the derogatory term of mob.
I have a problem here, and it is not just a switch in my brain that trips when I hear Tony Blair, George Bush, the European Union, the Guardian, Fox News, the CIA, the BBC, Lech Walesa, All Right-Thinking People, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All singing Mussorgsky’s Great Gate of Kiev in unison. The mob is the classic default mode of democracy. It is Walpole’s “supreme governor”. It is Les Misérables, the physical expression of popular will, seizing and briefly brokering power. It is systematised anarchy. It is never reliable.
The fixing of presidential elections is not a practice confined to Ukraine. Vladimir Putin obliterated his opponents in Russia’s last presidential elections, without a peep from the West. Gerrymandering, ballot stuffing, bribing and corrupting have a long democratic tradition. Given the ostensible narrowness of the Ukraine result — 49 per cent to 46 per cent — and the blatancy of the Government’s fixing, Mr Yushchenko clearly has a case. His view that the election was unfair is supported by overseas monitors. But we have no way of knowing if he was robbed of actual victory, in a country where opinion is strongly territorial and at least appears evenly split. The electoral commission validated the result, with reservations. That may be worth nothing, but is constitutional.
Mr Yushchenko sent his supporters on to the streets because he had nothing to lose. He had himself crowned as President in the parliament building. His deputy, Ms Tymoshenko, demanded the dismissal and conviction of Mr Yanukovych from his current post as Prime Minister, and the house arrest of the outgoing President, Mr Kuchma. They called for passive disobedience and relied on the media and security forces to change sides and not enforce law and order. Behind them lay the power of a mass of people — who knows if they are a majority? — which could only be gainsaid by violence.
The strategy appears to be working. The weight and persistence of the Kiev demonstration has broken the state media, then parliament, now the presidency and, it hopes, the judiciary. Although there is nothing in the Ukraine constitution to permit a rerun election, only a recount, victory for Mr Yushchenko under some rewriting of the constitution appears the most likely outcome. However justifiable, that is a coup.
So far, so post-communist. But what happens next? Ukraine is a substantial country. It has the same population as England, 50 million, and three times the size. With no natural boundaries, it has seen foreign armies dispute its seemingly endless flatlands throughout history. The most prominent feature is the division offered by the north-south River Dnieper. The Catholic-leaning, Ukrainian-speaking west looks towards Poland and Middle Europe. The Orthodox, mostly Russian-speaking east looks towards Russia and the Black Sea. That division was reflected exactly in the election. The potential now for a separatist movement in the east is as great as the separatism that consumed former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The surest path to such a split is for Russia to back the east and Europe and America to back the west.
This is what has occurred. Mr Putin has sided with Mr Yanukovych and the West has sided, en masse, with Mr Yushchenko. Poland and the European Union intervened to try to reverse the election result. This week America’s Colin Powell added his weight to Mr Yushchenko’s cause and demanded that the country not split in two. Yet if the outcome reverses the election result, east Ukraine is unlikely to accept it. Its population clearly feel that their man won. Their affinity to Russia (a quarter of Ukrainians claim to be Russians) and their strong regional loyalty to Mr Yanukovych may lead them to break completely with Kiev. Europe will have yet another proto-nation, embracing Donetsk, the Crimea and Odessa, and an even more paranoid Russia watching and trying to dominate its flank.
The West claims to oppose this division. It feels that states are sacrosanct and must be kept together by hook or crook. Yet the policy is a shambles. In the early 1990s the West encouraged Slovenia and Croatia to break from Yugoslavia and went on to enforce by arms the further partition of that wretched country. Intervention in Iraq seems certain to break that country also into two or three parts, rather than render it a united democracy. Is that what the West wants in Ukraine?
We are obsessed with ordering the world to our will — and complaining bitterly when it declines to be so odered. Mr Yushchenko may be “our sort” of oligarch, as opposed to Russia’s. His victory is probably in Europe’s interest, though not if Ukraine’s wealth, mostly in the east, goes to Russia. But even if justice is on Mr Yushchenko’s side, by its vociferous partisanship the West plays a dangerous game. It may drive eastern Ukraine into separation, dismembering a potential buffer state on the borders of Russia. And all this assumes that Mr Putin will eat humble pie with good humour. Will we then encourage partition in Chechnya?
As for the mob, I will cheer when it does good work. But I am mindful of Mr Pickwick’s advice to his fearful colleague: “Always shout with the largest.” Mobs are wayward monsters and hot to the touch. Mobs brought both communism and fascism to power. It was on the back of the mob that Slobodan Milosevic was elected boss of Serbia in 1989, much the same mob as toppled him a decade later.
The mob may have been outdated by democracy, or at least by opinion polls, but it can still play its lethal game. It made America’s withdrawal from Vietnam inevitable. It reformed and decentralised France after 1968. It signed the death warrant of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax in 1990. But it does not always win. The largest crowd ever to gather in Britain, against the Iraq war last year, had no impact on the Labour Government. Nor did the pro-hunting crowd in Parliament Square this year.
Such crowds are the manifestation of failure. They suggest that constitutions have lost consent and democratic institutions collapsed. They are an extension of politics in the direction of civil war. A crowd in the street is not an argument won but an argument lost. Its leaders merely hope that crude numbers will silence the guns and get the cameras rolling, to drive forward the blitzkrieg of publicity in support of the great god, No! We may accept the mob as a necessary evil, but should remember that evil it remains.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
