by Greg Satell
So, while I don’t think I was particularly obtuse, I really had little idea that anything was afoot for most of 2004. Sure, there were things going on that would be considered outrageous in most places, but Ukrainians, at least in my experience, tended to take them in stride. They focused on what was close to them. Politics was just not something anybody ever got involved in or excited about.
Nonetheless, a fever was brewing that fall. My fiancée and her friends were going to more and more demonstrations. Politics became an active subject of conversation—and an increasing source of contention—in the workplace. Although the regime controlled most media outlets, a new cable news channel, Channel 5, owned by the relatively liberal chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko, appeared and ran reports friendly to the opposition. The circulation of Korrespondent was picking up briskly, as was the activity on its website, Korrespondent.net.
By November, it was clear that the election would be hotly contested, and the atmosphere in the country became highly charged. On November 20, the eve of the runoff election, people started gathering around a platform at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), in the center of Kyiv. Then a tent city popped up on Kreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main thoroughfare, filled with protestors gearing up for a protracted battle.
Although exit polls showed the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, winning by 11 percent, the Central Election Commission of Ukraine saw things differently. It gave the victory to Yanukovych by a margin of 3 percent.8
The Orange Revolution had begun.
SELF-ORGANIZING CASCADES
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One word sums up the atmosphere of the Orange Revolution: confusion. Nobody seemed to know what was going on: not the diplomats I ran into at expat hangouts, the other business leaders I met with regularly, the government officials I chatted with each morning at the gym, or the journalists I talked with at work. Events took on a life of their own. We all just did our best to follow along.
In other words, we were all very much like Blockbuster CEO John Antioco in 2000, when Netflix came calling, General McChrystal before he realized he was facing a new type of enemy, and the Route 128 companies in the seventies and eighties. We were mostly oblivious to the forces swirling around us. In retrospect, all of the signs were there—the previous revolutions, the scandals, and the growing opposition—but we had also seen much of it before. Those who were hoping for change had already been disappointed many times, and those who preferred continuity had seen previous challenges to authority crushed in due time. Inertia can be a powerful force, even more powerful than hope or fear. It was hard to believe that this time could be different, no matter which side you were on. Nevertheless, it was very different.
It’s often hard to discern a passing fad from a historic moment or why some events spark a cascade while others just seem to fall flat. If we are to understand cascades, and learn to operate within their context, we need to be able to recognize some telltale signs. I noticed them in 2004, but to be honest, didn’t fully grasp their significance until years later.
Let’s move along to the epicenter of the Orange Revolution, Independence Square, or as the locals know it, the Maidan. Tens of thousands gathered there every night to hear speeches from opposition leaders like Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. There were celebrities, too, like the champion heavyweight boxers Vitaliy and Volodymyr Klitschko, Eurovision star Ruslana, and pop singer Slava Vakarchuk.
But all that happened for just a few hours each night. The true power of the revolution emanated from an area just a few hundred yards away, in the tent city that had sprouted up on Kreshchatyk, the city’s main thoroughfare. Hundreds of protestors stayed there for weeks in the bitter cold. Supporters brought food and warm clothing to sustain them. In offices around Kyiv, people worked in shifts: half of the workforce was out on the streets protesting or living in the tent city while the other half worked. Then they would switch places. At the office of our billboard company near Kreshchatyk, we would invite protestors into our conference room in groups of a dozen or so to drink tea, have something to eat, and get warm. Many other small businesses did the same. People from all over Ukraine came to Kyiv to join the protests, and when they did, they found perfect strangers willing to take them into their homes to sleep and get some warm food. Almost everybody we knew housed protest boarders. It was just something you did—although at any other time that type of thing would have seemed strange, even crazy, during the revolution it seemed perfectly normal and natural.
The atmosphere was electric, and that gave rise to unusual activity that you wouldn’t normally expect to see. For instance, there was a no-drinking rule. As in most Eastern European countries, alcohol plays a large role in the culture of Ukraine. Vodka, cognac, beer, and champagne are present at every gathering. (Russian champagne is surprisingly good and costs just a few dollars a bottle.) It’s not uncommon to drink beer at lunch during the workday, or to see someone walking down the street with an open bottle of vodka (although drinking from an open container in public is often frowned upon in more polite company).
So, in a strange way, one of the most impressive things about the revolution was that no alcohol was present at the protests. If someone were to be seen carrying a beer, they would be politely asked to throw it away. I never saw anyone refuse. There was no edict, nor were there any authorities (besides the occasional disapproving babushka) enforcing this rule. Somehow, word got around, and social pressure kept people in line. With the future of the country in the balance, everybody wanted to do their part, and the no-alcohol policy, although counter to cultural norms, was widely respected.
Another example was the horn protest outside the Central Election Commission. No one knows for certain how it started, but it’s not hard to imagine. When the news of the fraudulent election results came over the radio, somebody honked their horn in anger. Others joined in, then others, until nearly everybody passing the building was leaning on their horn. This was done for only a few seconds by each car, but resulted in a long, unending drone for those working in the building. It continued unabated, 24 hours a day, for weeks and didn’t ebb until the revolution was complete.
