The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  The explosion and partial meltdown of the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant released about 50 million curies of radiation into the atmosphere—the equivalent of five hundred Hiroshima bombs. In Ukraine alone, more than 50,000 square kilometers of land were contaminated—a territory larger than Belgium. The exclusion zone around the reactor alone accounted for 2,600 square kilometers, from which more than 90,000 inhabitants were evacuated in the first weeks after the explosion. Most of them would never see their homes again. The city of Prypiat, which housed close to 50,000 construction workers and operational personnel of the power plant, remains deserted even today—a modern-day Pompeii memorializing what would become the last days of the Soviet Union. Images of Vladimir Lenin and the builders of communism, along with slogans celebrating the Communist Party, still remain on the walls of Prypiat.

  In Ukraine, the radiation fallout directly affected 2,300 settlements and more than 3 million people. The explosion endangered close to 30 million people who relied on the Dnieper and other rivers for their water supply. The accident was a disaster for the forest areas of northern Ukraine—the oldest settled regions of the country, where for millennia the local population had found refuge from steppe invaders. Now the forests that had provided shelter from the nomads and food for survivors of the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933 became sources of destruction. Their leaves emitted radiation—an invisible enemy from which there was no refuge. It was a disaster of global proportions, and with the exception of neighboring Belarus, nowhere felt more acutely than Ukraine.

  The Chernobyl accident sharply increased discontent with Moscow and its policies across all party and social lines—radiation affected everyone, from members of the party leadership to ordinary citizens. As the Ukrainian party bosses mobilized the population to deal with the consequences of the disaster and clean up the mess created by the center, many asked themselves why they were risking their own lives and those of their family members. Around their kitchen tables, they grumbled about the center’s failed policies and shared their frustration with the people they trusted. Only the Ukrainian writers would not remain silent. In June 1986, at a meeting of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, many of those who had welcomed the arrival of nuclear power a decade earlier now condemned it as an instrument of Moscow’s domination of their republic. Among those leading the charge was Ivan Drach, whose son, a student in a Kyiv medical school, had been sent to Chernobyl soon after the accident without proper instructions or protective gear and was now suffering from radiation poisoning.

  The Chernobyl disaster awakened Ukraine, raising fundamental questions about relations between the center and the republics, the Communist Party and the people, and helping to start the first major public debate in a society struggling to regain its voice after decades of Brezhnev-era stagnation. The generation of the 1960s was in the forefront. Among them was writer Yurii Shcherbak, who organized an environmental group in late 1987 that evolved into the Green Party. The ecological movement, which presented Ukraine as a victim of Moscow’s activities, became one of the first forms of national mobilization in Ukraine during the years of the Gorbachev reforms. The new man in the Kremlin not only alienated the Ukrainian party leadership but also empowered democratically minded intellectuals and the nationally conscious intelligentsia to mobilize against that elite. As things turned out, the two conflicting groups in Ukraine—the communist establishment and the nascent democratic opposition—would discover a common interest in opposing Moscow in general and Gorbachev in particular.

  Mikhail Gorbachev was in many ways a member of the sixties generation, his worldview strongly shaped by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign and inspired by ideas of socialist reform promoted in the 1960s by liberal economists and political scientists both in the USSR and in eastern Europe. One of the principal ideologists of the Prague Spring of 1968, Zdenĕk Mlynář, was Gorbachev’s roommate in the dormitory of Moscow University Law School in the 1950s. Gorbachev and his advisers wanted to reform socialism in order to make it more efficient and “user-friendly,” or, as people said in Prague before the Soviet invasion of 1968, to create socialism with a human face.

  Gorbachev began with a program of “accelerating” Soviet economic development that did not call for fundamental reform but emphasized the more efficient use of available institutions and resources. But the Soviet economy was in no condition to accelerate anything other than rates of decline. “We were on the edge of an abyss,” went a political joke of Brezhnev’s times, “but since then we have made a huge step forward.” The rhetoric of “acceleration” soon gave way to the policy of “perestroika,” or restructuring, which took decision-making authority away from ministries in Moscow and invested it not in the regions and republics, as under Khrushchev, but in individual enterprises. This upset the central bureaucracies and local bosses, who were also antagonized by Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost,” or openness, which exposed them to criticism from below, which the Moscow-based media now encouraged. Perestroika originally mobilized support for the new leader and his reformist ideas among the intellectuals and the urban intelligentsia, who were fed up with Brezhnev-era controls on public life and the lies of official propaganda.

  Gorbachev’s reforms created opportunities for political mobilization from below. In Ukraine, dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s freshly released from the Gulag were among the first to take advantage of the new political and social climate. In the spring of 1988 they founded the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, the first openly political organization in perestroika-era Ukraine. Most of its members—including the head of the union, Moscow-trained lawyer Levko Lukianenko, who had spent more than a quarter century in prison and internal exile—had previously belonged to the Brezhnev-era Ukrainian Helsinki Group. That dissident organization, created in 1976, took on the task of monitoring the Soviet government’s observance of its human rights obligations as defined at the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which took place in the Finnish capital in the summer of 1975. If many members of the group, and then the union, began in the 1960s as Marxists who wanted to reinstate “Leninist norms” of nationality policy, the arrests unleashed in 1972 in conjunction with the removal from Ukraine of Petro Shelest put an end to their communist ideals. The Helsinki movement provided the Ukrainian dissidents with a new ideology—that of human rights, including the rights both of individuals and of nations, defined in political and cultural terms.

