46 From Soviet Ukraine to Independent Ukraine

The economic recovery of Soviet Ukraine during the first decade following World War II leveled off but did not end in 1955. Until the 1970s many branches of Soviet Ukraine’s industry recorded double-digit growth, with the largest relative increases occurring in the western Ukrainian oblasts acquired after the war.

For a while (1957-1965) central economic ministries were abolished and the entire Soviet Union was divided into economic regions. Each region had its own council with responsibility to determine economic development within a given territory. Several such economic regions functioned in Soviet Ukraine. While it is true that there was a return to centralized units, a Ukrainian Council of National Economy was established in the interim (1960) and it, together with individual enterprises in Soviet Ukraine and the central Soviet Union ministries in Moscow, jointly agreed on the content of the five-year economic plans and the pace of production. Such partial decentralization in economic planning provided an opportunity for enterprising local Communist party secretaries to gain control over the economy of a certain region or industry and, thereby, to create local power bases from which to launch political careers in republic and in all-Union Communist party structures. In this way Soviet Ukraine, in particular the military-industrial complex centered in Dnipropetrovs’k, became the launchpad for careers of the longtime Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the Communist party of Ukraine first secretary Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi, and eventually the second president of independent Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma.

46.1 Some of Soviet Ukraine’s writers and critics of the Sixties Group: Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovs’kyi, Hryhorii Syvokin’, Nadiia Svitlychna, Mykhailyna Kotsubyns’ka, and Ivan Svitlychnyi.

MAP 46 INDEPENDENT UKRAINE

Soviet Ukraine’s physical and human geography was also transformed. Between 1956 and 1972 a series of five reservoirs (Kiev, Kaniv, Kremenchuk, Dniprodzerzhyns’k, and Kakhovka) were built along the Dnieper River. Aside from transforming that waterway into an almost uninterrupted series of lakes, river transport was improved, spring flooding was controlled, and power stations were built alongside dams, which brought about a dramatic increase in hydroelectric energy. And when hydroelectric power and domestic natural gas reserves proved insufficient to fulfill Soviet Ukraine’s energy needs, four nuclear power plants were built between 1979 and 1984: Chornobyl’, Rivne (at Kuznetsovs’k), South Ukraine (at Kostiantynivka), and Zaporizhzhia (at Enerhodar).

46.2 Vasyl’ Stus (1938-1985), poet and Soviet Ukraine’s most prominent dissident, from 1972 until his death in forced labor camps or exile.

An even more remarkable change occurred in demographic trends and settlement patterns. A corollary to steady industrial growth was urbanization. Between 1959 and 1979, the number of cities in Soviet Ukraine with over 100,000 inhabitants increased from twenty-five to forty-six, in which at the time over one-third of the entire population of the country lived. The vast majority of the larger cities were and still are in the middle Dnieper and Donbas industrial belt of southcentral and eastern Ukraine (the Dnipropetrovs’k, Donets’k, and Luhans’k oblasts). This same period saw the number of cities with over one million inhabitants increase from one to five (Kiev, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovs’k, Odessa, and Donets’k).

Under Soviet auspices, Ukrainian culture was promoted to a certain degree. In the early 1960s, a group of creative writers and artists breathed new life into Ukrainian literature and the cinema, although they were soon criticized for going beyond the bounds of Soviet-style socialist realism. As well, research institutes connected with the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences produced several multivolume Ukrainian-language general and the matic encyclopedias, histories of art and literature, and language dictionaries. More problematic was the educational system. Overall the number of graduates from universities and technical schools rose dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, although the language of instruction was primarily Russian. Russian was also preferred over Ukrainian as a spoken language, in particular among the rapidly expanding urban population. As a result, while the absolute number of persons claiming Ukrainian as their mother tongue rose from 30 million (1959) to 37.4 million (1989), the percentage of such persons in the population as a whole declined during the same period from 94 to 88 percent.

