The Last Empire (47 page)

His political instincts were immediately rewarded with cries of “Hurrah for Kravchuk!” But the huge crowd, with people at the back
pushing those in front to get a glimpse of the man at the center, was becoming ever more restless. The Ukrainian Speaker suddenly felt excruciating pain and heard a crack—it was his finger. Someone in the crowd had grabbed Kravchuk's hand in an unsuccessful attempt to shake it and broke his finger. “As I looked around, things began to look somewhat frightening,” Kravchuk wrote. “It seemed that if the rather uncertain militia cordon did not hold, we would simply be crushed.” Kravchuk made his way out of the square as the locals continued to chant “hurrah”—a sign of approval of him personally and of the policies he advocated. He got out of Vinnytsia with new confidence in his victory, but his finger was broken, and his shoes were ruined: as his bodyguards dragged him through the crowd, he had dug in his heels so as not to lose balance. This was an aspect of democratic campaigning on which Bush could not have offered advice; who would have thought that the former Soviet officials did not know how to control a crowd?
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In early November, one month before the elections, Kravchuk was leading in the polls with more than 30 percent of the popular vote. His closest rival, a former political prisoner and now head of the Lviv regional administration, Viacheslav Chornovil, was trailing him with slightly more than 12 percent of the projected vote. Kravchuk's competitors believed that the deck was stacked against them, as their opponent had the full support of the state apparatus in the center and regions alike. Indeed, he was not only part and parcel of the establishment but also, under the circumstances, its favorite son and last hope. The former communist elite, initially either hostile to independence or wary of it, now fully embraced it. In August, the communist majority in the Ukrainian parliament had voted for independence on condition that the decision be ratified three months later by a referendum. This gave them an opportunity to change their minds if necessary, but there were no developments after August 24 that required a change of course.
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To be sure, the vote for independence did not save the party, which had been not just suspended but completely outlawed in Ukraine in late August 1991, months before it was fully banned in Russia. The process, however, was quite different. There was no public humiliation of party officials; nor were they deprived of former party property. Instead, one group of party officials calmly transferred party
property to another group: it came under the jurisdiction of the local soviets, regional and city councils controlled more often than not by former communist officials. For most of the former communist elite, independence became a new religion and Kravchuk its prophet, who would save them from the rage of Yeltsin, as well as from that of the democrats and nationalists in their own backyard. These two elements—Kravchuk and independence—were complementary parts of the ticket that would allow them to stay in power. They would do anything to support independence if Kravchuk became president and anything to undermine it if he lost to his rivals either from the pro-Yeltsin democratic camp or from the nationaldemocratic camp.
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KRAVCHUK HAD HIS TASK
cut out for him. Soon after the declaration of Ukrainian independence in August, it became clear that he had to find a way to convince the voters that despite his communist past he was the best candidate to lead them and the country into sovereignty. He also had to convince them to vote for independence. To achieve that goal, he had to appease the regional elites and dissuade them from playing the separatist card; to calm the sizable national and religious minorities, who might be afraid to remain in a Ukrainian-dominated country without the intermediacy and protection of the Union center; and to win over the commanders of Soviet military units, whom the Union or Russian leadership could use as a Trojan horse against Ukrainian independence.

