Leonid Kravchuk, who died after a long illness at the age of 88, was a Communist Party bureaucrat who became the first president of independent Ukraine and a major player in bringing the Soviet Union to a disgraceful end.
At a hastily held meeting at a remote hunting lodge in the Belovezhskaya Forest in Belarus in December 1991, Kravchuk joined Stanislav Shushkevich, a nuclear physicist who led Belarus, and Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, in signing a declaration that the Soviet Union union has ceased to exist. Shushkevich died of Covid-19 a week ago. Yeltsin died in 2007.
Kravchuk was the most dynamic and radical of the three men during the fateful discussion. Fearing that Russia would continue to try to dominate Ukraine, he told Yeltsin that he did not want the Soviet Union to become a loose confederation. It must be completely removed.
Leonid Kravchuk, left, and Boris Yeltsin sign an economic agreement in 1991. Photo: Vitaly Armand / AFP / Getty Images
The deal between the three took place without the knowledge of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president, who was shocked to hear the news. He had no choice but to resign two weeks later after accepting that the three Slavic republics, the main entities of the Soviet Union, were no longer loyal to the system.
The road to independence began in August 1991, when the Ukrainian parliament voted to secede from the Soviet Union a few days after the collapse of a failed coup by communist hardliners in Moscow to reverse Gorbachev’s democratization program. Kravchuk led the Communist Party’s majority in parliament and played a key role in persuading his colleagues to support the opposition’s proposal for independence.
Parliament is holding a confirmatory referendum and presidential elections on December 1st. About 92% of Ukraine’s electorate, including the majority of ethnic Russians, voted for independence. Kravchuk was elected president, a position he held until 1994.
In 1992, at a meeting with US President George W. Bush, Kravchuk agreed to send back to Russia the nuclear missiles stationed in Ukraine. Sometimes touted as a generous gesture, Kravchuk told German radio that owning a nuclear arsenal from Kyiv was largely symbolic. “All management systems were in Russia. “The black suitcase with the start button that was with Russian President Boris Yeltsin,” he said.
Bill Clinton and Leonid Kravchuk shake hands after a press conference at Kyiv airport in 1994. Photo: Marcy Nighswander / AP
Kravchuk was born into a Ukrainian rural family in the village of Veliki Zhitin. At that time the village was in Poland, and Kravchuk’s parents worked for Polish landowners. He was drafted into the Soviet Union after the Soviet invasion in 1939. Kravchuk’s father served in the Polish army in the 1930s and was killed during World War II.
Kravchuk graduated from Kiev Taras Shevchenko National University in 1958, a year after marrying mathematics teacher Antonina Mikhailovna Mishura. He immediately joined the Communist Party and worked his way through the propaganda department. Until 1989 he was the ideological secretary of the Central Committee in Kyiv. His first sense of the power of independence came when he discreetly attended the founding congress of Ruch, a popular local national movement that sat in the back row of the gallery as an observer in 1989.
In 1990, the Communist Party elected him chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, making him a nominal head of state. His restrained style and openness to alternative views made him a compromise candidate, supported by both conservatives and reformers.
His term as president was marked by his impartial approach to foreign policy. He took a pro-European stance, even when he defended Russian-speakers and sought to guarantee them better language rights. He spoke in support of an agreement that gives Russia the right to continue to base its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. In 1994, he signed a partnership agreement with the EU, but later that year lost the election to Leonid Kuchma, his prime minister, who argued that shrinking economic ties with Russia had caused Ukraine’s lack of growth.
Since then, Kravchuk has remained an MP, but has moved rather aimlessly, moving for a time to a group led by pro-Russian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, known as the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine. In the 2004 presidential election, which was marred by fraud and had to be re-run, Kravchuk backed pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych against pro-Western pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko. In 2006, he failed to be re-elected to parliament.
He then fell into political obscurity, appearing only for casual interviews. In 2014, he condemned the annexation of Crimea by Vladimir Putin, telling Radio Free Europe that the Russian president’s philosophy of a broad “Russian world” focused on “aggression and disregard for the interests of his neighbors.”
In 2020, at the age of 86, he accepted an invitation from President Vladimir Zelensky to serve as the president’s envoy to the tripartite contact group for resolving the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine. The group consisted of Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but failed to make progress.
Kravchuk was left by his wife and their son Alexander.
Leonid Makarovich Kravchuk, politician, born January 10, 1934; died on May 10, 2022
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