Calling Tymoshenko the Goddess of the Orange Revolution is More Than Glib Praise

By Marian J. Rubchak

Ukraine has enjoyed an epiphany, a moment of self-discovery in which a voiceless population found its voice and its self-confidence. The Orange Revolution was revolution as a national revelation.

And, fittingly, at this historic moment, Ukraine found itself a leader with almost mythic qualities: Yulia Tymoshenko, otherwise known as "the goddess of the revolution."

This was more than praise for her figurehead role in the revolutionary events, for the revolution has elevated Tymoshenko to iconic status. Beautiful, elegant, and fiery, Tymoshenko recalls, in her charismatic leadership, the mythical Marianne of the French Revolution as she led the revolutionary charge in her bonnet rouge, the Phrygian cap that signified freed slaves in the Roman era.

The Marianna of the Orange Revolution wore her own version of a Phrygian cap: an elaborate hairdo evocative of a peasant plait. But in Ukraine, that plait symbolized more than tradition. In Eugene Delacroix's famous painting Liberty Guiding the People, Marianne's prominently bared bosoms suggested motherhood, emphasizing Marianne's function as a symbol of the birth of a new French Republic and its values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Tymoshenko's plait did the same, evoking at a profound level the myth of a time when a matriarch--later named Berehynia--presided over the ancestral Ukrainian hearth, around which all her clan's decisions were made.

The term Berehynia itself derives from the name of a minor river nymph who protected river banks (berehy), but at some point in the 19th century the nymph evolved into an earth-mother symbol. In contemporary Ukraine, she has undergone yet another metamorphosis. Today this hearth-mother (or domestic Madonna) is associated with the guardianship of not only the family, but also the nation.

Berehynia now has iconic status, and iconic is a word used advisedly. In 2001, President Leonid Kuchma unveiled a monumental statue of a woman, arms held high above her head, reminiscent of the Praying Virgin of the Eastern Orthodox, known as Oranta, except that instead of raising her hands in prayer and adoration, she holds aloft a sprig of the snowball berry. Folk wisdom has it that the berry is the bearer of human souls, making this Berehynia a powerful representation of generational continuity. Initially, the statue was dubbed Berehynia-Oranta, but Kuchma christened it Oranta-Berehynia, elevating this Ukrainian archetype to sacred status. No longer was she simply Berehynia, mother of the nation; the ideal Ukrainian woman had been reconceptualized to signify the "mother of us all." A pagan matriarch, or domestic Madonna, had been conjoined with the Virgin Mary to form an even more compelling symbol of Ukrainian womanhood.

The monument was placed where a gigantic statue of Lenin once stood, on a 40-foot pedestal on Kyiv's main thoroughfare facing Independence Square. So when the orange-bedecked crowds of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathered on and around Independence Square in November and December to protest against fraud-marred presidential elections, they stood below a bronze goddess on a pedestal and a live "goddess" on the podium wearing Berehynia's trademark plait. (As it happens, Oranta-Berehynia has a headdress similar to Marianne's Phrygian cap.)

The father of the Russian Revolution has now been well and truly eclipsed by the mother of the Ukrainian Revolution.

The Ukrainian Marianne

"Myth finds its expression in forms that are prefigured in past experience," wrote the French semiologist Roland Barthes. "Its essentials are preserved, but in times of change people discover new ways to interpret and present it."

But did Tymoshenko deliberately evoke Berehynia, the mother of the nation?

Tymoshenko is not saying. She has characterized herself as, above all, a realist, declaring in 2002 that she would do whatever necessary to bring Ukraine into the ranks of modern democratic nations. She is no idealist, she says, yet she clearly has sought to convey that Ukraine has a historic mission. That same year she stated: "Ukraine is being called to fulfill its historical destiny. Its charge is to offer the world a new paradigm for the construction of a righteous society. Virtue and justice must reign in all spheres of Ukrainian life. ... Unlike other former Soviet republics, Ukraine remained in an indeterminate state after the collapse of the Soviet empire, a kind of limbo, as an oligarchic clan plundered her wealth and severely inhibited the development of a democratic society. Now the nation's destiny is to break out of its inertia by means of a spiritual breakthrough."

In the same interview, in a book by Liudmyla Taran, Tymoshenko made clear that she believes individuals need the same form of breakthrough and rebirth, to reshape themselves to meet the needs of the time. The statement may sound idealistic, but it also gives a politician license to be pragmatic; indeed, it obliges a politician to change.

