On that same day the State Bank ceased all payments to Union institutions, including the army and the presidential administration. The sole exception was the Ministry of International Relations, now headed again by Eduard Shevardnadze. Yeltsin, mindful of the negative reaction of Western leaders to his earlier plans to cut the ministry’s funding, continued to bankroll it from Russian coffers. Ministry officials sounded the alarm, expecting a takeover by Russia, but Gorbachev was powerless. “What could we do?” wrote Cherniaev in his diary. “Russia still has the wherewithal to pay, but M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] has nothing!”
At his meeting with Yeltsin and his advisers on November 30, Gorbachev had no cards to play. His only hope was to shame his opponents into giving him the money. “The case was presented as follows;” wrote Cherniaev in his diary, “the ‘center’ cannot be left with no means of support.” At the end of the four-hour session Yeltsin agreed to release some funds. His economic advisers were to figure out exactly how that would be done. While Gorbachev spoke with Bush on the phone in his office, the experts met in the adjacent Walnut Room, so called because of its paneling, previously used for meetings of the Politburo. The problem they were trying to solve could scarcely have been imagined, except perhaps as a nightmare, by the Soviet leaders meeting in that room in the heyday of their Cold War rivalry with the United States.23
The Union was on its deathbed. It was no longer even bleeding: when it came to finances, all the blood was long gone. The solution negotiated by Gorbachev was at best a whiff of oxygen. But despite all the disappointments of the previous few days, he was not giving up. In his conversation with Bush, Gorbachev was eager to report one of his rare political successes—on the previous day his efforts to save the Union had gained the full support of his political consultative council, which included the mayor of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Anatolii Sobchak, and the “grandfather of perestroika,” Aleksandr Yakovlev. The council members, many of them founders of the Interregional Group, the first democratic bloc in the all-Union parliament, would now back Gorbachev’s efforts to save the Union. Some of them spoke about creating a formal opposition to what was regarded as Yeltsin’s intention to destroy the USSR.
Yeltsin’s longtime ally, Sobchak, went on television that evening with a strong statement in support of the Union. But the council members were hardly an influential voice in the new Russia. They never formed the opposition bloc that they discussed with Gorbachev, and their ability to influence public opinion was limited at best. Yegor Yakovlev, a council member who had been appointed head of the Soviet Television and Radio Administration after the coup, was losing control of his own staff. “Yegor Yakovlev complained that television is being ‘taken away’ from him,” noted Cherniaev in his diary. “He is no longer master there. And the ‘Russians’ are now in charge.” Cherniaev then added, with regard to the television news program aired on November 29, “There were comments blatantly offensive to M[[ikhail]] S[[ergeevich]] concerning his ‘Ukrainian policy.’”24
A few days earlier, Cherniaev and Aleksandr Yakovlev, two liberal party apparatchiks, had concluded that, as Cherniaev noted in his diary, “whether we like it or not, there is no alternative to Russia’s breakthrough to independence. Gorbachev’s efforts to save the Union are hopeless spasms.” On November 29, the day on which Gorbachev received support from Sobchak and other leaders of perestroika, Cherniaev sent his boss a draft address to the Union parliamentarians with an appeal to vote for the new union treaty. Privately, he noted, “I don’t believe in it myself. . . . Yet I came up with the words!” The same day, he forwarded a memo to Gorbachev in which he did believe, advising him to “redirect his role toward international affairs and the defense of culture . . . to represent his world prestige at home and draw support from it, not relying either on the Union treaty or on the decisions of congresses that elected him and confirmed the election after the putsch, nor on the Constitution of the USSR!” This was not a plan to save the Union but an attempt to salvage Gorbachev himself as a historical figure, if not a political one.25
Gorbachev, for his part, was reaching out to anyone who would listen, predicting that the dissolution of the Union would mean a human disaster of epic proportions. In an interview with the Belarusian People’s Newspaper, Gorbachev made one of his habitual references to Yugoslavia, where the conflict between Serbs and Croats had forced hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to abandon their ancestral homes and flee the conflict area. He thought that the Yugoslav tragedy would pale in comparison to what could happen in the Soviet Union if new national boundaries were to create a host of ethnic minorities. His argument focused on the Russians—the former masters of the empire—and the discrimination they could face in newly independent states.
