Chapter 26 The Independence Square

Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation speech marked the official end of the Soviet Union, but its dissolution only got under way on that date. The USSR bequeathed not only an economy in ruins but also a socioeconomic infrastructure, army, way of thinking, and political and social elite bound by a common past and shared political culture.

On December 12, 1991, speaking to the Russian parliament upon its ratification of the commonwealth agreement, Boris Yeltsin stated, “In today’s conditions, only a Commonwealth of Independent States can ensure the preservation of the political, legal, and economic space built up over the centuries but now almost lost.” Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, echoed his former boss’s sentiments when he said in March 2014, on the occasion of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, “Many people in both Russia and Ukraine, as well as in other republics, hoped that the Commonwealth of Independent States, which arose then, would become a new form of joint sovereignty.” If there were some in Ukraine who wished for that at the time, they were not in the Ukrainian parliament, which on December 20, 1991, issued an appeal that stated the opposite: “According to its legal status, Ukraine is an independent state — a subject of international law. Ukraine opposes the transformation of the Commonwealth of Independent States into a state formation with its own ruling and administrative bodies.”

Whatever Yeltsin’s intentions, Ukraine took its independence seriously and planned to use the forum established by the commonwealth to negotiate the terms of divorce, not remarriage.

Early on, the Ukrainian leadership decided to form its own armed forces and navy on the basis of units of the Soviet army and navy stationed on Ukrainian territory. Whereas the Baltic states had asked the Soviet army to leave and created their own armed forces from scratch, the Ukrainians could not do likewise: the huge army, whose personnel exceeded 800,000 officers and men, would not leave of its own free will. It had nowhere to go, as Russia was already struggling to accommodate hundreds of thousands of troops returning from central and eastern Europe, whose constituent states were leaving Moscow’s sphere of influence for good in order to become fully sovereign.

The leadership entrusted the task of turning the Soviet military into a Ukrainian one to forty-seven-year-old General Kostiantyn Morozov, the commander of an air force army in Ukraine who became Ukraine’s first minister of defense in the fall of 1991. A native of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and half Russian by birth, Morozov tied his fate to the future of Ukrainian independence when he took the oath of allegiance to Ukraine on December 6, 1991, immediately before the Belavezha meeting and the creation of the commonwealth.

In January 1992, elements of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet also began taking the oath of allegiance to Ukraine. But the Ukrainian takeover of the fleet encountered a major problem when its commander, Admiral Igor Kasatonov, ordered all personnel to board their ships and put out to sea. This caused the first major crisis in Russo-Ukrainian relations in May 1992. In September, Presidents Kravchuk and Yeltsin agreed to divide the fleet, avoiding direct conflict between the two countries. It turned out to be a lengthy process. For some time the entire fleet, with more than eight hundred ships and close to 100,000 servicemen, remained under Moscow’s control. In 1995, Russia turned over 18 percent of the fleet’s ships to Ukraine but refused to leave Sevastopol. In 1997 the two countries signed a set of agreements providing legal justification for the continuing presence of the Russian fleet, including more than three hundred ships and 25,000 servicemen, in Sevastopol until 2017. Although Ukraine had lost the battle over the fleet, the deal opened the door to a Russo-Ukrainian friendship treaty that guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity. The parties signed the treaty in 1997, but the Russian parliament took two years to ratify it. Once that process was over, it appeared that Ukraine had completed its “civilized divorce” from its Russian neighbor and former imperial master.

By the end of the 1990s, Ukraine had settled its border and territorial issues with Russia, created its own army, navy, and air force, and established diplomatic and legal foundations for integration with European political, economic, and security organizations. The idea of Ukraine as a constituent of the European community of nations and cultures had long obsessed Ukrainian intellectuals, from the nineteenth-century political thinker Mykhailo Drahomanov to the champion of national communism in the 1920s, Mykola Khvyliovy. In 1976, the European idea had made its way into the first official declaration issued by the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. “We Ukrainians live in Europe,” read the first words of the group’s manifesto. Ukraine, officially a founding member of the United Nations, had not been invited to take part in the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Ukrainian dissidents believed nevertheless that the human rights obligations undertaken by the Soviet Union in Helsinki applied to Ukraine as well. They went to prison and spent long years in the Gulag and internal exile defending that point of view.

