In late June 1991, the CIA prepared an intelligence estimate for the president and his advisers, laying out possible scenarios for developments in the USSR. Only one of them, violent fragmentation, included the possibility of Ukrainian independence. Two other options were further “muddling through” and a coup by hard-liners, with the Soviet Union remaining intact. The last option, called “System Change,” foresaw independence for the Baltics, the three North Caucasus republics, and Moldova, with Ukraine entering a Russia-dominated Slavic–Central Asian union. Yeltsin wanted Ukraine to be part of that union, while Gorbachev feared “violent fragmentation.” It appeared that the CIA, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin were all agreed on one thing: if the United States wanted a peaceful transformation of the Soviet regime, which was now abiding by the START agreements to cut its nuclear arsenals, it should make certain that Ukraine stayed in the Union.5
Bush was reminded of the importance of the Soviet nationality question during his talks with Gorbachev at Novo-Ogarevo. Gorbachev’s monologue on the future of the Soviet-American world order was interrupted by a message for Bush. Nicholas Burns, a thirty-five-year-old staffer on the National Security Council and the White House liaison to Baltic Americans, had received a call from one of his Baltic acquaintances with the news that unidentified gunmen had attacked a recently established customs post on the Lithuanian border with Belarus and killed six Lithuanian customs agents in execution style. Burns passed the news to President Bush and his party in Novo-Ogarevo. Gorbachev was at once humiliated and infuriated; according to Bush, he visibly paled. The American president had heard of a shooting on Soviet territory before the country’s own chief executive! Gorbachev sent advisers to find out what was going on. The US embassy believed that it was the work of the OMON, a special unit of the Interior Ministry forces. The Americans suspected that hard-liners in Moscow had arranged the incident to embarrass Gorbachev. If that was the case, they achieved their goal. Gorbachev’s presentation of his vision of a new world order was cut short. “A pall fell over the meeting,” remembered Bush. “We resumed the discussions but the ebullient spirit was gone.”
As far as Gorbachev was concerned, the tragic events in Lithuania had given new urgency to the problem of self-determination, raising the specter of civil war in the USSR. He took the opportunity to switch his discussion with Bush to problems of national self-determination and requested American assistance with regard to Soviet policy in Yugoslavia, where Moscow wanted to prevent the disintegration of another Slavic-Muslim state. He also wanted support vis-à-vis the Soviet republics. “There are an enormous number of real and imaginary international and inter-ethnic problems,” Bush told Gorbachev. “Carving up states along these lines means provoking utter chaos. If I were to start listing the potential territorial problems, I wouldn’t have enough fingers, not just on my own hands but on everyone’s here. For example, here is the Soviet Union, 70% of inter-republic borders have not been definitely drawn. Before, no one cared about that, and everything was decided pragmatically, virtually at the district soviet level.” If news of the killings on the newly established Lithuanian border embarrassed Gorbachev before Bush, it also legitimized his fears about the possibility of Yugoslav-type chaos in the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev’s perspective, the news came at a most opportune time—on the eve of Bush’s “unsupervised” visit to Ukraine.6
SOON AFTER 1:00 P.M. ON AUGUST 1, 1991, the leaders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic gathered at Boryspil airport near Kyiv to welcome their guests of honor. It was the second time that an American president was visiting the city. The first visit occurred in late May 1972, when Bush’s onetime patron, Richard Nixon, came to the Ukrainian capital after signing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Leonid Brezhnev. He flew to Kyiv from Moscow on a Soviet plane that had to be changed at the last minute because of a technical problem detected on the ground in Moscow. George Bush flew to Kyiv on the newly built Air Force One, a Boeing 747 jet that had replaced the Boeing 707 used by American presidents from Nixon to Reagan. Back in 1972, Nixon had found the interior of the Soviet plane that took him to Kyiv quite impressive—as he remembered later, “in some ways more impressive even than ours.”7
