Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 21 – Today, on the
24th anniversary of Ukrainian independence, Ivan Drach, the poet who
headed the Rukh organization from 1989 to 1992, says that what is happening in
Ukraine now, including the intensification of patriotic feelings, is not
something unexpected but rather a logical playing out of what happened in 1991.
In an interview with Elena Rostikova
of Novy Region-2, Drach says one of the most serious problems of the Ukrainian
national movement was that it was dominated by intellectuals rather than
practical people (nr2.com.ua/interview/Ivan-Drach-Kommunisty-progolosovali-za-nezavisimost-Ukrainy-iz-za-Elcina-104354.html).
Ukraine’s intellectuals at the end
of the 1980s “were infected by events which began in Europe,” Drach says. “At
that time, the Berlin Wall fell and Solidarity was born in Poland, and there
appeared the bright popular movements in Estonia [and] Latvia …. We were in
contact with all these movements, and the idea arose that we should establish
something similar.”
Initially, he says, people thought
about holding a plenum of the various create unions like the cinematographers,
writers, and artists and then proclaim the founding of a Popular Rukh. “But the bosses, the KGB and the Central
Committee of the Communist Party were keeping track of all this and didn’t give
us the chance.”
Drach says that he met frequently
with Leonid Kravchuk, the head of the Central Committee’s agitation and
propaganda department, and eventually Kravchuk agreed to have a meeting so that
the party could control it. But his attacks on the idea of the Rukh at that
session, precisely because they were televised, had exactly the opposite effect
he intended.
Indeed, the Ukrainian poet-politician
says, “it would have been difficult for [those who wanted a popular front in
Ukraine] to think up a better advertisement” for what they sought than his
words. After that, Ukrainians came
together and “we already were able to intimidate the authorities into giving us
space for holding a large forum.”
The authorities did not leave the
field, however. They put out fake stories that the Rukh people were about to go
to Lithuania to hold their meeting and that Vilnius had already sent three
trains. Then they said that the Rukh leadership was planning to spend money on
holding its sessions on the beach somewhere.
But those efforts backfired as well,
and “the first congress of the Peoples Rukh for Perestroika took place in
September 1989.” The only reason the Rukh leadership added “’for perestroika’”
to the title, Drach says, was to justify their actions to Moscow by suggesting
that Rukh wanted to help Gorbachev and that Kyiv was moving too slowly.
The Kyiv communists continued their
provocations, but Rukh continued to grow, Drach says. And “already when Yeltsin defeated Grobachev”
at the time of the August 1991 coup, even the communists in the Ukrainian SSR
Supreme Soviet voted for Ukraine’s declaration of independence, “thanks to
Yeltsin.”
At that time, Kravchuk made a trip
around Ukraine in order to see what the lay of the land was. Drach says that he “told colleagues [at that
time] that Kravchuk left Kyiv as the head of the department of agitation and
propaganda and returned already with the thought … about becoming president of
Ukraine.”
Rukh had relatively few
organizations in the Donbas, Drach says; but the miners there supported it and
helped free Stepan Khmara when the activist was put in prison in
Lukyanovka. More than 80 percent of the
population in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts voted for independence because they
hoped that an independent Ukraine would give them a better life.
But because all of us, both Rukh
activists and ethnic Russians in the east, were caught up in the euphoria of
the times, “not one of us considered that for this to occur, Ukraine would have
to become a complete organism, separated from the Union,” with its own “strong
institutions” and without everything controlled from Moscow.
To a large extent, Drach continues,
this shortcoming was the result of the fact that all the leaders of the Rukh
were intellectuals. There weren’t enough “economists and financial specialists”
who could adopt a practical approach. Even Kravchuk was “an ideologue and a
humanitarian intellectual.”
In many ways, he says, this was a
repetition of the mistakes and shortcomings of the Ukrainian revolution in
1918-1920.
Now, Drach argues, Ukraine is
overcoming this problem, but it faces another: widespread corruption that is so
open that it undermines public confidence in the government. Kyiv needs to do
more to fight it and fight the oligarchic control of the economy if the country
is to be a success.
Asked about Ukraine’s role in the
collapse of the USSR, Drach is blunt: “If it had remained in the Union, the
latter would not have fallen apart. All the same, 90 percent were for a free
Ukraine; this was the expression of the will of our people. But in Ukraine all
would have evolved differently if Yeltsin had not come to power” in Moscow.
Yeltsin “dreamed” of a union he
could dominate, but “all these republics, including Ukraine interfered.” And he could never escape from that dream,
just as his successor has not been able to do.
“When we had proclaimed independence”
on August 21, 1991,” Drach recounts, he “arrived in Moscow when around the
White House where the Russian government was, instead of the shield of the USSR,
they had put up an enormous shield of Russia in the form of a two-headed eagle.”
For Russians, this symbolized their
independence, but for Ukrainians, “it was an executioner, a predator that will
continue to prey on us! Already then,
looking at this shield, I told friends that our liberation from Russia would
take a very long time. So it has,” but the last two years, with the Russian
invasion and the growth of Ukrainian patriotism, give hope.
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