One of the main problems faced by proponents of Ukrainian independence—from Kravchuk and Hryniov to Chornovil and Lukianenko—in their respective campaigns was the country’s regional and cultural diversity. This was the card that Georgii Shakhnazarov proposed Gorbachev play to stem the growing pro-independence tide in Ukraine and the problem that Gorbachev never tired of mentioning to anyone who would listen. While pollsters predicted a strong vote for independence in Ukraine as a whole, the degree of support varied from region to region. Support was strongest in Galicia, which had formerly been ruled by Austria and Poland. In Ternopil oblast in Galicia, more than 92 percent of those polled favored independence. Kravchuk’s native Volhynia, which had been part of Poland during the interwar period but never part of Austria-Hungary, was not far behind, with close to 88 percent of the projected vote favoring independence. Kyiv and central Ukraine had jumped on the independence bandwagon as well, but support for independence in some of Ukraine’s eastern and southern provinces was barely above 50 percent. Those were the regions that had been fully colonized only in the nineteenth century under the rule of the Russian Empire and had experienced a major influx of ethnic Russians in the Soviet period. There, Kravchuk was significantly ahead of his main rival, Viacheslav Chornovil. His election was an assurance for many that if independence actually came, it would not take the form of radical nationalism.8
On October 23 Kravchuk flew to Ukraine’s most independent-minded region, the autonomous republic of the Crimea, to convince the local parliament to support Ukrainian independence. The Crimea, a peninsula connected to Ukraine’s mainland by a strip of land seven kilometers wide and divided from Russia by the four and a half kilometers of the Kerch Strait, had belonged to the Russian Federation before 1954. It was transferred to Ukraine during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev for economic reasons and was one of twenty-five Ukrainian oblasts until February 1991. That changed after the Crimean referendum of January 1991, which endorsed not only autonomy for the Crimea but also its right to be a signatory to the new union treaty. In early 1991 Gorbachev and the center were busy building up the status of the autonomies in order to counterpose them to sovereignty-minded leaders of the Union republics. The tactic worked only to a degree. When in August 1991 Gorbachev invited Nikolai Bagrov, the Speaker of the Crimean parliament, to come to Moscow for the signing of the union treaty, Bagrov politely declined the invitation. It was already clear to everyone that Ukraine would not participate in the agreement.
But the Ukrainian leaders’ problems with the Crimea in the fall of 1991 were not all of Gorbachev’s making. In February 1991, the Kyiv authorities agreed to grant the Crimea autonomous status partly because it was the only region of the country where ethnic Ukrainians were a minority (a quarter of the population). More than 67 percent of the population consisted of ethnic Russians, who dominated Crimean politics and culture. There were no Ukrainian-language schools in the Crimea, few ethnic Ukrainians used the Ukrainian language in everyday life, and only half claimed Ukrainian as their native tongue—an indication that their Ukrainian identity was anything but strong. An additional concern for the Kyiv authorities was the presence in the Crimea of officers and sailors of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and military retirees opposed to Ukrainian independence. The Crimean Tatars, who had been deported from the peninsula by Stalin in 1944 on charges of collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation, were beginning to return to their ancestral homeland, adding new complexity to the ethnic balance.9
Kravchuk came to the Crimea on the day when its parliament was scheduled to vote on the law regulating the local referendum that was to put the question of the Crimea’s secession from Ukraine to a popular vote. He managed to convince the Crimean parliament to postpone the adoption of the law and cancel the referendum. His argument was simple: if the Crimea was an autonomous part of Ukraine, its parliament would have enough power to solve the region’s problems without interference from Kyiv. The former communist elite, who had worked with Kyiv since 1954, agreed to postpone the vote on the law. Their opponents in parliament, represented by the Republican Movement of the Crimea, which favored the referendum, were outvoted.
