Kravchuk refused. “I immediately grasped where power was now moving,” he remembered later. “I said: ‘Stanislav Ivanovych, the point is that the state is embodied in the Supreme Soviet, and I am the head of the Supreme Soviet. If Varennikov wants to meet, then we shall meet in my office at the Supreme Soviet.’” Hurenko had to agree. This represented Kravchuk’s first, modest victory over his rival. Just one year earlier, the fifty-five-year-old Hurenko, as first secretary of the Central Committee, had been considered a step above Kravchuk in the republican hierarchy. But with Ukraine declaring sovereignty in the summer of 1990, the role of parliament and its Speaker, traditionally known as the head of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, had grown enormously, making Kravchuk the republic’s principal figure. This was now the trend in all the Union republics, although it was not so pronounced in Central Asia, where local heads of party Central Committees also became Speakers of parliament.
Kravchuk later remembered that while waiting for Hurenko and Varennikov to arrive, he felt defenseless: no military or police units reported to the head of parliament, and the only force he had at his disposal consisted of three guards with handguns. Varennikov’s sudden arrival in Kyiv showed how ephemeral was the power of the head of a republic that had declared its sovereignty and set its own laws above those of the Union. Kravchuk had no doubt that he was being faced with a coup. Gorbachev’s alleged illness was a sham: Kravchuk had seen him in the Crimea a few weeks earlier. On the evening he visited Gorbachev in Foros, they had polished off a 0.75-liter bottle of lemon vodka with the help of Gorbachev’s son-in-law. Kravchuk did not conceal his skepticism about the Emergency Committee’s claim with regard to Gorbachev’s poor health from anyone with whom he chanced to speak, and later that day he mentioned the bottle of vodka at a meeting with World War II veterans. Finally the guests arrived, with Hurenko preceding Varennikov and his entourage.3
The host and his guests sat around the long table—military on one side, civilians on the other, Varennikov directly across from Kravchuk. Varennikov was the first to speak. “Gorbachev is ill; power in the country has gone over to a newly created agency, the Emergency Committee on the Extraordinary Situation,” he said, according to a participant in the meeting. “From 4:00 a.m. on August 19, in the interests of public safety, a state of emergency has been declared in Moscow in connection with the deterioration of the situation in the capital and the danger of disturbances. I have come to Kyiv in order to sort out the situation directly and, if necessary, to recommend the declaration of a state of emergency in at least a number of regions of Ukraine.” Varennikov specified Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, and one of the cities in the western region of Volhynia.
The civilians on the other side of the table reacted as if shell-shocked. There was complete silence for at least a minute. Hurenko showed no emotion. The silence was finally broken by Kravchuk, who seemed poised and confident without being aggressive. “We know you, Valentin Ivanovich, as the USSR deputy minister of defense, a respected individual, but you have shown us no credentials,” said Kravchuk in response. “Besides, we have not yet received any instructions from Moscow. And, finally, the most important point: the declaration of a state of emergency throughout Ukraine or in a particular region is a matter for the Supreme Soviet—that is what the law requires. We are informed that the situation both in Kyiv and in the regions is fairly calm, requiring no extraordinary measures.”4
Varennikov had come to Ukraine because the plotters in Moscow were apprehensive about Rukh—the pro-independence alliance of Ukraine’s opposition parties—and its possible actions against the coup in Kyiv and western Ukraine. “There is no Soviet power in western Ukraine; it’s all Rukh,” declared Varennikov. “It is imperative to declare a state of emergency in the western oblasts. Strikes are to be stopped. All parties except the CPSU are to be shut down, along with their papers; meetings are to be stopped and dispersed. You are to take extraordinary measures so that people do not think you are following the previous course. . . . The army is in full battle readiness, and we will take every measure, including bloodshed.” Kravchuk insisted that there was no need for a state of emergency. If the general thought there was, he could go to western Ukraine and see for himself that calm prevailed there.5
Varennikov changed his line. “You are a man of authority; a great deal depends on you, and I am asking you personally,” he said to Kravchuk, “that you, first of all, make an appearance on television, then on radio, and appeal to the people to remain calm, taking account of what has already been proclaimed.” After Hurenko and the others left Kravchuk’s office, leaving him one-on-one with the general, Kravchuk asked him as an old acquaintance (they had attended the same meetings of the Central Committee in Kyiv when Varennikov served in Ukraine), “Valentin Ivanovich, once you succeed, are you going to bring back the old system?” He had in mind the pre-perestroika political order and relations between the center and the republics. The general responded in the affirmative: “We have no other choice.” This answer spoke volumes to Kravchuk. As he remembered later, he realized at that moment that a victory for the Emergency Committee would not mean keeping things as they were but would actually lead to turning back the clock, perhaps all the way back to the times of mass persecution.
