This is a story I heard directly from Aleksander Moroz’s campaign director: “During the campaign, the police in Zhitomir arrested several of our people, who were hanging posters and flyers around the city, for destroying public property. The same day, the police arrested some of Kosteka’s people, who were tearing down the posters our people had put up earlier, for hooliganism. Both groups of people ended up in the same cell in the Zhitomir jail.”

Unfortunately, this story is all too true and accounts for the quintessential situation in Ukraine during the presidential elections. From an observer’s point of view, it appears that no single violation could invalidate the entire elections, however, he also cannot help but feel that the situation, as a whole, created by these precedences is unacceptable, especially as the election campaign was the main reason for the undemocratic character of these elections (and this is the main thesis of my article). Further violations of the law (despite being significant) were, in a way, simply a supplement to the previous violations.

A huge disparity of chances among the candidates was manifested by the lack of access to the media without which a candidate cannot reach all citizens with his program and image. Even private stations refused to air paid advertisements, hinting that such a show of independence could bring the wrath of government upon their heads. An example of public television’s biased position is the fact that instead of broadcasting a program of one of the candidate’s, a report was broadcast, while the program itself was finally broadcast only after repeated demands, however, only in parts which destroyed its composition and distorted the meaning. The sitting president’s use of the entire state apparatus for his own propaganda purposes was a considerable violation of the rules governing elections. The activity of the police, in light of the story above, requires no comment. Municipal services were also decidedly on Kuczma’s side, cleaning cities of flyers and posters in a particularly selective manner. However, the grossest violation done to democracy was the position taken by university personnel. The majority of lecturers strongly supported Kuczma with lectures at the end of October transforming into a series of political stump speeches ending with instructions on how to vote. The problem lies not only in the fact that politics entered the classroom, but the fact that the professors, frequently considered a source of authority by the students, taught the new generation of Ukrainians a lesson in conformity which, for many, can result in being disappointed with the institution of elections and in believing that politics cannot be subject to ethical judgement.

Irregularities directly involving the election procedure also had a large influence on evaluating the entire elections, despite the fact that they did not occur to the extent they did during the campaign. The first of them is the phenomenon of “dead souls,” the appearance on voter rolls of people long dead or those who have changed their place of residence. An acquaintance of mine told me that she managed to remove her grandmother, who died 5 years ago, from the voting rolls only after repeated efforts, and that she had seen people on the rolls who have not lived in her building for years. The second problem is that many streets were divided between election districts and the names of the people who live on them appear on the rolls of both districts. Both of these phenomena create huge possibilities for abuse, but these in themselves do not prove that someone tried to manipulate the results of the voting. In my opinion, evidence of manipulation is that many election commissions received an excessive number of ballots, even as many as 50% more than the number of people in one district (for example, a district in the Zhitomir region comprising 600 people received 900 ballots). This is a very threatening signal and places into question not only some general procedural standards, but the result of the voting itself.

Finally I would like to mention the social side of the elections. Ukrainians are a people much more politically conscious than it would appear to many and have a greater democratic culture than their political leaders. The coexistence of the general conviction that the elections were rigged (evidenced by the number of more or less true stories), which itself is proof of the abnormality of the situation, and the great faith in the institution of elections and the hopes that regular people have in them is amazing. The candidates and their programs were almost the sole topic of conversion in trains, buses and trams. In addition, the informal emotional coalition among activists of many campaign staffs, based on opposing the present way of conducting politics imposed by president Leonid Kuczma, bodes well for the future of Ukraine. If the socialists and liberals unite in the conviction that the basic condition for improving the situation in the country is the citizen’s freedom of political expression as well as in declarations that in such a system there is room for all political groupings, despite all the unsettling phenomena which can observed, positive changes in Ukraine remain only a question of time, while people following these ideals are the greatest capital of this country.

PS. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friends in Zhitomir, through whom I had the possibility to become acquainted with their fascinating country (although all too briefly) - a country of wonderful people, the existence of which we Poles know little.

Robert Szczesny