The task of convincing the voters that he was the best candidate for the presidency of Ukraine seemed the easiest one. Since there were five presidential candidates competing with Kravchuk, the democratic vote in Ukraine was split several ways. The urban intelligentsia from the Russified east, which had voted for democrats of Yeltsin's stripe during the perestroika years, found a spokesman in the second deputy Speaker of parliament, Volodymyr Hryniov. An ethnic Russian and a product of the democratic awakening in the city of Kharkiv on the border with Russia, Hryniov was an early and resolute opponent of the coup. He was also one of few deputies who voted against independence on August 24, not because he opposed independence per se but because he did not want the country to be ruled by communists. However, with the Communist Party officially outlawed, Hryniov embraced the idea of an independent Ukraine,
believing that this was what most people wanted at the time. As he subsequently recalled, “It was quite clearly apparent in the course of the election campaign that the mood of the people was oriented on the independence of Ukraine. When you meet the masses, you cannot disguise the mood.”
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The main candidate from the nationaldemocratic bloc, Viacheslav Chornovil, contrasted himself with Kravchuk by telling his life story, claiming that he had always been anticommunist and had not trimmed his views to fit circumstances. A longtime political dissident, first arrested in 1967, Chornovil had had more than enough time in prison camps to think about what kind of Ukraine he wanted and would be able to build. He believed that an independent Ukraine would have to become a federal state. When Chornovil became head of the Lviv regional administration after the first democratic elections in the spring of 1990, he promoted the idea of a Ukrainian federation in which Galicia, a historical region composed of three oblasts with its administrative center in Lviv, would have autonomy. But on the presidential trail he downplayed federalism, claiming that at the moment it undermined the goal of independence.
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For some of Chornovil's rivals in the nationaldemocratic camp, this was too little, too late. Levko Lukianenko, the principal author of the Ukrainian declaration of independence, continued to argue that Chornovil was a federalist and that federalism was harmful to Ukraine, as it would encourage Russian imperial ambitions and provide a legal foundation for separatism. Chornovil, the official candidate of Rukh, and Lukianenko, the head of Rukh's strongest and best-organized political force, the Ukrainian Republican Party, went their separate ways, creating a wedge in nationaldemocratic ranks that benefited Kravchuk. The Ukrainian nationaldemocratic vote was split even further when some members of that camp came out in support of Kravchuk. Many early proponents of Ukrainian independence from the ranks of the intelligentsia believed that his election was the only chance for Ukraine to emerge united and independent.
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For many in the Ukrainian intelligentsia, Kravchuk represented the lesser evil. Those from the national camp suspected that if not closely watched, he might cave in to pressure from Moscow. Pro-Yeltsin democrats from the Hryniov camp considered him too cozy with the nationalists. Neither group could forget his recent communist past.

Even so, those who did not believe that Chornovil or Hryniov could win were prepared to hold their noses and vote strategically for Kravchuk. As Larysa Skoryk, a nationaldemocratic member of parliament, explained to a Canadian correspondent of the
Ukrainian Weekly,
Kravchuk was the man of the hour and right for the job. He was the only pro-independence candidate capable of talking to the communist elite, as he had fully demonstrated during the vote for independence on August 24. According to Skoryk, Kravchuk knew that there was no way back. “He is an extremely clever person,” she told the reporter. “To say that this is a man with high moral values, I cannot. . . . But, on the other hand, is the given moment really one which demands heroics, or is it a moment where super diplomacy is needed?”
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AS KRAVCHUK WROTE
in his memoirs, winning the presidency would be meaningless unless Ukraine voted for independence. One thing he did not want was to become governor-general of a province ruled from Moscow. Very early in the campaign, with his position as front-runner consolidated and secure, Kravchuk decided that his best strategy was to campaign not for himself but for Ukrainian independence. This worked well with voters. There was a steady growth in the number of those who favored independence: 65 percent in late September; close to 70 percent of those polled and more than 80 percent of those intending to vote in the election by early November. It was most important that the number exceed the threshold of 70 percent—the level of support among Ukrainian voters for a renewed union registered in the March 1991 referendum initiated by Gorbachev. That result was Gorbachev's main weapon in his struggle to keep the Soviet Union alive.

Kravchuk faced a formidable challenge. Not only did he have to beat the results of the March referendum, he also needed to obtain a yes vote of at least 50 percent in every region of Ukraine. Otherwise, the legitimacy of Ukrainian independence would be challenged both at home and in Moscow, to say nothing of the West. Nothing could be left to chance. Kravchuk and his supporters deliberated for some time on the wording of the question that they would ask on December 1. Pollsters told them that if people were asked not only whether they supported independence but also whether they approved the August declaration of independence adopted by the Ukrainian parliament,
the results were usually better. The word “independence” had been discredited by decades of Soviet propaganda in eastern Ukraine. But parliament's sanction was giving the word and concept a new legitimacy that appealed to conservative voters. On the eve of the referendum, the presidium of parliament issued an appeal to the population of Ukraine, making one last point in the debate. It said that not supporting independence meant supporting dependence. Few people wanted their republic to remain dependent on Moscow.

