Shadow of Silence

On Saturday in Ukraine there is a day of silence before the parliamentary elections - campaigning is prohibited, candidates are resting. The PublicPost correspondent attended rallies of the ruling party and the united opposition, listened to Ukrainian pop music, stood in line for free tea, and even attended debates in the last hours of the campaign.

Yanukovych forever

On Friday, parliamentary candidates from the presidential Party of Regions and the opposition Batkivshchyna divided squares in Kyiv. But, apparently, they didn’t find any better options than to stand at a distance of a hundred meters from each other. "Regionals" held a rally on St. Michael's Square, against the backdrop of St. Michael's Cathedral, and the oppositionists - on Sofiyskaya Square, against the backdrop of St. Sophia. It looked quite comical, but standing in the middle, you could listen to both. “From stability to prosperity” was the name of the action of the party in power, which took place in the genre of a telethon. Live broadcasts from different cities were shown on the big screen in turn, and people in the cities were showered with compliments. They said that the “Party of Regions” does so much for the country” and “achieves everything through colossal work”, that 15 thousand gathered in Kharkov, and “Uzhgorod Square is warmed by the hearts of the people.” In Dnepropetrovsk they did not choose their words carefully, they just repeated the name of the marathon: “The Dnepropetrovsk region is moving from stability to prosperity.” No one has explained what kind of stability, what kind of prosperity there will be and then what kind of prosperity there will be.

Several thousand people with blue flags of the “regionals” joyfully watched the inclusions. These were mostly older women wearing multi-colored scarves and jackets with party symbols. My Kyiv friends tell me that people are brought to rallies of the ruling party from Donetsk, from the president’s homeland. But no one admitted this to me. “Yes, back in 2004 I voted for Yanukovych, and before that for Kuchma!” Lyudmila admitted to me. “I want us to win. Maybe then they’ll be allowed to be president for life. I’m tired of everything changing.” Lyudmila doesn’t believe in the opposition - she calls Yulia Tymoshenko a “thief”, Vitali Klitschko a “boy”, and she simply doesn’t know who the first number on the Batkivshchyna list, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is. But my interlocutor likes Prime Minister Mykola Azarov - number one on the Party of Regions list. He soon took the stage and, with an unusually strong accent and a hoarse Brezhnev-like voice, thanked “the people who came to support the party before a difficult test,” “the party of action, not talkers.” The politician also said that he did not want to divide the country into friends and foes. True, in the propaganda videos of the Party of Regions they still scare voters with “orange revenge.” The prime minister's performance was quite short, and soon his place on stage was taken by the former lead singer of the group "VIA Gra" Alena Vinnitskaya. Fortunately, she only sang and did not talk about politics.

Bad people don't go to jail

At the “Batkivshchyna” rally at that time they only sang - as if they were warming up for the politicians who were just about to take the stage. While waiting, people danced, waved flags (at Batkivshchyna they are white and red), stood in line for free hot tea (it got very cold in Kyiv two days before the elections) and shouted “Yule’s freedom!” A special attraction was posing in front of a portrait of Tymoshenko. At this rally I also found Lyudmila, but a different one. Lyudmila the oppositionist, of course, “hates” President Yanukovych. “But I treated him better until he imprisoned Yulia,” she says. “When Yulia was free, I myself doubted her a little. But when she was imprisoned, I stopped. They don’t imprison bad people in our country!”

Despite the fact that Tymoshenko is now more of an opposition ideologist, and the top officials of Batkivshchyna are different people, her presence is felt everywhere. And they even flaunt it. For example, the head of the party headquarters, Alexander Turchinov, spent almost all the time he spoke on stage reading out the appeal of the convict. Of course, in Ukrainian, as the ex-prime minister bequeathed. She herself, who knows Russian perfectly, refused to speak it even during the trial. And this became the trademark of the opposition. “The parliamentary elections that will take place on October 28 are special. This is not an isolated tactical battle that you can afford to lose, it is a war that can end either in your victory and a chance for change, or in our complete historical defeat,” Turchynov read. If Yanukovych, thanks to your votes, survives as a politician in these elections, he will complete the establishment of a dictatorship and will not give up power peacefully again." Even in her address, Tymoshenko thanked “for the children’s drawings” and letters and asked “to remove the mafia from power.”

Great TV debate

If during the rallies there were no conflicts between the parties (even the services of the internal troops soldiers sitting between the squares on buses were not needed), then a real scandal broke out at the entrance to the film studio named after. Dovzhenko, where they film the program “Big Politics” with Evgeny Kiselyov. It airs on the Inter channel. The authors of the program decided to hold a debate in the last hours before the day of silence. But only those candidates who, according to opinion polls, will definitely get into parliament. The concept did not suit everyone, and the leader of the nationalist party “Svoboda” Oleg Tyagnibok and his younger comrades tried to storm the film studio. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Azarov was supposed to come to the debate. As a result, a strange company of nationalists, members of the Berkut special squad and numerous security guards of the Prime Minister gathered at the gate. At some point, they stopped allowing everyone into the territory, including employees and guests of Big Politics, but the conflict was resolved, although the broadcast was still delayed.

In the studio, Azarov, Klitschko, Yatsenyuk and communist leader Pyotr Symonenko sat at one semicircular table. Moreover, the boxer and the communist were placed on adjacent high bar stools, extremely unflatteringly for the latter. As a result, Simonenko must have felt clearly insecure: if Klitschko’s feet stood firmly on the floor, then Simonenko’s feet did not reach the floor by about half a meter. The candidates' speeches and their answers to each other's questions were vague, but promising - as is usually the case before elections. Azarov argued that “we are at the very beginning of a long journey,” and unexpectedly admitted that he “bears responsibility when plaster falls at a school.” He also had to fend off reproaches from Klitschko, who read from a piece of paper a list of unfulfilled promises to the Party of Regions that it made before the last elections. This is, for example, the failed transition to a contract army in 2011.

The communist spoke about the need to force the rich to share with the poor, and the oligarchs to prove that they manage their enterprises well. Here, of course, he had to explain that these “Bolshevik slogans” do not bother him, because “the biblical commandments were invented thousands of years ago.” Klitschko, in turn, said that the main thing is the team, and he must win, because “no one has ever blushed for me in sports and no one will ever blush for me in politics.” It was difficult to understand what Yatsenyuk said. True to tradition, he did not speak a word of Russian even on a Russian-language television show. As Ukrayinska Pravda reports , the politician, it turns out, dreams that “someday it will happen that the opposition will support the government.” “Probably, when we come to power, we will do everything to ensure that the opposition takes our side, unlike our political opponents the Party of Regions,” he said at the debate.

A separate point of the show program were musical breaks. Participants were invited in advance to bring along a performer they liked and who supported them. Azarov brought the well-known Ukrainian pop star Taisiya Povaliy in Russia (she is number two on the party list of the Party of Regions) - a stately aged blonde, black and white flowers and pearls, Klitschko - his wife Natalya, who used to sometimes perform in the rings before his fights. Yatsenyuk and Simonenko did not bring anyone, for which they paid the price - for the first, the jazz band invited by the television crew sang the optimistic “I will survive” by Gloria Gaynor, and for the second, the no less optimistic “Back in USSR” by The Beatles. The candidates tensed, but then relaxed when, a few minutes before midnight, slender girls brought them a glass of vodka and lard.