  The defense of national culture, especially language, was among the key issues that galvanized Ukrainian society during the first years of perestroika. The first truly mass organization to be created in Ukraine was the Society [for the Protection] of the Ukrainian Language, which by the end of 1989, the year of its creation, numbered 150,000 members. Ukrainian intellectuals considered their language and culture—the very foundations of the Ukrainian nation—to be under threat. Language presented a special challenge. According to the census of 1989, Ukrainians constituted 73 percent of the republic’s population of 51 million, but only 88 percent of them claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue, and only 40 percent used it as a language of convenience. This was largely the outcome of an urbanization process in which rural Ukrainians moved to the cities only to become culturally Russified. By the 1980s, there were large ethnic Ukrainian majorities in most Ukrainian cities (Donetsk, where Russians were still in the majority, was a rare exception), but the language of convenience in all major cities, with the notable exception of Lviv in western Ukraine, was Russian. The Ukrainian Language Society wanted to reverse the process, addressing first and foremost those ethnic Ukrainians who did not speak Ukrainian on a daily basis but had a pronounced Ukrainian identity and believed that they or their children should speak the language. It was an uphill battle.

  In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was sometimes portrayed as a country not only with an unpredictable future but also with an unpredictable past. The Ukrainians, like the other non-Russian nationaliti
es, were trying to recover a past concealed from them by decades of official Soviet historiography and propaganda. The “recovery” began with the return to the public sphere of the historical writings of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, issued in hundreds of thousands of copies. Also reprinted were the works of writers and poets of the 1920s, representatives of the so-called Executed Renaissance of Ukrainian culture, many of whom did not survive the terror of the 1930s. As in Russia and other republics, the Memorial Society took the lead in uncovering Stalin’s crimes of the Great Purge period. In that regard, Ukrainian intellectuals had stories to tell that were unique to their country. The first of them was the history of the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933, which the regime had covered up completely. The second was the story of armed resistance to the Soviet regime in the late 1940s and early 1950s conducted by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

  The famine was part of eastern Ukrainian experience, while nationalist resistance and insurgency had characterized western Ukraine, but revived fascination with one historical narrative was capable of uniting east and west—the story of the Cossack past. After the removal of Petro Shelest in 1972, the authorities instituted a purge of so-called Cossackophiles among historians and writers, treating an interest in Cossack history as tantamount to an expression of nationalism. Now, with the collapse of the official historical worldview, the Cossack myth made its way back into the public arena, and indeed, as Brezhnev’s propagandists maintained, it was closely linked to the national idea.

  In the summer of 1990 Ukrainian activists, many of them from Galicia and western Ukraine, organized a “march to the east”—a mass pilgrimage to Zaporizhia and Cossack sites along the lower Dnieper. The march aimed to “awaken” Ukrainian identity in the eastern regions of the republic. It was a huge success, mobilizing tens of thousands of people and popularizing a version of Ukrainian history opposed to the one dominant in still very pro-communist southern Ukraine. In the following year the authorities, who had originally opposed the march, decided to jump on the bandwagon of the rising Cossack mythology. They sponsored their own Cossack events in both eastern and western Ukraine but failed to reap the expected political dividends. The party and its credibility were in precipitous decline.

  “What idiot invented the word ‘perestroika’?” Shcherbytsky asked his staffers when he heard the term for the first time. When Gorbachev, on a visit to Kyiv, asked people preselected by the KGB to apply pressure to local leaders, Shcherbytsky, who was present at the meeting, turned to his aides and pointed a finger at his head, indicating that Gorbachev’s mind was addled, and asked, “Whom, then, is he going to rely on?” In September 1989, Gorbachev felt strong enough to take on the last holdover of the Brezhnev regime in the Politburo—Shcherbytsky himself. That month Gorbachev came to Kyiv to tell the party elite that the all-union Politburo had voted to remove Shcherbytsky from his position. The Ukrainian Central Committee had no choice but to depose him as its first secretary as well. Less than half a year later, Shcherbytsky would commit suicide, unable to deal not only with the end of his own career but also with the end of the political and social order he had served all his life.

  The year 1989 became a turning point in Ukrainian political history in more ways than one. It saw the arrival of mass politics, with the first semifree elections to the new Soviet parliament; the creation of the first political mass organization, called Rukh—the Popular Movement for Perestroika—whose membership approached the 300,000 mark in the fall of 1989 and more than doubled by the end of the following year; and the legalization of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which the Stalin regime had driven underground but whose supporters now numbered in the millions. In 1990, elections to the new Ukrainian parliament dramatically changed the political scene in Kyiv. Pro-democratic deputies formed a bloc called the People’s Council that managed to change the tone of Ukrainian politics, although only a quarter of the parliamentary deputies belonged to it. In the summer of 1990, the Ukrainian parliament followed in the footsteps of its counterparts in the Baltic republics and Russia, declaring Ukraine a sovereign country. The declaration did not stipulate the republic’s secession from the USSR but gave its laws precedence over those of the union.

