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Ukraine in 1991

Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the second-most populous of the fifteen comprising the USSR, played a major – arguably, a decisive – role in the Soviet Union’s dissolution at the end of 1991. Several incidents had weakened the Ukrainian Communist Party’s authority in previous years. The explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in April 1986 had destroyed any sense of personal safety and dealt a serious blow to the republic’s economy. The coalminers’ strike in July 1989, centered in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas as well as the RSFSR’s Kuznets Basin and Vorkuta, seriously undermined the authority of local and regional party and trade union leaders as well as the all-Union Ministry of Coal. Less than two months later, inspired by developments in Poland as well as the Baltic republics, political activists seized the opportunity presented by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost to hold the founding congress in Kyiv of the People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika (popularly known as Rukh, Ukrainian for “Movement”). Within days, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, First Secretary of the KPU (Communist Party of Ukraine) since 1972, submitted his resignation.

Initially supportive of Gorbachev’s reformist agenda, both the miners’ movement and Rukh soon turned against the ineffectual Soviet leader and the Ukrainian Communist Party apparatus. Mass demonstrations celebrating Ukrainian national institutions proliferated as did the number of political movements and parties. In July 1990, the newly elected Ukrainian Supreme Soviet (Verkhovna Rada) issued a declaration of state sovereignty with Ukrainian laws taking precedence over those of the central Soviet government. In March 1991, nearly 80 percent of some 31 million voters in the Ukrainian SSR approved the declaration as part of the all-Union referendum to reconstitute the USSR as a Union of Soviet Sovereign States, while over 70 percent expressed support for the revised version of the USSR. At the same time, in the western Ukrainian region of Galicia where nationalist sentiment was strongest, 88 percent voted yes to an additional question about the complete independence of a Ukrainian state.

The failed coup of August 19, 1991, in Moscow only intensified separatism throughout Ukraine, as it did in the other Soviet republics. On August 24, the Verkhovna Rada overwhelmingly approved a resolution introduced by, among others, the former Soviet dissident and leader of Rukh, Vyacheslav Chornovil, calling for Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. In the meantime, Leonid Kravchuk, the veteran Communist who had been elected chairman of the Verkhovna Rada in July 1990, had undergone a political “metamorphosis,” gradually abandoning his support for limited sovereignty to take charge of the independence movement. On December 1, 1991, a referendum was held throughout Ukraine on the Rada’s declaration. More than 92 percent of voters approved. In the simultaneously held presidential election, Kravchuk achieved victory, with Chornovil coming in a distant second.

Widely regarded as the decisive deathblow to the USSR, the referendum preceded by one week the secretly organized meeting among the three presidents of the Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian republics. At a hunting lodge in the dense forest of Belovezha, Belarus, close to the border with Poland, Kravchuk, Boris Eltsin, and Stanislav Shushkevich declared an end to the Soviet Union and its replacement by the Commonwealth of Independent States. Two days later, on December 10, the Verkhovna Rada approved the Belovezha Accords.

Notwithstanding the massive vote in favor of independence, the result included signs of warning. While the majority in all 27 districts approved, voter turnout in eastern and southern Ukraine lagged behind the rest of the country. The two districts with the smallest majorities among votes cast were Crimea (54 percent) and Sevastopol city (57 percent), and in terms of eligible voters, the results were 37 and 36 percent. The heavily Russian ethnic composition of these populations undoubtedly was a factor. Thanks to support for independence by the miners’ movement, voters in the districts of Donetsk and Luhansk approved by a whopping 84 percent. Among other things, the miners had calculated that, as one of their leaders put it, in May 1991, “if Ukraine were independent, it would be better able to fix the economy and everything else on its territory.” But by July of the following year, scarcely six months after independence, he sang a different tune. “What has become worse?” he asked rhetorically. “Everything. The Center has just moved from Moscow to Kyiv. We didn’t want that. In the past we fought for the existence of Ukraine as an autonomous state, but we didn’t want Kyiv to become the Center instead of Moscow. We wanted power to be given to the localities, enterprises, cities.”

17 Moments in Soviet History - Ukrainian Independence by Lewis Siegelbaum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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