Leonid Kravchuk
First president of independent Ukraine who oversaw economic collapse and mishandled Russia
LEONID KRAVCHUK, who has died aged 88, was a Communist ideologue who changed his spots to fight for an independent Ukraine, becoming the first president of the independent state 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, he 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 other people. 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, for some strange reason, 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 braindrain 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 even 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. Hundreds of people formed daily queues outside bakeries.
By 1992, inflation was running at 2,500 per cent, falling back to 50 per cent a month the following year. The country’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, and failing to introduce a coherent reform programme.
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 deputy prime ministers 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 up tensions between the nationalist west of the country and the pro-communist south and east, sparking regionalist movements in the Donbas, the industrialised Russian-speaking area of eastern Ukraine, and a separatist movement in Crimea.
Although he enjoyed hobnobbing with Western leaders (he visited Britain in 1993) he also angered the West by his failure to introduce economic reforms and by trying to use Ukraine’s remaining nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip to get money. But it was his mishandling of relations with Russia which probably did the most lasting damage.
Kravchuk made bold statements about how he would not tolerate impositions from his northern neighbour, complaining about “imperial pressure” from Moscow and about Russian propaganda belittling Ukrainians. Yet Ukraine remained dangerously dependent on Russia for vital oil and gas supplies.
He angered Russia’s then leader Boris Yeltsin by rejecting plans for a unified military force of the new Commonwealth of Independent States, declaring himself commander-in-chief of Ukraine. Difficult Ukrainian-russian negotiations over issues such as the future of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal and the division of the Black Sea Fleet tended to conclude with statements that could be interpreted variously by both sides, adding to the sense of drift and emboldening the country’s pro-russian separatists. The status of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s presence in Sevastopol and Crimea was not resolved until 1997.
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 government were given licence to steal state assets.
The collapse of the Black Sea Steamship Company became the saddest symbol of the Kravchuk era. This once proud merchant fleet, the largest in the world (based mostly in Odessa), was covertly sold piecemeal to foreign companies, with the Ukrainian state receiving nothing.
As a result of all these factors, the voters of industrial and predominantly Russian-speaking south-eastern Ukraine supported Kravchuk’s main rival, Leonid Kuchma, in the 1994 presidential elections. Kuchma won under slogans of fighting corruption, reconstruction of the economy, and further integration with Russia.
Kravchuk resigned before he was pushed on July 19 1994.
Leonid Makarovych Kravchuk was born on January 10 1934 into a peasant family in western Ukraine, then part of Poland. As a boy he witnessed the Second World War and the simultaneous rise of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. His father served in the Polish cavalry in the early 1930s, and later he and his wife worked for the local osadniks (Polish colonists).
During the war his father perished on the frontline and Kravchuk himself recalled witnessing the killing of Jews. As president he would earn praise in the West for publicly admitting Ukrainian involvement in the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar in 1941.
One unconfirmed story about Leonid Kravchuk was that in 1948 he went Christmas-carolling and donated the money he collected to the Ukrainian partisans fighting the Soviet army. That may have been so, but he soon accommodated himself to the new realities.
After taking a degree in Economics at Kiev University he joined the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1958 and rose through the ranks of the party and its agitprop department to become its chief ideologue and distributor of party propaganda.
He became a member of the Ukrainian Politburo in 1989, and in July 1990 was elected chairman of the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in effect becoming head of state of the country and its most powerful politician.
As the Soviet Union began to crumble, Kravchuk 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. When Yeltsin called for resistance and strikes, Kravchuk went on television, appealing instead for “a normal working rhythm”, claiming that “Marxism-leninism has good prospects historically”.
After the failure of the coup, however, Kravchuk executed a rapid U-turn, 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, using its unreformed bureaucratic structure, went on to win the newly created office of President of Ukraine.
During the election campaign he outmanoeuvred opponents from more radical nationalist parties, demonstrating that he was prepared to take an even tougher stand with Russia than his rivals. He created the image of a national hero, but he also made Ukrainians believe that because he had been inside the Communist Party he knew the best way out of it.
On election day, Ukrainians gave him an outright majority, despite a field of six candidates.
After resigning from the presidency, Kravchuk remained active in Ukrainian politics, serving as a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament. He also joined the powerful business and political group led by the oligarchs Viktor Medvedchuk and Hryhoriy Surkis, which became formally organised as the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united). He served as the leader of the party’s parliamentary group from 2002 to 2006.
In 2020 President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed Kravchuk to take over from Leonid Kuchma as Ukraine’s representative at the trilateral contact group, which sought a resolution to the conflict in the Donbas region. This week, noting that Kravchuk had lived through the war and the Nazi occupation, Zelensky said that Kravchuk “knew the price of freedom and with all his heart wanted peace for Ukraine”.
With his wife, Antonina Mykhailivna, Kravchuk had a son.