Conville & Walsh

In December 2004 the world’s media was focused on Independence Square in Kiev, as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fought off bitter temperatures and the threat of police violence to challenge a fraudulent election. On stage, dressed in the orange of his party’s campaign colour, was Viktor Yushchenko, his face disfigured by poison. A month later he would become the Ukrainian president and declare his country free from a corrupt regime that was supported by the Kremlin.

AN ORANGE REVOLUTION follows the build up and denouement of this historic uprising, covering the main players on both sides of the conflict while also giving the reader a sense of what it was like to be in the middle of such an uplifting uprising. The book also provides a moving and illuminating historical portrait of the Ukrainian problem: battered by the Russians in their communist revolution, conquered briefly by the Germans, then annexed by Soviet Russia, the Ukrainians were dealt a cruel hand by the twentieth century.

Thus the book’s intriguing mixture of subjects: political corruption, organized crime, a beheaded journalist, poisoning of a presidential candidate, a family tragedy and the triumph of a historically oppressed but optimistic people.