Minsk Meet
Karatnycky, Adrian
Adrian Karatnycky Minsk Meet Russia and Ukraine get together to go their separate ways —and Gorby retires. On December 8, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia and President Leonid Kravchuk of...
...For example, some sort of agreement was reached between the Soviet military and the Ukrainian leadership, as could be inThe American Spectator February 1992 31 32 The American Spectator February 1992 ferred from reports that soldiers were encouraged to vote for Kravchuk in the December election and from the fact that 80 percent of them supported independence...
...These were not three reckless, irrational men...
...When I met him in Kiev in mid-October, he was forthright in his defense of Ukrainian independence...
...Petersburg...
...Fearing manipulation by interlopers and fair-weather allies, he insulated himself with a bunch of cronies he's known for decades, apparatchiks from his years as Communist overlord of Sverdlovsk...
...While Volsky himself may have tried to hedge his bets during the coup, many of his colleagues were forthright in their support of Boris Yeltsin...
...Of all the theories about why the coup didn't succeed, the least plausible is the one most readily offered—that its plotters were incompetent bunglers...
...Mikhail Gorbachev's myth of a unitary Soviet state was accepted to the bitter end only by President Bush, whose man in Moscow Robert Strauss initially questioned the viability of the new Slavic-led Commonwealth...
...Other crucial factors contributed, including the courage of the tens of thousands who took to the streets of Moscow, St...
...The results of Ukraine's independence referendum-90.3 percent in favor, with a turnout of 84 percent—confirm the impact of nationalist ideas...
...May God grant them success...
...But since the failed coup, Gorbachev's central state had been taking a daily beating...
...One instrument for that split was the USSR Scientific-Industrial Union, a little-known association headed by a former aide to Yuri Andropov—Arkady Volsky...
...There were other signs of imperial collapse...
...When economic issues such as dividing the Soviet debt were at stake, Kiev—not Moscow—was the venue for deliberations and Ukrainian leader Kravchuk—not Gorbachev—hosted them...
...With an unraveling economy, the worst grain harvest in recent memory, and price rises, inflation, and unemployment likely to heighten social tensions, the possibility of an irredentist Russian fascism cannot be ignored...
...fundamental economic reform and economic recovery, which will require a significant U.S...
...Indeed, at the time of the coup the Communist party was already a spent force in the western regions of Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk...
...We want to be masters of our own democratic destiny...
...We cannot merely pronounce independence...
...More significantly, Kravchuk won because he skillfully distanced himself from his servile past and emerged as a leader genuinely committed to Ukrainian statehood...
...He also revealed that the Commonwealth's military arrangement will involve a "defense alliance within a single command of strategic forces...
...consular staff on the ground in Ukraine, covering a country of 52 million, and no one permanently based in Kazakhstan, Belarus, or the other emerging nation states...
...After all, it was Lenin who said three-quarters of a century ago: "To lose Ukraine would be to lose one's head...
...By December 11, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR—with Russia and Belarus no longer participating—could not even muster a quorum...
...In dispensing with the USSR, the leaders of Europe's three newest nation-states were not opting for anarchy and civil war...
...The military, which too is fragmenting, is in no mood to intervene to preserve the old order...
...Punk bands and rap groups have adopted Ukrainian—the language of the oppressed—for their music, drawing a following of hundreds of thousands of teens...
...remained a bystander...
...Yeltsin's support was especially strong within the military's officer corps...
...If they hadn't split, the putsch might have succeeded," says Vladimir Bokser, a leader of the Democratic Russia movement and the deputy chairman of the Moscow Assembly, a quasi-governmental forum for the leading democratic groups...
...is ill-prepared to play a constructive role in helping resolve major issues that loom on the horizon, even if the new Commonwealth arrangement holds...
...As for Ukraine, many of its political activists already regard the new Commonwealth as a transitional structure...
...In the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, anti-Communism is flourishing under the slogan Kommunyaky na hilyaky ("Commies to the gallows...