Tymoshenko's own ability to reinvent herself is clear. Back in 2000, when she began to sport her Berehynia image, one reporter accused her of wearing a hair extension. She deftly removed the pins that secured the braid and let her hair down. In an instant, Tymoshenko had transformed a traditional, matronly look into that of a fashionable young woman.

As the occasion demands, this consummate 44-year-old politician can affect the look of an innocent young schoolgirl; a tough politician, a fiery reformer; a sophisticated, elegant businesswoman; a glamorous woman of the world, or a sultry vamp (one could go on and on).

This chameleon-like ability is not simply visual; it is also verbal. A reporter for Literaturna Ukraina noted in 1999 that when she speaks Tymoshenko wears a slightly ironic expression, as if to say, "Make of my words what you will."

That kind of studied elusiveness can be detected in her response, in 2003, to a direct question about the significance of her braid. "You wanted to emphasize the importance you attach to the traditional roles of wife and mother, didn't you?" asked an editor of Vechernyie Vesti. "Tell our readers whose idea it was to induce journalists to question the authenticity of your plait and provoke you into letting your hair down."

Her response: "Lately, people in Ukraine, without any talent whatsoever, have been resorting to all kinds of trickery to conceal their shortcomings. There is no room in my own political life for such deception."

Then, tongue in cheek, she riposted with a question of her own: "Whose idea was it for our president to grow such a startling head of hair instead of applying his time and energy to growing crops in Ukraine's wheat fields? Ask him that in your next interview."

It might just be that Tymoshenko's hairdo was simply an uncalculated fashion statement that resonated with ordinary Ukrainians. But it seems unlikely that this accomplished politician made no calculation and failed to pick up on the political potency of the matriarchal myth represented by the plait. The realities of women's lives in contemporary Ukrainian society might be oppressive, but the idealized vision of Ukrainian womanhood represented by Berehynia permeates Ukrainian culture and has arguably been the most noteworthy and pervasive attempt to draw on the nation's past in the 13 years of Ukraine's independence. (Berehynia is routinely invoked by politicians on occasions relating to women, and Berehynia's prominence in the media--a popular radio program titled Berehynia Ukrainy ran every Sunday from 1991 to 1994--has ensured a place for Berehynia in readers' and listeners' consciousness.)

Tymoshenko taps into more than the matriarchal chord. She has always been fiery, an Amazon, unafraid to express publicly her feelings, her hopes, her frustration, her outrage, whatever the consequences. Take, for example, an incident in 2002. Her chief aide, Nykolai Sivulsky, was arrested and taken to the Procurator General's Office for interrogation, a process which she herself first endured in February 2001. Tymoshenko filled a white windbreaker with broken bricks, went to the same office, and began to break windows.

So when the revolution arrived, when the time came to help Ukraine "break out of its inertia," and to battle the "oligarchic clan [that] plundered her wealth," Tymoshenko was ready for a fighting role. Like a latter-day warrior queen on a chariot, she clambered onto the top of a bus to rouse the demonstrators to call for the government's resignation. It was arguably she who was most active in getting them to blockade government buildings, and it was she who was most to the fore at critical points in the protests.

Tymoshenko confronts the police, 2002

At times, some thought the protests might go beyond rallies and blockades, and at one point a crowd attempted to break into parliament. Asked whether there had been a plan to storm the presidential administration on the third day of the revolution, Tymoshenko responded, "The government is so inept and so dense that, as the crisis mounted, we realized there was nothing worth storming.

"Ukraine simply lacks a Bastille," she declared. There, in her own words, was evidence of the prominence of the French Revolution and its imagery in Tymoshenko's thinking.

Ukraine might not have had a Bastille and Tymoshenko may have lauded the peacefulness of the revolution, but there can be little doubt that, like Marianne, Tymoshenko would have led the revolution's charge for a new, a more just, social order. (Tymoshenko's role in the near-storming of parliament is controversial: what is uncontested is that the militia carved a path through the throng carrying her on their shoulders to take her to the front of the crowd.)

Like her French model, to become mother of the revolution Tymoshenko also has had to become warrior of the revolution.

