First president of independent Ukraine failed to define relationshipwith Russia
Leonid Kravchuk, who has died aged 88, was a Communist ideologue who changed his spots to fight for an independent Ukraine, becoming its first president in 1991.
Kravchuk won election in December that year on a platform of national sovereignty, promising to build the new state along western European lines. Instead he presided over economic near-collapse, a corrupt political structure in which few Ukrainians had faith and, unlike the leaders of other former Soviet states, completely failed to define his country’s relationship with Russia.
Every time the economy seemed to be on the brink of disaster, Kravchuk contrived to put the blame on others.
But by 1994
Ukrainians had had enough of his bluster.
When the Soviet
Union collapsed, Ukraine appeared to be in a favourable economic position. It had coal, metal and engineering industries as well as agriculture and its own gas and oil reserves. But by 1994, its coal mines were struggling to maintain production; the metal industry was operating well below capacity because of coal shortages, and as a result the engineering industry could not increase production. Vacuum cleaners were the only items (apart from vodka) whose production increased.
Many Ukrainians were driven to working, often illegally, in Russia, while there was a significant brain-drain of scholars and qualified technical personnel. Things were as bad, if not worse, in the countryside. Agriculture remained collectivised, production plummeted and the one-time ‘‘bread basket’’ of the Soviet Union found itself unable to produce enough to feed its own citizens. The costs of the enormous bureaucracy required to keep the system going meant that it was cheaper to buy wheat from abroad than produce it at home. Almost three-quarters of Ukraine’s population were living below the poverty line. Daily queues formed outside bakeries.
By 1992, inflation was running at 2500 per cent, falling back to 50 per cent amonth the following year. Ukraine’s economic problems were exacerbated by external factors, such as the impact of rising prices of energy imports from Russia, but Kravchuk contributed to it by overseeing a loose monetary policy with massive budget deficits.
Throughout his time in office, Ukraine’s new political elite (most of them former Communist apparatchiks) spent more time discussing the colour of the new national flag and whether Ukrainian or Russian should be the official language than attempting to rescue the economy. Kravchuk threw out three prime ministers and a dozen deputies because of their cautious support for market reform. Ukraine’s parliament, meanwhile, refused to accept any one of the seven economic reform programmes introduced by successive prime ministers.
Politically, too, Kravchuk mishandled things. He stoked tensions between the nationalistwest of the country and the pro-communist south and east, sparking regionalist movements in the Donbas, the industrialised Russianspeaking area of eastern Ukraine, and a separatist movement in Crimea. But it was his mishandling of relations with Russia which probably did the most lasting damage.
Hardly a day went by when Kravchuk did not make some grand statement about how he would not tolerate this or that imposition from his neighbour, complaining about ‘‘imperial pressure’’ from Moscow, ‘‘insolent Russian leaders’’, and about Russian ‘‘propaganda’’ belittling Ukrainians. Yet Ukraine remained dangerously dependent on Russia for vital oil and gas supplies which it struggled to pay for.
Though Kravchuk’s political and economic failure did not compromise Ukraine’s formal sovereignty, it fostered the emergence of a situation in which Russia was able to gradually reassert its control over the country as a pliant vassal state. The dream of independence and prosperity only came true for a few people, as top government officials took advantage of a limited privatisation programme to enrich themselves, while cronies of the governmentwere given licence to steal state assets. He resigned before he was pushed, on July 19, 1994.
Leonid Makarovych Kravchuk was born into a peasant family inwestern Ukraine, then part of Poland. As a boy he witnessed World War II and the simultaneous rise of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. After taking a degree in economics at Kyiv University he joined the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1958 and rose through the ranks.
As the Soviet Union began to crumble, he at first rejected calls for Ukrainian independence as ‘‘emotional nationalism’’. But the failed Soviet coup attempt of 1991, when hard-line communists tried to oust Mikhail Gorbachev, marked a watershed. Kravchuk resigned from the Communist Party, and on August 24, 1991, declared Ukraine independent from the USSR. In October the (now officially banned) Communist Party renamed itself the Socialist Party and Kravchuk went on to win the newly created office of president.
He married Antonina Mykhailivna in 1957; they had a son, two grandchildren and a greatgranddaughter. –
Vacuum cleaners were the only items (apart from vodka) whose production increased.