At the height of the Gongadze affair, in early 2001, President Leonid Kuchma issued an open invitation to observe the Ukrainian authorities on their best behavior during the upcoming parliamentary elections, set for March 2002. With an unprecedented number of foreign observers (officially, over a thousand) seeking to test the president's word, and Western embassies helping to finance a huge exit poll on election day, which would make blatant forgery more obvious, any crude use of so-called administrative resources was unlikely to be as prevalent or have the same effect as it had in the presidential election in 1999 or the referendum fiasco of 2000.

Accordingly, the parallel count organized by the For Fair Elections committee claimed to detect only relatively small divergences from the official results (for these, see Table 1). The committee put Our Ukraine at 25.04 percent (up 1.4 percent from the Central Election Commission's figure); the Communists at 21.2 percent (up 1.2 percent); For a United Ukraine at 9.4 percent (down 2.4 percent); the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc at 8.6 percent (up 1.3 percent); the Socialists at 7.9 percent (up 1 percent); and the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (United) (SDPU[U]) at 6.3 percent (no difference).11 As was not the case in 1998, there was no suggestion that the six winners were not the right six or that any of these had not, in fact, passed the 4 percent barrier or that any of their rivals had been deliberately kept below it.

The real drama in the elections, therefore, was how the authorities would seek to construct a majority in the Rada, or parliament, under conditions where the use of "administrative resources" alone could not be relied on to have the desired effect. Their answer was to put their faith in Russian political consultants, or piarchiki, selling all sorts of questionable projects ranging from "black" or negative public-relations work to the creation of political fronts-"virtual" parties.

To many critics, the fact of the advisers' Russian origins was suspicious in itself. Organizations such as Gleb Pavlovsky and Marat Gelman's Foundation for Effective Politics (FEP), with its well-known Kremlin connections, they argued, "aren't just making money in Ukraine, but [are] serving as Russian agents of influence, 'distributors' of Russian interests."22With regard to other consulting agencies, one could object not just to the mere fact that they were Russian but also to their importing Russian methods into Ukraine that were deeply corrosive of the democratic process. A smaller number of observers made the equally powerful objection that many of the projects were crude copies of Russian originals, unlikely to have the same success in the very different circumstances of Ukraine.33 In many cases, the blind faith of the consultants' paymasters-Ukraine's so-called oligarchs-that the extremely costly contracts would inevitably bring results proved misplaced.

Plan A: Ukrainian unity
The piarchiki promised to deliver Ukrainian versions of Russian success stories. Obviously, any Ukrainian politician would love to repeat the performance of Russia's Edinstvo (Unity) party, which came from nowhere to win 23.3 percent in the Duma elections in 1999. In spite of that promise, however, when initially weakened by the Gongadze affair, Kuchma had vetoed plans put forward by Labor Ukraine oligarchs Viktor Pinchuk and Serhiy Tyhypko that their organization could serve as the core of a Ukrainian equivalent of Edinstvo. The president preferred, at that time, to play divide and conquer. Nevertheless, the growing threat from former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko and his Our Ukraine bloc forced the authorities to launch the rival For a United Ukraine (FUU) project in the fall of 2001. Unlike Edinstvo, FUU was much less successful at disguising its nomenklatura aura.

At first, the project seemed much less than the sum of its parts, which gave the bloc its initial acronym of TUNDRA (TU for Trudova Ukraina, or Labor Ukraine; ND for the National Democratic or Popular Democratic Party; R for the Regions Party; and A for the Agrarian Party). TUNDRA was an appallingly bad choice of image (the English word is of Russian origin and has roughly the same meaning in both languages). As Kyiv mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko remarked, "I think anyone who knows at least something of this country's history, or whose fate was to be born here and live through the great tragedies of this nation, is scared of the word 'tundra,'" with its obvious association with Stalinist exile and its barren imagery-frozen and foreign-in a country that suffered at least three famines in the twentieth century.44Nor was its replacement acronym much better. In Ukrainian, For a United Ukraine was usually shortened to "ZaedU," which sounds rather too much like à table! (For Food)-again, rather a risky image for a party with so many snouts in the trough.

