The Last Empire (49 page)

Morozov was in fact a native of Ukraine and half Ukrainian by birth. Born and educated in the Russified eastern part of the country, where most of the population spoke Russian or a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, he had studied standard Ukrainian in school but had not used it in more than thirty years of military service. His appointment to Kyiv to command airborne troops was a major error on the part of the General Staff in Moscow. According to an unwritten law of the Soviet military, under no circumstances could ethnic Ukrainian officers be allowed to serve in positions of high authority in Ukraine. The same rule applied to other ethnic groups in their native republics. General Dzhokhar Dudaev, the future leader of independent Chechnia, served under Morozov's command in Ukraine but was not allowed to hold command positions in his native land. Even in Ukraine, his promotion to the rank of general was not free of problems. He was accused of nationalism for dancing the
lezginka,
a national dance of many ethnic groups in the Caucasus, upon learning of the promotion.

Morozov got around the restrictions on Soviet ethnic minorities because, according to his documents, he was Russian, not Ukrainian. When he declared his support for Ukrainian independence in the autumn of 1991, his commanders in Moscow, including his former patron, Marshal Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, now the Soviet minister of defense, could not believe their ears. Shaposhnikov twice asked Morozov whether he was indeed Ukrainian. Morozov responded half jokingly that an error had apparently made its way into his personal file. For his commanders, as Morozov recalled later, half Russian meant Russian. His case underlined the complexity of Russo-Ukrainian relations and the blurring of the two cultures and identities as Russification of ethnic Ukrainians gathered speed in the course of the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union, people of mixed ethnic parentage, including Morozov, could choose their nationality at will. Many chose Russian as their passport nationality but, having been
born and raised in Ukraine, considered the latter their true homeland. Morozov was one of them.
¹⁷

Language, identity, and loyalty were three major issues that Morozov had to tackle in his capacity as chief architect of the Ukrainian armed forces. The importance of language came to the fore in October 1991 when he met a visiting American academic, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter came to Kyiv on the eve of the Ukrainian parliament's adoption of a resolution on the country's nonnuclear status. After his official conversation with the newly appointed minister of defense, Brzezinski asked Morozov whether they could speak privately. As Morozov remembered later, he agreed but was somewhat puzzled—he did not speak English, and Brzezinski was not prepared to switch to Russian. Eventually they found a way to communicate: Brzezinski, being of Polish origin, spoke Polish, while Morozov spoke Ukrainian. They understood each other perfectly well. One of the questions Brzezinski asked privately dealt with the language of Ukraine's armed forces: should it be Ukrainian or Russian? Morozov replied that it would be difficult to switch, but he felt that the language should be Ukrainian. Brzezinski liked what he heard and said something to Morozov that would be carved in the latter's memory forever: “The order to defend the nation should be given in the national language.”
¹⁸

For the time being, however, language would have to wait, not only because the minister of defense himself was still taking private Ukrainian lessons but also because the model of recruitment that Morozov and Kravchuk had chosen to implement did not include or even allow for the prompt introduction of a new language regime. It would have been possible only if Ukraine had followed the Baltic example, where the governments of the newly independent states demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from their territory and recruited their armed forces from scratch. Kravchuk and Morozov considered that infeasible in Ukraine. The Soviet army of seven hundred thousand had nowhere to go. Russia was still struggling and would struggle for years with the task of repatriating and resettling troops withdrawn from Eastern Europe. Kyiv had no choice but to take command of Soviet troops and Ukrainize them in the process.

This was relatively easy when it came to draftees: soldiers recruited in Ukraine would replace those from other republics. Nor was there
a problem with noncommissioned officers, who were all local. But the officer corps had been recruited from all over the Soviet Union. Morozov and his people did not intend to follow the nationality policy of the old Soviet army. Passport nationality would be only one of the criteria for deciding the fate of a given officer. He would not necessarily stay in Ukraine if he was a passport Ukrainian and/or be sent away if he was a passport Russian or Armenian. What mattered no less was the officer's place of birth and family ties, as well as other links to Ukraine. Last but not least, the officer would have to manifest a desire to serve Ukraine. If those criteria were met, he would be welcome: language acquisition could wait. Kravchuk was trying to build a political nation out of Ukraine's multiethnic population, and Morozov was recruiting the Ukrainian officer corps on the same principle.