The emergence of an independent Ukrainian state in 1991 created the conditions for turning the dissidents’ dream into reality. In institutional terms, that meant joining the European Union and parting ways with the Soviet past, reforming the Ukrainian economy and society, and counterbalancing the enormous political, economic, and cultural sway that Moscow continued to have over its former province. The realization of full sovereignty for Ukraine became closely associated with the aspiration to join the European community of nations. These interrelated tasks would test the political skills of the Ukrainian elites, the unity of the Ukrainian regions, and the Soviet-era discourse about Ukraine’s fraternal ties with its largest and historically most important neighbor, Russia.

Ukraine’s political engagement with the West began in earnest in January 1994 with the signing of a deal brokered by the United States, according to which Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the USSR — potentially the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal.

In June 1994, the Ukrainian government signed a cooperation agreement with the European Union (EU), the first such agreement that the EU had offered a post-Soviet state. In the same year, Ukraine became the first country among the members and associate members of the Commonwealth of Independent States to enter into the Partnership for Peace agreement with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Western military alliance, which had come into existence in 1949 at the start of the Cold War to defend western Europe from the Soviet Union, was now reinventing itself. NATO began building institutional bridges with former adversaries in eastern Europe, including Russia, which signed the agreement a few months after Ukraine. In 1997, Ukraine deepened its cooperation with the alliance by signing the Charter on Distinctive Partnership and opening a NATO information center in Kyiv. In 1998, the cooperation agreement signed four years earlier with the European Union became functional. Things looked promising. Major obstacles, however, stood in the way of Ukraine’s becoming a European nation as envisioned by its intellectuals. Most of them were within Ukraine itself.

Like many post-Soviet countries, during its first years of independence Ukraine underwent a major political crisis caused by economic decline and social dislocation and focused on relations between the presidency and parliament, both institutions having been created in the political turmoil of the last years of the Soviet Union.

Throughout the tumultuous 1990s, Ukraine not only managed its first transfer of power between two rivals for the presidency but also maintained competitive politics and created legal foundations for a viable democracy. In 1996, President Kuchma rewrote the Soviet-era constitution, but he did so together with parliament, which secured a major role for itself in the Ukrainian political process. One of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy was its regional diversity — a legacy of both distant and more recent history that translated into political, economic, and cultural differences articulated in parliament and settled by negotiation in the political arena. The industrialized east became a stronghold of the revived Communist Party. Western Ukraine, formerly ruled by Austria and Poland, sent deputies to parliament who populated the ranks of the national democratic Rukh, led by former Gulag prisoner Viacheslav Chornovil. But whoever gained a majority in parliament acquired it as a result of a coalition agreement and had to deal with an opposition that was not easy to satisfy or co-opt. No political grouping was strong enough to destroy or sideline another. At the time, Ukraine’s democracy was often called democracy by default. That turned out to be a good thing. In the post-Soviet space, democracies created purely by design did not last long.

As often happens with former colonial administrators, a strong inferiority complex afflicted the Kyiv elites vis-à-vis their Russian counterparts, and they initially followed models developed in Russia to deal with their own political, social, and cultural challenges. It took them a while to realize that the Russian models did not work in Ukraine. Ukraine was different. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Ukrainian religious scene. By 1992, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which accounted for 60 percent of all Orthodox communities in the former Soviet Union, had split four ways: there were Greek Catholics who had emerged from the underground, Orthodox who remained under Moscow’s jurisdiction, adherents of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Kyiv Patriarchate, and, finally, the Autocephalous (self-ruling) Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had its roots in the 1920s and also did not recognize the authority of Moscow. President Kravchuk’s efforts to turn the Kyiv Patriarchate into a de facto state church, as Russia had done with the Moscow Patriarchate, failed. So did President Kuchma’s attempts to do the same with the Ukrainian branch of the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Ukrainian scene remained as pluralistic at the turn of the twenty-first century as it had been after the declaration of independence. If anything, it became even more diverse. Eventually, all political forces had to accept the reality that Russian political solutions generally did not work in Ukraine. President Kuchma explained why in a book published in 2004, close to the end of his second term in office. The title was telling indeed: Ukraine Is Not Russia.

