From Devolution to Independence

When the Soviet president and CPSU general secretary Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, few if anyone could have predicted that before another decade had passed the Soviet Union would no longer exist.

The last years of Brezhnev’s rule were characterized by stagnation in economic and social life. Little changed after his death, since the CPSU chose as his succes­sors first a man incapacitated by ill health (lurii Andropov) and then an octoge­narian (Konstantin Chernenko) who died after only thirteen months in power. The CPSU then did the unexpected. On 10 March 1985, the Politburo elected its youngest member, the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, to become the party’s new general secretary. As a result of that choice, the Soviet Union and political rela­tions throughout the world within a few years would change beyond recognition.

The Gorbachev revolution

Mikhail Gorbachev was a party functionary who in the 1950s began a typical pro­gression through the Communist ranks. He was, however, quite different from all his Soviet predecessors, perhaps with the exception of Lenin. Gorbachev was well educated, articulate, and personable. Moreover, he exuded a sense of self-confi­dence and optimism that inspired both faith on the part of his supporters and respect from his adversaries. In the first year of his rule, he began to replace older officials with younger, more reform-minded types. This was the first step toward his primary goal, the resuscitation of the Soviet economy.

During the last years of Brezhnev’s rule, it had been clear to many Soviet leaders that their country had entered an economic decline which, if unchecked, before long would undermine its status as a world power.

Restructuring belonged primarily to the socioeconomic sphere. Although Gor­bachev was never strong on specifics, he and his reform-minded advisers seemed intent on doing away with centralized control over the economy and even, if nec­essary, implementing some form of free-market system. Gorbachev knew that a slogan like perestroika might be proclaimed, as other Communist slogans had so often been proclaimed in the past, but that in order for it to succeed the popula­tion as a whole - from the collective farmer, to the factory worker, to the plant manager, to the party functionary - had to be drawn into the process and made to feel that he or she had a stake in its success. To achieve such a radical trans­formation in people’s minds and hearts, Gorbachev argued, Soviet society must henceforth be guided by the principle of glasnost’, or openness, and its corollary, democratization. In effect, Soviet citizens were being encouraged to criticize their society. Before long, when people realized that Gorbachev was indeed standing by his promise and promoting glasnost’ without any resort to police repression, all segments of the population, almost without restraint, began to criticize virtually every aspect of their country.

Gorbachev’s efforts at domestic reform were complemented by the complete restructuring of the Soviet Union’s relations with the outside world. Gorbachev the economic reformer now became Gorbachev the political visionary. Soviet troops were brought home from Afghanistan (where Brezhnev had sent them in 1979); relations with the United States improved dramatically as a result of Soviet willing­ness to reduce its military forces and nuclear arsenal; and, most remarkable of all, the Kremlin effectively gave up its interest in dominating what since World War II had been the Soviet bloc in central Europe and the Balkans.

All these monumental events were owing in large part to the actions - whether their consequences had been intended or not - of Mikhail Gorbachev. Comparably profound changes would take place within the Soviet Union as well. With regard to the country’s internal political structure, Gorbachev consolidated his power in 1988 by being elected president and then ousting most of his opponents from the CPSU’s Politburo. Then, in 1989, elections were held to the Supreme Soviet, which for the first time in Soviet history began to act as an independent-minded legislative body, not surprisingly under the chairmanship of Gorbachev. But Gor­bachev’s ultimate political masterstroke came in early 1990. Sensing that his efforts to push through perestroika would be blocked by conservative-minded Communists, he arranged for the party to give up its monopoly on power and to invest even greater authority in the office of the president, to which he was duly elected.

These remarkable changes in political life inevitably were to have a profound impact on the various peoples (titular nationalities and national minorities) throughout the Soviet Union. The self-imposed limiting of Moscow’s author­ity allowed interethnic squabbling to break out that for decades had been held in check by Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. Conflict initially erupted in the Caucasus and Central Asian regions, where Armenians and Azerbaijanis began to fight openly over disputed territory (Nagorno-Karabakh), where Georgians clashed with Abkhazians, and where Uzbeks attacked Meshketian Turks living in their midst.