Now George Bush was proud to show off the interior of his own brand-new plane, designed in American Southwest style at the suggestion of Nancy Reagan, to Gennadii Yanaev, the Soviet vice president. Yanaev had greeted the Bushes on their arrival in Moscow, and Gorbachev had asked Bush to take him along to Kyiv. Some Americans believed that Gorbachev’s motive was to underscore Ukraine’s membership in the USSR, while others thought Yanaev was being assigned to keep an eye on the American president. As Air Force One took off, Bush led Yanaev on a tour of the airplane, including the presidential command center. Yanaev, whom Bush later identified as the most senior Soviet official to fly on Air Force One, responded with polite comments. Bush later told his aides that the Soviet vice president was a “friendly sort of guy” but “not a heavy hitter.”8
While Bush entertained his Soviet guest on the flight to Kyiv, the members of his staff became involved in a linguistic debate with major political implications. Jack Matlock, who was shown the text of the speech that Bush was scheduled to deliver later that day in the Ukrainian parliament, protested to one of the speechwriters against the use of the definite article with “Ukraine.” The ambassador told his interlocutor, “Make sure the president leaves out the article. He should just say ‘Ukraine.’ Ukrainian Americans think the article makes it sound like a geographic area rather than a country.” The speechwriter protested, “But we say ‘the United States,’ don’t we?” But Matlock eventually prevailed. His argument was not linguistic but political: “If the president says ‘the Ukraine,’ the White House will be getting thousands of letters and telegrams in protest next week.”
The United States had close to 750,000 citizens of Ukrainian descent. Canada had another million. It was not a huge community by North American standards, but it was well organized, politically active, and persistent. Throughout the Cold War, leaders of the Ukrainian American diaspora had successfully urged their followers to vote Republican. Bush was aware of this, and on hearing Matlock’s political argument, he endorsed it. Dropping the article would appease his voters at home without hurting Gorbachev: the Russian language has neither definite nor indefinite articles. The version of the speech now on the website of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, includes a few passages where the definite article before “Ukraine” was overlooked and not stricken from the text—a sign of the confusion prevailing on the issue among the president’s advisers during their flight to Kyiv. Matlock also tried to strike passages from Bush’s speech that lent support to Gorbachev and the new union treaty, as he considered them inappropriate in Kyiv, but it was too late—the text of the speech had already been distributed to journalists.9
“In Kiev, capital of the Ukraine on the Dnieper River 515 miles south of Moscow, Bush will see a different face of the Soviet Union,” read the advance pool report for the members of American media. “The city is neat and clean with broad, tree-lined avenues and will make for a colorful, moving finale of the trip.” The author of the report joked that the real reason for the president’s visit was to launch the campaign of the deputy White House news secretary, an ethnic Ukrainian named Roman Popadiuk, for the Ukrainian presidency. “His campaign slogan: I have nothing for you on that,” quipped the author of the report.
Kyiv was welcoming Bush not as the “mother of Russian cities,” as Richard Nixon had referred to it nineteen years earlier, but as the capital of a sovereign if not yet independent state. A sign at the terminal read, “Mr. Bush, welcome to Ukraine!” Besides the Soviet and American anthems, the band played the anthem of Ukraine. The degree of Ukraine’s allegiance to Moscow was an open question. Jack Matlock, who had accompanied Nixon on his 1972 visit, noticed other differences as well. The speeches were now given in Engli
sh and Ukrainian, not in English and Russian, as had been the case in 1972.10
These were different times. Nixon had flown to Kyiv ten days after Brezhnev replaced the nationally minded party boss of Ukraine, Petro Shelest, with his own loyalist, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. Brezhnev’s protégé crushed the national revival then under way in Ukraine, turning it into an exemplary Soviet republic and a bulwark of Moscow’s rule in the USSR. A native of the same Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine as Brezhnev, Shcherbytsky was a key figure in the Dnipropetrovsk clan, a group of Brezhnev loyalists who effectively ruled the Soviet Union until the death of their boss in November 1982. Shcherbytsky created a pyramid of party officials in Ukraine personally loyal to him, and it took four long years for Gorbachev to become powerful enough to remove him from office in the fall of 1989.
