The Gates of Europe
Page 40
Bush took Gorbachev’s side in his address to the Ukrainian parliament, dubbed by the American media his “Chicken Kiev speech” because of the American president’s reluctance to endorse the independence aspirations of the national democratic deputies. Bush favored setting the Baltic republics free but keeping Ukraine and the rest together. He did not want to lose a reliable partner on the world stage—Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that he represented. Moreover, Bush and his advisers were concerned about the possibility of an uncontrolled disintegration of the union, which could lead to wars between republics with nuclear arms on their territory. Apart from Russia, these included Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. In his speech to the Ukrainian parliament, President Bush appealed to his audience to renounce “suicidal nationalism” and avoid confusing freedom with independence. The communist majority applauded him with enthusiasm. The democratic minority was disappointed: the alliance of Washington with Moscow and the communist deputies in the Ukrainian parliament presented a major obstacle to Ukrainian independence. It was hard to imagine that before the month was out, parliament would vote almost unanimously for the independence of Ukraine and that by the end of November, the White House, initially concerned about the possibility of chaos and nuclear war in the post-Soviet state, would endorse that vote.
The event that triggered the change of heart among the conservative deputies of the Ukrainian parliament and, in time, throughout the world was the hard-liners’ coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow on August 19, 1991. The coup had in fact begun a day earlier in Ukraine, more specifically in the Crimea, where Gorbachev was taking his summer vacation. On the evening of August 18, the plotters showed up on the doorstep of his seaside mansion near Foros and demanded the introduction of martial law. Gorbachev refused to sign the papers, forcing the plotters to act on their own. On the following day, in Moscow, the plotters, led by the KGB chief and the ministers of defense and interior, declared a state of emergency throughout the USSR. The Ukrainian leadership, headed by Kravchuk, refused to implement the emergency measures in their republic but, in striking contrast to Russian president Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, did nothing to challenge the coup. While Kravchuk called for the people of Ukraine to stay calm, Yeltsin brought his supporters into the streets and forced the military to withdraw from Moscow after the first skirmishes between the army and the protesters resulted in fatalities. The plotters blinked and lost. In less than seventy-two hours, the coup was over and the plotters under arrest. Muscovites poured into the streets to celebrate the victory not only of freedom over dictatorship but also of Russia over the union center.
Gorbachev returned to Moscow but proved incapable of regaining power. In fact, he fell victim to another coup, led this time by Yeltsin, who took advantage of the weakening of the center to start Russia’s takeover of the union. He forced Gorbachev to rescind decrees appointing his people as heads of the army, police, and security forces, and then suspended the activities of the Communist Party, leaving Gorbachev no choice but to resign as its general secretary. Russia was effectively taking over the union—an unexpected turn of events that diminished interest in the union among those republics that had wanted to be part of it until August 1991. Ukraine was now leading the way out.
On August 24, 1991, the day after Yeltsin took control of the union government, the Ukrainian parliament held a vote on independence. “In view of the mortal danger hanging over Ukraine in connection with the coup d’état on 19 August 1991, and continuing the thousand-year tradition of state building in Ukraine,” read the declaration of independence drafted by Levko Lukianenko, the longest-serving prisoner of the Gulag and now a member of parliament, “the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly declares the independence of Ukraine.” The results of the vote came as a surprise to everyone, including Lukianenko himself: 346 deputies voted in favor, 5 abstained, and only 2 voted against. The communist majority that had opposed independence since the first session of parliament in the spring of 1990 was no longer in evidence. Kravchuk and his “pro-sovereignty communists,” under attack from the opposition for not having opposed the coup, closed ranks with the national democrats and brought along the hard-liners, who felt betrayed by Moscow and threatened by Yeltsin’s attack on the party. Once the result of the vote appeared on the screen, the hall exploded in applause. The crowds outside the parliament building were jubilant: Ukraine was free at last!
Lukianenko’s declaration referred to the thousand-year history of Ukrainian statehood, meaning the tradition established by Kyivan Rus’. His declaration was in fact the fourth attempt to proclaim Ukrainian independence in the twentieth century: the first occurred in 1918 in Kyiv and then in Lviv, the second in 1939 in Transcarpathia, and the third in 1941 in Lviv. All those attempts had been made in wartime, and all had come to grief. Would this one be different? The next three months would tell. A popular referendum scheduled for December 1, 1991, the same day as the previously scheduled election of Ukraine’s first president, would confirm or reject the parliamentary vote for independence. The referendum provision was important for more than one reason. On August 24, it helped those members of the communist majority who had doubts about independence to vote in favor of it—theirs, after all, was not the final decision and could be reversed in the future. The referendum also gave Ukraine a chance to leave the union without open conflict with the center. In the previous referendum organized by Gorbachev in March 1991, about 70 percent of Ukrainians had voted to stay in a reformed union. Now another referendum would enable it to make a clean break.
