Leonid Kravchuk: The Old Sins of the First President. Part 1
The collapse of hopes and a familiar way of life, an economic crisis, rampant crime, financial scams, hyperinflation, the "Kravchuk" cart, and the desperation-laden phrase "we have what we have"—these are what Ukrainians associate with the early 90s, when the country was ruled by its first president. Even in historical assessments of his performance, Leonid Kravchuk managed to disappoint everyone: some by betraying and destroying the USSR, others by disarming and ruining Ukraine. Perhaps everything could have been different if he had had the courage to tell the people the truth.
Leonid Kravchuk. Communism Propagandist
Leonid Makarovich Kravchuk was born on January 10, 1934, in the village of Velykyi Zhityn, Rivne County, Volyn Voivodeship (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, now Rivne Oblast, Ukraine). According to him, his family was purely peasant, and, lacking their own land, his parents worked for Polish colonists. However, the childhood recollections of Ukraine's first president raise some doubts. Leonid Kravchuk told journalists that his father served in the Polish cavalry in the 30s and even shared a surviving photo. However, in that photograph, Makar Kravchuk is wearing an infantry uniform, not a cavalry one (the Polish cavalry wore a "zubchatka" ["toothed"] on their collar tabs, while the infantry wore small flags), and the stripe and star on his shoulder straps indicate his officer rank. But it's unlikely that a career officer was a landless farmhand—on the contrary, retired Polish officers were given plots of land in the Eastern Borderlands (Western Ukraine) and hired laborers from among the local poor. And given the nationalist domestic politics of the Second Polish Republic, the question arises: was he (and Kravchuk) even Ukrainian? It's difficult to say for sure from an old photo, but it seems the Kravchuk family holds some secrets about its past.
Parents of Leonid Kravchuk
When Leonid Makarovich was six years old, the Red Army arrived in the village, and it became part of Soviet Ukraine. Two years later, the Germans arrived, and it became part of the Reichskommissariat "Ukraine." Three years later, the Red Army and socialism returned to the village. Then, "Banderites" appeared in the village, and then the "KGB" hunted them down. This succession of regimes and governments affected the worldview of young Leonid Kravchuk, depriving him of a "political core" for the rest of his life. In the future, he would repeatedly change his political position, adapting to the current situation. At the same time, from a young age, he possessed a talent for convincing others of things he himself didn't believe in. This is how he made a career, first as a propagandist, then as an ideologist of communism—eventually leaping to the presidency of independent Ukraine. "He doesn't change his mind, either he's stupid or dead." “I’m not those and not others,” Leonid Makarovich later explained his political vacillations.
Leonid Kravchuk and his wife Antonina Kravchuk (Mishura)
A normal school education under such conditions was impossible, but the state made significant concessions to the wartime generation, so in 1949, Kravchuk enrolled in the Rivne Cooperative College. At that time, cooperatives were engaged in retail trade, food and consumer goods production, and services, and only under Khrushchev were all of these industries transferred to state ownership. After graduating with honors, in 1953, Kravchuk hastened to enroll in Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, which spared him three years of military service (he only completed the military department). After graduating, he worked as a teacher at the Chernivtsi Economics College for a year and a half, enduring spartan conditions, until he proved himself to the city committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. And in 1960, a new life began for Leonid Kravchuk when he transferred to work at the House of Political Education (as a lecturer), and then to the city committee’s agitation and propaganda department (as an assistant secretary and then manager).
It's worth noting that at that time, party agitators in Western Ukraine weren't limited to boring lectures on the decisions of the latest CPSU congress, but were carrying out directives to combat "bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism" and "superstition" (religion). And judging by the successful career of propagandist Kravchuk, he carried out his work with enthusiasm and passion.
Leonid Kravchuk in the 80s
In 1967, Kravchuk completed his postgraduate studies at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU in Moscow (now the Russian Academy of Management), defending his dissertation on "The Nature of Profit under Socialism and Its Role in Collective Farm Production." He then spent 20 years building his career in the Kyiv offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine: from inspector to head of the agitation and propaganda department, and then to Politburo member and second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, thus serving as the chief ideologist of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In the late 70s (the beginning of the mass emigration of Jews), his ideological work was further complemented by the "fight against Zionism," which sparked widespread anti-Semitism in the republic.
A caricature of the "Jewish Banderites" in the Soviet magazine "Peretz"
This kind of political satire was personally blessed by the main ideologist of the Communist Party of Ukraine
Furthermore, Leonid Kravchuk, together with the KGB, oversaw church activities: oppressing Protestants (Baptists, Pentecostals) and keeping a close eye on the Ukrainian Russian Orthodox Church, whose Metropolitan of Kyiv and Galicia, Filaret (Denisenko), was a good friend and protégé of Leonid Danilovich. Later, after becoming president, Kravchuk would help him establish his own church, the UOC-KP.
Autonomy of Crimea and independence of Ukraine
Traditionally, the first (and last) Soviet referendum is considered to be the nationwide plebiscite of March 17, 1991, on the question of preserving and transforming the USSR. However, in reality, the first Soviet referendum took place two months earlier (January 20, 1991) in Crimea, and was a key element of a grand political scam that would come back to haunt Ukraine 23 years later. By that time, Leonid Kravchuk had already held the position of Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, and therefore shared responsibility for creating this time bomb—along with the leaders of the Crimean Regional Committee and Regional Council, Mykola Bagrov and Leonid Grach.