The major challenge to the democratic nature of the Ukrainian political process was the catastrophic economic decline that followed the declaration of independence and was often blamed on it, making not only the Leonid Brezhnev era but also the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms look like a paradise lost. In six years, between 1991 and 1997, Ukrainian industrial production fell by 48 percent, while the gross domestic product (GDP) lost a staggering 60 percent. The biggest loss (23 percent of the previous year’s GDP) occurred in 1994, the year of presidential elections and the signing of the first cooperation agreement with the European Union. These were figures comparable to but more significant than American economic losses during the Great Depression, when industrial production fell by 45 percent and GDP by 30 percent.

The 1990s brought terrible hardship to Ukraine. By the end of the decade, close to half of Ukrainians claimed that they had barely enough money to buy food, while those who were leading relatively comfortable lives amounted to barely 2 or 3 percent of the population. This translated into higher mortality rates and lower birth rates. The former overtook the latter for the first time in 1991. Ten years later, when the government of independent Ukraine conducted its first census, it found 48.4 million Ukrainians in the country, 3 million fewer than the 51.4 million counted in the last Soviet census of 1989.

Once again, Ukraine became a source of emigration. Many left for a few months or even years to make the kind of money they could not make at home. They headed mainly to Russia, with its oil and gas wealth, and the countries of east-central Europe and the European Union. Others left forever. Ukrainian Jews led the way. Many of them had not been allowed to leave the Soviet Union in the 1980s, becoming “refuseniks” whom the Soviet authorities denied exit visas and turned into second-class citizens by firing them from the universities and barring them from government jobs. Now they could leave and did so in astonishing numbers. Between 1989 and 2006, more than 1.5 million Soviet Jews left their countries of residence, including a good many Jews of Ukraine. Whereas the Ukrainian population as a whole fell by roughly 5 percent between 1989 and 2001, the Jewish population fell by a staggering 78 percent, decreasing from 487,300 to 105,500. Among those who left were the families of the cofounders of Paypal (Max Levchin) and WhatsApp (Jan Koum). But not only Jews wanted to leave. Many of the emigrants were Ukrainians, Russians, and members of other ethnic groups. Ukraine also became a transit point for illegal immigrants from the rest of the commonwealth and countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The reasons for the steep economic decline were numerous. The collapse of the Soviet economy not only disrupted economic ties between different republics but also spelled the end to procurement for the ex-Soviet military. Ukraine, home to a highly developed military-industrial complex, suffered disproportionately in this regard. Unlike Russia, Ukraine had no oil and gas revenues to soften the blow. Moreover, the Ukrainian metallurgical complex — the industrial sector that survived the crash and provided most of the funds for the Ukrainian budget — depended entirely on Russian natural gas supplies and had to pay ever increasing prices for that precious commodity. But by far the most important reason for the economic decline was the Ukrainian government’s delaying of badly needed economic reforms and continuing to subsidize money-losing state enterprises by issuing credits and printing more money. Runaway inflation, which reached a staggering 2,500 percent in 1992, set the seal on the rapid economic decline.

During the first years of independence, the government was reluctant to give up ownership and thus control over Soviet-era industrial and agricultural enterprises that required more and more state subsidies. Once it finally decided to do so, it faced opposition in parliament, largely from the “red directors” who managed the large enterprises. In 1995, parliament exempted 6,300 state-owned enterprises from privatization. By that time, fewer than one-third of industrial enterprises had been transferred to private ownership. The first stage of privatization was carried out with vouchers issued to the entire population of the country. It benefited largely the “red directors,” who now had assets but few resources for investment. But privatization without investment and restructuring could not revive the Ukrainian economy. By 1999, when close to 85 percent of all enterprises were privately owned, they accounted for less than 65 percent of all industrial output. Half the industrial enterprises in the country were in deficit. Large and small enterprises ended up in the hands of Soviet-era managers and people close to the government. They maintained monopolies, restrained competition, and deepened the economic crisis.