The Republican Movement’s leader, Yuri Meshkov, one of the few Crimean deputies who had opposed the August coup, declared a hunger strike in protest. He defined the conflict in parliament as a struggle of democracy against communism. But not everything was clear-cut in Crimean politics. Soon four women journalists—one Ukrainian, one Tatar, and two Russians—began their own hunger strike to protest the escalation of ethnic hatred in the Crimea by Meshkov’s supporters. Kravchuk’s line eventually prevailed: there would be no separate referendum on Crimean independence. Crimean voters would go to the polling stations to answer just one referendum question: whether they supported Ukrainian independence. Unlike Yeltsin in the case of Chechnia, Kravchuk managed to keep the autonomous Crimea within his republic by political means.10
The Crimea, which had gained autonomy in early 1991 and was now given special consideration by Kyiv, was envied by local elites in the Transcarpathian oblast of Ukraine, which had belonged to Czechoslovakia before the war. They, too, wanted autonomy. Odesa in the south and the Donbas coal region in the east were prime candidates for similar status. With federalism becoming a dirty word in the Ukrainian presidential election, Viacheslav Chornovil promised the Odesa elites a free economic zone. Kravchuk toured the country with a different message, offering broad economic autonomy for Ukrainian historical regions, of which he counted twelve. The local elites had to settle for what he was offering, as most of them were not about to vote for Chornovil. Rumor had it that if Kravchuk lost, the regional elites in the east and south would declare themselves independent of Kyiv.
Centrifugal tendencies in the regions were one of the challenges facing Kyiv in the run-up to the December referendum. The impact that those tendencies would have on Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors, Soviet and non-Soviet, was another. After the statement made in late August by Yeltsin’s spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, it had become clear that, depending on the results of the referendum, Russia was prepared to make claims on the Crimea and possibly on eastern regions of the country. Hungarians in Transcarpathia looked to their ethnic brethren across the border, and a Romanian movement was gaining strength in northern Bukovyna, a largely Ukrainian-populated region that had belonged to Romania during the interwar period. And if the Czechoslovak and Hungarian elites were not making any claims on current Ukrainian territories, the Romanian parliament was much less accommodating.
On the eve of the Ukrainian referendum, Romania’s parliament adopted a resolution calling for nonrecognition of the results in northern Bukovyna, which it called an “ancient Romanian land.” The Ukrainian foreign minister, Anatolii Zlenko, learned of the Romanian resolution as he was on his way to Bucharest for his first official visit there. He decided not to proceed and left the train in the middle of the night, before it crossed the border. The next morning the foreign minister of Romania, who was not informed of his Ukrainian guest’s sudden change of plans, waited for him in vain at the Bucharest train station. The Ukrainians treated the question of their territorial integrity very seriously. In fact, they had no other choice: postwar Ukraine included territories that had belonged to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Russia before 1939.11
Foreign claims on Ukrainian territory, like those of Russia and Romania, and centrifugal tendencies among Ukraine’s diverse regions were closely linked to the question of Ukraine’s ethnic minorities. The Russians were the largest group, accounting for 11 million people, settled largely in urbanized eastern and southern Ukraine. Their concerns were on the minds of Kravchuk and the other presidential candidates whenever they campaigned in the Crimea or southeastern Ukraine. The message they all delivered was roughly the same: they wanted Russians in Ukraine to feel even more comfortable than they would in Russia. Many did. The closeness of the two East Slavic languages, Russian and Ukrainian, and the fact that most ethn
ic Ukrainians in eastern urban centers switched to Russian in their daily lives made the Russo-Ukrainian divide all but invisible and gave the Russians confidence about their future in an independent Ukraine. Many of them had lived in Ukraine for generations and had intermarried with Ukrainians. As a group, they were not hostile to the idea of Ukrainian independence and were prepared to be persuaded of its advantages.