Gorbachev believed that support for independence in Ukraine would never reach 70 percent. Yeltsin was not so sure. In late August 1991, soon after the Ukrainian parliament had voted for independence, he instructed his press secretary to make a statement that if Ukraine and other republics declared independence, Russia would have the right to open the question of its borders with those republics. Yeltsin’s press secretary indicated the Crimea and eastern parts of Ukraine, including the Donbas coal region, as possible areas of contention. The threat was partition if Ukraine insisted on independence. Yeltsin then sent a high-powered delegation led by his vice president, General Aleksandr Rutskoi, to force Ukraine to reverse its stance. But the Ukrainians stood their ground, and Rutskoi returned to Moscow empty-handed. Blackmail had failed, and Yeltsin had neither the political will nor the resources to deliver on his threat.
In September 1991, Ukraine entered a new political season. Six candidates were contending for the presidency, and all of them were campaigning for independence. Kravchuk convinced the Crimean authorities to shelve their plans for a separate referendum on the peninsula’s independence from Ukraine. Polling numbers showed growing support for independence among all national groups and in all regions of the country. The two largest minorities—the Russians, who numbered more than 11 million, and the Jews, whose numbers approached 500,000—were expressing support for the idea of Ukrainian independence. In November 1991, 58 percent of ethnic Russians and 60 percent of ethnic Jews were in favor. The minorities now embraced the Ukrainian cause, as they had not done in 1918, regarding Moscow with greater concern and suspicion than the capital of their republic.
On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds went to the polls to decide their fate. The results were mind-boggling for even the most optimistic proponents of independence. The turnout reached 84 percent, with more than 90 percent of voters supporting independence. Western Ukraine led the way, with 99 percent in favor in the Ternopil oblast of Galicia. But the center, south, and even the east were not far behind. In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatar
s, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.) In the center and east of the country, many voted for independence while supporting Leonid Kravchuk’s bid for the presidency. He won 61 percent of the popular vote, obtaining a majority in all regions of Ukraine except Galicia. There, victory went to the longtime Gulag prisoner and head of the Lviv regional administration Viacheslav Chornovil. Ukraine voted for independence and entrusted its future to a presidential candidate who, many believed, could strike a balance between Ukraine’s various regions and nationalities, as well as between the republic’s communist past and its independent future.
The vote for Ukraine’s independence spelled the end of the Soviet Union. Those participating in the referendum had changed not only their own fate but the course of world history. Ukraine freed the rest of the Soviet republics still dependent on Moscow. Yeltsin made a final attempt to convince Kravchuk to sign a new union treaty when he met with him at a Belarusian hunting lodge in Belavezha Forest on December 8, 1991. Kravchuk refused, citing the results of the referendum in all oblasts of Ukraine, including Crimea and the east. Yeltsin backed off. If Ukraine was not prepared to sign, Russia would not do so either, he told the newly elected Ukrainian president. Yeltsin had explained to the president of the United States more than once that without Ukraine, Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim republics. A union including neither Ukraine nor Russia, with its huge energy resources, had no political or economic attraction for the other republics. At Belavezha the three leaders of the Slavic republics—Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Stanislaŭ Shushkevich of Belarus—created a new international body, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which the Central Asian republics joined on December 21. The Soviet Union was no more.
On Christmas Day, December 25, 1991, Gorbachev read his resignation speech on national television. The red banner of the Soviet Union was run down the flagpole of the Kremlin’s senate building, to be replaced with the Russian tricolor—red, blue, and white. Kyiv’s colors were blue and yellow. There was no longer a symbolic link between Moscow and Kyiv. After four unsuccessful attempts, undertaken by different political forces under various circumstances, Ukraine was now not only united but also independent and free to go its own way. What had seemed impossible only a few months earlier had become a reality: the empire was gone, and a new country had been born. The old communist elites and the leaders of the young and ambitious national democrats had joined forces to make history, with Ukraine as the gravedigger of the last European empire. They now had to find a way to create the future.
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. The entity that would take the place of the vanished empire—whether a community of truly independent states or the reincarnation of a Russia-dominated polity—was anything but a given. The first challenge facing the newly elected president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, and his aides after Gorbachev’s resignation entailed convincing their Russian counterparts that the Commonwealth of Independent States was anything but a reincarnation of the USSR. That was no easy task.
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. The tensions between Russia, which viewed the commonwealth as an instrument for the reintegration of the post-Soviet space, and Ukraine, which insisted on full independence from Moscow, came to the fore in January 1993, when Ukraine refused to sign the Statute of the Commonwealth and thus declined to become a full member of the organization it had helped create two years earlier. The country would take an active part in the economic program and initiatives of the commonwealth but not in military ones. Ukraine never signed the statute. In the course of the 1990s, Kyiv also refused to sign numerous agreements on collective security with other commonwealth members. Kyiv had serious disagreements with Moscow regarding the future of the Soviet armed forces, control over nuclear arsenals, and the disposition of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.
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. On January 3, 1992, the first group of Soviet officers swore allegiance to independent Ukraine. The Ukrainian takeover of the 800,000-strong Soviet ground forces was complete by the spring of 1992. Officers had the choice of swearing allegiance to Ukraine and staying in service or moving to Russia or other parts of the former Soviet Union. In all, there were 75,000 ethnic Russians in the Soviet forces stationed in Ukraine. About 10,000 officers refused to take the oath and either retired or were transferred. Soldiers and noncommissioned officers conscripted into the Soviet army returned home, wherever that might be. New conscripts now came from Ukraine alone.
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 do
or 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.