Despite the late but necessary name change, FUU found itself still trailing at only 5-6 percent in the polls with only a month to go. In the final weeks of the campaign, however, the bloc's public-relations campaign was crudely effective (if unoriginal). Eventually advised to pose as a party of social accord, FUU played on the still-strong yearning for social harmony in Ukraine, copying the tactics used by Jacques Séguéla in François Mitterrand's successful reelection campaign in 1988, when one of his two key slogans had been "For a United France." In Ukraine, FUU's first big advertisement (rumored to have been prepared by the piarchiki employed by Pinchuk and Tyhypko) provided a 90-second touchy-feely potted history of Ukraine copied directly from Séguéla's similar montage of French history from 1789 to 1988.55The bloc's final ads concentrated on the threats to Ukrainian unity that conservative Ukrainians risked if they backed the opposition, showing stark images of social conflict (Chechnya, Palestine, the attack on the twin towers), alongside a selection of Ukraine's darker historical moments, followed by a scene of conscripts boarding a bus to a tearful farewell, off to defend a "united Ukraine," albeit unlikely to be sent off to a real fight-as was not the case in Russia.

That said, 11.8 percent on the national list (Table 1) was not that impressive as a final score for a bloc so heavily supported by the official mass media. FUU was unable to build an image in any way comparable to Edinstvo's, with its unique dynamic of authority myths (its symbol being the bear, "the czar of the forest, not always good, but just") and regional, even antiurban, rhetoric-all invented by image makers sitting in their Kremlin offices.6 In comparison with Edinstvo, FUU suffered from its too-obvious assembly out of constituent parts drawn from the ruling elite; in a way, from not being virtual enough.

Kimitaka Matsuzato has argued that Ukraine under Kuchma has developed a form of "centralized caciquismo."7 The local machines that made up FUU-Labor Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk, the National Democratic Party in Kharkiv, the Regions Party in the Donbas, the Agrarians in the countryside, and the late addition the Party of Industrialists and Enterprise Bosses were all a necessary part of FUU's effort in the constituencies, but their presence made it much harder to reinvent the bloc for the list vote. FUU's lopsided success in the elections (35 seats on the party list but 66 in the constituencies, almost the exact inverse of Our Ukraine's ratio of 70 to 42) was dependent on its effort in the 225 territorial constituencies, where these local machines further expanded the process that Matsuzato noticed in 1999-pushing the communist "red belt" out from the industrial heartlands and into central Ukraine. This time around, the Communist Party won only 6 constituency seats, compared to 38 in 1998, only 2 of which were in its traditional stronghold in the Donbas. The very visibility of these machines on the ground, however, made FUU's national television advertising less effective.

Edinstvo continued to aggrandize itself after 1999, in particular, by forcing a shotgun marriage with Fatherland-All Russia in 2001. In Ukraine, by contrast, once control of the parliamentary leadership had been secured, FUU-its new name in hand-had already begun, by June, dissolving into its constituent parts (see Table 2). FUU even gave birth to three entirely new factions. Of these, European Choice was essentially a second bet for the Ukrainian group least likely to be thought of as European in geography or political culture, namely that part of the Donbas clan more closely associated with Mykola Azarov, head of the State Tax Administration. Democratic Initiatives was the vehicle for the rival Kharkiv clan. People's Power was the flag of convenience for neophytes and defectors from other parties (see section C below)-those who were more likely to be following the allure of cash than the call of popular sovereignty. Thirty-two deputies remained as For a United Ukraine.

The establishment's other main force was the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (United) or SDPU(U)-the party of the Kyiv business elite-which was widely rumored to have employed Gleb Pavlovsky's FEP to run its campaign.8 The party's coyness about the link reflected the fact that Pavlovsky allegedly had less to do with the success of the SDPU(U) and more with the "black" public relations used against Yushchenko and others. Certainly, the methodology of the internet kachka (toss)-putting out false or anonymous stories that the mainstream media then quote-was already well known from other FEP campaigns in Russia. FEP claimed it had been hired only to help set up the party website, but even a cursory look at this and the linked websites, such as Details and Observer, demonstrated how their news material blended with AiN and Podrobnosti, the main news show and website of the Inter television channel controlled by the SDPU(U)'s Oleksandr Zinchenko. Also typical of FEP was a spoof website of the same sort that was used against Fatherland-All Russia in 1999.

The Inter network was the chief source of the "black" public relations launched against Yushchenko.9 The two main examples were Tapegate Two and the attempt to blacken Yushchenko by association with the ultraright. The first, an alleged recording of a conversation between Yushchenko and Kyiv mayor Omelchenko about the removal of Viktor Medvedchuk of the SDPU(U) as deputy chair of parliament in December 2001, was designed to tarnish the former prime minister's reputation for relative honesty and diminish the Gongadze problem by convincing voters that politicians were all the same. Except of course, the voters were not convinced thereby. Tapegate Two had nothing like the magnitude or impact of the original. Nothing illegal was discussed; Yuschchenko's private personality was little different from his public face. Also enjoying little obvious success were the attempts to link Yushchenko's family with the plundering of the bank Ukraina.