The Iron Lady

Some might challenge the notion that Tymoshenko has always had these Amazonian tendencies. In 1999, the journalist Valeria Rublevska wrote, "She is no heroine simply because she is no warrior." But Tymoshenko has demonstrated toughness and extraordinary resilience time and again since she entered parliament in 1997.

This toughness reaches back a long way. Her childhood was one of relative deprivation, and as the daughter of a single mother (her father abandoned the family when she was born) she learned self-reliance early on. Unlike many of Ukraine's elite, she resisted being drawn into Soviet political activity, even refusing as a young girl to become a member of the communist youth organization Komsomol. Instead, Tymoshenko directed her energy toward excelling in her studies.

An economist, she made a fortune in business, a sphere in which Ukrainian women rarely have the opportunity to do well. Arguably the most important figure in the Ukrainian gas industry in the mid-1990s, Tymoshenko became known from her time as head of Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine as the "gas princess," a moniker usually meant as a smear.

In Ukraine, politics, too, is a man's world. Back in 1994, the mayor of Cherkassy, Volodymyr Oliynyk, summed up the prevalent Ukrainian notion of a woman's proper place. "Politics is not a home, it is a brutal man's game," he insisted. "Those elegant amusements in which women indulge, smiling charmingly all the while, can produce such a mess."

Tymoshenko's answer to such attitudes appeared in her interview with Taran, reprinted in a book whose title translates as Woman and Man: Defeating Stereotypes. Responding to the interviewer's comment on typical male arguments that women venture into politics only when they have not been fulfilled in their personal lives, she countered, "It is quite evident that men present women in this light simply because they fear the loss of their own power and authority."

Clearly, she knows how to disabuse male politicians of their stereotypes and emerge the victor. This was perhaps acknowledged most explicitly by her opponents in 2000 when Tymoshenko, by then deputy prime minister, met one of Ukraine's most prominent oligarchs and power brokers, Hryhoriy Surkis, in a televised debate. Surkis' attempts to unmask her as a dirty politician were routinely rebuffed in a cool, professional manner. Dignified and calm, Tymoshenko wasted no time in reducing her opponent to whining. He had "anticipated an exchange of views with a soft-spoken, charming, smiling woman," Surkis complained, "but, instead, faced a hardheaded public servant." (The pair almost came to blows in a parliamentary session just over a year ago. He complained that in the scuffle she had "nearly ruined an expensive, brand-new pair of shoes.")

Berehynia looks down on protestors, Kyiv, November 2004.
Photo courtesy of Mark Murrmann.

Tymoshenko has also repeatedly demonstrated just how brilliantly a woman can play the "brutal man's game" when needed. In particular, in 2002, during a brief stint in the short-lived government of Viktor Yushchenko she pushed through a reform of the energy sector and returned to the public coffers some $2 billion (some say $3 billion) that had previously found its way into the shadow economy. That reform earned her the title "Iron Lady"--and iron was sorely needed in trying to impose her will on Ukraine's complex and highly corrupt energy sector.

In January 2001, Tymoshenko was fired by Kuchma. After that she was harassed routinely by the government. After leaving parliament in 2001, she was jailed twice on charges of corruption (a judge later dismissed the charges), her husband was jailed, and, in January 2002, she was injured in a car crash and hospitalized for a month, an incident widely viewed as an attempt on her life.

The warrior princess

Tymoshenko continued in what became a single-minded attempt to become one of Ukraine's primary reformers. The Iron Lady then turned into Joan of Arc (as she called herself), and the Gas Princess metamorphosed into the Warrior Princess before becoming the Goddess of the Revolution.

"The mass arrests of those near and dear to her, and 42 days of incarceration in isolation have transformed Yulia Tymoshenko into a most uncompromising leader of the orange wave," wrote the newspaper Zerkalo Tyzhnia by way of explanation, though her anti-oligarch sentiments, like her calls for reform, appear to have predated her fall from power.

In 2000 and 2001 she emerged at the forefront of protests aimed at toppling Kuchma, after the release of secretly recorded tapes incriminated the president in the disappearance of journalist Georgi Gongadze. She has poured money earned in business into her political activities and capitalized on the authorities' continued attempts to get her into jail.

The militancy that Tymoshenko has shown in the battle to defend herself and attack the government has been a route back to public favor and, during the Orange Revolution, to the peak of her popularity.

