Democracy counts.(Scan)

Two thousand and four has been a year of rigged elections in the former Soviet Union. First came a farce in Chechnya, where all candidates not approved by the authorities were forced to withdraw. Then, in Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenka--the definition of a tin-horned dictator--falsified a referendum to change the constitution so he could be president for life. In a continuing crisis in the tiny region of Abkhazia, legally a part of Georgia, Russia has just imposed an economic blockade because residents elected an insufficiently pliable man a president.

In Ukraine, a nation of 48 million, the stakes are higher. Every trick in the book was used to secure victory for the corrupt prime minister Victor Yanukovych. A creature of the mafia that has stolen much of the country's industrial wealth, Yanukovych served two terms in a Soviet penal colony for assault and rape. He personifies the thugocracy which has run Ukraine for the last decade, turning it into a version of Latin America in the bad old days without the palm trees: huge inequalities of wealth, "disappearances" of independent journalists, and rent-a-mouthpiece media.

A single malicious hand was involved in all four of the manipulated elections in ...