The putschists would have nothing to lose, and their victory would mean not only the end of Kravchuk’s political career but also his possible imprisonment. Unlike Hurenko, Kravchuk was in no position to gain anything politically by siding with the coup, but neither was he prepared to rebel like Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. His strategy was different: to do everything in his power to avoid giving the military a pretext to introduce a state of emergency in Ukraine. “Presentiment suggested to me,” remembered Kravchuk later, “that it was necessary to gain time, to avoid any unnecessary moves, and all would be well.” It was a wait-and-see attitude for which he would later be severely and justly criticized.6
Kravchuk’s stand was largely shared by the Ukrainian government. None of its members genuinely supported the coup, recalled the liberal-minded deputy prime minister, Serhii Komisarenko. At a meeting of the government presidium called that day, Komisarenko himself described the actions of the Emergency Committee as “openly anticonstitutional.” However, if there was lack of support for the committee’s actions, there was no lack of fear. The government soon created a special commission along the lines proposed by Varennikov, although its purpose was somewhat different from the one that he suggested. The title of the government decree establishing the commission indicated the main concern of its creators: “On the Establishment of a Temporary Commission to Prevent Extraordinary Situations.” If a state of emergency was declared in Ukraine, then real power would be taken away from the parliament and government, where it had rested until then. Once lost, it would never be regained. The commission’s main task was to keep the opposition quiet and shut out the Emergency Committee and the military.7
The only man at the top of the Ukrainian power pyramid who had much to gain from the coup, the first secretary of the Central Committee, Stanislav Hurenko, returned to party headquarters after meeting with Kravchuk and Varennikov to find a telegram from Moscow urging party committees to support the coup. He called in the leading party officials for a meeting and informed them of the state of affairs and the plan of action: a special memo should be prepared on the basis of the telegram received from Moscow and sent to the local party committees, instructing them to offer all possible support to the coup. The memo prepared at Hurenko’s bidding was many times longer than the telegram from Moscow, indicating the agitation of the Ukrainian party apparatus. The Ukrainian Central Committee instructed party cadres on the ground that support of the Emergency Committee was their most important task, ordered them to prohibit any meetings or demonstrations, and stressed that preservation of the Soviet Union was among the main tasks of the party. The actions of the Emergency Committee, wrote the leaders of the Communist Party of Ukraine, “correspond to the attitudes of the overwhelmin
g majority of toilers and are consonant with the principled position of the Communist Party of Ukraine.”8
Meanwhile, Kravchuk began his all but impossible balancing act, trying to please everyone while retaining the power he already had. He addressed the country on Ukrainian radio and television late in the afternoon of August 19. The idea of an address had been suggested by Varennikov, but the Ukrainian leader had his own agenda. Kravchuk refused either to support or to condemn the coup. He appealed for calm and pleaded for time, which was allegedly needed to assess the situation. “That is to be done by a collective agency elected by the people,” he told the audience. “But there is no question that in a state founded on law everything, including the declaration of a state of emergency, is to be done on the basis of the law.” He declared that a state of emergency would not be introduced in Ukraine. “Kravchuk urged Ukrainians,” reads an American diplomatic dispatch from Kyiv, “to demonstrate wisdom, restraint and courage, and above all not to antagonize Moscow, which could make the situation worse.”9