Ukraine needed new owners and a new class of managers to revive its economy. The country got both in a group of young, ambitious, and ruthless businessmen who had no roots in the old planned economy of Soviet times and had made their way up from the economic chaos of the perestroika years and mafia wars of the 1990s. Known in Ukraine, as in Russia, as oligarchs, they emerged as the main beneficiaries of the second stage of privatization, which amounted to the sale of government assets at a fraction of their actual value. The oligarchs made their fortunes by being innovative and opportunistic, but also by ingratiating, bribing, and shooting their way into the offices of the “red directors.” With the military-industrial complex in steep decline, the Ukrainian metallurgical industry became the richest prize in the 1990s and early 2000s. At that time, more than half the country’s industrial output came from four eastern oblasts — Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk — that were rich in iron ore and coal and produced Ukraine’s primary export product: steel.

The new “men of steel” included the leader of the Donetsk group, Rinat Akhmetov, who in the early 1990s took over leadership of a company called Lux, known to the Ukrainian authorities for its criminal origins and connections. In the Dnipropetrovsk region, two local businessmen divided major metallurgical assets: Viktor Pinchuk, who married into President Kuchma’s family, and Igor Kolomoisky, who established one of the first major private banks in Ukraine. Others also shared the loot of post-Soviet Ukrainian privatization. Still, the corrupt and often criminal nature of the privatization process aside, the “oligarchization” of the Ukrainian economy coincided with the end of economic decline. Ukraine began the new millennium with a rapid economic recovery, and, for better or worse, the oligarchs were important figures in that new success story.

Most of the privatization of Ukrainian industry took place on the watch of President Leonid Kuchma between 1994 and 2004. Kuchma, who had been a “red director” himself, presided over the process that ultimately benefited the oligarchs, gaining him their economic and political support. Kuchma won his second term in 1999 by presenting himself as the only candidate capable of defeating the communists, who were exploiting economic decline and hardship to attempt a revival, and by splitting the national democratic bloc: his main opponent on the “right,” Rukh leader Viacheslav Chornovil, died under suspicious circumstances in a car crash a few months before the elections. During his second term in office, which began in 1999, Kuchma emerged as the supreme arbiter of relations between the new oligarchic clans in economics and politics. He also tried to consolidate his personal power and marginalize parliament. It did not work as planned: Ukraine, indeed, was not Russia.

President Kuchma’s downfall began in the autumn of 2000 with the release by opposition leader Oleksandr Moroz, head of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, of tape recordings made secretly in Kuchma’s office by one of his bodyguards. The tapes documented Kuchma’s dealings with local officials involved in privatization schemes, his bribe taking, and his efforts to suppress opposition media. One journalist whose name was mentioned on the tapes was Heorhii Gongadze, the thirty-one-year-old founder of the web newspaper Ukraïns’ka pravda (Ukrainian Truth). Kuchma wanted him detained and sent to Chechnia, where insurgents were fighting the Russian army. In September 2000, Gongadze’s corpse was found beheaded in a forest near Kyiv. Kuchma’s complicity in the murder was never proved in court, but those who listened to the released tapes had no doubt that the president himself had ordered the minister of the interior to threaten and kidnap the journalist.

Kuchmagate, as the tape scandal became known in Ukraine, was a turning point in Ukrainian politics. It ended the rise of authoritarian tendencies in the presidential office. The scandal exposed the corrupt side of the policies of the president, who had been credited during his first term with solving the dispute over the Black Sea Fleet, securing the Crimea, convincing Russia to recognize Ukraine’s borders, turning his country toward the West, and launching the long-delayed privatization. Now it turned out that the president was also a crook, perhaps even a murderer. The opposition, which included former national democrats, socialists, and even communists, launched a political campaign under the slogan “Ukraine without Kuchma.” Citizens responded positively to calls for a clampdown on political and economic corruption. The emerging middle class that was replacing the Soviet-era intelligentsia, which the economic collapse had wiped out, was fed up with official corruption, the suppression of political activity, and restrictions on freedom of speech. Ukraine wanted change.

