Did the Ukrainians have to fight the Russians in order to secede from the Soviet Union?
In the last years of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev's inconsistent attempts to democratize political life resulted in the devolution of power from the centralized party apparatus to the 15 union republics.
This process did not result from any constitutional changes; rather, with the decline of the Communist Party's power, the republics began claiming the authority that had technically always been vested in them by the Soviet constitution. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SFSR) soon came to see themselves as allies against the declining Soviet center. In the last year of the Soviet Union's existence, the elected leader of the Russian SFSR, Boris Yeltsin, often clashed with Gorbachev in defense of the republic's rights. Yeltsin, a speaker of the Russian legislature, was elected president of the Russian SFSR in 1990, which resulted in two sitting presidents claiming authority in Moscow, the Soviet one resident in the Kremlin and the Russian one with his offices in the republic's parliament across the river.Yeltsin and his young team of pro-Western reformers positioned themselves as defenders of democracy against the imperial center, which was prone to conservative backlash. In reclaiming their constitutional rights, other Soviet republics drew inspiration from Yeltsin's contest with Gorbachev. Democratic activists in Ukraine envied the reformist momentum of the Yeltsin administration in Russia, as old-style communist functionaries still controlled the legislature in their own republic. They did not see Yeltsin's fledgling democratic Russia as an enemy, but as a beacon in the joint struggle against the Soviet center and communism. Those Ukrainian party functionaries who cautiously embraced the notion of republican sovereignty also regarded the Russian president as a natural ally.
The tumultuous events of August 1991 afforded Yeltsin an opportunity to assert democratic Russia's authority against the weakening Soviet state.
When conservative party apparatchiks tried to organize a coup against Gorbachev, it was Yeltsin who led popular resistance in Moscow. In contrast, the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, took a cautious stand in Kyiv, not coming out openly on either side. The all-Union governing structures and institutions essentially disintegrated with the collapse of the coup, and the republics filled the power vacuum by formally declaring independence. Any remaining hopes to salvage the former Soviet polity in the form of a loose confederation were laid to rest on December 1, 1991, when Ukraine held a national referendum to confirm its declaration of independence. Their hopes buoyed by optimistic projections of economic prosperity that was to follow liberation from Soviet imperial fetters, the overwhelming majority of the republic's citizens voted in favor of independence: 92.3 percent nationally, including a majority in each province, and 54.2 percent even in the Crimea with its ethnic Russian majority.1 On the same day, Ukrainian voters also elected Kravchuk as the country's first president.At the time, this historic choice was not seen as a parting of ways with Russia, but as a farewell to the oppressive communist empire. Gorbachev, the discredited Soviet president, was the only prominent politician advocating the "no" vote in the Ukrainian referendum, while Yeltsin's Russia appeared to be a valuable ally in constructing the new democratic future. Later in December the Soviet Union was officially dissolved.