Nuclear arms presented another challenge to the idea of Ukrainian independence. Morozov wanted an independent Ukrainian army, but initially neither he nor his political masters challenged the principle that nuclear forces on Ukrainian territory should be commanded from Moscow. That view was shaken by a conversation with another of Morozov's new American acquaintances, the national security adviser and secretary of state in Richard Nixon's administration, Henry Kissinger. At their first meeting, Kissinger seemed half asleep, but the questions he asked the minister showed a mind working in unexpected ways. When Kissinger inquired what Morozov and the Ukrainian leaders were going to do with the nuclear arms and strategic armed forces on their territory, Morozov answered as he had always done: strategic arms would be under the central control of Moscow. The apparently sleepy Kissinger asked a blunt follow-up question: “And what, then, is independence?” The question overturned all of Morozov's previous thinking on the issue. Ukraine could not take over strategic nuclear forces on its territory without becoming an international pariah, but if its leaders were serious about independence, they could not allow major military formations in their country to report to Moscow rather than to Kyiv. This was the origin of Morozov's conclusion that the strategic forces should be transferred to Russia: better to lose them than to keep a Trojan horse inside the country.

For most of the autumn of 1991, Morozov's plans for the Ukrainian armed forces remained little more than a vision. The Moscow authorities rejected the idea of Kyiv's takeover of military formations
based in Ukraine, proposing that Morozov remain the commander of Soviet airborne troops there (and continue to take orders from the General Staff) while moonlighting as an official of the Ukrainian government. As Morozov recalled, they could not bring themselves to pronounce the title “minister of defense.” He requested the transfer from Moscow of a number of General Staff officers who were natives of Ukraine and had volunteered to help build its army. They were sent to Kyiv but distrusted thereafter by their former colleagues.

Morozov established his headquarters in the offices of a former party building in downtown Kyiv. The office was severely understaffed and underfunded. Morozov communicated with his people on the ground mainly by telephone, and the Ukrainian diaspora in North America donated a couple of fax machines. At first he drove the car that he had used as commander of airborne troops. Morozov's small staff relied on volunteers in individual military units stationed in Ukraine to collect information about what was going on there. In some units, his officers worked virtually under cover. Morozov himself was barely tolerated by the commanders of Ukrainian military districts, all of whom held military rank higher than his.

In November, a rumor began to make the rounds that General Viktor Chechevatov, the commander of the Kyiv military district and one of the officers who had visited Kravchuk during the coup as part of General Varennikov's entourage, had issued an order to arrest Morozov. There were also reports that Gorbachev had approved military maneuvers to be held in Ukraine by units stationed there on November 28, two days before the referendum. Although Morozov condemned those plans, he had little control over what the military would do on the territory of the state that he now served as minister of defense.
¹⁹

ON THE MORNING
of Sunday, December 1, Kravchuk dropped his ballot into a box at a polling station in central Kyiv to the flashes of dozens of cameras belonging to Ukrainian and foreign correspondents catching the historic moment. Like many of his compatriots, Kravchuk voted in the morning. Early reports from polling stations indicated that the turnout was good.

The countryside, where most people were early risers, led the way. In the village of Khotiv, south of Kyiv, between 70 and 80 percent of
registered voters had cast their ballots by 10:00 a.m. A local woman who informed Western correspondents of this fact burst into tears. She was proud of her fellow villagers, and there was no doubt in her mind that they had voted for independence. In Kyiv, as in the villages, many went to vote with members of their families, taking children along. Some were reluctant to go home after voting and stayed near the polling stations, discussing the possible outcome of the referendum and its significance. Ukrainian Americans and Canadians who had come to their ancestral homeland to help with the historic vote were moved by the experience. Chrystyna Lapychak of the
Ukrainian Weekly
expressed the feelings of many of her fellow Ukrainian Americans when she told an Associated Press correspondent, “I felt that ghosts were present that day in all of those places—ghosts of people who were not fortunate enough to have lived to vote. All of our ancestors were there, everyone who had ever suffered, who had ever dreamed that their grandchildren would see freedom. We are those grandchildren.”
²⁰