The second kachka, in the very last week of campaigning, sought to link Yushchenko to an alleged decision by the Ivano-Frankivsk city council to grant former combatants in the wartime SS-Galicia division the status of war veterans. The story may have served to a limited degree in blunting the expansion of Our Ukraine's appeal in southeast Ukraine; but, once again, it was-as propaganda-off the mark. To some piarchiki, however, this was a deliberate strategy, often dubbed "Toad's Eye": the attempt to create a media whirlwind to distract voters from the original reason they were attracted to a particular candidate (a toad being able to focus only on a moving object).

SDPU(U) was also the top spender for television advertising (see Table 3), with a reported $2.14 million as against an official limit of $480,000. As with FUU, the party's slickly produced advertisements contained no programmatic information. Instead, they depicted 2002 as the "year of social democracy," showing their equivalents in governments throughout Europe. It was, therefore, unfortunate when some party leaders congratulated the Portuguese Social Democratic Party after its victory earlier in March-they are a right-wing party with an accidental name. Nor was it clear what the highly personal focus on Medvedchuk and Zinchenko in the party's advertisements had to do with European-style social democracy. Approximately two-thirds of the party's ads were in Russian,10 reflecting its strategy of reinventing its electorate from one based mainly in the rural fringes of western Ukraine (where votes could easily be scooped up in 1998) to one with strong links to business interests in the east and south, thus indicating the party's flexible approach to its nominal ideology. The SDPU(U)'s strongest performance in 2002 was in Crimea, where it won 15 percent and two-eventually four-seats.

Plan B: The satellites
Further evidence of the involvement of Russian piarchiki could be seen in the various satellite parties launched by the authorities. The oligarchs and the presidential administration were well aware that they could not put all their hopes in Plan A-a big victory for FUU. Unlike Russia in 1999, they therefore paid more attention to plans for creating a majority after the elections-by launching a variety of ancillary projects in various disguises to bolster the ranks of the progovernment forces.11 All told, at least a dozen of the 33 parties and party blocs running in the elections were artificial projects with opaque sponsorship and
nefarious purposes.

The large number of such projects reflected the search for a new brand that could recreate the success of the Green Party of Ukraine in 1998. Although in origin a genuine environmental party, in the late 1990s it became a vehicle for Ukrainian businessmen (many in the highly polluting energy sector), who paid for a slick antipolitical campaign with a strong youth appeal that won the party a surprise 5.4 percent of the vote.12 This time around, the favorite brands were youth and women, though the Green Party also ran again. All such parties, however, were virtual in the sense of being nothing more than brands or fronts and vehicles for business interests.

Four types of evidence elucidate the real nature of these groups. All parties or blocs standing in the elections publicized the first five names on their party lists, but one did not have to look much further down to find sponsors who were rarely young or female or enjoying alternative, planet-friendly lifestyles. The main youth party leader, Valeriy Khoroshkovskyi of Winter Crop, had business interests in common with major oligarch Viktor Pinchuk in the Luhansk Oblast energy company. Women for the Future included several notable allies of Vasyl Khmelnytskyi, one of the Green Party's 1998 stable of businessmen (all of whom were male) including Andriy Ivanov head of the board of Zaporizhzhia Steel at number five in the party list; Shamsaddin Abdynov, head of the Zaporizhzhia confectionary firm at number eleven; Mykhailo Pasichnyk, boss of the pharmaceutical company Falbi at twelve; and, at thirteen, Volodymyr Linnyk, head of Rosava. Finally, the Green Party's businessmen were even more firmly locked in the presidential orbit, after the possibility of corruption charges against four of its leaders was first raised and then quietly dropped in 2000.13

A second indication of the true nature of the virtual parties was the sheer cost of their television campaigns (see Table 3). Third was the extra exposure given to them-apart from their paid advertising-in state- and/or oligarch-controlled media. Nataliya Vitrenko appeared constantly on the channels STB, ICTV, and Era (close to Labor Ukraine). In early March, she was cited almost as often as Yushchenko, Tymoshenko, and Moroz combined. 14 ICTV and New Channel simultaneously backed both For A United Ukraine and Winter Crop. The Greens again received favorable coverage in media once linked to Vadym Rabinovych.