For much of the 1990s, however, she was unpopular. Many Ukrainians attributed her vast fortune to the type of corruption that Tymoshenko now rails against. Charges that she benefited from the decision of Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko to create regional gas monopolies have never been proven, although the stigma of her past association with Lazarenko continues to dog her.

After a run-in with Kuchma, Lazarenko fled the country in 1997, and in 2003 he was found guilty on 29 counts of extortion and money laundering in the United States.

Tymoshenko left the business world for a career in politics. She denies any corruption and, despite the efforts of Ukrainian and Russian authorities, no charges have ever been proven. Nonetheless, Ukrainians, accustomed to wealth and corruption in high places and knowing the murky nature of Ukrainian business and legislation in the 1990s, continue to look upon her wealth with suspicion. As a result, the tax she harvested from the energy sector boosted not her status, but benefited chiefly the popularity of Yushchenko, who used the revenues to pay pension and wage arrears.

Still, by the time of the parliamentary elections in March 2002, Tymoshenko clearly felt confident enough to lend her name to the political grouping that she led, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc. The bloc did well. Tymoshenko's personal popularity then began to become clear. This was amply illustrated when she attended a service in Lviv to commemorate the 83 people killed in an air show disaster in 2002. Her appearance there, according to one reporter, was "greeted with a murmur of approval and warm applause." Though too controversial a figure to be seen as the opposition's best candidate for the presidency in 2004, her reputation has grown conspicuously. As her virtues began to eclipse her alleged vices in the eyes of the public and as she started to ride the crest of popularity, the oligarchs began to view her as an ever more dangerous opponent.

Tymoshenko's popularity--at least within the Yushchenko camp--skyrocketed during the heady days of the Orange Revolution. In the words of Andriy Bilous, a young doctor who came from Lviv to help treat protesters in Kyiv's tent city, "The image of this revolutionary is enough to move hundreds of thousands of people to begin a blockade against government departments. ... She knows how to cheer people up, to make them believe in what they are doing, believe in their victory."

The Orange Revolution brought out, then, an exceptional aptitude for leadership that had been honed by years at the forefront of Ukrainian business and politics and by her militancy.

Mother of the nation?

Thus far, Tymoshenko has gone where angels (and men) fear to tread and has reached most of the goals that she set for herself. But now, as Ukraine's prime minister-designate, this mother of the revolution faces an arguably even more difficult task--assuming (and this is a major assumption) that she receives majority support in parliament. Reconciling Ukraine's two halves and helping to implement much-needed reforms will not be easy, particularly for a flamboyant and radical person ever ready to step into the role of a firebrand when needed.

But she would face another task: Would she also be able to become a political, rather than a symbolic "mother of the nation," as the prime minister's role might suggest?

In battling corruption and forcing through reforms, she will have to resist the temptation to settle personal scores along the way. She will also be called upon to reduce the animosity felt toward her in eastern Ukraine. Though born in Dnipropetrovsk, one of the great Russian-speaking urban centers in the east, her campaign against the political leaders in the pro-government camp--many of whom, including Viktor Yanukovych, come from the east--has left her deeply resented. (Her own upbringing in a Russian-speaking household does not appear to help her much. In 1999, she resolved to master Ukrainian, and now communicates only rarely in Russian).

A hint of how unpopular she remains in some parts of the country came on 29 December during a post-election visit to Donetsk, Yanukovych's hometown. She was greeted with insults and vulgarities and faced a string of hostile questions and negative comments on a televised phone-in program. A truly constructive dialogue, not to mention a healing of the existing rift between Ukraine's east and west, seems a long way off.

Still, her visit to the Donbas region demonstrated a willingness to reach out and start the healing process. She underscored her effort by apologizing on television for any stridency or excessive zeal she might have demonstrated during the course of the revolution. But she is not prepared to give too much ground: she reminded viewers that there had been examples of much more aggressive behavior on both sides.

Whatever the future holds for Tymoshenko, having challenged Ukraine's entrenched corrupt male power structure to become Ukraine's acting prime minister, she is already a new symbolic Berehynia, a symbol of liberty, and a model of empowered womanhood in Ukraine. The nation's democracy now has a woman's face.

Marian J. Rubchak is professor of European history and director of modern European studies at Valparaiso University in the United States. Her current research centers on identity formation with a particular focus at the moment on Ukrainian women.

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25 January 2005