Even in those republics where political demands were limited to calls for decen­tralization and greater autonomy, local leaders, especially from among the Com­munist- and non-Communist-affiliated intelligentsia, were inspired by Gorbachev’s call for glasnost Their criticisms were largely demands for the conferring of offi­cial status on local languages within the republics, for the full use of those lan­guages at all levels of education and cultural life, and for the rewriting of history so as to fill in the so-called blank spots, or deliberate omissions, in the official Soviet version of the countries’ pasts. More often than not, these “blank spots” left out events or personages who had struggled for independence from tsarist Russian or from Soviet rule. Filling in the blank spots, that is, rehabilitating national histories, helped to justify new demands on the part of the republics and titular nationalities for autonomy or even independence from Moscow.

The Soviet heritage in Ukraine

Unlike in other Soviet republics, it took a few years before perestroika and glasnost' (in Ukrainian: perebudova and hlasnist') reached Soviet Ukraine. This was largely because the CPU was still led by Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi, the Brezhnev appoint­ee and an opponent of Gorbachev, who denied there was any need for fundamen­tal changes in his republic. There were, however, numerous reasons for discontent in Ukrainian society related to the economy, the environment, and culture.

It was the need to revive a stagnating Soviet economy that initially motivated the Gorbachev revolution.

Environmental issues were another source of discontent. In fact, it was the explosion on 26 April 1986 at the nuclear power facility at Chornobyl’, to the north of Kiev, that made the world aware of Ukraine, and Ukrainians aware of the profound degree to which they lacked control over their lives. The initial reluc­tance of the Gorbachev government to provide information about life-threatening radioactive fallout perhaps more than anything else alienated the ordinary citi­zen from the Soviet system. “Chornobyl’,” in the words of one Ukrainian political activist, “helped us understand that we are a colony.”¹ In addition to its political and cultural imperialism with respect to Soviet Ukraine, Moscow was now accused of environmental imperialism. Nor was the Chornobyl’ disaster an isolated inci­dent.

Finally, there was deep concern about the future of the Ukrainian nationality. Despite the fact that in the 1980s a sense of Ukrainian national identity in broad segments of the population may have been as strong as it ever had been, the Soviet Ukrainian status quo still discriminated against ethnic Ukrainians in numerous ways. Visitors to Kiev or other cities were immediately struck by something ordinary citizens experienced on a daily basis: scorn and derision if the Ukrainian language was used on the streets or in public offices. The low prestige of the Ukrainian lan­guage and therefore of Ukrainian culture was a consequence of governmental policies that had changed little since the end of Ukrainianization in the 1930s.

For instance, ever since World War II there had been a steady decline in the publication of Ukrainian books. Whereas in 1958 Ukrainian-language titles had made up 60 percent of book production in Soviet Ukraine, by 1978 that figure had dropped to only 27 percent - the lowest since 1923. Soviet Ukraine’s educational system, in particular, seemed not to be responding to the needs of the republic’s titular and numerically largest nationality. Whereas during the 1950-1951 school year 81 percent of elementary school students had been enrolled in Ukrainian- language schools, by 1988-1989 the figure was only 47.5 percent. At the higher levels, access was a problem. Whereas in 1939 Ukraine had ranked fourth among the sixteen Soviet republics with respect to the percentage of the population that had completed secondary or higher education, by 1970 it ranked eleventh.

The proportion of ethnic Ukrainians with higher education had suffered a rela­tive decline for several reasons: (1) admissions policies favored children of par­ents with white-collar occupations; (2) Russian-language entrance requirements favored native Russian speakers; and (3) budgetary and admissions control rested in the hands of central ministries in Moscow (in 1965, only 50 of Soviet Ukraine’s 132 VUZy [university-level institutions] were under the jurisdiction of Kiev). Since during these same years Soviet Ukrainian society was becoming increasingly urban­ized and better educated, there was a concomitant rise in social expectations, and for many Ukrainians their republic’s educational system was simply unable to ful­fill these expectations.