The fourth telltale sign of the virtual parties' character was their use of expensive Moscow piarchiki. For example, Piotr Shchedrovitsky, founder of the School of Cultural Policy, was reportedly the main adviser to the bizarrely named Winter Crop Generation Team (Komanda ozymoho pokolinnia) project. Its imagery, supposedly reminiscent of hardy youth, was adopted late in the day and to general bemusement. While still on the drawing board, the project had been known as the New Liberal Union or NLO-the Russian acronym for UFO. The later acronym KOP also gave rise to amusement, as it is pronounced like the word "cop" in English. Additionally, Winter Crop was mocked as a Russian hand-me-down, as its campaign was remarkably similar in structure and method to that of the Union of Right Forces in the 1999 Duma elections, a project also run by Shchedrovitsky. The Ukrainian party did have two young and glamorous leaders (with Valeriy Khoroshkovskyi playing the part of Sergei Kirienko and Inna Bohoslovska doubling as Irina Khakamada) and ran reality game shows, as did its Russian equivalent (with places on the party list as prizes) on Pinchuk-oriented channels like STB, ICTV, and New Channel. Winter Crop also handed out free pop-music videos, thereby arguably overemphasizing its appeal to younger voters who were, in any case, less likely to vote.

Women for the Future ran a similarly disconnected campaign. Its rallies were notorious for handing out free goods-helped by the sponsorship of confectionary firms and pharmaceutical companies-whereas its television advertisements were vague. The latter, mainly images of happy children, were not sufficiently connected to women's issues (as locally understood). They generated empathy but no real sense of why it was important to elect the party. Nor was the provision of benefits-promised or actual-properly conditional on support for the party. Both Women for the Future and Winter Crop managed to convert their largesse into what became free handouts.

The Greens, on the other hand, hired the British firm Saatchi and Saatchi, which was less well versed in local politics and produced a campaign that was a tired rerun of 1998. The party's 2002 slogan "choose life" was no match for the 1998 "politicians are all demagogues." Moreover, the party had alienated too many of its original, pre-1998, environmentalist voters and now faced too much competition for an inherently limited market-namely, political naifs who were still likely to vote.

A second strategy of the virtual politics, also backed by shadowy official forces, was the creation of the so-called clones, designed to leech support from the regime's opponents, or, in the case of the Communists, make sure that their opposition campaign remained within carefully defined limits. Winter Crop was also designed, in part, to take some reform voters away from Yushchenko, as also was Yabluko-a crude copy of its Russian namesake, whose cartoon ads rather undermined the party's would-be reformist image by concentrating on its populist promise to abolish the value-added tax. Yushchenko was also faced with the crude clone calling itself the Bloc of The People's Movement of Ukraine, led by Bohdan Boiko, which discredited itself by making the same allegations of a US plot to support Yushchenko as had Nataliya Vitrenko of the Progressive Socialists.15

The official Communists faced two faux-Bolshevik parties created in haste in 2000-2001. On the left flank was the Communist Party of Workers and Peasants (whose Ukrainian acronym was conveniently the same as CPSU), and on the right the Communist Party of Ukraine (Renewed) or CPU(R), although the latter was in essence nothing more than a vehicle for Soviet nostalgia with zero policy commitment. The CPU(R)'s advertisements were a carefully prepared amalgam of the symbols of Soviet success (Yuri Gagarin, "labor achievements," the Kremlin clocktower, the post-war reconstruction of Kyiv) under the slogan "We remember how it was." Enough agreed to give the CPU(R) 1.4 percent. The Communist Party of Workers and Peasants' ersatz radicalism was harder to present on television and pulled in only 0.4 percent of the vote. Nataliya Vitrenko, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, who had somewhat disappeared from view after her cameo performance in the presidential election of 1999, was once again suddenly omnipresent-this time with only few of her own advertisements but with plenty of talking-head time on official television.

All told, the virtual parties (and clones) won almost 13 percent between them, providing an important lesson next time around. Too many virtual projects competing for a limited protest vote crowded each other out; they all failed to cross the 4 percent barrier for representation. On the other hand, they were successful in a negative sense, drawing support away from Our Ukraine, Tymoshenko, and the Socialists, over whom it would otherwise would have been much more difficult for FUU and the SDPU(U) to leapfrog in terms of parliamentary strength after the elections (see Plan C below).

The one-dimensional existence of many of the above projects, as mere images for broadcasting and without any real party structure, is suggested in Table 3. Three out of the top ten spenders on television advertising were the obvious, main competitors in the elections. Our Ukraine was notable for its efforts to match its rivals' previous comparative advantage on the television screens. FUU and the SDPU(U), as discussed above, were trying to mythologize particular aspects of the party brand by disguising others. The All-Ukrainian Union of Christians was backed by the Moscow Patriarchate. (New Generation was a copy of KOP's copy.) That leaves a clear majority, six parties in the top ten, that were virtual projects pure and simple.