Ukraine’s Russian population could see that the Soviet Union was not working; the economy was in free fall. Everyone in Ukraine, including the Russians, was ready to try something else. Marta Dyczok, a graduate student from Oxford University who was freelancing for the Guardian while doing her archival research in Ukraine, traveled the country on assignment for the newspaper in an effort to grasp the mood of the people. Later she summarized what she learned as follows: “Listening to people before and after the coup, it was that desire for change that was really, really strong. That was the bottom emotion that we heard everywhere. Enough of this confusion, enough of this corruption, enough of this. We want something else. The thing that was being offered as a change was Ukraine becoming independent.”12
In his appeal to voters, Kravchuk put the main emphasis not on ethnocultural nationalism but on economic independence, drawing on the myth, ingrained in the minds of the country’s inhabitants, of Ukraine as an economic superpower and breadbasket of Europe that was now feeding Russia and the rest of the Soviet republics. Ukrainian newspapers featured a story—which turned out to be completely false—that experts at the Deutsche Bank considered Ukraine the Soviet republic with the greatest economic potential. With living standards in Ukraine higher than those in the Russian provinces for most of the Soviet period and the Ukrainian consumer market for agricultural goods doing much better than the Russian market in the fall of 1991, it did not take much to persuade Ukrainian citizens of all nationalities to choose independence and thus economic prosperity.
The need for political and economic independence became self-evident when in November the Soviet central bank cut payments to Ukraine, making it difficult for many Ukrainian institutions and enterprises to pay wages and salaries. Yeltsin’s speech on economic reform destabilized the consumer market in Russia, causing prices to rise and goods to disappear from stores in the Soviet capital. Muscovites, whose salaries were paid by the Russian government, headed south by train to buy agricultural products in Ukraine. In response, cash-strapped Ukrainians and Russians in the traditionally Russia-friendly east of the country physically protected their markets and low prices on agricultural goods by not allowing travelers from the north to leave train stations on their arrival. Clashes between the two groups became an everyday occurrence in Ukrainian industrial centers such as Dnipropetrovsk. Independence seemed the only way out of the conundrum, whatever one’s ethnic origin.13
Jews were Ukraine’s second-largest minority, accounting for half a million Ukrainian citizens. They were among those most discriminated against during the last decades of Soviet rule, and it was with regard to them that the Ukrainian authorities sought to demonstrate their newfound tolerance. In October 1991, with national democrats on the offensive and former communists on the run, the Ukrainian authorities sponsored the first public commemoration of the massacre of the Jews of Kyiv in the Babyn Yar ravine in the fall of 1941. For tens of thousands of Jews who attended the ceremony, it was the first time in their lives that they could publicly manifest their Jewish identity. For tens of thousands of non-Jews, it was the first time that they publicly recognized and embraced the suppressed identity of their neighbors.
Gorbachev sent a personal representative to the event at Babyn Yar—the “grandfather of perestroika,” Aleksandr Yakovlev. Bush sent a delegation of prominent Americans, headed by his brother Jonathan. Kravchuk met with the delegation and spoke at the event, preaching tolerance and respect for human rights and human life. “Dear friends!” said Kravchuk to the multiethnic and multireligious audience. “The history of relations between the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples is complex and dramatic. It has had its bright and dark pages. Not one of us has the right to forget anything. But we should remember not in order to reopen old wounds but so that we never let them happen again. May our memories include more often that which unites us and not the differences between our peoples.” Kravchuk, who had witnessed a massacre of Jews in Volhynia and knew about the participation in the Holocaust of Ukrainian policemen recruited by the Nazis, finished his speech in Yiddish after offering his apologies to the Jewish people on behalf of the Ukrainian nation.14