One of the main problems faced by proponents of Ukrainian independence—from Kravchuk and Hryniov to Chornovil and Lukianenko—in their respective campaigns was the country's regional and cultural diversity. This was the card that Georgii Shakhnazarov proposed Gorbachev play to stem the growing pro-independence tide in Ukraine and the problem that Gorbachev never tired of mentioning to anyone who would listen. While pollsters predicted a strong vote for independence in Ukraine as a whole, the degree of support varied from region to region. Support was strongest in Galicia, which had formerly been ruled by Austria and Poland. In Ternopil oblast in Galicia, more than 92 percent of those polled favored independence. Kravchuk's native Volhynia, which had been part of Poland during the interwar period but never part of Austria-Hungary, was not far behind, with close to 88 percent of the projected vote favoring independence. Kyiv and central Ukraine had jumped on the independence bandwagon as well, but support for independence in some of Ukraine's eastern and southern provinces was barely above 50 percent. Those were the regions that had been fully colonized only in the nineteenth century under the rule of the Russian Empire and had experienced a major influx of ethnic Russians in the Soviet period. There, Kravchuk was significantly ahead of his main rival, Viacheslav Chornovil. His election was an assurance for many that if independence actually came, it would not take the form of radical nationalism.
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On October 23 Kravchuk flew to Ukraine's most independent-minded region, the autonomous republic of the Crimea, to convince the local parliament to support Ukrainian independence. The Crimea, a peninsula connected to Ukraine's mainland by a strip of land seven kilometers wide and divided from Russia by the four and a half kilometers of the Kerch Strait, had belonged to the Russian Federation before 1954. It was transferred to Ukraine during the rule
of Nikita Khrushchev for economic reasons and was one of twenty-five Ukrainian oblasts until February 1991. That changed after the Crimean referendum of January 1991, which endorsed not only autonomy for the Crimea but also its right to be a signatory to the new union treaty. In early 1991 Gorbachev and the center were busy building up the status of the autonomies in order to counterpose them to sovereignty-minded leaders of the Union republics. The tactic worked only to a degree. When in August 1991 Gorbachev invited Nikolai Bagrov, the Speaker of the Crimean parliament, to come to Moscow for the signing of the union treaty, Bagrov politely declined the invitation. It was already clear to everyone that Ukraine would not participate in the agreement.

But the Ukrainian leaders' problems with the Crimea in the fall of 1991 were not all of Gorbachev's making. In February 1991, the Kyiv authorities agreed to grant the Crimea autonomous status partly because it was the only region of the country where ethnic Ukrainians were a minority (a quarter of the population). More than 67 percent of the population consisted of ethnic Russians, who dominated Crimean politics and culture. There were no Ukrainian-language schools in the Crimea, few ethnic Ukrainians used the Ukrainian language in everyday life, and only half claimed Ukrainian as their native tongue—an indication that their Ukrainian identity was anything but strong. An additional concern for the Kyiv authorities was the presence in the Crimea of officers and sailors of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and military retirees opposed to Ukrainian independence. The Crimean Tatars, who had been deported from the peninsula by Stalin in 1944 on charges of collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation, were beginning to return to their ancestral homeland, adding new complexity to the ethnic balance.
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Kravchuk came to the Crimea on the day when its parliament was scheduled to vote on the law regulating the local referendum that was to put the question of the Crimea's secession from Ukraine to a popular vote. He managed to convince the Crimean parliament to postpone the adoption of the law and cancel the referendum. His argument was simple: if the Crimea was an autonomous part of Ukraine, its parliament would have enough power to solve the region's problems without interference from Kyiv. The former communist elite, who had worked with Kyiv since 1954, agreed to postpone the
vote on the law. Their opponents in parliament, represented by the Republican Movement of the Crimea, which favored the referendum, were outvoted.