...Historians are likely to reject the notion that the failed coup was somehow a victory for glasnost and perestroika...
...For centuries their fates have been intertwined...
...Another imperialist voice is that of Nikolai Travkin, who heads the self-styled Democratic party of Russia...
...In October, a sampling of public opinion found solid support for splitting up the Red Army, with 47 percent welVolsky's organization sharpened the division between the progressive, reform-oriented captains of Soviet industry and their more backward counterparts, and helped link up the industrial molochs of Stalinist economics, including much of the military-industrial complex, with reformist entrepreneurs, cooperative movement activists, and leaseholders...
...Even if he did not participate in it, he could well have planned to introduce a state of emergency at an appropriate moment...
...On December 1, Ukrainian voters launched the final assault on Gorbachev's empire...
...The events of August 19-21 destroyed the cohesion of the three pillars of the Soviet state—the Communist party, the KGB, and the military...
...30 The American Spectator February 1992 T ogether, Russia and Ukraine account for approximately 70 percent of the former USSR's population and 80 percent of its territory...
...These were not three reckless, irrational men...
...nor is its newfound freedom a sure thing...
...One year ago, radicalized youths forced the resignation of Ukraine's retrograde prime minister...
...Yet even this parliamentary structure, which underwent a facelift following the August coup, could not survive...
...The most important thing . . . is to immediately start developing a concept of collective security...
...He left little doubt about Ukraine's participation in any union of republics: "We do-not want today to take part in political unions which have as their aim a central government structure...
...While the future of the ex-USSR was being shaped, the U.S...
...It wouldn't pay to withdraw the Army from Ukraine...
...During the coup, many soldiers and officers simply refused to move against their president...
...The urgency of their undertaking was clear: a worsening economic crisis, institutional paralysis, an almost willfully destructive central state, and a military uncertain whom it should serve...
...By resurrecting the region's tradition of Cossack self-rule dating back to the seventeenth century, Rukh succeeded in rekindling local pride and support for Ukrainian statehood...
...The coup failed because of a profound split at the heart of the military-industrial complex...
...As many as half a million participants have thronged to these cultural and historical celebrations that feature song, dance, pageantry, and speechifying...
...Ukraine is likely to press for a place in the new Europe along with Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia...
...Armenia, under pressure from its- Turkic neighbors, will cling to a strong alliance with Russia...
...Speaking before the Russian parliament on December 12, Yeltsin reported that the new Commonwealth of Independent States formed in Minsk just four days earlier was now supported by military leaders...
...In Azerbaijan, all USSR government offices were ordered closed as of October 19...
...Moldova, which has indicated it wants to join the Commonwealth, in the end will succumb to pressure for reunification with Romania...
...Still, the move toward Ukrainian independence has raised great anxieties within military circles...
...to a marginal role in advancing democratic change, which more and more is being shaped by the leaders of Russia and Ukraine...
...In early November, however, Marshal Shaposhnikov told the Moscow News: I understand only too well [Ukraine's] desire to be independent...
...This rapprochement would not have been possible without the active involvement of Yeltsin, whose visionary leap toward a loose commonwealth of states holds the promise of a stable evolution toward democracy, and augurs well for resolving the thorny question of what to do with the former Red Army...
...Although Ukrainians in Kiev are as likely to speak Russian as their native tongue, they are no less determined than their brethren in Lviv to be rid of Moscow's domination...
...My prognosis is as follows: the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine will achieve its objective, to create its own armed forces...
...We have no use for . . . a union that allows someone else to govern on our territory...
...Vladimir Bukovsky has suggested that, far from being its victim, Gorbachev may well have been engaged in preparing the coup...
...Managers of nearby hotels fed the heroic resisters...
...And it was Minsk, the Slavic USSR's westernmost capital, that became the venue of the empire's iron curtain call...
