Interesting read....isn't it amazing what people can do when they're resolved?!?

The power of crowds
By Don Murray

The first thing that struck me in Kiev was the confidence of the crowds. And the organization of their leaders. This was a crowd driven by belief, almost a religious belief that its power, the power of numbers, the power of democracy would triumph and change the face of the nation.

Moscow 1991, Belgrade 2000, Kiev 2004. Each was a remarkable confrontation, each saw thousands of people pouring into streets and squares to protest an abuse of power, each saw opposition coalesce around an unlikely hero, and, finally, each was startling because so unexpected.

Moscow was the locale for the first, and perhaps the most momentous, of these struggles. In August 1991, a military coup took place. The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was placed under house arrest at his summer residence in the south.

In Moscow the military and political leaders of the coup, which aimed to restore the dead hand of centralized power on the Soviet Union, somehow forgot to arrest Boris Yeltsin, the head of the Russian Federation. This was, at the time, a province of the Union. Yeltsin sped to the Russian parliament and called on people to come out and join him.

They did, in their thousands.

The hardline communist leaders had the divisions and the generals. Yeltsin stood on a tank and voiced defiance. The crowds dared them to attack. The generals blinked; their soldiers had made it clear they didn't want to shoot their fellow citizens.

The coup collapsed; it had lasted just three days.

In 2000, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic called an early presidential election, confident of victory. His opponent was a rather dour professor, Vojislav Kostunica, chosen because he was the only candidate acceptable to all wings of the fractured opposition.

Milosevic controlled the police, the army and, so he thought, the voters. He was wrong. As the votes were counted in the first round of the presidential election, it became clear that Kostunica was winning outright. The count was halted.

For a day there was confusion. Then the crowds began to gather. At first they were relatively small; the mood was tentative. They feared a harsh counterblow from the authorities. It didn't come. The crowds became larger and more assertive. The daily demonstrations in Belgrade became large and boisterous. The miners announced they were going on strike and joining the protest.

Twelve days after the vote a mass rally gathered in huge delegations from around the country. They marched on parliament. Then they stormed it. The police who ringed the building and the police waiting inside simply melted away. The revolution was over.

But one man hadn't grasped the change. Milosevic carried on in his presidential residence. It took the intervention of the Russian foreign minister the next day to point out the obvious: he was yesterday's man.

Thirty hours after parliament fell he went on television to announce calmly that he recognized the verdict and would carry on as leader of the opposition. Six months later he was in jail, and two months after that he was on his way to The Hague to face trial for war crimes in the Yugoslav wars.

In Ukraine the opposition riposte to the massive vote fraud that appeared to be tilting the second round of the presidential election toward the outgoing prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, was massive and immediate. Crowds flocked to Independence Square.

They vowed to stay, day and night, until the injustice was expunged. A stage was set up, complete with huge screens. Speeches and performers kept the crowds entertained.

Their leader, Viktor Yushchenko, came every day to speak to them. He vowed defiance. Others organized civil disobedience. Crowds blockaded the offices of the president and the cabinet. They surged around the parliament as it sat to debate the contested election. It voted to overturn the result. The vote was only symbolic; the final decision would be made by the country's Supreme Court.

Throughout all this, the men of power – the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, and the outgoing prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych – seemed practically paralysed and all but invisible.

There was a half-hearted attempt to bring miners from the east – Yanukovych's backyard – to Kiev to confront the Yushchenko crowds. A few thousand arrived, having spent the night on the train drinking. A handful tried to set up a tent city to rival the huge Yushchenko tent city. They stayed a night and then melted away.

When asked by our editors and anchors, on the air and off, about the risk of confrontation in the streets, we replied: what confrontation? Kiev was a capital totally in the hands of the opposition crowds. They were happy, disciplined, obedient and seemingly indifferent to the cold. There was one moment of possible danger a week into the standoff. Reports had come to opposition leaders that several thousand soldiers had been mobilized. Their task would be to move in and clear Independence Square. Yushchenko went before his supporters and appealed directly to the soldiers: you must not turn your guns on the nation.

The threat never materialized.

In all these crises the reaction of those in power was similar: they were stunned. All three societies had long been used to oppression, and passivity in the face of the powerful. It had become the rulers' due. When suddenly people surged into the streets, the men used to receiving unquestioning obedience were confused and paralysed.

In each crisis the breaking point came offstage. The autocrats turned to their police and military leaders and demanded action. But action meant, almost certainly, the killing of citizens, possibly in large numbers. In each case the men with the guns refused that order. They were not democrats but they feared their soldiers and police would simply revolt. And they understood that power had dramatically shifted. Their new leaders were in the streets.

As I said, the Kiev crowds were more confident and better organized. So were their leaders. Almost every day saw them take or announce a new initiative. It would capture the headlines and keep the establishment firmly on the defensive.

The organization was due to planning; unlike the first two crises, Yushchenko and his lieutenants saw this confrontation coming. The first round of the presidential vote, which he had narrowly won, had been scarred by voting abuses. The second round was far worse.

That Yushchenko reacted by organizing what amounted to a street revolution was due to a personal transformation. It literally can be read on his face. Where just six months ago his complexion was youthful and his hair brown, now his face is sagging, pockmarked, festooned with warts and his hair is shot with grey. Yushchenko has no doubt: he was poisoned, he believes, during a dinner with Ukraine's chief of security in September. He almost died.

The experience angered and galvanized him. From being a rather plodding candidate, a conscientious bureaucrat who had run the country's central bank before being elevated to prime minister for a year and a half, he became a guerrilla leader, mobilizing vast crowds and promising all-out political war.

His anger also flowed from the realization that his case was not isolated. In previous years MPs, journalists, an opposition leader had been killed or had died in mysterious circumstances. The evidence appeared to implicate people at the top of the Ukrainian state. And this was a state noted for corruption that was attempting to buy the presidential election for its favoured candidate, Viktor Yanukovych.

The crowds Yushchenko mobilized helped serve, in turn, to mobilize Ukraine's Supreme Court. Just as important were files of evidence presented to the court showing massive vote fraud. It ruled the second round of the election invalid and ordered a new, third round on Dec. 26.

Yushchenko, like Yeltsin and Kostunica, has become the unlikely hero, the man who mobilizes the crowds. He hasn't yet won power but he is now only a step away.

If he does, he might do well to reflect on the aftermath of the heady days in Moscow and in Belgrade. So much emotion and faith had been invested by the crowds in the streets that no man or team could hope to fulfil those hopes. And so much faith was invested because the economic and political situation of the countries was so dire.

Inevitably people were disappointed, often bitterly disappointed. From being guerrilla leaders and giant killers, Yeltsin and Kostunica shrank back in the public imagination to the size of all-too-human politicians.

They held on to power (Kostunica is now Serbia's premier; Yeltsin only retired as president nine years later), but the adjective attaching to their leadership was no longer "heroic" but something more prosaic – ineffectual, inconsistent, or even, in the case of Yeltsin, drunken.

In Kiev the shrinkage has not yet started. The crowds are still flexing their muscles and Yushchenko is still their hero.

Thank you for that post (good reading).

c-

What is going on in now in Ukraine is absolutely amazing and pretty inspirational. To think that the people care so much about this election that they are willing to camp out in the cold in protest is unbelieveable. These protestors completely changed the election and forced the government into agreeing to a re-election. Its just inspirational to hear that people are making a difference by protesting.
Anyways,
Great read, thanks man.

"o povo unido jamais será vencido" (the people united will never be defeated)