Kravchuk tried, less successfully, to take the same line in a brief interview with the all-Union television news program Vremia. There he shocked the Soviet audience by saying that “what happened had to happen, perhaps not in such a form.” He argued that a situation in which neither the center nor the republics had enough power to deal with urgent economic and social issues could not last forever. Kravchuk also characterized the coup as a lamentable development that, given the tragic history of Ukraine, raised people’s concern about the possibility of a return to the totalitarian past. Despite these caveats, the general impression created by Kravchuk’s interview, which ended with a statement on the need to maintain the working rhythm of the economy, was that at best he was trying to take both sides of the issue and at worst he was supporting the coup. Contrasted with reports on the same program about Yeltsin’s open resistance and the declaration by President Mircea Snegur of Moldova that his republic would continue to press for independence, Kravchuk’s maneuvering looked like indirect support for the coup.10
THE COUP CAME AS A COMPLETE surprise not only to Ukrainian government officials but also to the leaders of the Ukrainian “national democrats,” the members of the liberal opposition who had welcomed President Bush to Kyiv a few weeks earlier with the slogan of Ukrainian independence. The session of parliament that Bush had addressed on August 1 was long over, and the deputies had dispersed all over Ukraine, working in their constituencies or taking well-deserved vacations. Viacheslav Chornovil, a longtime prisoner of the Gulag and now head of the Lviv regional administration in western Ukraine, spent the days leading up to the coup in Zaporizhia, an industrial city of nine hundred thousand in the southern part of the country.
Chornovil was the leading democratic candidate in the presidential elections announced by parliament a month earlier, and Zaporizhia seemed the perfect place to launch his campaign. In the summer of 1991 Zaporizhia was chosen as the site of the second all-Ukrainian Chervona Ruta (Red Rue) song festival, which combined traditional folk music with a rock and underground music culture that was breaking free of Soviet restraints. The finale of the music festival took place at the local soccer stadium on the evening of August 18, the same evening on which the plotters paid a surprise visit to Gorbachev in the neighboring Crimea. It turned into a major celebration of Ukrainian culture and emerging, previously suppressed trends in music but was completely ignored by the local communist administration. The next morning participants and guests, including Chornovil and quite a few nationaldemocratic leaders, were supposed to leave the city. For many of them the departure became an ordeal as thousands of guests, alarmed by news of the coup, stormed the airport and the railway and bus terminals in an effort to get to Kyiv as soon as possible.11
On the morning of August 19, the first day of the coup, Chornovil was awakened when a journalist staying in the same hotel knocked on his door to tell him that there had been a coup in Moscow. To Chornovil, who had spent more than fifteen years in Soviet prisons and internal exile, the fact that he was learning of the coup from a journalist and not a KGB officer was already good news. “The putsch must not be serious if I’m still sleeping here, still dreaming some dream, and not in a prison cell,” said Chornovil to his awakener.