...Border troops were trying to learn Ukrainian and adapting their Soviet uniforms to include Ukrainian emblems and symbols...
...Russia's autumn offensive was the product of growing discontent with the central state...
...Such movement leaders as Starovoytova, Father Gleb Yakunin, Lev Ponomaryov, Bella Denisenko, and Yuri Afanasyev have spoken out clearly on behalf of independence for all the republics...
...Russia, which already had agreed to abide by the results of the plebiscite, extended diplomatic recognition to the new state...
...Farther away, strike committees and emerging free trade As events showed, Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich would not have acted without at least some assurance from the military that it would back their gambit...
...As Mykhaylo Horyn, vice chairman of Rukh, observes: "We do not want to be part of a union that at any time can fall into tyranny...
...It could last about five years...
...Democratic Russia has emerged as the best guarantor of an independent Russia's democratic transformation...
...Such a formulation is a sign of progress...
...Not a single region failed to support statehood for Ukraine...
...Ambassador to Gorbachev Robert Strauss was shown on Soviet television' handing over $600 million in food credits to Ivan Silayev, the Soviet prime minister without portfolio, if you will...
...Losing Ukraine would be like losing an arm, painful but bearable," he told me in Moscow...
...We must prepare and adopt a status on stationing Union troops on the territory of independent republics in the transition period...
...While Yeltsin announced his intention to create a Russian national guard, the Ukrainian parliament went further, claiming dominion over all non-nuclear Soviet military forces in Ukraine and beginning to raise a Ukrainian army between 120,000 and 420,000 strong...
...On the very day 26 million Ukrainian citizens opted for independence, U.S...
...Other governments followed, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Canada, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Finland, and Switzerland...
...Another contributing factor was the emerging legitimacy of Russian statehood and the Russian president...
...In the long term, however, the Commonwealth may well see the departure of the Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan, which could eventually be drawn into a Pan-Turkic community (the more optimistic prospect) or a fundamentalist Islamic confederation (the darker possibility...
...By the summer of 1991, they had embraced Ukrainian sovereignty...
...On December 1, 81 percent of this area's vote was pro-independence...
...The community created by Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine is likely to be joined by all but the Baltic states and quirky Georgia...
...He had won the overwhelming backing of the armed forces in June's presidential elections, despite explicit orders from the center to back former Soviet prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov...
...CI The American Spectator February 1992 33...
...In Ukraine, troops patrolling the republic's western border with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland were taking down the red Soviet flag and raising the blue and yellow colors of independent Ukraine...
...If it is to contribute to the democratic resolution of these matters, the U.S...
...Supreme Soviet...
...Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, who resisted the coup plotters, at first sharply criticized the Ukrainian legislature's effort to take control of troops and materiel on Ukrainian soil...
...continued efforts by local, regional, and republic-level apparatchiks to cling to power by resorting to nationalist demagogy...
...T he most significant aspect of the new Commonwealth of Independent States is that it does not create a new government structure above that of the constituent nation states...
...Its only significant legislative initiative came on November 19—a law guaranteeing deputies six months' severance pay in the event of the dissolution of the parliament...
...In late October, the leaders of a widely supported strike movement in the Donbas issued a public statement endorsing the integrity of Ukraine, denouncing attempts to redraw the republic's borders, and backing Chornovil...
...With the party now banned, its offices shut down, and its bank accounts frozen, the news media in Russia and Ukraine are daily revealing sensational details of illegal and wasteful Communist financial doings...
...The new Commonwealth was proof that democratic nationalism was the central political engine in the collapse of Communism and the unraveling of empire...
...must recognize that even with the welcome creation of a loose Commonwealth, central authority no longer exists and can only be restored through violence and repression...
...Yeltsin's democratic inclinations have been the subject of intense speculation, but his recent behavior has demonstrated a commitment to democratic change, economic reform, and a rejection of Russian imperialism...
