The Two Viktors.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Foreign Affairs: Serious historians resist talking about events as inevitable. Millions of lives, after all, were lost over the past century as ideologues embraced morbid notions of "historical process."

But when Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich bowed to his opponent's decisive win, it underscored that the future belongs to democracy. The televised resignation came on New Year's Eve, a fitting moment to usher in a new era of popular sovereignty.

A week ago the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko won, and won clearly, one of the most dramatic national elections in recent history. The democratic revolution of Central Europe that started in 1989, finally bringing down the Soviet empire, shouted to a weary world that it was alive.

Not only alive, but vital as a check against those who still aspire to unanswerable power. What happened in Ukraine would have been unimaginable not so long ago. The region bears a distinction as one of the first laboratories of totalitarian intention. Ukrainians refused to let go of the collective memory.

Seven decades ago, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decided to punish the politically restive republic. He engineered an artificial famine over the productive agricultural expanse. Up to 7 million Ukrainians perished as Stalin introduced that particular diabolism in which the loss of a single life is taken as a tragedy, the loss of millions a mere statistic.

Stalin's Western apologists willingly blinded themselves to the starvation, their hopes for a worker's utopia imperishable. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, denying the genocide, even won a Pulitzer Prize for his propagandized dispatches -- the unrevoked prize remaining among the elite media's unfinished business.

In the streets of Kiev toward the end of 2004, Ukrainians took care of business. Eschewing mob rule, the Orange Revolution, as they called their wintry demonstration, actually demanded procedural honesty. Last week's election, ...