46.3 All-Union Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Soviet Ukraine party chairman Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi, who oversaw political repression during the 1970s and 1980s, in Kiev among young female pioneers (Soviet youth group).

46.4 Confession administered clandestinely in a forest by an underground Greek Catholic priest near the Galician village of Urochyshche, 1987.

These and other concerns led some intellectuals to conclude that the Ukrainian nationality was under threat.

46.5 The remains of reactor four at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl’ following an explosion on April 26, 1986.

By the 1980s it was not ideological deviation that posed any real threat to the Soviet Union, but rather economic stagnation. In an effort to reinvigorate the centralized command economy, the newly appointed general secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, set out to reform the system soon after taking power in 1985. Guided by what he called perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost’ (openness), Gorbachev and his reformminded advisors seemed intent on doing away with centralized control over the economy and perhaps adopting some form of free market system. Gorbachev also invited the Soviet public to provide open and constructive criticism to help his reformminded advisors. The public did respond, especially when it saw how government authorities continued to act in a secretive manner and against the interests of people. A symbolic turning point in relations between citizens and the state came in 1986, when an explosion that spread radioactive debris Europe-wide occurred at the nuclear plant at Chornobyl’ in north-central Ukraine. The mishandling of the disaster by the Soviet authorities quickly transformed human and ecological concerns into political protests and further alienation of Ukraine’s people from the Communist-dominated system under which they were living.

46.6 A human chain stretching for 500 kilometers from Kiev to L’viv, organized by Rukh on January 21, 1990 to symbolize support of ethnic Ukrainians— both east and west—for a sovereign and democratic Ukraine.

The greatest changes inspired by Gorbachev’s rule were to come in 1989 and early 1990. In 1989 the Soviet Union gave up control of its satellite countries along its western border, and one by one Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania ended Communist rule and opened their borders by tearing down the Berlin Wall and removing the proverbial Iron Curtain that for nearly four decades had separated these countries from the rest of Europe. At home, in early 1990, Gorbachev ended the Soviet Communist party’s monopoly on power, and almost immediately he was faced with demands on the part of the Baltic republics, which announced their intention to secede from the Soviet Union.

The impact of Gorbachev’s call for perestroika and glasnost’ (Ukrainian: perebudova and hlasnist’) was not fully realized in Soviet Ukraine until 1989. In that year a largely ethnic Ukrainian political umbrella group called Rukh was formed, the Greek Catholic Church and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox churches were allowed to function legally, and the long-time conservative (and anti-Gorbachev) head of the Communist party of Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi, was replaced. When elections to Ukraine’s parliament or Supreme Soviet (Verkhovna Rada) took place in March 1990, Rukh won nearly one-quarter of the seats and together with the Communists declared Ukraine a sovereign state in July 1990.

Sovereign Soviet Ukraine’s actual relationship to the rest of the Soviet Union was not clarified, however, for another year. Again the initiative came from outside Ukraine. In August 1991 conservative political forces in Moscow staged a coup (putch) in an attempt to overthrow Gorbachev.

46.7 Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag brought ceremoniously into parliament in Kiev at the conclusion of the session that declared the country’s independence, August 24, 1991.

With the end of the Soviet rule, a debate arose over what was to be the new structure of independent Ukraine. Most government and independent observers agreed that the Soviet command economy needed to be replaced by some form of free market, although the extent to which large state-owned industrial enterprises and collective farms should be privatized was unclear. There was even less of a consensus regarding the future form of the state. Opinion was divided among those who favored a unitary state with power concentrated in the president and parliament in Kiev versus those who called for a federal state on the model of Germany or Austria, in which Ukraine would be comprised of self-governing regions. When Ukraine’s constitution was finally adopted, in June 1996, the unitary model was adopted, not the federal.

