At 9 p.m. all treatments were already over - from liter-size droppers to Hanne Severinsen’s visit. A two-room ward: a manipulation room and a tiny visiting room in which we were talking. To my silly question: «So how was it in there?» Yulia Tymoshenko gave a very serious answer: «A hundred times worse than I had ever expected».

We talked for a little more than an hour. Yulia Tymoshenko, just released by the district court, told how the well-organized and often efficient system worked to psychologically break an individual. The ex-Vice Premier assured me from the start that she had been treated by Lukyanivka [Kyiv remand jail] warders without abuse which made her story all the more horrible. «When I was led into the cell, I couldn’t even see what was in there, who was there or how big it was. As soon as the door was locked, the light was turned off and I found myself in pitch darkness. Only later I learnt that it was one of the first psychological tests: if you start shouting, banging on the door and asking to turn on the light, the jailers make a conclusion: this one will tell everything at the interrogation. I didn’t shout, I didn’t even make a step because I didn’t know what was there in the dark. I sat down on my bag and I sat there till they turned on the light.

The cell was so small that two people couldn’t pass between the plank beds. The window was screened by a huge metal sheet - that cell was designed for political prisoners so that they couldn’t pass messages outside. The close-stool, excuse me, was stinky as can be. The jarring light was on all night. The place was so dirty that I asked my lawyer to bring me a pair of long rubber gloves, and with cold water I scrubbed the window, the walls and... all the rest. Otherwise it would have been impossible to stay there.

I shared the cell with another woman. But it didn’t take me long to get a clear impression of her...

It was a serious psychological ordeal to feel being watched every minute. And it isn’t an exaggeration: any time, every ten minutes they looked into the peep-hole. You must know how psychologically hard it is, and for a woman - absolutely unbearable. After a few days I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I stuck a towel into the clinks around the peep-hole and said I wouldn’t let anyone remove the towel, or else I’d go on hunger-strike. That was the only freedom I was able to win back. Every hour the iron jaw of the door clanged, and the warder looked into the slot through which they pass meals. At that moment you are to stand up with your hands raised behind your head until you are allowed to sit down or lie down (because this procedure is performed at night, too).

When I was to see my lawyer and to be interrogated I was convoyed like a dangerous felon convicted for a crime against humanity - two guards ahead and two behind. Anyone who happened to come across was pushed aside to the wall, hands behind head. I was searched before and after every meeting. That was a special procedure, a humiliation I had never experienced in my entire life. I had my first few «walks» in the common courtyard, and the inmates were friendly to me. That’s why, I think, the warders dug up some old plans of the prison and began to take me to a rather strange place. To get there, I had to pass a narrow vertical tube with crampons. They could hardly squeeze through that «rat-hole» themselves. Four bare walls, some grates above. The sky is seen like through a sieve. To stay on those four or five square meters was what they call «a walk».

But it got the hardest after my interview was published in the Zerkalo Nedeli. All the brass-hats of the jail flooded my cell and announced that I was denied parcels because of a breach of discipline. It meant the following: water from the tap and three dishes on the menu, quite worthy of describing. What’s called gruel has never seen butter and is just bran boiled in water with bugs, cockroaches, hairs and splinters. Then there is soup. This stands for water with some half-boiled beet, carrots and potatoes, dirty or rotten (I didn’t risk to try that). And what they call delicatessen is soup made from rotten fish. When I was going to see my lawyer and saw vats with that concentration-camp food in the corridor, I always breathed through a handkerchief to stifle the natural reflex.

So for the last fifteen days I ate almost nothing. I want you to note that all this happens to people whose guilt hasn’t been proved in court. It’s a remand detention center, not a prison.»

Perhaps Yulia Tymoshenko could have told us about many more things that might have helped Nina Karpachova [Ukrainian Ombudswoman] to understand that she was far from well-informed about what’s going on in our penitentiary system and also helped the masters of this country who have lost all sense of reality to find their whereabouts in place and time...

But our conversation was interrupted. We heard irritated male voices from the next room. Tymoshenko listened and said quietly: «They’ve come to arrest me». A phrase exactly from Bulgakov’s «Master and Margarita», but nothing like fiction. I guess if Mykola Obikhod [Deputy Prosecutor General] had been in the room at that moment, he would have remembered her eyes even after his retirement... But Tymoshenko braced up herself at once. She stopped Olexander Turchynov’s squabbling with the investigator and spoke in a clear-cut but polite manner as did the investigator who came to hand in the city court’s [arrest] warrant passed overnight.

