The best color in the world

18 januari 2006 Perhaps revolutions are not beneficial for creative work after all. Even if they are orange and entirely peaceful. Paraphrasing a classic, muses are silent when the Maidan, Kyiv’s main square, speaks. In particular my own creative literary muse kept silent for several months. She could not let herself be creative. Half a year taken by the election campaign and the revolution – and not a single poem, no hint of inspiration. The muse, as a socially conscious citizen, was at the Maidan, side by side with all the newly born citizens who had refused to be just so many Homo Sovieticus’es, a gray mass, a gathering of hopeless provincials. The nation today is strong as never before. And invincible as never before. A heart, once warmed up by goodness . . . And what about freedom, that absolute good which at the same time is something elusive, whose contours are hard to grasp? It turned out that thirteen years of limited, circumscribed freedom had sufficed for the social and political emancipation of the Ukrainians. Although, can something limited be called freedom? We are being admired; we enjoy unprecedented solidarity. It was those European nations who at the turn of the nineties succeeded in embarking on the only possible path, the path of liberation and the European choice, that in turn emerged at the forefront of supporters of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution. It is they – the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Hungarians – who know better than anyone else in Europe the price of this notion, freedom, which is now more concrete than ever for the Ukrainians. As one well-known Pole once joked, the Solidarity trade union fought for the right of a worker to be liberated from employment. Oh well, this too is freedom, or rather its consequences. So there is no need to overidealize it.

It so happened that our struggle for freedom and independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, was in reality only a struggle for independence. Although what kind of independence is this without freedom? And only now, following almost to the letter the classic Marxian formulation of the revolutionary situation, our ‘lower strata’ could not go on any more, and our ‘upper strata’ did not want to. In Ukraine this formula worked in a slightly different way: our ‘lower strata’ (that is, us) could not tolerate things any more, and the ‘upper strata’ (that is, them) did not want to lose anything. But the liberalization and democratization of life does not take place without a global redistribution. This is the essence of every revolution. Including the first Ukrainian ‘bourgeois’ revolution, which was embraced by the widest spectrum of social strata and age groups, in other words, joined together the expensive Audi and the old Lada. A revolution of people of different levels of satiety but with the same degree of desire for freedom.

And in addition to all this our revolution was also international, but in a non-declarative fashion. I saw the flags of Angola and Jamaica with my own eyes, never mind the flags of united Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia. There was a particularly large number of those of the neighboring (still, alas, totalitarian) Belarus and of the friendly (fortunately, already democratic) Georgia. And besides, this revolution was also ‘rock-carnivalesque’: on the stage at the Maidan live music did not stop for a moment, turning this revolution into a never-ending concert. Can you imagine the French Revolution accompanied by rock music? And it was also cheerful and kind. Were it not for the dominance of the color orange, it probably would have been named the Revolution of Smiles. A higher degree of positive feeling and good-naturedness than at the Maidan is hard to imagine. People finally looked each other in the eye, the rich saw the poor, the old started respecting the young. It also turned out that yet another revolutionary class had emerged in Ukraine. The homeless, who are treated with a degree of prejudice in every country, suddenly found themselves tolerated to an unprecedented level: they were fed and clothed, just like all the other revolution participants. And this revolution was also ironic and sarcastic. And the irony was targeted not only at those against whom we struggled – everyone received their dose. And it was also left-wing liberal and right-wing conservative: socialists and anarchists stood side by side with liberals, national-democrats and hardcore nationalists. And it was also anti-alcoholic: at minus ten centigrade you could not find a single drunk. And it was also permanent. For the sun always rises, and it is always orange. Revolution has a beginning but it doesn’t have an end. And so Zhirinovsky shouldn’t think that by banning the color orange in Russia he is going to ban the sun. The sun is not afraid of Zhirinovskys, nor of Moscow-mayor-Luzhkovs in their ‘beloved caps’, of the psychically inadequate cohorts of the united candidate of the powers-that-be, of the foreign special forces at suburban railway stations, of mercenary puppet journalists and their puppeteers, the Russian ‘political technologists’. The sun did not need to capture the post office, the telephone exchange, or the telegraph – it sufficed for it simply to rise and shine.