Glasnost’ in Ukraine

Among the first group of Ukrainians to respond to Gorbachev’s call for open­ness and constructive criticism was the creative intelligentsia, represented in large part by the Ukrainian Writers’ Union. This organization had traditionally followed Communist party directives, but in 1986, at a conference of nearly 1,100 mem­bers, the policy of the union’s executive was changed radically. From that time, the Writers’ Union actively promoted the rebirth of Ukrainian culture and language, by encouraging the creation of native-language societies; by rehabilitating, with public fanfare, writers who had been suppressed during the Stalin and Brezhnev eras; and by publishing new works that spoke openly about historical events which for decades had been banned from public discussion. It was not long before writ­ers like Ivan Drach, Ivan Dziuba, Dmytro Pavlychko, and Mykola Zhulyns’kyi would be playing leading roles in Ukraine’s civic and political transformation.

Taking up the call sounded by the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, writers and other activists established several new organizations and publications to address politi­cal, economic, environmental, and cultural issues. Among the first of these was the Ukrainian ecological association, Green World (Zelenyi Svit), founded in late 1987 to lobby the government for stricter controls over the environment and, in particular, for a nuclear-free Ukraine that would be spared any future Chor- nobyl’-like disasters. Two years later, the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society, headed by the writer Dmytro Pavlychko, was created to improve the status of Ukrainian and make it the official language of the country. This goal was partly achieved in October 1989, when Ukrainian was declared the state language.

The largest and most influential of the new organizations was the Popular Move­ment of Ukraine for Restructuring, better known by its Ukrainian acronym, Rukh (The Movement). Led by the writers Ivan Drach, Mykhailo Horyn’, and Volodymyr lavorivs’kyi, Rukh published its program in February 1989, which called for the “rebirth and comprehensive development of the Ukrainian nation.”² The program stressed the need for political, economic, environmental, and cultural reforms as well as institutionalized guarantees for human rights. Despite its emphasis on the ethnically Ukrainian character of the country and particular concern for protec­tion of the Ukrainian language, Rukh defended the rights of national and religious minorities. In this regard, Rukh made a special effort to counteract the negative stereotypes associated with traditional Ukrainian-Jewish relations by condemning all forms of anti-Semitism as inimical to the liberal-democratic society it wished to see created in Ukraine. While political concerns and the relationship to Moscow were high on Rukh’s agenda, the organization did not call for independence, but rather for the transformation of the Soviet Union into a union of truly sovereign states with assurances that Ukraine could determine its own political, economic, and cultural affairs without interference from Moscow.

Even before the establishment of Rukh and other organizations, there was movement on another very sensitive front, religion. For decades, the Greek, or Ukrainian, Catholic Church, which had been outlawed in the late 1940s, had con­tinued to function in secret in western Ukraine, that is, in former Galicia and Transcarpathia. In addition to the underground Greek Catholic Church, western Ukraine had the greatest number of parishes and monasteries belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church of any area of Ukraine, and many of that church’s cler­gy and faithful remained clandestine Greek Catholics.

With the new atmosphere in the Soviet Union, in 1987 the clandestine Greek Catholic hierarchy decided to “come up from the underground.” Their action prompted the Vatican and Ukrainians living in the diaspora to increase their lob­bying of the United States and western governments, who in turn exerted diplo­matic pressure on the Soviet Union. These efforts bore fruit when in December 1989 Gorbachev’s government granted permission to the Greek Catholic Church to register its parishes. Similarly, in the summer of 1989 the Ukrainian Autocepha­lous Orthodox Church, banned by the Soviets since the early 1930s, began its reconstitution, a process that culminated a year later in a church council (sobor) which formally restored the church’s hierarchy.

