Gloom Boxes: Rukh Riders
Karatnycky, Adrian
RUKH RIDERS T oday, in the Ukraine, the Soviet 1 Union's second most populous republic (one in six Soviet citizens lives here), forces for independence and democracy command majority support. While...
...In December, a series of pro-Khmara strikes broke out in Kiev and the western Ukraine...
...In an effort to keep pace with expectations of sovereignty, it has announced that Ukrainian citizens should perform military service on the republic's territory, and vowed that any treaty linking the republic to the Soviet Union will be put to a referendum before the Ukrainian citizenry...
...This would allow predominantly Russian areas such as Odessa and the Crimea to safeguard their local traditions within a pluralistic and independent Ukraine...
...A 17-day hunger strike by Ukrainian students ended in mid-October with the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Vitaly Masol...
...In March 1990, despite censorship and Communist efforts to prevent opposition candidates from registering in a majority of districts, pro-independence democrats won two-thirds of the 180 races in which they fielded candidates...
...As the old order rapidly collapses, it is fitting that the most popular and credible voices for democratic change are coming from the ranks of former Gulag prisoners...
...Now he has emerged as the leader of the radical Ukrainian Republican party, which has made impressive inroads among workers...
...Particularly effective have been the interventions of the leaders of the Narodna Rada (People's Council...
...In Lvov, 50-year-old grandmother lryna Kalynets—a political prisoner for nine years in the 1970s—is leading a broad-based effort to rid the educational system of all traces of Communist cant...
...11111111111^111=1111, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 23...
...Khmara, who spent most of the 1980s in prison or in exile, was arrested for assaulting a "man" in plain clothes...
...n November 17, the fiery deputy Stepan Khmara, elected by workers of the radical mining town of Chervonohrad, near the Polish border, was jailed...
...The woman has since disappeared, the man in plain clothes turned out to be a KGB colonel with a record of brutality against peaceful demonstrators, and the alleged "assault" by the deputy was coincidentally captured on videotape and broadcast on Ukrainian television...
...It is at this level that beachheads are being won for an independent press and local radio and television...
...These zeks include several towering moral and political figures likely to lead a future Ukrainian democratic state...
...The landmark shift in Ukrainian public opinion is linked directly to the televising of parliament...
...According to Democratic activists, Khmara was entrapped by a woman pleading for help in fending off a man who had accosted her...
...The symbolism is not lost on the Communist authorities, who will not be above any means to discredit this new leadership...
...Another charismatic figure is Vyacheslav Chornovil, 53, governor of the Lvov region and a three-time political prisoner...
...Privatization is being tried...
...He is a proponent of a federal structure for the future Ukrainian state, in which education and cultural policy would be under the jurisdiction of the territories...
...Even the Communist parliamentary majority has felt the tangible shift in public opinion...
...One such is 63-year-old Levko Lukyanenko...
...While the Ukrainian Communist party is suffering mass defections from its membership of three million, Rukhthe democratic pro-independence Ukrainian Popular Movement—has grown from a handful of writers in 1989 to an organization with 700,000 paid-up members and five million adherents...
...On October 1, a pro-independence general strike was openly supported by 10 percent of the Ukraine's workers and brought as many as half a million demonstrators to the doors of the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev...
...Party hardliners won 239 seats, while reformist Communists linked to a program called the Democratic Platform won about ninety...
...A schoolmate of Mikhail Gorbachev at Moscow University's law school, Lukyanenko spent twenty-six years in jail between 1961 and 1988 for favoring Ukrainian independence...
...If the KGB expected the Khmara "affair" to intimidate the opposition, it has had the opposite effect...
...At the center of the Rada is a group of leaders who, like Kalynets, are former political prisoners...
...While the Rukh inspires such citizen activism, the more formal political life of the Ukraine is firmly in the hands of democratic deputies in Lvov, Kiev, the mining center of Donetsk, and other municipalities...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