You know what happened next. But it’s still unknown what happened before that decision. It’s known that it took the district court three weeks to replace custody with a no-leave undertaking. During that time Pechersk District Court Chairman Mykola Zamkovenko met with Viktor Yushchenko several times. He never promised to release Tymoshenko, but each time he reassured the Prime Minister about his own objectivity and readiness to prove it. In the end the court ruled in favor of the ex-Vice Premier. To some it was predictable. I won’t dwell on that since Oleksandra Prymachenko’s article in the previous issue expounded this version: Tymoshenko was released to be indicted on new charges and imprisoned again, thus casting shadow on the entire opposition.

But there were those who thought that Tymoshenko was released because she had made a deal with the authorities. Those rumors reached her. So during her first meeting with journalists upon release she made several sharp anti-presidential statements. The reply arrived in tarpaulin boots. As for the protest by Supreme Court Chairman [Vitaliy] Boiko, it was justified. Besides, it was a matter of honor for Tymoshenko’s team, the Prime Minister and the Supreme Chief Justice himself. I should remind you, however, that the Tymoshenko affair is not over yet. The Supreme Court is considering the issue of sanction.

So Tymoshenko is free, albeit partly. She has made no deal with the authority and remains with the opposition. Still, Yulia Volodymyrivna [Tymoshenko]’s behavior is somewhat strange. We already know that prison, especially in Ukraine, is not all milk and honey. And even forty-two days spent there leave a lasting emotional trace. It was most probably for this reason that Tymoshenko, as soon as she got a chance to talk to mass media, came up with a number of statements that could be explained by a «demob syndrome». Those who have served in the army needn’t be explained what it means, and those who haven’t may recall the exaltation of their friends returning to their civil homes after two years of hard life: it takes them at least a month to adapt to and understand realities of life and their place in it. Yulia Tymoshenko’s statements about her intention to run for president which transformed from the subjunctive to categorically indicative mood within a week can be seen as a sign of the above-mentioned syndrome. Perhaps if Yulia Tymoshenko, even bearing such far-reaching intentions, had seen journalists after two weeks of recreation, somebody could have explained to her in that time that by a move like that she was doing harm above all to the opposition (where at least every second one sees himself as President). And the problem is not even there. The National Salvation Forum, initially meant to be a public initiative, unites outstanding personalities who have different ideological concepts and aim not at overtaking power, but at its lawful replacement. This is why the Forum’s program is not a party program, and the Forum can have no single leader, because as soon as leadership is claimed by Tymoshenko, Moroz, Chornovil or Filenko, the coalition will simply fall into pieces. For quite a long time its members have kept, at least in public, from «pulling over the blanket». That was the reason why Tymoshenko’s statement drew a generally negative response.

And one more thing, even more serious. Tymoshenko really can not be President of Ukraine. And that’s not, as President Kuchma says, because she is female: at the previous elections Natalia Vitrenko [Progressive Socialist Party leader], hadn’t the authority bridled her in the last lap, would have had absolutely every chance to make it to run-offs. And not even because Tymoshenko has a past that looks far from clean. Who of her opponents hasn’t? We live in a country where rocks are hurled at sinners by those who well deserve to be buried under stones. After all, should Tymoshenko be given nationwide media support and a chance to reveal her charismatic, oratorical and financial capabilities, this problem could be solved, too. Didn’t we elect to Parliament politicians who are not even charismatic but have the same muddy past and a still muddier present? The reason lies not there. People like Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Medvedchuk must be absolutely barred from unlimited powers vested in the President. As is known, measure is the most complex philosophic category. Those who go beyond it may be simply dangerous at that post. It’s quite different with second or third «violins». And Yulia Tymoshenko proved definitely that, if under permanent control, she could be useful for the country. This is testified by the results of her work at the post of Vice Premier in charge of the energy sector.

In other words, Yulia Tymoshenko is like nuclear energy which is hard to control, and in different conditions may be either a nuclear bomb or a power plant generating peaceful electricity. To give her the right to act at her free presidential will means to doom the country to living with a leader whose unpredictability range is too vast.

The five-month history of confrontation between the authority and the opposition is in fact a history of errors. On the one hand, it’s simply a shame not to defeat the authority that allowed the debauch of Mykhailo Potebenko [Prosecutor General] who, better than Melnychenko’s tapes, showed the world that «something is rotten in the Kingdom of Ukraine». To defeat the authority that gave many other occasions for people to see how incompetent and undemocratic it is. On the other hand, it was stupid not to make use of the politically advantageous situations with the dispersal of the tent-in on Khreshchatyk street in Kyiv, with Tymoshenko’s arrest, release and another arrest, with the March 9 events in Kyiv etc. Sometimes it seems like the sides are competing under a Dumb and Dumber movie motto. They respond to an error with an error, to a provocation - with a pre-arranged action, and this is done by both sides too. Possibly, all these political upheavals should serve as a sort of fuel for the first stage of a rocket that will eventually bring to orbit a third force - a payload of sorts. But we will talk about that some other time. Provided there’s anyone worth talking about.