...In the 1991 Russian presidential election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a Ukrainian-born chauvinist, received six million votes on a platform that called for abolishing the republics and restoring a great Russian imperial state...
...Petersburg, and Kiev...
...When we met in Moscow in October, Sergei Stankevich, one of the three state counsels to President Yeltsin, was already confronting the possibility of Ukrainian independence...
...Indeed, as events showed, Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich would not have acted without at least some assurance from the military that it would back their gambit...
...Most probably, it doesn't want to leave—many officers would likely choose to stay...
...It's become trendy to be Ukrainian...
...Will Russian democracy triumph over Russian chauvinism...
...Red Army officers posted in Ukraine realize that they can continue living in comfortable postings in Kiev and Lviv under Ukrainian control or risk expulsion and relocation to such harsh terrain as Russia's long border with China or to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan...
...It also meant we had only two U.S...
...For the moment, the real basis for military loyalty will be wages, housing, and food...
...it is fueled mainly by practical economic interests, an awareness that prosperous Ukraine has an excellent chance of improving its lot if left alone...
...By late November, Yeltsin had taken control of the economic levers of central state power...
...The coup created a political vacuum that enabled, indeed encouraged, Boris Yeltsin and other republic leaders to press for independence...
...While this set off alarm bells within the democratic community, Democratic Russia leader Galina Starovoytova is optimistic that "Yeltsin has again opened the door to the democrats...
...Their declaration was a call upon the world community to withdraw diplomatic recognition from the Soviet Union and to confer it upon the newly sovereign republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States...
...In the end, however, Chornovil lost out to ex-party ideologue Leonid Kravchuk by 61-23 percent, in part because the wily parliamentary leader dominated television and radio...
...Two factors give reason for hope: Boris Yeltsin and the powerful Democratic Russia coalition movement...
...A rapid-fire orator, the democratic nationalist Chornovil allayed Russian fears of Ukrainian independence by proposing a federalized Ukraine, in which educational and cultural policy devolves to the regional level...
...In the area of international relations, we have to claim our place in Europe and take full part in the United Nations...
...If their action was driven by urgency and necessity, it was also calmly reasoned and well thought out...
...Shaposhnikov made it clear that he would not countenance the army's entanglement in ethnic conflicts or political matters: "No political objective is worth one drop of human blood...
...Ukrainians long served in key administrative posts in the czarist empire and do so in today's unraveling USSR (reform economist Grigory Yavlinsky and top Yeltsin aide Sergei Stankevich are both Ukrainian-born), while Russians streamed into Ukraine's cities to live a more comfortable life...
...Yegor Gaidar believes that if inter-republic trade is based on world prices, both Russia and Ukraine will come out winners, with Central Asia and the Baltics losing out...
...Ukraine can thus develop its own national armed forces, which will cooperate with Russia's in a NATO-like command...
...The Ukrainian move to independence has been largely free of chauvinism...
...Our nomenklatura in the military-industrial complex split...
...In western Ukraine (with a 98-percent "yes" vote), democratic nationalists rule with 'confidence and authority...
...In the last months of 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev formally controlled the black briefcase with one of the keys to the Soviet nuclear system, but with the military now siding with the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine it seemed likely that Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk would soon have their hands on the keys...
...A mass-based organization coalition similar to Poland's Solidarity or the Czech Civic Forum, Democratic Russia has nearly half a million members and is particularly strong outside Moscow and St...
...unions led resistance among coal miners in Russia and Ukraine, and pro-Yeltsin industrial workers in the Urals...
...The KGB, which formerly had a force of 488,000 workers, has been broken up along republic lines...
...The greatest danger still lies in the attitude of the Soviet military, which remains loyal to Yeltsin and the new Commonwealth...
...When conflicts arose among the republics, it was Boris Yeltsin and Nursultan Nazarbayev who plunged into action, as when they brokered a temporary respite to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in early October...
...The poet Ivan Drach, who is chairman of the Rukh, worries about the fate of Ukraine's dominant neighbor...
