Don’t be surprised if over the coming months of electioneering you hear friends, colleagues and the media increasingly referring to the predictions of Nostradamus and any number of local soothsayers when discussing the likely outcome of the big vote. They will no doubt explain to you how it has long since been foretold that a lady will rise to lead Ukraine into Europe, or that it is written in the stars how Russia will once again rule the steppe, or the prediction that ten days of bloodshed will be followed by the rise of a new leader from the West, and so on and so forth.
Many ordinary Ukrainians appear to be addicted to this sort of superstitious nonsense in the same way they place great trust in the most ridiculous of rumours, urban myths and wild speculation. On countless occasions I have borne witness to otherwise intelligent folk swearing on their lives that President Kuchma was actually dead, or had AIDS, or that the mayor of Kyiv was a cocaine baron in league with Nigerian drug lords, or that Yulia Tymoshenko was a secret agent of the New World Order sent to undermine the Slavic people.
I have seen university dons argue at length that Ukraine’s tragic history is all a result of the spiritually troubling choice of blue and yellow as national colours, and I am no longer surprised when someone suggests for the umpteenth time that western support for human rights in the USSR was actually all a big plot to degrade the Soviet people and turn them into colonial slaves.
The general tone of Ukrainian conspiracy theories is so fanciful that it makes the seemingly idiotic but nevertheless widespread theory that Viktor Yushchenko poisoned himself seem almost rational by comparison.
This national passion for the superstitious and the far-fetched is not unique to Ukraine, but the trend tends to be strongest in parts of the world where, like here, the population has grown used to being deceived and kept in the dark by blanket state censorship and unending propaganda. In the absence of hard facts and safe in the knowledge that they are being denied access to the truth, it is only natural that mechanisms like this should spring up.
When nothing is as it seems, only a fool would believe the official version, encouraging people to put their faith in ever more unlikely versions of events based on everything from renaissance era texts and global conspiracies to modern day star gazers and allegedly informed insiders.
In their own way these alternative versions of reality offer comfort and some sort of empowerment to the disenfranchised masses. I have no doubt that such fantastic rumour mills are also alive and well in China, Iran and elsewhere in the un-free world, but in that respect things should be improving here in Ukraine.
After all, the country’s media has come a long way from the censorship and sycophancy of the old regime in the three years since the Orange Revolution, but it has yet to capture the wider imagination in a way that could dampen the decades long enthusiasm for conspiracy theories, astrological predictions and local legends.
The coming parliamentary elections will be the biggest test yet for Ukraine’s freer press, but in reality it may well take many years before the population in general learns to appreciate the power of free speech enough to put the superstitious ways of old behind them.
