Fools on the Barricades

The Orange Revolution, which swept over Ukraine and turned downtown Kiev into a huge, round-the-clock political protest cum tent city cum rock concert, had one major, if little-noted, effect on Russian-Ukrainian relations: all of a sudden, Russians stopped calling their southern neighbors Khokhly, the pejorative normally used widely to describe Ukrainians.

Really.

It was replaced with the more politically-correct duraki (fools, idiots).

And so, soon after I stepped off the train that brought me home to Moscow from Kiev, I learned that I had spent weeks surrounded by duraki. More specifically: duraki who obviously could not cope without their Russian brothers and who were turning their country into a huge mess (not to mention selling out to the West).

Well, I won’t argue. My memories speak for themselves.

For instance, there was one freezing cold night in Kiev, standing atop the barricades that the duraki had put in front of the presidential administration building. The duraki were thoroughly peaceful, yet also determined to keep the election from being stolen. Just 15 yards in front of me, protecting the building, were riot police. They were so very young. And so completely unsure of what they were doing. It did not help that female duraki kept slipping roses and carnations into their riot shields. And all around us, choirs of duraki were singing Ukrainian folk songs through the snowy night – the very songs that had made me fall in love with this region many years ago.

I remember standing in a sea of orange flags at an opposition rally on Kiev’s central Independence Square. I was talking to a lovely young durachka (that would be a female durak, itself the singular of duraki), a blonde student with just a hint of freckles on her face. A Ukrainian citizen, she also happened to be ethnic Russian. This, she told me, was the first time she had felt genuinely proud of her country. While Ukraine had acquired its statehood after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she continued, now it was at last becoming a nation.

She was interrupted by hundreds of thousands of voices striking up the Ukrainian national anthem. Can you believe it? These duraki even have their own anthem?! It is a slow, entrancing, quintessentially Slavic melody, with lyrics calling on you to defend your freedoms and other similarly outlandish notions.

I remember being handed an orange scarf at opposition headquarters, and being told by opposition activists that they had placed their order for tens of thousands of scarves, armbands, flags and other “revolutionary memorabilia” with a factory in China months before. So well organized, those duraki.

Nevertheless, Russians in Moscow assured me, those Ukrainians were all duraki. Thankfully, the Russians stated with pride, such a thing would never happen in Russia.

True enough. There were no mass rallies on Red Square when President Putin decided to scrap the direct election of regional governors, replacing them with Kremlin appointees. There were no serious protests against biased Russian TV (now completely Kremlin-controlled) during the recent presidential campaign. Nor, with but one or two exceptions, have there been significant demonstrations against the way thousands of young Russian soldiers and Chechen civilians are killed each year in Chechnya.

Defend your freedoms? Are you out of your mind? Only duraki do this. Duraki like in Ukraine.

Well, as I already said, I won’t argue. But please count me among the duraki.