Chapter 25 Good Bye, Lenin!

On November 15, 1982, the citizens of Ukraine, along with their counterparts in other republics of the Soviet Union, were glued to their television screens. All channels were transmitting a report from Moscow: the leaders of the Soviet Union, representatives of numerous foreign countries and international organizations, and tens of thousands of Muscovites were gathered in Red Square to bid farewell to Leonid Brezhnev, a native of Ukraine who had ruled the world superpower for eighteen long years.

In Ukraine, in the course of the two decades from 1966 to 1985, the annual industrial growth rate had decreased from 8.4 to 3.5 percent; in agriculture, which had never done well, it fell from 3.2 to 0.5 percent. Those were the official numbers, which did not mean much in an era of falsified reports. The reality was even grimmer. The Soviet Union was becoming ever more dependent on hard currency from the sale of oil and gas abroad. In the early 1970s, while Soviet and Western engineers were busy constructing pipelines to bring gas to Europe from Siberia and central Asia, Ukrainian gas from the Dashava and Shebelynka fields was taken away from domestic consumers and shipped to central Europe to bring in hard currency. With its gas fields depleted, Ukraine would in time become a gas-importing country.

Khrushchev’s promise to the Soviet people that they would live under communism never materialized, and the regime’s propagandists had completely forgotten it. The standard of living was in free fall, slowed only by high oil prices on the world markets. By the time of Brezhnev’s death, cynicism among both the elites and the general population with regard not only to communism but even to “developed socialism” — the term that replaced communism as the definition of the Soviet social order — had reached an all-time high. As Brezhnev’s casket was lowered into a freshly dug grave near the Kremlin wall, the clocks on the Kremlin towers struck another hour, and the guns fired salvos signaling the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. It would bring an attempt at radical reform, dramatic economic decline, and the political fragmentation of the mighty Soviet Union — a process in which Ukraine would lead the way toward its own independence and that of less decisive Soviet republics.

Among the members of the Politburo who gathered on the podium of the Lenin mausoleum to deliver eulogies for the deceased Brezhnev, one man stood out from the rest. Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the silver-haired party boss of Ukraine, remained hatless on that cold November day in a show of respect. A client of Brezhnev’s for most of his career, Shcherbytsky had special reason to grieve. Before Brezhnev’s unexpected death, there had been a rumor in the halls of the Kremlin that at the forthcoming plenum of the Central Committee he would step down and transfer his powers to Shcherbytsky, ensuring the continuing preeminence of the Dnipropetrovsk faction in the country’s leadership. Shcherbytsky, a native of that region, had been the party boss of Dnipropetrovsk before coming to Kyiv. But Brezhnev died before the plenum took place. The new party leader, former KGB chief Yurii Andropov, had nothing to do with the Dnipropetrovsk clique and would soon go after Brezhnev’s cronies for corruption.

After the funeral, Shcherbytsky would go back to Ukraine and dig in there, trying to survive the uncertain times. In good health at sixty-four, he was a youngster among the members of the Politburo. His immediate competitors were older and in poor condition. Besides, during his years at the helm of the Ukrainian party machine, Shcherbytsky had managed to establish a loyal clientele. He survived Andropov, who died in December 1984, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, who passed away in March 1985. But his chances of rising to the top in Moscow were now a thing of the past. The partnership between the Russian and Ukrainian elites established by Nikita Khrushchev and cemented by Brezhnev was all but gone. The energetic new leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in March 1985, had no ties to the Ukrainian party machine. The son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, Gorbachev grew up in the North Caucasus — a territory with a mixed Russian and Ukrainian population — and learned Ukrainian folk songs as a child. But he was first and foremost a Soviet patriot with no special attachment to any republic except Russia. He saw the client pyramids created by Brezhnev’s allies in the republics as a major threat to his own position and to the reform program that he launched soon after coming to power