“Seventy-five million people live outside the bounds of their ‘small fatherlands,’” asserted Gorbachev, referring to the ethnic homelands of Soviet nationalities and the intermingled population of the Union. “What, then, are they all second-class citizens? And let them not lull us with assurances that everything will be guaranteed in bilateral agreements signed by the republics. I do not believe that they will solve the problem. We must preserve a state that will provide a legal defense for every individual.” Gorbachev then referred to the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the region, who could not fully participate in the political process without knowledge of the local languages. “Willy-nilly, it’s turning out that certain citizens living in the Baltic republics are being reduced to something in the nature of a second class,” he told the journalist.
Even though the Belarusian reporter asked questions openly critical of Yeltsin, inviting Gorbachev to lash out against his main political opponent, the Soviet president did not rise to the bait. Whatever he thought of Yeltsin, in public he made an effort not to attack him. Gorbachev was much less restrained when it came to Leonid Kravchuk. Referring to Kravchuk’s bid for Ukraine’s presidency, he told the reporter, “Generally speaking, a wonderful republic . . . But look at how they are exploiting the idea of independence: in my judgment, by no means only for the purpose of an election campaign.” Then Gorbachev played his minorities card, claiming that he wanted to see Ukraine united, while drawing attention to Ukraine’s large Russian minority. “And if they intend to separate Ukraine from the Union,” argued Gorbachev, “what are the twelve to fifteen million Russians living there supposed to do, and who needs it, anyway? I am for self-determination without the destruction of the Union.”26
Kravchuk and his supporters in Ukraine believed that by constantly expressing concern about the fate of the eastern regions of Ukraine, Gorbachev was in fact trying to stir up interethnic conflict in the republic and exploit it to save the Union. But the question of what would happen to the Russian minority in Ukraine was more than a propaganda ploy on Gorbachev’s part. Even those in his entourage who had already given up on the Union were concerned about the prospect of partitioning what was regarded as Russia’s historical territory. “In general there would be nothing amiss if it were not for Ukraine and for the Crimea, which cannot be given up,” noted Cherniaev in his diary.27
The answer to Gorbachev’s and Cherniaev’s concerns would be given by the forthcoming Ukrainian referendum. Those around Gorbachev did not believe that the Crimea and other regions of Ukraine with a sizable Russian population would vote for independence. It was a paradoxical situation. The future of the Russia-dominated Union depended on the Ukrainian vote, which in turn depended on the ethnic Russian vote in eastern and southern Ukraine.
14
THE UKRAINIAN REFERENDUM
LEONID KRAVCHUK SPENT THE LAST DAYS of November campaigning. The referendum scheduled for December 1 was to be held concurrently with Ukraine’s presidential election, and Kravchuk, who wanted to become president of independent Ukraine, had to win both races.
An experienced party apparatchik but a novice public politician, Kravchuk remembered the advice given to him by George Bush during his July visit to Kyiv: loo
k people in the eye, and you can figure out right away whether they will vote for you. Kravchuk did not go knocking on doors like a Western politician, but neither did he avoid contact with all sorts of people. At one point it almost cost him his life. As he visited a local department store in the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, the head of his security detail told him that thousands of people had gathered on the square in front of the store to see him. Neither his own security detail nor the local police had enough personnel on hand to control the crowd, which was estimated at twenty thousand. Kravchuk refused to leave through the back door. “To flee like a thief from people, many of whom would soon be voting for me?” he wrote in his memoirs. “That would be nonsense!” A rookie campaigner, he overruled his guards and went to talk to the people on the square.
