34 Years Ago Today – How Ukraine Reaffirmed Its Desire to be Independent
On Aug. 24, 1991, the then still Soviet Ukrainian parliament declared Ukraine’s independence. How and why?
It is important to remember that Ukrainians have a long history of struggle for their national rights and recognition as a nation and independent state.
It has taken many forms over the centuries and included resistance to various invaders, would-be imperialists, colonizers and destroyers of their cultural identity and suppression of their language.
Bohdan Nahaylo, Chief Editor of Kyiv Post since December 2021, is a British-Ukrainian journalist, author and veteran Ukraine watcher.
He was formerly head of Amnesty International's Soviet Union unit, a senior United Nations official and policy adviser, and Director of Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian Service.
He writes: "...the strength of the burgeoning Ukrainian national movement forced the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin at the beginning of the 1920s to accept the establishment of a “Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,” which was theoretically free, but in reality ruled by Moscow.
Despite the terrible consequences of communist rule – the genocidal man-made famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33, oppression and terror, and Russification – in 1945, Iosif Stalin even allowed Soviet Ukraine to be one of the founding members of the United Nations."
By early 1991, it had slowly caught up with the democratic and patriotic processes taking place in the other non-Russian republics, and Moscow itself, and was asserting the “state sovereignty” it had proclaimed in July 1990.
However, an attempted coup by communist hardliners in Moscow on Aug. 19- 22 that year jeopardized progress. The communist leadership of the republic, above all parliamentary speaker, Leonid Kravchuk, wavered. The democratic opposition, which was still in the minority, could not persuade him to call an emergency session of parliament until it was obvious that the coup had failed. It was scheduled for Aug. 24.
Bohdan Nahaylo further writes:
On Aug. 22 (1990) in the Soviet capital outside the KGB headquarters, angry crowds toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police. In Estonia and Lithuania, the Communist Party was banned.
And in Kazakhstan, its Communist leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, resigned from the party and ordered the “departization” of his vast Central Asian Republic, that is, stripping the Communist Party of its exclusive ruling role.
The following day, Kravchuk flew to Moscow where he witnessed the public humiliation of Gorbachev by Boris Yeltsin, who had broken with the Communist Party and was spearheading the movement for democratization within the “sovereign” Russian Federation.
Surprisingly. Yeltsin suspended the activities of the Communist Party in the Russian Federation, ostensibly pending the investigation of its role during the attempted putsch. Communist Party offices were sealed in Moscow and Leningrad.
It was against this politically surreal background that Kravchuk returned home to face the music along with his stunned and beleaguered party colleagues. They were in effect fighting for their political lives.
Aug. 24, 1991 : Kravchuk agreed to hold an emergency session of parliament on Aug. 24 – a Saturday. The extraordinary session lasted for over 12 hours and was broadcast live on state TV and radio.
Initially, there was only one item on the agenda – the political situation in the republic after the attempted putsch, and how to safeguard the republic’s sovereignty from possible new threats in the future.
But the opposition was determined not to let Kravchuk and his comrades off the hook and to make the fullest use of this unprecedented situation.
As the heated exchanges continued, the latest news from Moscow again played a sobering and catalytic role.
The Russian authorities were unilaterally taking over the center’s structures, including the KGB. Yeltsin was placing his people in key positions and the Russian government had taken control over all Union economic and communications ministries.
One angry Ukrainian deputy, Valerii Batalov, asked rhetorically whether Ukraine had any need of a union in which all the key positions would be held by Russians.
Kravchuk seized the opportunity to redeem himself and replied that he too had been “distressed and even annoyed” by the demands that “only Russians be appointed.” He warned that the democracy saved by Yeltsin had produced “a very dangerous” wave of “drunken democracy.” Unexpectedly, he now recommended that the deputies support a Declaration of Independence. Given this major concession, some of the tension subsided.
But one of the leaders of the democratic opposition, Ihor Yukhnovsky, caused a stir in his own ranks, proposing that the declaration of independence be endorsed by a referendum to bolster its validity. Extending a peace offering to the Communists, he also advocated that an orderly transition be carried out and that there should be no recriminations against serving communist officials, the Editor writes.
President Zelenskyy's address to nation on the Independence Day
"And now, as the full-scale war for independence continues, it is here, on Maidan, that one can find such powerful symbols. Symbols of how we fight, what we fight for, and how we overcome this war.
These symbols are all around us, in this Monument of Independence. Inside, it has a reinforced concrete frame and can literally withstand a hurricane. Just like our Ukraine has withstood the great calamity that Russia brought to our land.
Here, at the “Zero Kilometer.” This is the starting point, where distances to Ukrainian cities are marked. To our Donetsk, our Luhansk, our Crimea. And today, these markers have an entirely different meaning. They are no longer just about kilometers.
They remind us that all of this is Ukraine. And our people are there, and no distance between us can change that, and no temporary occupation can alter that. And one day, this distance between Ukrainians will disappear, and we will be together again as one family, as one country. "
ends
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