The conveyor that had brought Ukrainian cadres to Moscow for the previous thirty years soon stopped functioning. Gorbachev was bringing in new people from the Russian regions. Among them was his future nemesis, Boris Yeltsin. In December 1986, Gorbachev violated the unofficial agreement between the center and the republics that had existed since Stalin’s death — the party boss in charge of each republic had to be a local belonging to the titular nationality. Gorbachev “parachuted” an ethnic Russian, Gennadii Kolbin, into Kazakhstan to replace a Brezhnev loyalist, the ethnic Kazakh Dinmukhamed Konayev. The appointment of Kolbin, a product (like Yeltsin) of the Sverdlovsk (currently Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals) party machine who had no ties with Kazakhstan and had never worked there, brought Kazakh students into the streets in the first nationalist riot in the postwar history of the USSR.

The rift between the new leadership in Moscow and the leaders of Ukraine came to the fore soon after the worst technological disaster in world history — the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant located less than seventy miles north of Kyiv — hit Ukraine. The idea of bringing nuclear energy to Ukraine belonged to Ukrainian scientists and economists; Petro Shelest, who wanted to create new sources of electrical energy for the rapidly developing Ukrainian economy, had lobbied for it in the 1960s, during his tenure as party boss of the republic. By the time the Chernobyl nuclear power station went online in 1977, Ukrainian intellectuals, including one of the leading lights of the sixties generation, Ivan Drach, were welcoming the arrival of the nuclear age in their country. For Drach and other Ukrainian patriots, Chernobyl represented a step toward the modernization of Ukraine. He and other enthusiasts of nuclearization failed to notice, however, that the project was run from Moscow, with most of the power plant’s skilled personnel and management coming from outside Ukraine. The republic was getting electrical energy but had little control over what was going at the plant, which, like all Soviet nuclear facilities, and indeed most of Ukraine’s industrial enterprises, was under the jurisdiction of all-union ministries. The plant itself and the accident that occurred there became known to the world under the Russian spelling of the name of the nearest city — Chernobyl, not Chornobyl.

When on the night of April 26, 1986, the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl power station exploded as a result of a turbine test that went wrong, the Ukrainian leaders suddenly realized how little control they had over their own destinies and that of their republic. Some Ukrainian officials were invited to join the central government commission dealing with the consequences of the accident but had little influence there, finding themselves obliged to follow instructions from Moscow and its representatives at the site.

As party organizers brought columns of students and workers to downtown Kyiv to begin the parade on the morning of May 1, one man was conspicuously missing from the group of republican leaders: Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. For the first time in his long career, he was running late for the May Day parade. When his limousine finally reached Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street and the focal point of the parade, the Ukrainian party leaders saw a clearly upset Shcherbytsky. “He told me: You will put your party card on the table if you bungle the parade,” said the Ukrainian party boss to his aides. No one doubted the identity of the unnamed “he” — only one person in the country, Mikhail Gorbachev, was in a position to threaten Shcherbytsky with expulsion from the party. Despite the rapidly increasing radiation level, Gorbachev ordered his Ukrainian underlings to carry on as usual in order to show the country and the world that the situation was under control and that the Chernobyl explosion presented no danger to the health of the population. Shcherbytsky and other party leaders knew otherwise but felt they had no choice other than to follow the orders from Moscow. The parade went on as scheduled. They could only shorten it from four hours to two.

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 Mlynař, 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 nationalities, 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 parliament 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.

Bush took Gorbachev’s side in his address to the Ukrainian parliament, dubbed by the American media his “Chicken Kiev speech” because of the American president’s reluctance to endorse the independence aspirations of the national democratic deputies. Bush favored setting the Baltic republics free but keeping Ukraine and the rest together. He did not want to lose a reliable partner on the world stage — Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that he represented. Moreover, Bush and his advisers were concerned about the possibility of an uncontrolled disintegration of the union, which could lead to wars between republics with nuclear arms on their territory. Apart from Russia, these included Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. In his speech to the Ukrainian parliament, President Bush appealed to his audience to renounce “suicidal nationalism” and avoid confusing freedom with independence. The communist majority applauded him with enthusiasm. The democratic minority was disappointed: the alliance of Washington with Moscow and the communist deputies in the Ukrainian parliament presented a major obstacle to Ukrainian independence. It was hard to imagine that before the month was out, parliament would vote almost unanimously for the independence of Ukraine and that by the end of November, the White House, initially concerned about the possibility of chaos and nuclear war in the post-Soviet state, would endorse that vote.