Kuchma managed to survive the immediate fallout from the tape scandal but was unable to stop the rise of political activism. A new generation, coming not from outside the political establishment, as in Soviet times, but from within, led opposition to his regime. Those who wanted to end government corruption, improve relations with the West tarnished by Kuchmagate, and launch a program of integration with the European Union found their leader in handsome forty-seven-year-old former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko, who had no ties with the political and economic clans of eastern Ukraine and came from the rural northeast.

Viktor Yushchenko had presided over the beginning of economic recovery. During his short stay in the prime minister’s office, from December 1999 to May 2001, Yushchenko, together with his deputy prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, closed loopholes that allowed the oligarchs to avoid taxation. He lowered taxes on medium and small business, bringing a good part of the Ukrainian economy out of the shadows and increasing state revenues. This in turn allowed Yushchenko’s government to pay wage and pension arrears. On Yushchenko’s watch, Ukraine’s GDP stopped falling and showed solid 6 percent growth in 2000, which also saw industrial production increase by 12 percent. The trend would continue for most of the decade. Dismissed from his position in the middle of Kuchmagate, Yushchenko soon emerged as the leader of the Our Ukraine Party, which got almost a quarter of the popular vote in the parliamentary elections of 2002.

Whereas pro-reform Ukraine pinned its hopes on Yushchenko, the former governor of Donetsk oblast and Kuchma’s last prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, championed President Kuchma’s oligarchic regime. He was also the choice of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who took over from Yeltsin in 2000 and was eager to have an ally, if not a client, in Kyiv. In 2004, Yushchenko and Yanukovych faced each other in the most strongly contested presidential elections Ukraine had seen since independence. In early September 2004, Yushchenko, who was leading the race, fell suddenly and violently ill. With the diagnosis unclear and his life in danger, his aides brought him to a clinic in Vienna, where the doctors came to a shocking conclusion. The Our Ukraine presidential candidate had been poisoned, and the poison was of a particular kind — a dioxin of a strain produced in a handful of countries, including Russia and excluding Ukraine. The correct diagnosis saved Yushchenko’s life. With his face disfigured by the poison and a reliance on heavy medication to deal with the excruciating pain, Yushchenko returned to the election trail, gaining more support.

In late October 2004, when Ukrainians went to the polls to choose among twenty-four presidential candidates, Yushchenko was in the lead, with Yanukovych a close second: each received close to 40 percent of the vote. They then proceeded to the second round, with Yushchenko gaining the support of most of the voters whose candidates did not make it to that stage. Following the second round of voting on November 21, independent exit polls showed Yushchenko clearly in the lead, with 53 percent of the popular vote against Yanukovych’s 44 percent. But when the government-controlled electoral commission announced the official results, most Ukrainian voters were in for a surprise. According to the official report, Yanukovych had won with 49.5 percent of the vote over Yushchenko’s 46.9 percent. The official results were rigged. As telephone intercepts of discussions between members of Yanukovych’s campaign staff showed, they had tampered with the server of the state electoral commission to falsify election results submitted to Kyiv.

Yushchenko’s supporters were outraged. An estimated 200,000 Kyivans came to the Maidan, Kyiv’s Independence Square, to protest the election fraud. The Orange Revolution, which received that name after the official colors of Yushchenko’s presidential campaign, had begun. In the following days and weeks, with protesters coming from the rest of Ukraine, the number of participants in rallies swelled to half a million. As television cameras transmitted images of the Maidan protests all over the world, European viewers discovered Ukraine for themselves, seeing it for the first time as something more than a distant region on the map. The images left no doubt that its inhabitants wanted freedom and justice. Europe and the world could not stand aside. Backed by voters, European politicians involved themselves in the Ukraine Crisis and played an important part in its resolution. The key role went to Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who convinced President Kuchma to throw his support behind the decision of the Constitutional Court to annul the official results of the elections as fraudulent.