Plan C: Cuckoos in the nest
A third and final attempt to confuse and distort the electorate's verdict entailed placing progovernment "cuckoos" in various opposition parties-the election was, after all, only the first stage in influencing parliament's composition. The outgoing Rada had failed to push through an amendment to Art. 81 of the Constitution (see Ukraine Update, EECR, Vol. 10, No. 4, Fall 2001), which has been interpreted, since December 1998, as giving even those deputies elected on party lists carte blanche to change allegiance-the failed amendment would have prevented this. The early signs were that many political loyalties in the new parliament were, once again, highly flexible. Table 5 shows the relative size of the factions in parliament by mid-July, after initial movement had stabilized, and FUU had swallowed most independents. Factions are listed in order of their precedence in the original party-list vote in order to show how the balance of power changed. It is worth reiterating, at this point, that the total list vote for FUU and the SDPU(U), which together controlled 221 or 49.1 percent of seats by July, had been only 18.1 percent; the vote for Our Ukraine, the Tymoshenko bloc, and the Socialists, left with only 154 seats or 34.2 percent by July, had
been more than double that of FUU and SDPU(U) at 37.8 percent.

Just before the March election a document was leaked from FUU headquarters to Our Ukraine that the latter claimed showed plans to "start the work of draining away (po vidtoku) deputies, who will be elected to the Supreme Council on the Our Ukraine list to the proposed faction, in order to separate off two to three independent deputy groups from the bloc." 16 The new parliament met on May 14, but FUU, then with 182 deputies, and the SDPU(U), with 30, were still short of the simple majority of 226 votes necessary to elect a parliamentary leadership. That majority was only scraped together on May 28, when seven of the "cuckoos" in Our Ukraine were persuaded to break ranks and support the election of Volodymyr Lytvyn as parliament's chairman. These newly fledged deputies, now showing their true colors, included many of Yushchenko's leading business sponsors the nationalist right had always distrusted. Among the seven were Dmytro Sandler, who had lobbied for Russia's LUKoil; Oleksiy Yaroslavskyi, whose brother Oleksandr was one of the Green Party's new businessmen; the latter's associate in Ukrsibbank Ernest Haliev; and the ever-unreliable Volodymyr Shcherban, the former boss of Donetsk, now governor of Sumy oblast. The seven were promptly expelled, reducing Our Ukraine's strength to 111.

Most notable among a second wave of defectors, in July, from Our Ukraine was Volodymyr Pliutynskyi, another well-known business sponsor from the agricultural sector, who left to join the Agrarians spin-off from FUU. The Solidarity group he represented-a
presidential creation in the last parliament-had long been suspected of being a potential Trojan Horse in Our Ukraine's ranks.

Other parties also suffered defections. Former prosecutor general Mykhaylo Potebenko, a surprise recruit to the Communists' election list at number 20, broke ranks to vote for Lytvyn and was expelled. The Socialists also experienced the danger of attracting sponsors, when their Leonid Hadiatskyi, a former associate of exiled prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko and his Hromada party, showed his loyalty to the Dnipropetrovsk machine and defected to the Labor Ukraine wing of FUU. Only the Tymoshenko bloc controlled sufficient resources to maintain its original strength of 23.

Conclusions
Only with different combinations of Plans A, B, and C were the propresidential forces able to win control of parliament on May 28. Given their artificial and fragmented strength, this may prove to be a temporary victory; but, in contrast to the 1998-2002 Rada, electoral cycles this time dictated an early strike. In 1998, the propresidential forces, which could easily have elected a parliamentary leadership from its own ranks, as later events indicated, chose instead to cede control to the center-left in order to build up the myth of the "red threat," come the presidential election in the autumn of 1999. Once Kuchma was safely reelected, the left was ousted from all its leadership positions in the Rada in the "velvet revolution" of January-February 2000.17

This time around, however, the main challenger to the powers-that-be in 2004 will likely be Viktor Yushchenko, given Our Ukraine's relative initial success in 2002-a real rather than preferred opponent. Control of the levers of parliament, its legislative, publicity, and budgetary powers, will therefore be much more crucial in the period 2002-2004, and the presidential administration has once again stolen a comparative advantage. On the other hand, the problems faced both by For a United Ukraine and the virtual parties created for 2002 demonstrate that not everything can be manipulated. Success is not automatically assured.