Since the 1950s, the Ukrainian party elite had not only governed its own republic but also become a junior partner in running the Soviet Union. The “second Soviet republic,” as Ukraine became known to political scientists in the West, had entered into an informal power-sharing agreement with its Russian counterpart in the 1950s, when the Ukrainian establishment helped propel its former boss, the longtime first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, to power in Moscow. Given that the Russians did not have their own communist party and ran the all-Union party instead, the Ukrainian party cadres emerged as the largest voting bloc at party congresses in Moscow. They used their voting power well. Khrushchev brought dozens of his Ukrainian backers to Moscow and appointed them to positions of power there. If anything, his ouster from power in the Kremlin coup of 1964 enhanced the status of the Ukrainian cadres.
Khrushchev’s replacement at the helm of the party was Leonid Brezhnev, an ethnic Russian from Ukraine who had given “Ukrainian” as his nationality on his party registration card in the 1930s. Nikolai Podgorny (Ukrainian: Mykola Pidhorny), another native of Ukraine, became the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the formal head of the Soviet state. The post of head of government went to an ethnic Russian, Aleksei Kosygin, but when he died in the late 1970s, his replacement was another former Ukrainian functionary, Nikolai Tikhonov. The minister of internal affairs and two deputy heads of the KGB were members of the Brezhnev clan and products of the Ukrainian party machine. The rule of the Dnipropetrovsk clan was supposed to continue even after Brezhnev’s demise: the ailing leader saw Volodymyr Shcherbytsky as his successor.
But after Brezhnev’s death in 1982, the KGB under Yurii Andropov took control of the Kremlin. Andropov brought to prominence Gorbachev, who, although half Ukrainian, had no links to the party machine in Ukraine or to Ukrainians in the capital. Furthermore, Gorbachev removed Shcherbytsky from his post in Ukraine and blocked the pipeline that was bringing Ukrainian functionaries to Moscow and making them influential there. With no prospect of furthering their careers in the center and under attack at home, the Ukrainian party elite felt betrayed by Moscow. The deal they had had with the Union since the time of Khrushchev—loyalty in exchange for unlimited rule at home and power sharing in the center—was no longer in effect, and they were not the ones who had abrogated it.
Resentment in the party elite had begun soon after the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in April 1986. The power station was entirely under Moscow’s control, but it was the Ukrainian authorities who were left to deal with the long-term consequences of the disaster and take care of those resettled from the contaminated areas. Besides, Moscow pushed for a May Day parade even as the radioactive cloud reached Kyiv. The party elite believed that Gorbachev had forced Shcherbytsky to hold the parade, threatening him with expulsion from the party if he did not comply. Chernobyl unleashed a mass protest movement against the authorities, and again it was the party elite in Ukraine that had to deal with the situation. On top of that, the center was now encouraging democratic movements in the republic, which would further undermine the authorities’ power. The Ukrainian party elite felt betrayed, abandoned, and angry. The center was now bringing them nothing but trouble.11
On their arrival in Kyiv, George and Barbara Bush were greeted by the fifty-seven-year-old Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Leonid Kravchuk. A pool report characterized Kravchuk as “a dynamic-looking, silver-maned, tanned guy who looks a little like John Gotti; he is obviously a natural politician, maybe the Newt Gingrich of the Ukraine.” Kravchuk’s background could not have been more different from those of the notorious New York Mafia boss or the rising star of the Republican Party. A former party apparatchik, now into his second year in the Speaker’s office, Kravchuk performed a difficult balancing act, maintaining a veneer of loyalty to the center while aggressively advancing the interests of his homeland in relations with the weakened Gorbachev and the increasingly powerful republican leaders. He also emerged as the only figure capable of reconciling the interests of the Shcherbytskyera party machine with the agendas of the rising pro-independence and democratic movements in Ukraine.12
A member of the same generation as Gorbachev and Yeltsin (Kravchuk was born in 1934), the Ukrainian leader had a background different from that of his Moscow counterparts. Born in the western Ukrainian province of Volhynia, which was then part of Joseph Pilsudski’s Poland, Kravchuk experienced firsthand the brutality of World War II, which brought not only opposing German and Soviet armies but also the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, and a struggle between Ukrainian and Polish nationalist guerillas to his home region. His father was killed fighting the Germans as a Red Army soldier, and the young Kravchuk learned survival skills early. As he later recalled, his grandfather’s philosophy was not to stick out one’s neck.