On December 26, 2004, Ukrainians went to the polls for the third time in two months to elect their new president. As expected, Yushchenko won with 52 percent over Yanukovych’s 44 percent — results close to those of the independent exit polls conducted during the second round of the elections. The Orange Revolution got its president. But could he fulfill the promise of the revolution — to bear down on crony capitalism, free the country from corruption, and bring it closer to Europe? Yushchenko believed that he could. His road to the transformation of Ukraine led through the European Union.

President Yushchenko made foreign policy his priority and confided to one of his aides that joining the EU was a goal worth living for. Ukrainian diplomats did their best to capitalize on the positive image of Ukraine created in the West by the Orange Revolution and to jump on the departing train of EU enlargement — in 2004, the European Union accepted ten countries as members, seven of them former Soviet satellites and republics. It was too late: the train had left the station. While the European Parliament voted in January 2005 in favor of establishing closer relations with Ukraine with an eye to future membership, the European Commission, which made decisions on enlargement, was much more cautious. Instead of starting negotiations on accession to the union, it offered Ukraine a plan for closer cooperation.

The locomotive of history did not take Ukraine into the EU along with some of its western neighbors in the wake of the Orange Revolution for several reasons. Some of them were beyond Kyiv’s control. Germany and other major stakeholders in the union were worried about the economic and political consequences of the enlargement that had already taken place. They added insult to injury by questioning Ukraine’s status as a “European state.” But the main reasons for Kyiv’s failure to join the European club of democratic nations had to do with Ukraine itself. The post-Orange years were full of internal contradictions. Major achievements mixed with spectacular failures of government policy.

The new government stopped the persecution of political opponents and provided guarantees of freedom of expression for citizens and the media. Economically, Ukraine was doing better than might have been expected. Between 2000 and 2008, when its economy felt the impact of the global recession, the country’s GDP doubled, reaching $400 billion and surpassing GDP figures for 1990, the last full year of the USSR’s existence. But the Yushchenko government failed to make Ukraine a fairer place in which to live and conduct business. It did precious little about rampant corruption. On top of that, the constitutional changes to which the Yushchenko camp agreed in December 2004 to cancel the fraudulent elections made the country difficult to govern. According to the amendments demanded by Yanukovych’s supporters and accepted by Yushchenko, the president lost the right to appoint the prime minister, who, now elected by parliament, emerged as an independent actor in Ukrainian politics. Neither the president nor the prime minister had enough power to implement reforms on his or her own, and Yushchenko had a hard time finding common ground with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, his former revolutionary ally.

By the time Yushchenko’s term came to an end in early 2010, there was broad disappointment with his rule. His rivalry with Tymoshenko had turned Ukrainian politics into an interminable soap opera, discrediting the cause of reform and European integration. The president’s attempt to build a strong Ukrainian national identity by promoting the memory of the 1932–1933 Great Ukrainian Famine and celebrating the fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against the Soviet regime failed to translate into broad electoral support. In fact, memory politics divided Ukrainian society. Especially controversial was Yushchenko’s posthumous “Hero of Ukraine” award to Stepan Bandera, leader of Ukrainian radical nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. The Bandera affair provoked a strong negative reaction not only in the east and south of the country but also among the Ukrainian liberal intelligentsia in Kyiv and Lviv and alienated European friends of Ukraine. Yushchenko, observers said at the time, was trying to bring Ukraine into Europe, but he had in mind the Europe of the turn of the twentieth, not the twenty-first, century.

Not only Ukraine but the whole post-Soviet region was lagging behind, trying to manage the transition from imperial subject to independent state that the countries of central Europe had resolved nearly a century earlier. Very soon, Ukraine would find itself in a crisis that reminded many of the problems of the nineteenth century. That crisis would bring foreign intervention, war, annexation, and the idea of the division of the world into spheres of influence. It would also test Ukraine’s resolve to remain independent and challenge the key elements of its national identity.