Review: Tomorrow's elections will gauge frustration at faltering progress since the Orange Revolution. But three new instant histories remind us how far Ukraine has come

Standing in the crowds in central Kiev during the Orange Revolution it was hard to avoid the sense that this was history in the making.

With up to 500,000 people jamming into Independence Square and the surrounding streets, the demonstrators were united in the conviction that something extraordinary was happening. …

Fifteen months later, the mood in Kiev is quite different. Among the Orange Revolution's supporters there is widespread disappointment with president Viktor Yushchenko who raised so many hopes when he took power. …

Dr Andrew Wilson [UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies] … is particularly strong on the interplay between politics and business before and during the Orange Revolution. He shows how the Ukrainian parliament was taken over by wealthy business people for whom a key attraction was a deputy's legal immunity. Kuchma was surrounded by oligarchs who grew rich from untransparent privatisations and who, in return, contributed generously to campaign financing. Yushchenko also relied on the backing of wealthy businessmen - without money he could never have started a campaign, let alone led a revolution. But, as Wilson argues, Yushchenko's financial backers were genuine entrepreneurs not the recipients of crooked government favours.

Wilson, a specialist in the fake democracies of the former Soviet Union, writes with relish about the Kuchma regime's multiple efforts to fix the presidential election. The key evidence was secret tape recordings made by security services officers eavesdropping on an illegal computerised vote-fixing cell. Results sent by computer from regional election commissions to the central election commission in Kiev were secretly diverted to this cell with the knowledge of senior election commission officials. The cell's experts massaged the data before transmitting it to the central election commission to ensure the numbers came out right for Yanukovich. …

It is now obvious that Yushchenko has failed in the last year to push through as many reforms as he had hoped. Wilson suggests Yushchenko should have secured a better deal with Kuchma. "It was far from clear, however, that the package was the best that could have been negotiated or even whether improvements could not have been made under the existing system." …

The three books present a far more positive view of western engagement in the Orange Revolution. …

Perhaps the decisive western input was in providing observers who helped to ensure that the fraud could not be hidden: 2,455 people in the disputed second round and 13,644 in the rerun, the largest number of foreign observers ever deployed anywhere. As Wilson says: "On the whole the west was doing exactly what it should have been doing in Ukraine, though arguably not doing enough. … The west was promoting its own values. It may not always live up to them itself, but that does not mean it is wrong to try to help other countries live up to these values." Of course, it favoured Yushchenko, but at least the west saw a distinction between the man and the message. Russia had no time for such niceties.

'Ukraine's Orange Revolution' by Andrew Wilson (Yale University Press £18.95, 256 pages)

Stefan Wagstyl, 'Financial Times Weekend Magazine', 25 March 2006