The events in Soviet Ukraine during the Gorbachev era had a profound impact on Ukrainians throughout the diaspora. After having been cut off for decades from their homeland by a hostile Soviet government, non-Communist Ukrainian organizations from the West (especially the United States and Canada) were for the first time allowed to provide the national rebirth in the homeland with advice and financial support. Renewed contacts with the diaspora were most evident in church affairs. Even though the hierarchs of both the Ukrainian (Greek) Catho­lic and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox churches had resided “temporarily” (since World War II) in the West, they were able to reestablish their authority in the Ukrainian homeland. Local bishops in each church recognized as their supe­rior either the Ukrainian (Greek) Catholic metropolitan (some would say patri­arch) Myroslav Cardinal Liubachivs’kyi, in Rome, or the Autocephalous patriarch Mstyslav Skrypnyk, in New Jersey, both of whom were expected to - and eventually did - return home to lead their flocks.

The rebirth of the Ukrainian (Greek) Catholic and Autocephalous Orthodox churches in Soviet Ukraine posed a direct threat to the Russian Orthodox Church under the patriarch of Moscow, which until the Gorbachev revolution had been the only Eastern Christian body permitted to function legally. Faced with the chal­lenge of two renewed Ukrainian churches, in 1989 the Russian Orthodox Church renamed its Ukrainian exarchate the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. At the parish level, the result was a three-way struggle among the various churches for the alle­giance of the faithful and - more problematic - for control of church property and the use of church buildings. In general, the Ukrainian (Greek) Catholic Church was the most successful in attracting clergy and parishes in western Ukraine (espe­cially in Galicia), and the Autocephalous Orthodox Church was strongest in the Right Bank and central Ukraine.

Besides the activity of the non-state-run secular and religious organizations, there was a phenomenal rise in new publications. Gorbachev’s glasnost’ effectively ended state censorship and thus allowed for the almost spontaneous appearance of a host of newspapers, journals, bulletins, and flyers ranging in subject matter from politics, religion, and scholarship to sex and how best to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Publicists and historians in particular took advantage of glasnost' in order to fill in the “blank spots” in Ukrainian history. Past cultural figures were “rehabilitated,” such as the nineteenth-century national activists Panteleimon Kul­ish and Mykhailo Drahomanov, and the early twentieth-century cultural and polit­ical leaders Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who, if they had been mentioned previously, had been described as anti-progressivist and anti-Sovi­et. Researchers also worked diligently to make public documentary evidence con­cerning recent Ukrainian national tragedies, such as the Great Famine of 1933, which, until the late 1980s, according to Soviet sources had never occurred, and the numerous massacres of Ukrainians by Soviet security forces on the eve of and during World War II (at Vinnytsia and L’viv, among other places), which had been unjustly attributed to the German invaders.

Finally, glasnost had an impact on the various national minorities who lived in Soviet Ukraine. Some, like the Poles and Jews, were concerned primarily with improving the cultural, linguistic, and religious status of their respective commu­nities. Beginning in 1988, the taboo against formal relations between Poland and ethnic Poles living in the kresy (the Polish term for the western part of the Soviet Union) was effectively ended. This meant that now there could be serious dis­cussion about the national survival of Poles under Soviet rule. In Soviet Ukraine, the first Congress of Poles took place in 1990, and it provided a stimulus for the creation during the following several months of new Polish cultural organizations and of Polish-language newspapers, magazines, and radio programming emanat­ing mostly from L’viv. The status of the Roman Catholic Church was of particular importance in a social environment still characterized by the view that a “Catholic equals a Pole.” In 1991, the Vatican reestablished the Polish Roman Catholic hier­archy in Ukraine, and the number of churches that were reopened and that used Polish in their services rose within a few years to some 450.