On November 1, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a Declaration on the Rights of Nationalities of Ukraine that guaranteed equality to citizens of all origins. On November 16, a thousand delegates gathered in Odesa to take part in the All-Ukrainian Inter-ethnic Congress, jointly organized by Rukh and the Ukrainian parliament. The delegates overwhelmingly adopted a resolution supporting Ukrainian independence—only three votes were cast against it. A Los Angeles Times reporter was amazed to see a Hassidic Jew and a Ukrainian dressed in Cossack style, with a saber at his side, attending the same congress and peacefully promoting their respective causes in front of the Odesa opera house. It was a marked difference from Ukraine’s previous attempt to gain independence. In January 1918, Jewish delegates to the Ukrainian parliament, who had earlier supported autonomy, voted against independence. What followed was a split in the pro-democratic alliance, years of civil war, and numerous pogroms and massacres that left deep scars in Jewish memory. Now both nationalities saw a common solution to their respective problems. In November 1991, Jewish support for independence registered at 60 percent, slightly above the Russian figure of 58.9 percent.15
On November 20, Kravchuk addressed the first all-Ukrainian religious forum. The former self-described chief atheist of Ukraine (under his supervision, the ideology department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine oversaw the country’s religious organizations) asked forgiveness of religious leaders, not on behalf of the defunct party but on that of the state he now represented. As communism and atheism lost their ideological appeal and religion returned to the public sphere, religious denominations began to play an ever more important role in society. Ukraine, which accounted for two-thirds of all Orthodox Christian parishes in the USSR and was home to most Soviet Protestants, was considered the Bible Belt of the Soviet Union. It had become a religious battleground with the arrival of perestroika and glasnost. Kravchuk called for interreligious toleration and support for independence. He wanted religious leaders to work toward the independence of their religious institutions but to avoid strife in doing so. On November 20, leaders of sixteen religious organizations in Ukraine pledged their support for government policy on religion. It was, in effect, a gesture of support for independence.16
THE FATE OF THE SOVIET ARMY on the territory of Ukraine was another of Kravchuk’s major concerns. Kravchuk had realized how defenseless the Ukrainian authorities were against the Soviet military when General Valentin Varennikov visited him in his parliamentary office on the first day of the coup. After the coup collapsed, the Ukrainian authorities immediately set about forming a national guard by taking over Interior Ministry troops on their territory. But that was hardly enough to deter Soviet army formations stationed in Ukraine and commanded from Moscow. Ukraine, considered the second echelon of Soviet defense structures in case of global war (the first was Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe), was home to Soviet army units totaling seven hundred thousand men.
On August 27, three days after the declaration of Ukrainian independence, Kravchuk called a meeting of senior Soviet military commanders posted in Ukraine. He wanted them to accommodate the new political reality of Ukrainian independence and begin the formation of independent Ukrainian armed forces. The military brass did not believe that the decision of the Ukrainian parliament affected them. With support from Moscow, they argued that the Soviet army should remain united under a single command. Kravchuk’s call for military reform gained a positive response
from only one senior officer who attended the meeting. He was Major General Kostiantyn Morozov, the forty-seven-year-old commander of an Air Force army stationed in Ukraine. An open-minded officer sympathetic to the movement for democracy in Ukraine, Morozov was the only officer in the room who had boycotted the directives of the coup leaders to put their troops on the alert. Now he became the only officer at the meeting to suggest that an independent Ukraine should establish its own armed forces. That made him a marked man with no prospect of advancement or even of remaining at his current post.
Like his former subordinate General Dzhokhar Dudaev, who left the Soviet military in the spring of 1991 to lead the Chechen republic toward independence, Morozov was now solidly in the anti-Moscow camp. He had reached a point of no return, and his life and career would henceforth be associated with the idea of Ukrainian independence. A week after the August 27 meeting, the Ukrainian parliament voted overwhelmingly to appoint Morozov as Ukraine’s first minister of defense. Morozov shared the vision of Ukraine as a nuclear-free state and was ready to give up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. He was opposed, however, to transferring nuclear weapons to Russia and wanted them dismantled in Ukraine. Morozov’s confirmation by parliament became a certainty when he answered a question from Dmytro Pavlychko, who, apart from chairing the foreign relations committee, headed the Society for the Promotion of the Ukrainian Language. Asked whether he would master Ukrainian, Morozov, who spoke to parliament in Russian, answered in the affirmative. He told Pavlychko that he would be happy to do so with the help of the society. The answer charmed the national democrats, who were uncertain whether they could entrust the defense of their not yet fully born country to a general with a typically Russian surname.
The Last Empire Page 35