The only exception to the unitary model was the Crimea. After a protracted political process lasting for most of the 1990s, an Autonomous Republic of Crimea was established within the framework of Ukraine. In April 1996 Crimea adopted its own constitution, which two years later was ratified with some changes by Ukraine’s parliament. The Autonomous Republic of Crimea has its own parliament based in the regional capital of Simferopol’, its own cabinet of ministers, and the right to pass legislation as long as it is compatible with the constitution, laws, and other government decrees of Ukraine.

One other region, Transcarpathia, had also hoped to restore its historic autonomy and to acquire self-governing status. In the December 1991 referendum on Ukrainian independence, the residents of Transcarpathia were asked about self-rule (samouprava), as outlined in a proposal formulated by the local regional council (oblasna rada). A significant majority (78 percent) voted in favor, although Transcarpathia was not granted self-governing status.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, the size of Ukraine’s population declined from 51.4 million (1989) to 48.4 million (2001). This is a result of a drop in the birth rate that had begun during Soviet times as well as emigration and lower life expectancy. At the same time the absolute and relative size of the various nationalities has changed, in some cases dramatically (see Table 46.1). Whereas the absolute number of ethnic Ukrainians has basically remained the same, the number of ethnic Russians has declined by over three million. This marked change is the result of three factors: the return of Russians to other parts of the former Soviet Union from which they originally came; the emigration abroad of Jews (a high percentage of whom identified themselves as Russians); and, most especially, the tendency of persons who had identified themselves as Russians during Soviet times, but who now find it more prestigious—or simply more practical in a Ukrainian state—to identify themselves as ethnic Ukrainians.

Among the most serious problems faced by Ukraine at the outset of the new millennium is the direction of economic growth, the slow pace of legal reform, and increased corruption throughout all levels of society and government. During the decade-long presidency of Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004) Ukraine’s currency was stabilized and economic productivity gradually increased. The country’s new-found wealth was anything but evenly distributed, however, and instead was in the hands of a few dozen businessmen and women who, following the collapse of Soviet rule, managed to take over former state-owned enterprises and to create monopolies to increase their income. Several of these enormously wealthy individuals, known to the public as oligarchs, courted favor with President Kuchma in order to protect and enhance their business interests. Government cooperation with some oligarchs and the alienation of others out of favor with the president led to increasing corruption that filtered down throughout all levels of society. All the while the vast majority of the population lived in poverty like conditions and were subject to increasing psychological insecurity caused in large part by the breakdown of health and other social programs that had functioned to some degree under Soviet rule.

TABLE 46.1 Demographic change among the largest nationalities in Ukraine, 1989 and 2001

The worst example of political corruption and the increasing tendency toward authoritarian rule came in 2004, when the government of President Kuchma tried to assure the election of a hand-picked successor. The efforts to rig the October-November 2004 presidential elections failed, however. In what came to be known as the Orange Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens (regardless of ethnic background) protested peacefully and managed to overturn the election results in favor of the opposition candidate, Viktor Iushchenko. As the candidate calling for strong civic institutions as the basis of democracy, for a market economy under the rule of law, and for greater integration with the rest of Europe, Iushchenko was installed as Ukraine’s third president in early 2005.

Both international observers and Iushchenko supporters are convinced that the Orange Revolution will bring the kind of political, economic, and social change that was earlier heralded in central Europe by the revolutions of 1989. As a result of the Orange Revolution, the government of President Iushchenko certainly has the support and good will of many of Ukraine’s citizens as well as that of influential powers on the international scene. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether the events of 2004 marked just another change of government or whether the Orange Revolution has indeed set the groundwork for serious reform and a wide-ranging transformation of Ukrainian society.

46.8 President-elect Viktor Iushchenko (b. 1954) and his coalition ally and soon-to-be prime minister Iuliia Tymoshenko (b.1960), flanked by the president’s American-born wife (far left) and the rock-music star Ruslana (far right), put forth the face of a new Ukraine as they greet their Orange Revolution supporters on the main square of Kiev, December 2004.