Jews focused their attention on reviving their religious life and the Yiddish language. With the financial assistance of Jewish organizations abroad, new syna­gogues were built and educational facilities - including Sunday schools, yeshivas (religious schools for men), and ulpans (Judaic study centers) - were opened to teach the principles of Judaism as well as the Yiddish and Hebrew languages. A wide range of Jewish organizations concerned with charity, publications, com­munity projects, cultural activity, and property restitution also came into being. Whereas the revival of Jewish life started under glasnost’ during the last years of Soviet rule, its expansion and most significant achievements were to occur in post­Communist independent Ukraine.

Other peoples were concerned as much with their political as their cultural sta­tus. Ever since the 1960s, Crimean Tatar activists were calling for the right to return from “exile” (surgun) in Central Asia to their Crimean homeland, and their cam­paign had become well known in Soviet dissident circles. In 1967, the people as a whole were exonerated of the accusations of betrayal during World War II and, finally in 1988, the Soviet government gave them the right to return to the Cri­mea, where their numbers increased dramatically from about 38,000 in 1989 to 120,000 in 1990. The returnees from various parts of Soviet Central Asia were espe­cially concerned with the Crimea’s Russian-dominated political leadership, which was calling for union with the Russia should the structure of the Soviet Union ever change. To assert their voice, the Crimean Tatars met in a convention (kurultay), which in June 1991 declared national sovereignty for the Crimean Tatar people and its intention to reestablish a sovereign Tatar state. That same convention cre­ated a legislative body (mejlis) to advocate Crimean Tatar political demands.

Along the far western edge of Soviet Ukraine, the year 1990 marked a some­what unexpected revival of the so-called Rusyn movement in Transcarpathia. Its leaders demanded recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct East Slavic nationality (claiming that a Ukrainian identity had been forced upon the popu­lation by the Soviet authorities after World War II), while the regional council (Oblasna rada) established a commission calling for the renewal of an autono­mous status for Transcarpathia that harked back to the experience of that region as Subcarpathian Rus’ within Czechoslovakia during the interwar years (see chap­ter 47).

The road to sovereignty and independence

In the midst of the intellectual and civic-minded ferment that reverberated through many segments of Soviet Ukrainian society, an important turning point came in September 1989, when one of the last of the Brezhnevite opponents of Gorbachev, Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi, was removed from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (CPSU) and from his post as first secretary of the Communist party of Ukraine. With the fall of Shcherbyts’kyi, the pace of political change quickened in Soviet Ukraine. That same month, Rukh held its first national congress in Kiev, and backed by its nearly 300,000 members it began preparing for elections to Soviet Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet (Verkhovna Rada) scheduled for March 1990. In these elections, pro-Rukh candidates were part of the Democratic Bloc, which won just over 100 of the 450 seats contested. In the new parliament - as the Supreme Soviet was popularly called - the Democratic Bloc joined forces with the “democratic” wing of the Communists. Together, they were instrumental in having the parliament declare Ukraine a sovereign state, on ¹⁶ J^uly ¹99^O.

By 1991, the formerly Communist-dominated and Moscow-loyalist Ukrainian parliament was in the forefront of the process of creating a legal and administra­tive infrastructure for a sovereign state. The parliament’s work was made easier after the Communists ceased to function as a unified voting bloc, with some join­ing the opposition in support of specific issues. The change in direction of the parliament was also due in large measure to its new chairman, Leonid Kravchuk, a Communist who quickly adapted to the more nationalist-minded mood of the people. Soviet Ukraine established diplomatic relations with several neighboring

Declaration of Independence

Resolution of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian S.S.R. on the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

The Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic rules:

To declare Ukraine an independent democratic state on September 24, 1991.

From the moment of declaration of independence only the Constitution of Ukraine, its laws, resolutions of the government, and other legislative acts of the republic are active on its territory.

To hold on December 1, 1991 a republican referendum on the confirmation of the dec­laration of independence.

