The Communist who midwifed a new Ukraine

Leonid Kravchuk 1934–2022

Leonid Kravchuk’s political conversion changed the world. Before becoming the first democratically elected president of Ukraine in 1991, he had spent the previous 30 years as a powerful Communist functionary. As leader of the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, he decried the “emotional nationalism” that flourished during the glasnost years. But whether because of a genuine change of heart or because the politician nicknamed the “wily fox” saw an opportunity, Kravchuk eventually embraced nationalism. He resigned from the Communist Party shortly after the failed August 1991 hard-line coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. That December, he met up with Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus to pronounce the Soviet Union officially dissolved. To his people, he declared, “A new Ukraine has been born.”

“Kravchuk’s life story followed his country’s turbulent history,” said the Financial Times. Born to Ukrainian peasants in a village then within Poland, he lost his father in World War II. He joined the Communist Party in 1958 and rose quickly. He was Ukraine’s propaganda chief, suppressing criticism of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and later chairman of the republic’s Supreme Soviet. After the coup attempt, he called a referendum on Ukrainian independence, and saw Ukrainians approve it “by an extraordinary 90 percent” and choose him as their first democratic president. Newly independent Ukraine housed Soviet weapons that gave it the world’s thirdlargest nuclear arsenal, but the control systems remained in Moscow, so Kravchuk agreed to forfeit the weapons in exchange for a security guarantee from the U.S., the U.K., and Russia—which “turned out to be worthless” when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.

His brief presidency was marred by “political and economic failure,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). By 1992, inflation had soared 2,500 percent, and corruption and mismanagement sank three-quarters of Ukrainians into poverty. And Kravchuk railed against Russia even as Ukraine remained “dangerously dependent” on Russian oil. In 1994, he lost his re-election bid, yet he didn’t contest the results, said The Washington Post. Later, he presided over post-2014 negotiations to bring peace to the Donbas, and he never lost hope that Ukraine, as he put it in 1994, would “open the doors of democracy to the East.”