Eventually, to drown out the noise, Election Commission officials set up loudspeakers and blasted old Russian folk songs. It wasn’t much of an improvement, and it proved to be in vain. It takes more to drown out massive collective action than a few loudspeakers and some bad music.
One of the most interesting viral memes during the Orange Revolution was the chant “Razom nas bahato, nas ne podalaty” (“Together we are many, we won’t be overcome.”) Within a few days, it could be heard everywhere in Kyiv. The pop band GreenJolly set the chant to music. In 2005, after the revolution was over, the song became Ukraine’s entry into the Eurovision song contest, an event viewed by 500 million people. GreenJolly didn’t invent “Razom nas bahato,” nor did the band make it popular. The chant spread widely weeks before the band recorded it. Much like most things in the Orange Revolution, it just sprang up and quickly became highly contagious.
That’s what the Orange Revolution was like for those of us that were there. While Yushchenko and the other officials at the Maidan were the focal point, they weren’t directing the action. There were, in fact, no truly identifiable leaders. The crowd had taken over. All conventional notions of power had become defunct.
THE AFTERMATH
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On December 3, 2004, Ukraine’s Supreme Court ruled that the election had indeed been fraudulent and ordered a revote to take place later that month. This time, Yushchenko emerged victorious, and he was sworn in as president on January 23. As unlikely as it had seemed just a short time before, democracy, in the end, prevailed. We had won, or so it seemed.
But before long, the new government was at war with itself. The Yushchenko and Tymoshenko camps, united during the drama of the revolution, fell into infighting amidst mutual recriminations. Both accused the other of betraying the ideals of the revolution, although to be honest, it was n
ever exactly clear what those were. Pora, the grassroots activists who had spearheaded the protests, attempted to form a political party, but gained little traction. On September 8, Yushchenko dismissed Tymoshenko from her post as prime minister and ordered the formation of a new government for the first, but not the last, time during his term in office.
What followed was a disintegration of the political powers into three distinct camps, President Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party, the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc, and the Party of Regions. The latter was led by Viktor Yanukovych, who, to widespread amazement, still carried legitimacy in the eastern part of the country. Corruption remained rampant, and although Yushchenko was never accused of any personal wrongdoing, he proved to be an ineffective leader.
As Mustafa Nayyem, who would later provide the spark that led to the Euromaidan protests in 2013, told me, “In 2005, we had only one goal, for Yushchenko to be president. We had hope he would change everything. It was not so much about social mobilization or about political mobilization.”9 The vision was centered on personalities rather than values. When those particular people failed to deliver, the revolution died.
The financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 hit Ukraine especially hard, and the economy plummeted by 15 percent. The national currency dropped by nearly 40 percent against the dollar, and bank controls were instituted to prevent a further decline. The country was now in a full-scale crisis, and whatever legitimacy Yushchenko still had was lost for good. In the meantime, Yanukovych, the villain of the Orange Revolution, was polishing his image. Coached by Western political consultants, including Paul Manafort, who would later perform a similar service for Donald Trump, he was able to position himself as the champion of traditional working people against the elites in the rising middle class. In 2010, Yanukovych rose to the presidency in an election that international observers judged to be legitimate. The economic crisis proved to be a trigger, but the network of disappointment had been building for some time.
Yanukovych quickly moved to consolidate his power, first jailing Tymoshenko on trumped-up corruption charges, then orchestrating a fraudulent parliamentary election in 2012. The Ukrainian constitution was changed to put more powers in the hands of the presidency, a crackdown on the media commenced, and his fiscal governance was deemed so poor that the IMF suspended its relief program. Although expectations were exceedingly low to start with, the Yanukovych regime proved to be even worse than feared.
The corruption was, even by Ukrainian standards, mind-blowing. The president’s son Oleksandr, a dentist by profession, quickly became one of the richest men in the country, amassing a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few short years. A group dubbed “The Family,” a network of friends and relations close to the regime, emerged from obscurity to control vast swaths of industry and real estate. Estimates of the looting run as high as $100 billion, nearly equal to Ukraine’s GDP in 2017.10
It appeared as if our efforts had been made in vain. While we took to the streets to bring about the dream of a new day for Ukraine, what we woke up to was even worse than before. Ukraine was poorer, more corrupt, and even more poorly governed than ever. Even Kuchma, for all of his shortcomings, had gotten some things done. Under Yanukovych, however, even the most modest standards of competency—not to mention decency—would not be met.
Under the Yanukovych regime, corruption and cynicism had reached new heights, and there had been a series of incidents involving officials and their children.11 Ukrainians came to expect violence and terror to be connected to the members of the regime that drove their luxury cars at high speed on city streets and made scenes at nightclubs and restaurants. Anybody who questioned their right to do so was intimidated and beaten. If someone was hurt or even killed, the worst that would happen was a suspended sentence. While there was some outcry, Ukrainians mostly took the incidents in stride. After all, what could they expect from a president who was himself twice convicted of violent crimes?