L. Kravchuk, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian S.S.R.

Kiev, August 24, 1991

Act of Ukraine's Independence Declaration

Proceeding from the mortal danger that threatened Ukraine as a result of the coup d’etat in the U.S.S.R. on August 19, 1991:

- developing the centuries-old tradition of the Ukrainian state formation;

- proceeding from the right to self-determination, envisioned by the United Nation­Charter and other international legal documents;

- acting in compliance with the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic declares:

The independence of Ukraine, and the formation of a sovereign Ukrainian state - Ukraine.

The territory of Ukraine is integral and inviolable.

From now on only the constitution and laws of Ukraine are applicable on its territory. This act comes into force from the moment of its approval.

The Supreme Soviet of Ukraine

August 24, 1991

source: News from Ukraine (Kiev), September 1991, p. I.

countries before the end of the year, and Kravchuk embarked on several visits to western Europe and North America, acting as if he were the head of an independ­ent state.

The question of Ukraine’s relationship with the Soviet Union was finally decid­ed in August 1991, when conservative political forces in Moscow staged an unsuc­cessful coup (putsch) to overthrow Gorbachev. After some initial hesitation in condemning the leaders of the failed putsch, Kravchuk acted decisively. On 24 August 1991, he spearheaded a resolution that declared Ukraine an independent state. The declaration also called for a referendum on independence to be held throughout the new republic on 1 December 1991. That same day, presidential elections were scheduled as well.

In the months leading up to the referendum and elections, Kravchuk enhanced his reputation as a defender of Ukrainian interests by opposing Gorbachev’s pro­posals for a new union treaty that would limit the political and economic sovereign­ty of its members. When the 1 December referendum was finally held, the results were a surprise to even the most ardent believers in independence. No less than 92 percent of the country’s inhabitants voted for independence. Over 80 percent of the voters in each of the supposedly russified eastern industrial oblasts (Donets’k, Dnipropetrovs’k, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv) voted for Ukraine’s independence. Even the Crimea, which as of September 1991 had had its own “state sovereignty within Ukraine,” returned a 54 percent majority in favor of independence. Kravchuk won the presidency with a comfortable majority of 62 percent of the vote.

24 August 1991 marked the sixth time in the course of the twentieth century that independence had been declared for all or part of Ukrainian territory. The conditions surrounding the declaration of independence in 1991 differed signifi­cantly, however, from those surrounding the earlier declarations, whether those of the immediate post-World War I period (Kiev, 1918; L’viv, 1918; Kiev, 1919) or those on the eve of and during the course of World War II (Khust, 1939; L’viv, 1941). All the previous attempts at independence, whether they had applied to Ukraine as a whole or to one of its parts (western Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine), had come at a time of civil war and/or invasion by foreign powers. Furthermore, on previous occasions Ukraine’s inhabitants had been consulted only in part or not at all as to their views on independence.

All was different in 1991. Ukraine may have been part of an empire in devolu­tion or dissolution, but that process was esssentially a peaceful one, in which, iron­ically, the ruling Communist elite participated along with significant segments of the population. And because of the power of the modern media, all this took place under the watchful and sometimes approving eye of the world. Moreover, the declaration of independence by parliamentary representatives was legitimized through a referendum in which 80 percent of eligible voters participated, and which outside and inside observers agreed was conducted in accord with generally accepted democratic practices. The results were almost immediately welcomed by the international community. Independent Ukraine retained its status as a full- fledged member of the United Nations, and within a few weeks it was recognized by most of the leading countries in the world community. The fact that nine out of every ten inhabitants approved independence confirmed that Ukrainian state­hood was the wish not only of Ukrainian nationalists. In effect, an independent Ukraine seemed to promise the most attractive alternative for all those who want­ed change, whether in politics, the economy, the environment, or cultural life. And for the first time Ukrainians had the opportunity to resolve their problems on their own.