The event that triggered the change of heart among the conservative deputies of the Ukrainian parliament and, in time, throughout the world was the hard-liners’ coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow on August 19, 1991. The coup had in fact begun a day earlier in Ukraine, more specifically in the Crimea, where Gorbachev was taking his summer vacation. On the evening of August 18, the plotters showed up on the doorstep of his seaside mansion near Foros and demanded the introduction of martial law. Gorbachev refused to sign the papers, forcing the plotters to act on their own. On the following day, in Moscow, the plotters, led by the KGB chief and the ministers of defense and interior, declared a state of emergency throughout the USSR. The Ukrainian leadership, headed by Kravchuk, refused to implement the emergency measures in their republic but, in striking contrast to Russian president Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, did nothing to challenge the coup. While Kravchuk called for the people of Ukraine to stay calm, Yeltsin brought his supporters into the streets and forced the military to withdraw from Moscow after the first skirmishes between the army and the protesters resulted in fatalities. The plotters blinked and lost. In less than seventy-two hours, the coup was over and the plotters under arrest. Muscovites poured into the streets to celebrate the victory not only of freedom over dictatorship but also of Russia over the union center.

Gorbachev returned to Moscow but proved incapable of regaining power. In fact, he fell victim to another coup, led this time by Yeltsin, who took advantage of the weakening of the center to start Russia’s takeover of the union. He forced Gorbachev to rescind decrees appointing his people as heads of the army, police, and security forces, and then suspended the activities of the Communist Party, leaving Gorbachev no choice but to resign as its general secretary. Russia was effectively taking over the union — an unexpected turn of events that diminished interest in the union among those republics that had wanted to be part of it until August 1991. Ukraine was now leading the way out.

On August 24, 1991, the day after Yeltsin took control of the union government, the Ukrainian parliament held a vote on independence. “In view of the mortal danger hanging over Ukraine in connection with the coup d’état on 19 August 1991, and continuing the thousand-year tradition of state building in Ukraine,” read the declaration of independence drafted by Levko Lukianenko, the longest-serving prisoner of the Gulag and now a member of parliament, “the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly declares the independence of Ukraine.” The results of the vote came as a surprise to everyone, including Lukianenko himself: 346 deputies voted in favor, 5 abstained, and only 2 voted against. The communist majority that had opposed independence since the first session of parliament in the spring of 1990 was no longer in evidence. Kravchuk and his “pro-sovereignty communists,” under attack from the opposition for not having opposed the coup, closed ranks with the national democrats and brought along the hard-liners, who felt betrayed by Moscow and threatened by Yeltsin’s attack on the party. Once the result of the vote appeared on the screen, the hall exploded in applause. The crowds outside the parliament building were jubilant: Ukraine was free at last!

Lukianenko’s declaration referred to the thousand-year history of Ukrainian statehood, meaning the tradition established by Kyivan Rus’. His declaration was in fact the fourth attempt to proclaim Ukrainian independence in the twentieth century: the first occurred in 1918 in Kyiv and then in Lviv, the second in 1939 in Transcarpathia, and the third in 1941 in Lviv. All those attempts had been made in wartime, and all had come to grief. Would this one be different? The next three months would tell. A popular referendum scheduled for December 1, 1991, the same day as the previously scheduled election of Ukraine’s first president, would confirm or reject the parliamentary vote for independence. The referendum provision was important for more than one reason. On August 24, it helped those members of the communist majority who had doubts about independence to vote in favor of it — theirs, after all, was not the final decision and could be reversed in the future. The referendum also gave Ukraine a chance to leave the union without open conflict with the center. In the previous referendum organized by Gorbachev in March 1991, about 70 percent of Ukrainians had voted to stay in a reformed union. Now another referendum would enable it to make a clean break.

