KIEV, Jan 23 (AFP) - Viktor Yushchenko, who on Sunday was sworn in as Ukraine's president after leading mass "orange" protests that captured the world's attention, is not your archetypal revolutionary leader.
A trained banker, he is not a gifted orator -- reporters would come back from his briefings as chief of Ukraine's central bank with pages full of notes but few quotes that could be understood by people outside the financial sector.
Yet revolutionary leader is what he became in late November, as hundreds of thousands of people poured out into the streets in organized protests to support him in the standoff with the ruling regime of Leonid Kuchma.
His face -- bloated and pockmarked -- became a potent symbol of the rot of the outgoing regime. The handsome features were grotesquely disfigured in September after he fell ill in what doctors have since said was a result of a massive dioxin intake that the opposition leader charged was a murder attempt by the authorities.
The 50-year-old is a dignified, deeply religious man, whose insistence on high moral standards and decency inspires confidence among supporters.
"I just wanted Yushchenko to be president," said Roman Bezsmertnyi, a top aide. "I saw in him a person who would be able to change the country."
He is also notorious for a painfully slow decision-making process, a desire not to offend that often results in an inability to say 'no' and for being shockingly unpunctual.
The third president of an independent Ukraine was born in 1954 in the village of Khorujevka in eastern Ukraine and began his career in the banking sector in 1976.
At the age of 39 in 1993, he became chief of Ukraine's central bank, catching the eye of an American ethnic Ukrainian consultant with the KPMG audit firm.
"He was very open-minded and very free-market oriented," said Katherine Chumachenko who is today Yushchenko's wife. "I found that very interesting that somebody so young and in such an important position really had such a Western outlook on the economy."
Yushchenko came to head the central bank in the first tough years of post-Soviet reform. In 1996 he introduced the country's first stable post-Soviet currency, the hryvna, to great fanfare, managing to keep the nascent unit stable while a similar experiment in neighboring Russia went through a roller-coaster ride.
After six years in the post, he was tapped to become Kuchma's cabinet chief.
He leapt at the chance, stacking his government with young liberals, focusing his efforts foremost on breaking the powerful but invisible bond between the state and organized crime.
Over the next year Ukraine enjoyed its first rise in economic growth since the Soviet Union's collapse.
But as his anti-corruption drive charged ahead, Yushchenko came up against ever more powerful enemies in both parliament and the government and Kuchma, bowing to an irate parliament that had earlier voted down an austerity budget proposed by Yushchenko, dumped him from office in April 2001.
He enjoyed his first taste of popular success that day, as 15,000 people rallied in the streets in his support, turning him into an instant opposition leader at a time when Kuchma himself was fighting off allegations of being linked to the murder of an opposition journalist.
With the revolution over and won, Yushchenko will now face the even harder task of making good on his campaign promises -- a fight against corruption, a transparent government, levelling the field for business players, setting Ukraine on a European integration course.
"I am certain that soon the world will see a new Ukraine, with a new people and a new government," he told US President George W. Bush in a phone call on Saturday as he prepared to take the oath of office.
01/23/2005 11:25 GMT - AFP