John Stepanchuk, the acting American consul in Kyiv, who had also attended the Red Rue festival and was staying in the same hotel as Chornovil, soon came to his room. He witnessed Chornovil making phone calls to KGB and military headquarters in the city of Lviv, where he had been elected head of the local administration, to find out what was happening. The commander of the Carpathian military district told Chornovil that his forces were essentially opposed to the coup and that he would not interfere with the workings of democratic governments in the western Ukrainian oblasts as long as they refrained from declaring a general strike. Chornovil assured the commander that he would do his best to maintain peace in western Ukraine.12
Chornovil’s first reaction to the coup was basically the same as Kravchuk’s: both were eager to make a deal with the military, exchanging peace on the streets for its noninterference in government affairs. That was the strategy also adopted by Yeltsin’s close ally Anatolii Sobchak, the democratically elected mayor of Leningrad. With the help of his deputy, Vladimir Putin, Sobchak made a deal with the military and the KGB, exchanging relative peace on the streets for neutrality of the security forces that reported to Kriuchkov and Yazov. This was a strategy meant to preserve the political gains of perestroika. But Chornovil’s reaction, dictated largely by his role as head of the regional administration in the largest center of western Ukraine, was not shared by many opposition leaders in Kyiv, some of whom called for active resistance.13
The highest-placed reformist leader in the Ukrainian parliament, Deputy Speaker Volodymyr Hryniov, went on radio that morning to condemn the coup in the strongest possible terms. He later remembered his attitude at the time: “I understood perfectly that if the nomenklatura officials came to an understanding with one another, there would be no one to come to an understanding with me about anything.” An ethnic Russian elected from the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, Hryniov represented an all-Union trend in the Ukrainian opposition. He and his supporters closely associated themselves with Boris Yeltsin and the Russian liberal democrats without sharing their Russia-first attitude. Hryniov and the constituency he represented—the urban intelligentsia of Ukraine’s Russified east and south—stood for a democratic Ukraine in a Russia-led confederation. Hryniov’s allies were among the first to raise the flag of resistance to the coup in such cities as Zaporizhia.14
Chornovil and other national democrats were caught between Kravchuk’s vacillations and the radical position taken by Hryniov and Yeltsin’s other allies in Ukraine. It took a while for Rukh, the nationaldemocratic umbrella organization consisting of a number of democratic parties and associations, to come up with a statement. It appeared only on the second day of the coup, but it was strong and unequivocal in its condemnation and called on the citizens of Ukraine to prepare for a labor strike that would paralyze the country’s economy. For the Ukrainian national democrats, the moment of indecision had passed. That day the Lviv regional council declared the coup unconstitutional. So did the Kharkiv city council in eastern Ukraine, and the miners of the Donets Basin were getting ready for a strike. Rukh announced a general political strike to begin at noon on August 21. In cities all over Ukraine, democratic activists distributed Yeltsin’s appeal for resistance. People were glued to their radios, listening to the Voice of America, BBC, and other Western stations. The news coming from the Moscow White House was more and more worrisome. No one knew whether Russian democracy would survive the night.15
ON AUGUST 21, THE THIRD and decisive day of the coup, Leonid Kravchuk was awakened before 4:00 a.m. by a call from one of the opposition deputies demanding an emergency meeting of the presidium, the ruling body of parliament. News had reached him that army units had begun an attack on the Russian White
House. Kravchuk was noncommittal, as always: there was nothing they could do about the situation in Moscow in the middle of the night, so the meeting would have to wait until the start of the working day. By the time Kravchuk reached his office that morning, the situation had changed dramatically. The news from Moscow left little doubt that the coup was unraveling and that Yeltsin, hitherto a virtual prisoner in the White House, was emerging victorious.
Kravchuk immediately did what the opposition deputies had been demanding for days: he jumped on Yeltsin’s bandwagon. He later claimed that he had kept in touch with the besieged Russian leader and his entourage throughout the coup. The Ukrainian Speaker was the first republican leader whom Yeltsin had called on the morning of August 19. Although he failed to convince Kravchuk to join forces in resisting the coup, he received assurances that Kravchuk would not recognize the Emergency Committee. Kravchuk never formally violated his promise to the Russian leader. On the last day of the coup, Yeltsin told George Bush that he believed he could trust Kravchuk. It seemed that Kravchuk was again on the right side of history. But that was not the impression shared by the leaders of Ukrainian opposition forces. The people pouring into the main square of Kyiv at the news of the defeat of the coup were chanting, “Yeltsin, Yeltsin! Down with Kravchuk!” The day that began for the Ukrainian Speaker with worries about a possible crackdown by the putschists ended with worries about his political future in an environment fully dominated by the national democrats.16
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