His political instincts were immediately rewarded with cries of “Hurrah for Kravchuk!” But the huge crowd, with people at the back pushing those in front to get a glimpse of the man at the center, was becoming ever more restless. The Ukrainian Speaker suddenly felt excruciating pain and heard a crack—it was his finger. Someone in the crowd had grabbed Kravchuk’s hand in an unsuccessful attempt to shake it and broke his finger. “As I looked around, things began to look somewhat frightening,” Kravchuk wrote. “It seemed that if the rather uncertain militia cordon did not hold, we would simply be crushed.” Kravchuk made his way out of the square as the locals continued to chant “hurrah”—a sign of approval of him personally and of the policies he advocated. He got out of Vinnytsia with new confidence in his victory, but his finger was broken, and his shoes were ruined: as his bodyguards dragged him through the crowd, he had dug in his heels so as not to lose balance. This was an aspect of democratic campaigning on which Bush could not have offered advice; who would have thought that the former Soviet officials did not know how to control a crowd?1
In early November, one month before the elections, Kravchuk was leading in the polls with more than 30 percent of the popular vote. His closest rival, a former political prisoner and now head of the Lviv regional administration, Viacheslav Chornovil, was trailing him with slightly more than 12 percent of the projected vote. Kravchuk’s competitors believed that the deck was stacked against them, as their opponent had the full support of the state apparatus in the center and regions alike. Indeed, he was not only part and parcel of the establishment but also, under the circumstances, its favorite son and last hope. The former communist elite, initially either hostile to independence or wary of it, now fully embraced it. In August, the communist majority in the Ukrainian parliament had voted for independence on condition that the decision be ratified three months later by a referendum. This gave them an opportunity to change their minds if necessary, but there were no developments after August 24 that required a change of course.2
To be sure, the vote for independence did not save the party, which had been not just suspended but completely outlawed in Ukraine in late August 1991, months before it was fully banned in Russia. The process, however, was quite different. There was no public humiliation of party officials; nor were they deprived of former party property. Instead, one group of party officials calmly transferred party property to another group: it came under the jurisdiction of the local soviets, regional and city councils controlled more often than not by former communist officials. For most of the former communist elite, independence became a new religion and Kravchuk its prophet, who would save them from the rage of Yeltsin, as well as from that of the democrats and nationalists in their own backyard. These two elements—Kravchuk and independence—were complementary parts of the ticket that would allow them to stay in power. They would do anything to support independence if Kravchuk became president and anything to undermine it if he lost to his rivals either from the pro-Yeltsin democratic camp or from the nationaldemocratic camp.3
KRAVCHUK HAD HIS TASK cut out for him. Soon after the declaration of Ukrainian independence in August, it became clear that he had to find a way to convince the voters that despite his communist past he was the best candidate to lead them and the country into sovereignty. He also had to convince them to vote for independence. To achieve that goal, he had to appease the regional elites and dissuade them from playing the separatist card; to calm the sizable national and religious minorities, who might be afraid to remain in a Ukrainian-dominated country without the intermediacy and protection of the Union center; and to win over the commanders of Soviet military units, whom the Union or Russian leadership could use as a Trojan horse against Ukrainian independence.
