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Dear friends:

I'm writing you from a country haunted by the prospect of being turned into a dictatorship by next week. You may find this an exaggeration. It's not. It's only human to refuse to believe the worst until it's too late.

And from recent conversations with my friends and journalists in Western Europe, I know how little information can be found in the European media on the situation in Ukraine. As a result, there's little understanding of what is really at stake in Sunday's presidential election.

The election has meant this: It's been a long time since I've seen so many happy, smiling faces in the streets - in fact, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But as the past 13 years have proved, our celebration then was definitely premature.

With no change of the political elite, with just the very small beginnings of civil society, with no real revolution, Ukraine has started sliding back into the dark shadow of Sovietization. In the current election campaign, the whole strategy of the presidential "candidate of power," Viktor Yanukovich, is the brainchild of Moscow professionals and spin doctors. And Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has in such short order turned his own country into a place browbeaten by the fear of terrorism, has turned up in Kiev to offer support for the Ukrainian thugs active in this election. Small wonder: Criminals and KGB officers have worked together since the good old days of the Gulag.

Politically and intellectually, Kiev is looking more and more like a city under Russian occupation. How this unholy alliance has plotted to ensure the succession of power in Ukraine has become visible to all in the past few days. Since the late 1990s, the autocratic post-Soviet regime has been trying to smother Ukraine's budding democracy. Last weekend, blood was spilled on the Kiev pavement.

At 11 p.m. on Saturday, after an opposition rally, a small crowd (including women and senior citizens) lingering in front of the Central Election Commission was attacked by assailants in civilian clothes. The crowd had remained outside the Central Election Commission office because they feared that some of those inside were debating an agenda on changing the voting lists.

Suddenly, about 50 men in black leather appeared out of the darkness wielding clubs and knives. Eleven demonstrators from the group wound up in hospital. Not surprisingly, there was no sign of official police anywhere. But when parliamentarians and their bodyguards ran out of the building, three of the attackers were caught and handcuffed. According to their IDs, they appeared to be policemen. Kiev residents had been hearing rumours of "special detachments" arriving from all over the country and concentrating in the city.

Now, many citizens fear there will be more violence in the days ahead - that the gangsters in power would sooner close the polling booths and fight rather than give up their positions. Could any special detachments, however "specially trained," really take on hundreds of thousands of people determined to exercise their democratic rights?

The Ukrainian Internet is now boiling with the discussions of how and where to meet, how to protect against future attacks, and so on. Perhaps it won't come to this. And few of us believe that the Ukrainian army will agree to turn its guns against Ukrainians, either. But Thursday, only three days before the election, there was a military parade in Kiev - nothing like this has ever been held just before an election.

And since Tuesday, Mr. Putin has been in the city. Again, rumours are flying - this time, that his bodyguards carry bayonets. Some of us fear that democratic Ukraine has only a few days left. A few days of an electrifying autumn of free political discussions in the cafés and clubs, of gatherings, demonstrations - and hope.

For, despite everything, there's a strong hope, dare I say a belief, that we can slay the Ukrainian part of that old, corrupt, Soviet-era dragon on Sunday at the polls.

Channel 5, Ukraine's last free TV channel, remains operative. The announcers are still smiling, like the people I see in the streets. Although it can reach no more than 30 per cent of the country, Channel 5 has been the only channel to give a full report of the events on Saturday night outside the Central Election Commission.

None of the beating victims interviewed on Channel 5 sounded like victims. They spoke indignantly, but righteously, as people aware of their rights and ready to protect them. Which may be why we have a totally irrational, yet overwhelming, feeling that "we," the people, are stronger than "they," the corrupt ones who are trying to stay in power. And that it is "they," not we, who are most frightened.

On election night, I'll be in the streets, too. I don't know what is going to happen, what forces will be turned against us, and what will be the final result. Yet, even if the worst happens, and Mr. Putin's bodyguards help to turn my country into a Stalinist state, we'll be in the streets as a way of declaring: "This is not our choice."

We know how eagerly the Western press buys the made-in-Russia political analysis of the current Ukrainian situation - the version that says Ukraine is "split" into East and West, "pro-Russian" and "pro-Western" factions. As George Orwell knew, the old totalitarian dragon feeds on artificially constructed illusions. So I just want to let you know how things look and feel from here. And to say that this is not a farewell letter. It is a letter of hope.

Oksana Zabuzhko is a poet and novelist, best known for her novels Extraterrestrial Woman and Field Studies in Ukrainian Sex. A former Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University, she has taught Ukrainian literature at Penn State. She lives in Kiev.