Yet the networks that had given rise to the Orange Revolution remained. They were dormant and hardly noticeable, but they were still there. Yes, the tent cities had long left Kreshchatyk, but they hadn’t really disappeared, only dispersed. And when they found a purpose around which to coalesce, they could prove to be very powerful indeed.
One particular event involving a young woman, Oksana Makar, whose attackers were set free due to political connections, was so unimaginably brutal and cold-blooded that it shook the populace out of their complacence. Videos on YouTube, of both Oksana in her hospital bed and a leaked video of one of her attackers’ chilling confession, as well as a variety of social media pages and websites decrying the incident, flooded the Internet and incited widespread protests. Eventually, the uproar became so intense that even President Yanukovych felt compelled to have the local prosecutor fired and publicly call for justice to be meted out.
There was, underneath the corruption and tacit acquiescence, a network of civil activity. From social media groups to more formal organizations like the women’s rights group FEMEN, some semblance of protest remained. So when, 18 months after the Oksana Makar incident, President Yanukovych backed out of an EU trade agreement, the cascades began again. A Facebook post by the journalist and activist Mustafa Nayyem called his fellow citizens to return once again to the Maidan. Before long, Ukrainians were pouring into the streets to protest in numbers not seen since the Orange Revolution, nearly 10 years before.
Yet this time, the matter would not be settled by firing a prosecutor and throwing a few miscreants in prison. Despite the regime’s seemingly complete hold on power, the networks formed during the Orange Revolution awakened from their vegetative state, and a new movement, this time called Euromaidan, was soon in full swing. Within the space of a few months, Viktor Yanukovych would go from despot to pariah to, finally, fugitive. The Ukrainian Parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove him from power, and he fled the country. He remains in exile to this day.
ARE CASCADES THE NEW NORMAL?
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As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, revolutions are remarkable things because they upend the existing order, which has power and inertia on its side. In effect, they make farces out of the conventions of normalcy that have become ingrained in our minds. But, what if our conventional notions of how the world works are flawed? What if there are natural forces at work that make cascading movements not only possible, but inevitable?
It certainly seems that way. As we have already seen, the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan protests, although incredible turns of events, weren’t exactly unusual. In fact, they were part and parcel of a series of similar uprisings that began with the Otpor movement in Serbia. Even before that, there were earlier antecedents, such as the women’s suffrage movement, Gandhi’s Satyagraha in India, and the struggle for civil rights in America. More recently, the movement for LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, and the “March for Our Lives” movement that arose out of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, follow the same patterns. Despite their long history, movements such as these do seem to happen with increasing frequency.
An eerily similar trend can be observed in the business world. Consider technology. Microsoft was founded in 1975, Apple in 1976, and the personal computer revolution took hold in the 1980s. The next major disruption was the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989, more than a decade later. Then came the launch of Netscape Navigator, the first consumer browser, in 1995. That gave rise to new corporate titans such as Yahoo! and Amazon. Google was incorporated at the end of 1998; by the time of its IPO in 2004 six years later, it was a $23 billion company. Facebook’s rise was even faster. A new breed of technology companies, known as “unicorns,” often achieve massive scale in a matter of not years, but months.
And while viral cascades are most conspicuous in the technology sector, it’s a mistake to dismiss them as a purely technological phenomenon. Moisés Naím has observed that similar disruptions occur in many other facets of modern life: military affai
rs, religion, and business. It’s hard to think of anything that’s been left untouched.
Many leaders and scholars have noticed this shift and have even come up with an acronym for it: VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). Some say that leaders need to become more enlightened, to be more agile and open, to embrace flexibility and “join the conversation.” Yet while it’s tempting to see those who are taken by surprise by nascent movements as a bunch of feckless, self-important dullards with their heads in the sand, that’s far too facile an explanation.
In retrospect, it may seem clear that Ukraine was ripe for revolution in 2004, but it was far from obvious to anyone who was there at the time. Despite my experience in Eastern Europe and deep connection to events, I didn’t see the Orange Revolution coming, nor did the journalists I worked with or the business and political leaders that I knew. The leaders of the Route 128 companies outside Boston were no buffoons either, but super successful entrepreneurs who had once been considered visionaries. Still, they never saw the rise of Silicon Valley coming until it was too late.
At the same time, the seemingly enlightened leaders who bring powerful movements about often lack the planning, discipline, and organization to create change that lasts. As we have already seen, the coalition formed during the Orange Revolution broke down within months as the various factions fell to infighting. The Arab Spring has had a similarly spotty record. Egypt descended into chaos within two years after Hosni Mubarak was deposed and his successor, Mohamed Morsi, suffered a similar fate. Barack Obama made sweeping changes to America, but his successor has worked to reverse every single one of them.