Gorbachev believed that support for independence in Ukraine would never reach 70 percent. Yeltsin was not so sure. In late August 1991, soon after the Ukrainian parliament had voted for independence, he instructed his press secretary to make a statement that if Ukraine and other republics declared independence, Russia would have the right to open the question of its borders with those republics. Yeltsin’s press secretary indicated the Crimea and eastern parts of Ukraine, including the Donbas coal region, as possible areas of contention. The threat was partition if Ukraine insisted on independence. Yeltsin then sent a high-powered delegation led by his vice president, General Aleksandr Rutskoi, to force Ukraine to reverse its stance. But the Ukrainians stood their ground, and Rutskoi returned to Moscow empty-handed. Blackmail had failed, and Yeltsin had neither the political will nor the resources to deliver on his threat.

In September 1991, Ukraine entered a new political season. Six candidates were contending for the presidency, and all of them were campaigning for independence. Kravchuk convinced the Crimean authorities to shelve their plans for a separate referendum on the peninsula’s independence from Ukraine. Polling numbers showed growing support for independence among all national groups and in all regions of the country. The two largest minorities — the Russians, who numbered more than 11 million, and the Jews, whose numbers approached 500,000 — were expressing support for the idea of Ukrainian independence. In November 1991, 58 percent of ethnic Russians and 60 percent of ethnic Jews were in favor. The minorities now embraced the Ukrainian cause, as they had not done in 1918, regarding Moscow with greater concern and suspicion than the capital of their republic.

On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds went to the polls to decide their fate. The results were mind-boggling for even the most optimistic proponents of independence. The turnout reached 84 percent, with more than 90 percent of voters supporting independence. Western Ukraine led the way, with 99 percent in favor in the Ternopil oblast of Galicia. But the center, south, and even the east were not far behind. In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatars, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.) In the center and east of the country, many voted for independence while supporting Leonid Kravchuk’s bid for the presidency. He won 61 percent of the popular vote, obtaining a majority in all regions of Ukraine except Galicia. There, victory went to the longtime Gulag prisoner and head of the Lviv regional administration Viacheslav Chornovil. Ukraine voted for independence and entrusted its future to a presidential candidate who, many believed, could strike a balance between Ukraine’s various regions and nationalities, as well as between the republic’s communist past and its independent future.

The vote for Ukraine’s independence spelled the end of the Soviet Union. Those participating in the referendum had changed not only their own fate but the course of world history. Ukraine freed the rest of the Soviet republics still dependent on Moscow. Yeltsin made a final attempt to convince Kravchuk to sign a new union treaty when he met with him at a Belarusian hunting lodge in Belavezha Forest on December 8, 1991. Kravchuk refused, citing the results of the referendum in all oblasts of Ukraine, including Crimea and the east. Yeltsin backed off. If Ukraine was not prepared to sign, Russia would not do so either, he told the newly elected Ukrainian president. Yeltsin had explained to the president of the United States more than once that without Ukraine, Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim republics. A union including neither Ukraine nor Russia, with its huge energy resources, had no political or economic attraction for the other republics. At Belavezha the three leaders of the Slavic republics — Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Stanislaŭ Shushkevich of Belarus — created a new international body, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which the Central Asian republics joined on December 21. The Soviet Union was no more.

On Christmas Day, December 25, 1991, Gorbachev read his resignation speech on national television. The red banner of the Soviet Union was run down the flagpole of the Kremlin’s senate building, to be replaced with the Russian tricolor — red, blue, and white. Kyiv’s colors were blue and yellow. There was no longer a symbolic link between Moscow and Kyiv. After four unsuccessful attempts, undertaken by different political forces under various circumstances, Ukraine was now not only united but also independent and free to go its own way. What had seemed impossible only a few months earlier had become a reality: the empire was gone, and a new country had been born. The old communist elites and the leaders of the young and ambitious national democrats had joined forces to make history, with Ukraine as the gravedigger of the last European empire. They now had to find a way to create the future.