After some time, leadership of Rukh fell to Viacheslav Chornovol, who enjoyed great authority among Ukrainian dissidents thanks to his ten-year struggle with the Soviet regime. However, there were also sincere communists like Drach and Pavlychko in the party. Many well-known Ukrainian nationalist leaders who played a huge role in the 2014 Maidan coup and the subsequent war in the Donbass launched their political careers in Rukh , including Oleg Tyagnibok, leader of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Svoboda party, and Andrey Parubiy, former speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
In the parliamentary elections of March 1990, the Democratic Bloc, which included Rukh , received 111 out of 450 seats, becoming the second largest party in the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. The parliament was controlled by the Communist majority, the so-called ‘Group of 239’, led by Aleksandr Moroz. Nationalists demanding that Ukraine separate from the USSR were supported mainly by residents of Western Ukraine and, partly, Kiev. However, it was Rukh that became the driving force that led Ukraine to independence in 1991.
Events developed at lightning speed. In July of 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, but it had no practical consequences. However, in the wake of rumors about the signing of an updated Union Treaty that would fix the Ukrainian SSR as part of the USSR, students from universities in Kiev and Lviv demanded a new parliamentary election and went on hunger strike, dubbed the ‘Revolution on Granite’.
At the height of events on October Revolution Square (now Independence Square), 150 people were taking part in the hunger strike. After two weeks, the head of the Ukrainian SSR’s Council of Ministers, Vitaly Masol, resigned. But despite some opposition successes, by the summer of 1991, prospects for real Ukrainian independence appeared illusory. In a March referendum, more than 70% of the inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR voted for the preservation of the USSR.
Participants of hunger strike during ‘Revolution on Granite’, Kiev, 1990A Logical Outcome At a festival on August 17, 1991, Rukh ’s leader, Chornovol, acknowledged that the probability of independence was extremely slim. However, just two days later, a coup took place in Moscow, when the State Committee for Emergency Situations (GKChP) emerged to prevent the signing of a new Union Treaty, which would have turned the USSR into a confederation. As a result, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the ‘Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine’ on August 24. The activities of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR were subsequently suspended, and then banned.
The collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists, Communist directors, and Soviet-Party nomenclature, amplified by the administrative resources of the Ukrainian SSR’s vertical power structure, made it possible to rally public support. On December 1, 1991, a new referendum was held, in which more than 90 percent of residents voted for an independent Ukraine. Ironically, in Ukraine’s first presidential elections, which were held simultaneously, residents voted, in essence, for the preservation of the Ukrainian SSR by electing party apparatchik Leonid Kravchuk, while nationalist candidates Viacheslav Chornovol and Levko Lukianenko couldn’t garner even a third of the votes between them.
Moreover, in 1992, Chornovol and Rukh had already begun to actively promote the federalization of Ukraine “on the principles of nationalism and national unity.” Vladimir Cherniak, a member of Rukh ’s Central Committee, stated that the transition to federalism “will accelerate the process of state-building, as it will free the central authorities from solving regional problems, making it possible to focus their attention on global issues.”
However, such initiatives received no response from the population, and disagreements between party members almost resulted in a split. The old constellation of nationalists that had led Ukraine to independence began to exit the political scene. In their place, more radical organizations emerged that demanded total Ukrainization and war with Russia. Among them were the Ukrainian National Assembly, which had its own armed subdivision dubbed the Ukrainian Nationalist Self-Defense, as well as the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, which was renamed Svoboda in 2004.
By Alexander Nepogodin, an Odessa-born political journalist, expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union.
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