Having witnessed the secret police persecution of surviving members of the Ukrainian national movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kravchuk had no need of Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956 to show him the political bias of the Soviet judicial system in the era of Stalin’s “cult of personality.” Still, not unlike Gorbachev and Yeltsin, whose relatives had been persecuted during the Great Terror, Kravchuk apparently had no qualms about serving the Communist Party. After graduating from Kyiv University with a diploma in political economy, he made a spectacular career for himself. Whereas Gorbachev and Yeltsin were party bosses entrusted with running huge regions of the Soviet Union, Kravchuk was an apparatchik, or party bureaucrat, par excellence.
By the 1980s, Kravchuk, a former Polish subject, had risen through the ranks to head the Communist Party propaganda apparatus in Ukraine. Given that he did not come from the industrial Donbas in eastern Ukraine or belong to the Dnipropetrovsk clan, this was probably the highest position to which he could aspire in Brezhnev’s USSR. But then came Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, the first semi-free elections, and the party’s need for people who could speak to the masses and hold their own in debates with political opponents. Kravchuk turned out to be a master of this trade and was promoted to secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee in charge of ideology after Shcherbytsky, who never trusted the Volhynian propaganda genius, was forced to retire in the fall of 1989.
In the summer of 1990 Kravchuk became Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, replacing Volodymyr Ivashko, a party boss whom Gorbachev summoned to Moscow to serve as his second in command in the party apparatus in an attempt to restore the shaken Russo-Ukrainian partnership at the center. Kravchuk found himself at the helm of a legislative body in which roughly one-third of the deputies advocated independence, while two-thirds were bent on enhancing their autonomy in the USSR. “As chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet,” read Kravchuk’s biography in Bush’s briefing book, “Kravchuk must carefully balance the demands of the Communist majority in the legislature with those of independent-minded deputies.” Indeed, he skillfully maneuvered between the two factions, finding common ground in a policy of endowing the declaration of Ukrainian sovereignty adopted by the parliament that summer with political and economic substance. David Remnick, reporting on Bush’s visit to Kyiv for the Washington Post, quoted Kravchuk as saying that he saw an opportu
nity to create a full-blooded Ukrainian state and was not going to miss the chance.13
Kravchuk was happy to welcome his prominent American guest in Kyiv, although the visit itself came as a surprise to him. As he recalled later, Moscow allowed him no part in preparing the visit, and at the last moment he was recalled from vacation to greet the American president. He flew from the Crimea directly to Boryspil airport—the press noticed his suntan—with no time to go into the city. Kravchuk began his address by welcoming George and Barbara Bush on “Ukrainian soil,” pointedly referring to Ukraine rather than the Soviet Union but avoiding any reference to it as a country or a republic. Like the president’s advisers who were concerned about the use of the definite article with “Ukraine,” Kravchuk had his own linguistic conundrum to solve. For a year, Ukraine had been an officially sovereign but not independent state. What was the difference? No one but Gorbachev seemed to know, and Kravchuk did his best to equate the two terms. “The American Nation knows only [[too]] well the price of genuine sovereignty, and the Declaration of Independence was one of the first to proclaim to the whole world the ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood,” he told his American guests.
George Bush was not prepared to endorse Kravchuk’s equation of sovereignty with independence (he would draw a distinction between freedom and independence a few hours later). In his response to the Speaker’s greetings, Bush began with less controversial matters. He noted that Ukraine was the ancestral homeland (he used the Soviet-friendly term “motherland”) of hundreds of thousands of Americans. He quoted Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, and welcomed the return to Ukraine from the West of Christian church leaders once banned by Moscow and the beginning of the spiritual revival of other religious groups. On Washington’s relations with the republics, he was as cautious as he had been in his talks with Yeltsin. “We want to retain the strongest possible official relationship with the Gorbachev government,” declared Bush, “but we also appreciate the importance of more extensive ties with Ukraine and other Republics, with all the peoples of the Soviet Union.” Apparently he managed to deliver his first brief address on Ukrainian soil without ever using the definite article before “Ukraine.”14
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