And really, it is somehow strange, this all-Ukrainian resistance, somehow nonviolent yet decisive, unarmed, but not defenseless. And the personification of this revolution, Viktor Yushchenko, is a peculiar synthesis of Mahatma Gandhi, Kemal Ataturk, and Vaclav Havel. At times one really wished that the second and the third component balanced out the first one a little better. And sometimes it seemed that without the first of them the second and the third were impossible in our situation. The first ‘father of the nation’ of modern Ukraine indeed cared about the life and wellbeing of the people. This is the first Ukrainian leader for whom the nation is not an abstract notion nor an empty sound, but a community, a gathering of individualities. Yushchenko/Gandhi did everything to prevent people from being thrown under tanks, restraining the extreme radicals in his entourage from particularly firm actions. Yushchenko/Ataturk started the shaping of the country’s European image. Yushchenko/Havel promised reforms, convinced the populace in the unshakability of democracy and in the need to adhere to liberal values. Yushchenko/Yushchenko emerged as the first Ukrainian president that is genuinely loved in Ukraine. But still, Ukraine also has those who hate him. He now has all the opportunities to change these negative attitudes toward himself.

For me personally the colorful heterogeneity of our revolution was a certain guarantee against banal populism and depersonalization. When in a million-strong crowd there is no pushing and shoving with subsequent apologies, but a determination to avoid pushing and shoving in principle. Not to mention that during the Revolution there was no mug-punching after all. Our revolution is moral, for it actualized a simple but vitally important thing: attentiveness and respect for one’s neighbor. And also the Ukrainian revolution is when a rabbi and a skinhead stand side by side in Maidan with orange ribbons in their hands. I liked this most of all. As well as a capacity to help one’s neighbor: a feature that simply fell from the sky, it seemed, on the distrustful individualist Ukrainians. Suddenly observing the commandment to love one’s neighbor became the highest, voluntary and honorific duty, which rivaled only the overwhelming, and never seen before, desire to sing the national anthem with one’s hand over the heart.

This is the world’s first revolution that took place as one great artistic performance/carnival. Bizarre costumes made from various orange-colored things, processions of cars with flags, conceptualist installations made of snow, hit songs born out of popular slogans, balloons, a whole sea of ribbons, posters, cartoons, stickers, spontaneous poetic activity, folk music orchestras, and so forth. The ‘drummers of freedom’ were particularly memorable: heavy-set mountaineers from western Ukraine for weeks, not stopping at night or at daytime, banged on their improvised drums made from industrial iron barrels. All this was happening in front of the blockaded Cabinet of Ministers building, covered with posters, drawings, and stickers. A serious grownup goal was being reached with the use of every possible non-serious, childlike means. The explanation is simple: the motor of this revolution, its energy and backbone, for the first time in Ukrainian history was to be found among the young, the generation that came into its own already after the disintegration of the Soviet empire. The grim Ukrainian propensity for martyrology and necrophilia, tedious seriousness and self-importance somehow disappeared by the wayside. For the first time the goal of a revolution was not death in the name of the motherland, but life for motherland’s sake.

This is the first revolution in the world that to a great extent took place thanks to the Internet. It appears that liberation from totalitarianism in present-day world is directly proportional to the growth of the number of Internet users. According to the boldest calculations, no more than eight per cent of the Ukrainians have Internet access – which in comparison with other European countries feels like a drop in the bucket. However, in the conditions of effective absence of independent TV channels and printed media it was precisely the Internet that emerged as the only sphere beyond control, free of censorship and persecution. Paradoxically virtual space became the most real of spaces. And it was precisely via the Internet that the most important information got transmitted. It was through the Internet that people found out about Yushchenko’s illness caused by a grave poisoning. It was precisely via the Web that the opposition disseminated its latest political declarations. It was the Internet that warned about the possible provocations and repressions prepared by the powers-that-be.

Not to mention the daily massive booming folk creativity. Jokes about Yanukovych sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. The candidate of the powers-that-be got it particularly hard after his staged fall and fainting after being hit by an egg thrown by an underage student in Ivano-Frankivs’k. The state mass media and representatives of Yanukovych’s election headquarters for days tried to deceive the electorate by speaking of the Prime-Minister being hit by a “heavy dull object,” which led to countless jokes and gibes. (For example: “A chicken egg hit a heavy dull object which later turned out to be Prime-Minister Viktor Yanukovych.”) People also poked fun at the inescapable billboards with the mug of the candidate of the powers-that-be that spread all over Ukraine, creating an illusion of absence of alternatives. The seemingly innocent Photoshop software became a powerful weapon in the hands of Yushchenko supporters. The Internet, instantaneously reacting to the latest political events, became a particularly rich source of folklore. The satirical website ‘Merry Eggs’, which created a humorous pastiche serial about the election campaign of the candidate of the powers-that-be, put together from clips from well-known Soviet films with altered soundtracks, gained the highest popularity. Not to mention various collages, homemade animation, and computer games like “Stop Election Falsification.”