Yurii Shcherbak, a minister in the Ukrainian government, had read the declaration of Ukrainian independence from the podium of the all-Union parliament in Moscow in late August. He remembered later that different political forces and social groups came together to vote for independence. Each had its own hopes and expectations: the national democrats were intent on independence and rapid cultural Ukrainization; the former communist leaders wanted a safe haven for themselves and their families, free from Moscow's control; and most of the population, convinced that Ukraine was the richest republic of the Union, wanted to separate from poor and unpredictable Russia, with its political and military conflicts. The success of the Ukrainian Americans, who had managed to commit President Bush to the recognition of Ukrainian independence even before the vote took place, gave confidence to the Ukrainian elites that independence could be not only proclaimed but also achieved.
²¹

The results of the referendum exceeded the expectations of the most optimistic supporters of Ukrainian independence. The turnout on December 1 was 84 percent, and more than 90 percent of voters supported independence. Gorbachev had called Kravchuk a dreamer when he predicted that no less than 80 percent of voters would back independence, but even Kravchuk did not expect what actually
happened. A week before the referendum, when Stepan Khmara, a deputy of the parliament and a former prisoner of the Gulag, told him that support would exceed 90 percent, Kravchuk replied that he was crazy. Khmara turned out to be right: the final result was 90.32 percent in favor of independence.

As predicted by the pollsters, a virtually unanimous vote for independence was recorded in Ternopil oblast in Galicia, where the turnout exceeded 97 percent, and close to 99 percent of voters supported independence. In Vinnytsia, the city in central Ukraine where Kravchuk had almost been stampeded by his admirers a few weeks earlier, the vote for independence exceeded 95 percent. Support was less impressive but still very strong in the east and south. In Odesa oblast, more than 85 percent voted for independence. In Luhansk oblast, which was part of the Donbas region and the easternmost oblast in Ukraine, the vote for independence exceeded 83 percent. In neighboring Donetsk oblast, it reached almost 77 percent. Even in the Crimea, so troublesome to the Ukrainian authorities, more than 54 percent voted in favor. In Sevastopol, the base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, the figure was 57 percent.

Kravchuk learned the first results of the referendum at about 2:00 a.m. on December 2. There was now no doubt that the pro-independence campaign conducted by Kravchuk and his rivals would produce an independent state for one of them to lead. As expected, Kravchuk was in the lead in all Ukrainian oblasts except Galicia, where the winner was Viacheslav Chornovil. Nationwide, Kravchuk received 61 percent of the vote over Chornovil's 23 percent. Kravchuk's strongest showing was in Luhansk oblast, where he gained more than 76 percent of the vote. In the Crimea, he won with 56 percent against Chornovil's 8 percent. Despite Gorbachev's grim predictions, Ukraine was not divided by ethnic strife or local separatism. Later that morning, when Kravchuk called Gorbachev to report on the results of the referendum and the presidential election, Gorbachev could not believe what he was hearing. He congratulated the Ukrainian leader on his victory in the presidential race but did not mention the referendum.
²²

On the following day, Gorbachev tore up a draft appeal to the citizens of Ukraine prepared by his adviser Georgii Shakhnazarov. By now, Shakhnazarov had stopped making suggestions on how to use
the ethnic card to undermine the drive for Ukrainian independence and had fully embraced the Russian position on the Ukrainian referendum. Those around Yeltsin had bowed to the inevitable and were prepared to endorse the results. Shakhnazarov's draft had included congratulations to the Ukrainians on their “historic choice.” Gorbachev ordered his other aide, Anatolii Cherniaev, to prepare a new draft, including such statements as “All are independent, but not all turn independence into a weapon against the Union. . . . Misfortune awaits the Ukrainians—both those who live there and those scattered around the country. . . . That goes even more for Russians.” Cherniaev obliged. The next day Gorbachev published an appeal to parliamentarians throughout the Soviet Union. “Every one of you has the right to reject the Union,” read the appeal. “But it requires that those chosen by the people consider all the consequences.” He warned the deputies against interethnic conflict.