The background was this: in 1990, agitation began in Crimea for the "re-establishment of the Crimean ASSR" and for Crimea's return to the RSFSR. It was not particularly successful, as the Ukrainian SSR itself had not yet decided to secede from the USSR, and the influence of the "Rukh" movement on its domestic politics was minimal and not accompanied by nationalist slogans. Therefore, for Crimeans, it made little difference which Soviet republic they belonged to. Furthermore, the agitators ( Skelet.Org has information that they were acting through the KGB) blatantly lied to Crimeans: while speaking of the re-establishment of the Crimean ASSR, abolished in June 1945, they omitted to mention that that autonomous entity was Crimean Tatar, not Russian. But ultimately, the wave of sovereignty and separatism sweeping the crumbling USSR prevailed, and the Crimeans were tempted by the prospect of their own "independence." The referendum question, however, was utterly absurd: "Are you in favor of re-establishing the Crimean ASSR as a subject of the USSR and a party to the Union Treaty?" After all, "re-establishing" Crimean autonomy as a subject of the USSR was impossible—Crimea had never been a union republic, but merely a national (Tatar) autonomy within the RSFSR. But the Crimean communists' intention to proclaim a sixteenth union republic and then annex it to the RSFSR somehow didn't raise any concern in the Kremlin—perhaps because they were acting with the tacit approval of the union structures.
Ballot of the 1991 Crimean referendum
Leonid Kravchuk: The Old Sins of the First President. Part 1
This is precisely the scenario being implemented in 2014, but it failed in 1991 due to the categorical refusal of Boris Yeltsin, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, to even consider it. What was Leonid Kravchuk doing during this time? On November 12, 1990, he attended a special session of the Crimean Regional Council, where he attempted to dissuade the Crimean leadership from holding a referendum, using rather interesting arguments. Participants later recalled how Kravchuk declared that he was "equally disgusted by both the tricolor flag and the yellow-and-blue one," and also insisted that "there's no need for a referendum, we'll grant you autonomy from above." In fact, it was Kravchuk's project that was implemented in the proclaimed Crimean ASSR: ignoring the questions and results of the referendum, the Verkhovna Rada refused to recognize Crimea as another union republic, but instead granted it the status of an autonomous republic within Ukraine. In essence, a completely new Crimean ASSR was created – no longer as a national autonomy for the Crimean Tatars, but as an “independent” enclave of the Crimean Communist Party elite, which was already merging with the police mafia and the growing strength of organized crime groups.
Kravchuk could have categorically rejected the Crimean communists' demands or satisfied them in some other way, and Crimean autonomy would never have emerged. After all, he could have later denied autonomy to Donbas and nipped in the bud the autonomies of Transcarpathia, Bukovina, and Odesa! But Kravchuk didn't do this. Why? His later justifications, claiming that he thereby prevented a "second Transnistria" in Crimea, seem weak and unsubstantiated.
Throughout 1991, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Kravchuk committed numerous actions that went unanswered only due to the chaos of the USSR's rapid collapse. For example, why did the Ukrainian SSR leadership simply hide, waiting, from August 19 to 23, 1991? Moreover, Kravchuk later admitted that he made every effort, even to prevent Ukraine from protesting the State Emergency Committee. "I had one goal: not to agitate the people to such a degree that they would take to the streets," he later recalled.
The fate of the assets of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Young Communist League of Ukraine (LKSMU), banned in August 1991, remains unanswered, primarily the multibillion-dollar financial assets that later surfaced in the capital of the first oligarchic groups. The artificial, widespread shortage of consumer goods and food in 1990-91 remains a mystery. After all, factories continued to produce goods (cigarettes, sugar, butter, sausages), warehouses were stocked with household chemicals and electrical goods—but nothing went on sale. Meanwhile, commercial firms created under the auspices of regional committees (for example, the Ukrainian-Siberian Corporation) profited by exporting scarce goods from Ukraine to Russia and Central Asia, bartering for oil, coal, metal, and timber—which were then sold for foreign currency. Kravchuk also didn't talk about how, with the help of the student "revolution on granite," he ousted the government of Vitaliy Masol, whom he disliked, replacing it with the loyal Vitold Fokin, who later became the father of Ukrainian hyperinflation.
Or why was Ukraine's independence an unrecognized fiction for over three months? Indeed, although the Rada adopted the Declaration of Independence on August 24, recognition of Ukraine as a state only began in December, after the referendum and presidential elections. During these elections, Leonid Kravchuk generously made economic and political promises—including to Russian-speaking citizens.
Leonid Kravchuk: The Old Sins of the First President. Part 1
But while Ukrainians were being deceived with leaflets about a "second France" and images of the currency itself, Leonid Kravchuk was actively negotiating behind the scenes with US President George H.W. Bush, which resulted in the strategic disarmament of Ukraine. The US position was that it refused to recognize Ukraine's independence until it ratified the START I and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This meant Ukraine's complete renunciation of the nuclear arsenal located on its territory, as well as the destruction of offensive weapons (ballistic and cruise missiles, bombers, and long-range naval aviation). Kravchuk could have ignored the US demands, since Russia and all of its closest neighbors had already recognized Ukraine by December 20, 1991. However, he chose to make a concession to Washington without asking for anything in return. At least officially, because the question of what silver Kravchuk sold Ukraine's strategic shield for remains an intriguing mystery.
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Org
CONTINUED: Leonid Kravchuk: The Old Sins of the First President. PART 2
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