Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
Ukraine is used to strong women, but not necessarily powerful ones. Yulia Tymoshenko… who’s running in the presidential runoff this weekend is both. Reporter Brigid McCarthy looks at the Tymoshenko phenomenon.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Ukraine holds its Presidential run off this weekend and the two remaining candidates are a study in contrasts.  Victor Yanukovich is a burly former Communist Party boss.  His opponent is the current Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.  She’s five foot two and favors designer dresses and high heels.  She’s also believed to be one of the richest people in Ukraine.  Brigid McCarthy has her story.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is probably the most recognizable symbol of Ukraine. She’s risen to the top in a part of the world where women are rarely seen in politics.  One of her campaign posters shows her curled up with a baby tiger with the caption “Tiger Yulia”.  She’s ferocious one moment, kittenish the next.  Here she is in a video Christmas card she sent to the nation a few weeks ago.  She begins, “my darlings”, but she also once attacked an opponent in Parliament with her stiletto heel.  The 49-year-old Yulia Tymoshenko doesn’t hide her femininity, she flaunts it and uses it as a weapon.  Welcome to feminism, Slavic style.  Martin Nunn is a British public relations executive who’s worked here for nearly 20 years.  He says one way to understand the Tymoshenko phenomenon is that Ukrainians are used to strong women.  They have the Soviets partly to thank for that.

MARTIN NUNN:  In the Soviet era, women were expected to drive the buses, clean the streets, drive the tanks, clear the rubbish, do everything.  There was no gender difference.  However, women also had to look after the children, run their homes, do the cooking, etc., etc.  Consequently, during that period, Ukraine became very much a matriarchal society.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: And the post-Soviet state of Ukraine still is; unofficially at least.

MARTIN NUNN:  The women do the work here.  Look at my office, 70% of my staff are women.  Why?  Because they do a better job.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: Still, most of the bosses are men.  Ukrainian women seem to accept that.  They have a saying, “mean are the head, but women are the neck”.  But not Yulia, she’s both.  Ievgeniia Kononenko is a writer and scholar at the Ukrainian Center of Cultural Studies.  She says Tymoshenko appeals to Ukraine’s complicated electorate in powerful subliminal ways.  Take her signature wrap around braid; it’s the traditional hairdo of married Ukrainian women.

IEVGENIIA KONONENKO:  And of course it’s not only just national style, it’s even religious style.  It’s like a halo around the head.  It’s just the style of Ukrainian icon, its style of God’s mother.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: And there’s one more thing.

IEVGENIIA KONONENKO:  Of course her beauty attracts electors as well.  We can hear then just in private conversation that okay, maybe she’s bad woman but she’s so beautiful.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: But there’s another side to Yulia Tymoshenko.  Underneath the glamour, she’s essentially a product of the Soviet era.  She was raised by a single mother in Eastern Ukraine’s Russian speaking industrial region.  When she was 19 she married the son of a Communist Party boss.  She was trained as an economist before running for a seat in new independent Ukraine’s Parliament in 1996.

IEVGENIIA KONONENKO:  People hated her in the beginning of her career.  She was a woman who steals gas and everything.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: While in government, Tymoshenko also ran a shadowy business that resold cheap Russian gas to Ukrainian enterprises.  It made her fabulously wealthy and Ukraine’s first female oligarch.  Her nickname was “the gas princess”.  Freelance journalist Yuri Lukanov says the size of her fortune remains shrouded in mystery.

YURI LUKANOV:  This isn’t the United States.  It’s Ukraine.  They illegally send their money to offshore zones and so this is why nobody is able to say but I think it’s over a billion dollars.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: Yulia Tymoshenko started to attract a national following in politics by railing against the country’s oligarchs and corrupt politicians.  She grew more popular still when she joined forces with the pro-western reformist leader Victor Yushchenko.  Together, they were the hero and heroine of the Orange Revolution in 2004.  Dmitriy Chekalkin is a former Ukrainian diplomat who was also the master of ceremonies at the wedding of Tymoshenko’s daughter.  He says Yulia Tymoshenko is extremely charismatic, not just before a crowd, but in person too.

DMITRIY CHEKALKIN:  I watched her on many occasions negotiating, speaking in private, so she’s very talented negotiator.  She can really make people fall in love with her.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: Martin Carr saw another side of Yulia Tymoshenko when he did public relations for her in 2007.

MARTIN CARR:   The first meeting I was warned, she will try to stare you down.  I thought it was a bit strange, but what actually happened in the meeting was that Mrs. Tymoshenko, when I started talking, stared me down, literally.  She stares at you.  And she’s looking into you.  Now, if you blink or turn away, then she knows she’s won.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: Carr says Tymoshenko’s leadership style is pure Soviet.  She has to be in control of everything.  Journalist Yuri Lukanov says her manner of governing hearkens back to the Soviet Commissars in another way.  Russians and Ukrainians even have a special term for it.

YURI LUKANOV:  In the Ukrainian language – - .

BRIGID MCCARTHY: Roughly translated, it means manual mode, or ruling by hand.  It’s basically government by decree.  Take last fall’s swine flu outbreak, Tymoshenko used her powers as Prime Minister to cancel all schools and public gatherings for an unprecedented three weeks.  But she did almost nothing to prepare the country for a likely outbreak.  Journalist Yuri Lukanov says Tymoshenko has never articulated a coherent political program or vision for the country.

YURI LUKANOV:  I believe that power is the largest love of her life.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: But how she would use that added power if she wins Sunday’s Presidential election is anyone’s guess.

YURI LUKANOV:  If she loses, she won’t be a peaceful woman.

BRIGID MCCARTHY: But if she loses, Yulia Tymoshenko will still be the second most powerful political figure in Europe’s second largest country.  For The World, I’m Brigid McCarthy in Kiev, Ukraine.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.