WHO WAS THE FIRST DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE?

 

         …A former Communist, Leonid Kravchuk, was the first President of Ukraine

 

How a former Communist became the first elected President of Ukraine?

 

Here’s a story about the nation of Ukraine that most Americans aren’t aware of today.

Before becoming the first democratically elected president of Ukraine in 1991, Leonid Kravchuk spent the previous 30 years as a powerful Communist functionary.  As leader of the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, at the time, he denied the “emotional nationalism” that flourished during the glasnost years.

Kravchuk eventually embraced nationalism.  He then resigned from the Communist Party shortly after the failed hardline coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. That December, he met up with Russian President Boris Yeltsin to pronounce the Soviet Union dissolved. To his people, he declared, “A new Ukraine has been born.”

Kravchuk was born to Ukrainian peasants in a village that was then within Poland, he then lost his father in World War II. 

He had joined the Communist Party in 1958 and rose quickly.  He became the Ukraine’s propaganda chief, where he suppressed any criticism of the 1998 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  He was later, chairman of the republic’s Supreme Soviet. 

But after the attempted coup, as the leader of Ukraine, he called for a referendum on Ukraine independence, and saw Ukrainians approve it by an extraordinary 90%.  They also chose him as their first democratic president. 

At the time, Ukraine had housed Soviet weapons that gave it the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, but the control system stayed in Moscow.  So Kravchuk agreed to forfeit the weapons in exchange for a security guarantee from the U.S,, the U.K. and Russia.  This guarantee eventually turned out to be worthless when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.

Kravchuk’s brief presidency was marred by “political and economic failure.”  By 1992, inflation in Ukraine soared by 2,500%, and corruption and mismanagement sank 75% of all Ukrainians into poverty.

Kravchuk railed against Russia even though Ukraine remained “dangerously dependent” on Russian oil. 

In 1994, he lost his re-election bid, yet he didn’t contest the results.  Later he presided over post-2014 negotiations to bring peace to the Donbas area of Ukraine.

He never lost hope that Ukraine would “open the doors of democracy to the east”.  Just this May 10^th, Leonid Kravchuk died at age 88.

Copyright G. Ater 2022