The task of convincing the voters that he was the best candidate for the presidency of Ukraine seemed the easiest one. Since there were five presidential candidates competing with Kravchuk, the democratic vote in Ukraine was split several ways. The urban intelligentsia from the Russified east, which had voted for democrats of Yeltsin’s stripe during the perestroika years, found a spokesman in the second deputy Speaker of parliament, Volodymyr Hryniov. An ethnic Russian and a product of the democratic awakening in the city of Kharkiv on the border with Russia, Hryniov was an early and resolute opponent of the coup. He was also one of few deputies who voted against independence on August 24, not because he opposed independence per se but because he did not want the country to be ruled by communists. However, with the Communist Party officially outlawed, Hryniov embraced the idea of an independent Ukraine, believing that this was what most people wanted at the time. As he subsequently recalled, “It was quite clearly apparent in the course of the election campaign that the mood of the people was oriented on the independence of Ukraine. When you meet the masses, you cannot disguise the mood.”4
The main candidate from the nationaldemocratic bloc, Viacheslav Chornovil, contrasted himself with Kravchuk by telling his life story, claiming that he had always been anticommunist and had not trimmed his views to fit circumstances. A longtime political dissident, first arrested in 1967, Chornovil had had more than enough time in prison camps to think about what kind of Ukraine he wanted and would be able to build. He believed that an independent Ukraine would have to become a federal state. When Chornovil became head of the Lviv regional administration after the first democratic elections in the spring of 1990, he promoted the idea of a Ukrainian federation in which Galicia, a historical region composed of three oblasts with its administrative center in Lviv, would have autonomy. But on the presidential trail he downplayed federalism, claiming that at the moment it undermined the goal of independence.5
For some of Chornovil’s rivals in the nationaldemocratic camp, this was too little, too late. Levko Lukianenko, the principal author of the Ukrainian declaration of independence, continued to argue that Chornovil was a federalist and that federalism was harmful to Ukraine, as it would encourage Russian imperial ambitions and provide a legal foundation for separatism. Chornovil, the official candidate of Rukh, and Lukianenko, the head of Rukh’s strongest and best-organized political force, the Ukrainian Republican Party, went their separate ways, creating a wedge in nationaldemocratic ranks that benefited Kravchuk. The Ukrainian nationaldemocratic vote was split even further when some members of that camp came out in support of Kravchuk. Many early proponents of Ukrainian independence from the ranks of the intelligentsia believed that his election was the only chance for Ukraine to emerge united and independent.6
For many in the Ukrainian intelligentsia, Kravchuk represented the lesser evil. Those from the national camp suspected that if not closely watched, he might cave in to pressure from Moscow. Pro-Yeltsin democrats from the Hryniov camp considered him too cozy with the nationalists. Neither group could forget his recent communist past.
Even so, those who did not believe that Chornovil or Hryniov could win were prepared to hold their noses and vote strategically for Kravchuk. As Larysa Skoryk, a nationaldemocratic member of parliament, explained to a Canadian correspondent of the Ukrainian Weekly, Kravchuk was the man of the hour and right for the job. He was the only pro-independence candidate capable of talking to the communist elite,
as he had fully demonstrated during the vote for independence on August 24. According to Skoryk, Kravchuk knew that there was no way back. “He is an extremely clever person,” she told the reporter. “To say that this is a man with high moral values, I cannot. . . . But, on the other hand, is the given moment really one which demands heroics, or is it a moment where super diplomacy is needed?”7
AS KRAVCHUK WROTE in his memoirs, winning the presidency would be meaningless unless Ukraine voted for independence. One thing he did not want was to become governor-general of a province ruled from Moscow. Very early in the campaign, with his position as front-runner consolidated and secure, Kravchuk decided that his best strategy was to campaign not for himself but for Ukrainian independence. This worked well with voters. There was a steady growth in the number of those who favored independence: 65 percent in late September; close to 70 percent of those polled and more than 80 percent of those intending to vote in the election by early November. It was most important that the number exceed the threshold of 70 percent—the level of support among Ukrainian voters for a renewed union registered in the March 1991 referendum initiated by Gorbachev. That result was Gorbachev’s main weapon in his struggle to keep the Soviet Union alive.
Kravchuk faced a formidable challenge. Not only did he have to beat the results of the March referendum, he also needed to obtain a yes vote of at least 50 percent in every region of Ukraine. Otherwise, the legitimacy of Ukrainian independence would be challenged both at home and in Moscow, to say nothing of the West. Nothing could be left to chance. Kravchuk and his supporters deliberated for some time on the wording of the question that they would ask on December 1. Pollsters told them that if people were asked not only whether they supported independence but also whether they approved the August declaration of independence adopted by the Ukrainian parliament, the results were usually better. The word “independence” had been discredited by decades of Soviet propaganda in eastern Ukraine. But parliament’s sanction was giving the word and concept a new legitimacy that appealed to conservative voters. On the eve of the referendum, the presidium of parliament issued an appeal to the population of Ukraine, making one last point in the debate. It said that not supporting independence meant supporting dependence. Few people wanted their republic to remain dependent on Moscow.
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