In his cycle ‘Pieces of Knowledge’, my favorite twentieth-century French poet, Henri Michaux, included a shockingly simple aphorism that resembles a Buddhist koan: “There is no proof that a flea that lives on a mouse is afraid of the cat.” Being prone to lengthy meditations over truly deep maxims but far from an expert in deciphering allegories and metaphors (I never cared for the self-satisfied attitude of fabulists, or any other didactically-minded individuals for that matter), I suddenly, for the first time in my life – I confess – resorted to a brazen tampering, a reworking of an aphorism; I even have the audacity to report this out loud. So here it is: “Proof exists that fleas who live on a mouse are capable of not being afraid of the cat.” Naturally, I realize that one may think I resorted to a simple logical operation, twisting a syllogism in my favor. But for the first time in my life I was overjoyed over my own, somehow childlike, perspicacity, which did not follow from an intellectual game but was a consequence of something greater. Actually, of that something that life gave as a gift to me and many of my fellow countrymen in the form of the so-called Orange Revolution of November–December 2004. No, do not think that I literally compare Ukrainian citizens to fleas, Ukraine to a mouse (grayness is the main attribute of the cowed down and the hopeless), and the evil and cunning forces of authoritarianism and counterrevolution to a cat. This is simply an allegory. For the sake of self-rehabilitation I can creatively continue the aphorism: “and thereby stop being fleas.” And thus doing a great favor to the mouse as well, who stops being satisfied with the grayness of its existence and miraculously transforms itself into a much nobler creature with a long list of virtues. This all happened here and now, in my lifetime and with my participation. People stopped being fleas. Ukraine stopped being a mouse. No one is afraid of the cat any longer: it has been declawed, plied with catnip, and mentally prepared for neutering. Observing such metamorphoses with one’s own eyes makes for true happiness. It is true happiness when you see millions rise from their knees, become free, and never again allow anyone to abuse them. You realize that these are the things worth living for. And it is also worth living for the instantaneously born feeling that you are ready to give your life for the people who stand around you. To give your life for something greater than individual interests. And to do it with a smile on your lips. I was equally convinced that those people were also ready to give their lives for me. There was no need then to call on people to be heroes. We were all united in this feeling: it is sweet and joyful to die for the sake of freedom. This was a conscious choice of millions of people. Perhaps this is precisely why no one did die, for no one dared to shoot at these joyful smiling people.

I rejoice at the thought that no one confuses my country with Russia any more or asks where it is located. I personally was politely asked on numerous occasions where Ukraine was located. One Spaniard once asked me how we survived the war after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, since he thought Ukraine was one of the ex-Yugoslav states. One young American woman was surprised at my light complexion since I lived in Ukraine. She did not know Ukraine from Bahrain. I also once had to explain to an Anglican pastor from Namibia that Ukraine was not a Scandinavian country. There is an anecdote about Vladimir Nabokov: at some official reception in the US, upon hearing Ukrainian being spoken, he stopped to ask those people which language they were speaking. They answered, “We are speaking Ukrainian.” “Uranian?” asked the author of Lolita in return. For him nothing Ukrainian could exist, nothing was possible without the empire. Therefore for him the Ukrainian language was something nonsensical, something absolutely unreal. He would be more willing to believe those people truly had arrived from the planet Uranus rather than from Ukraine. The Orange Revolution fulfilled its main goal, which, actually, was not set by anyone: it created the modern Ukrainian European nation, and also turned into an extremely successful PR-campaign for Ukraine, now known around the world not only for the successes of the soccer star Andriy Shevchenko, the boxing Klitschko brothers, the Ukrainian mafia, and Europe’s worst corrupt government. For the world Ukraine is now indeed like a newly discovered planet, inhabited by free orange people who on one cold November day refused to be anonymous human singularities.

And also after the Orange Revolution I will probably have to change my wardrobe somewhat. As it happens, for years I nurtured a textile ‘orangism’. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to rethink creatively my love for the color orange – a color you loved, it seems, all your life, and the color that over a couple of months became the favorite color of millions of your compatriots. In order not to get lost in the orange sea. But on the other hand, can there even be a better color than this?