  The center was powerless to stop the republics’ assertion of sovereignty. Gorbachev, the father of the Soviet reforms, was by now in serious trouble. He had alienated the communist elites and lost the support of the intelligentsia in the center and the republics. His economic reforms unbalanced the economic system, sending production figures into a tailspin and worsening already low living standards. The party bosses were unhappy with reforms that threatened their power and struck them as doomed to fail, further endangering their position. Intellectuals, by contrast, considered the reforms insufficiently radical and tardily implemented. Ironically, these mutually hostile groups found a common enemy in Gorbachev and the center as a whole. Sovereignty, and finally complete independence, became a common platform enabling cooperation between these opposing forces in the Ukrainian political spectrum.

  Mass mobilization in Ukraine followed a variety of regional patterns defined by history. In Galicia, Volhynia, and to some extent Bukovyna—areas attached to the Soviet Union on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—mobilization was similar to that in the Baltic states, which the USSR had also annexed at the start of World War II. There, former dissidents and intellectuals led the movement under the banner of democratic nationalism, and took control over local governments. In the rest of the country, the party elites, whose survival Gorbachev made dependent on their ability to get elected to the republican and regional councils, were confused, but hung on to power. When the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet elected as its new chairman a native of Volhynia, the fifty-six-year-old Leonid Kravchuk, the arrival of this new leader originally from western Ukraine did not appear to count for much. But times were changing. Gorbachev’s reforms made parliament by far the most important branch of government. By the end of 1990, the wily Kravchuk had emerged as the most powerful and popular leader in Ukraine. He was the only Ukrainian official who could talk to the rising opposition movement, based largely in the western lands. He also had a significant following among the party elite, the group of so-called pro-sovereignty communists who wanted political and economic autonomy for Ukraine.

  In the course of the following year, Kravchuk showed real political talent in maneuvering among various groups of deputies and steering parliament toward the achievement of sovereignty and then independence. The first test of his skills came in the fall of 1990. Alarmed by the Lithuanian declaration of independence in March of that year and responding to the growing pro-independence movement in the other republics, Gorbachev succumbed to the pressure of hard-liners in his government and gave tacit approval for the rollback of democratic freedoms. In Ukraine, the communist majority in parliament passed a law prohibiting demonstrations near the parliament building and approved the arrest of a member of the People’s Council in parliament. But the communist hard-liners were in for a surprise. On the morning of October 2, 1990, dozens of students from Kyiv, Lviv, and Dnipropetrovsk descended on October Revolution Square in downtown Kyiv—the future Independence Square, known as Maidan—and began a hunger strike. Among other things, they demanded the resignation of the prime minister and Ukraine’s withdrawal from negotiations on the new union treaty—Gorbachev’s initiative to save the union by giving its constituent republics greater autonomy.

  The authorities were divided in their reaction to the student strike. Whereas the government brought in the police to disperse the protesters, the Kyiv city council gave permission for the protest to continue. Over the next few days, the number of hunger strikers grew to 150. When the government organized its supporters to dislodge the protesters, close to 50,000 Kyivans marched on the square to protect the students. Soon all the city universities were on strike. The protesters marched on parliament, occupying the square in front of the parl
iament building. Under pressure from the street and urged to yield by Kravchuk and the parliamentary moderates, the communist majority decided to retreat. They gave the student leaders television time to present their demands and dismissed the head of government, who had taken part in negotiations for a new union. It was a major victory for the Ukrainian students and Ukrainian society as a whole. The events of October 1990 in downtown Kyiv would later become known as the First Maidan (maidan is Ukrainian for “square”). The second would come in 2004 and the third in 2013 and 2014.

  When on August 1, 1991, President George H. W. Bush of the United States flew to Kyiv from Moscow to urge Ukraine to stay in the USSR, the Ukrainian political class was divided with regard to its goals. The national democratic minority wanted outright independence, demands for which had been growing in Ukraine ever since Lithuania declared its own independence in March 1990. The communist majority in the Ukrainian parliament wanted broad autonomy within a reformed union. That was also Gorbachev’s aim. After failing to stop the independence drive of the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia by using military force in early 1991, Gorbachev called a referendum on the continuing existence of the union. It took place in March 1991, and 70 percent of those who took part voted in favor of a reformed union. Gorbachev also renewed his negotiations with the republican leaders, including Boris Yeltsin of Russia and Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan, trying to convince them to form a looser union. He reached a deal with them in late July 1991, but Ukraine was not ready to sign. Leonid Kravchuk and his group were pushing for a different solution: a confederation with Russia and other republics that Ukraine would join on its own terms.