...In part, their move was born of necessity: Yeltsin's decision to take control of Russia's coal industry meant that Ukrainian miners now had to deal with Kiev...
...and wrested control of trade unions from Communist apparatchiks...
...Patriotic sentiment has also made significant headway in the countryside and in former Cossack strongholds like Zaporozhye, where for two years the democratic Rukh movement has conducted massive Woodstock-style festivals of Cossack culture...
...They have added a patriotic and democratic content to the educational curriculum, reformed the local police, peopling it with newly trained officers...
...T he Ukrainian move to independence has been largely free of chauvinism...
...The same day, Kravchuk reported that Soviet military leaders on Ukrainian soil had agreed to abide by a decree making them subject to his control...
...protection of ethnic minority rights in the republics...
...As 28 The American Spectator February 1992 After the coup, the once-scorned Russian flag 'was omnipresent...
...restored and reopened thousands of churches...
...On December 8, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia and President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, with the concurrence of Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), met in Minsk to sign the obituary of the last empire: "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence...
...Of course, this scenario does not take into account a re-actionary restoration...
...Georgia is likely to pursue an isolationist course, under its increasingly irrational despot, Zviad Gamsakhurdia—a leader who gives new meaning to the idea of political paranoia...
...While it is difficult to predict what the future holds, a likely scenario can be put forward...
...he asks...
...Accelerating Russia's move to statehood was a similar movement in the republic's historic and cultural sibling, Ukraine, a Texas-sized country of 52 million...
...and Western presence in most republics...
...A new future beckons, so we'd better get used to dealing with Russia and Ukraine—the two largest countries in Europe...
...Rather, it combines aspects of the European Community and NATO, with a unified military command and a single nuclear force...
...The Rukh coalition has sought to engage Russians, Jews, and Poles, blocking the emergence of mass-based "inter-fronts" or other Russian chauvinist structures...
...After the coup, fewer than half of the old USSR's fifteen republics—Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan—were participating in the reorganized Adrian Karatnycky, special assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO, is co-author of The Hidden Nations: The People Challenge the Soviet Union (Morrow...
...Then he announced that Russia would cease payments to seventy central ministries, leaving 100,000 of Mikhail Gorbachev's apparatchiks headed for the unemployment line...
...Moreover, the new generation of young democrats and technical experts in Yeltsin's government helped pave the way to the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States...
...The age of Gorbachev has come to an end...
...Already, some of them are switching allegiance...
...The remaining 20 percent weren't sure how to answer...
...But given a recent report by the Deutsche Bank that rated Ukraine as the republic with the best economic prospects, the workers have good reason for optimism...
...In recent weeks he has held a series of consultative meetings with the Democratic Russia leaders, who are satisfied with the positions that have emerged from these deliberations, including Yeltsin's economic reform program...
...Zhirinovsky received financial support from both the KGB and the Communist party...
...A private detective agency provided security to the defenders of the Russian parliament...
...And the Ukrainian parliament's call for Ukrainian officers now outside the republic to complete their service at home is being heard...
...It was the official Communist-controlled unions that denounced the free trade unionists and urged workers not to disrupt the "rhythm of work...
...Even in the Russian redoubt of Odessa, 85 percent voted for independence...
...The road to Ukrainian statehood, of course, was not smooth...
...It also means that the U.S...
...The legacy of this approach is that, as of December 25, we had a policy for a country that didn't exist and a close relationship with a leader who had no power...
...His thinking was apparently widespread...
...After the failed August coup, Kravchuk banned the Communist party and allowed its property to be seized by local governments...
...The Union of Ukrainian Officers has already signed up over 15,000 active-duty and 10,000 reserve officers...
...The Zhirinovsky phenomenon, Travkin's calls to restore the union, and the August coup itself help explain why democratic forces in the republics, which once were ready to support a loose confederation, prefer complete independence today...
...As early as October 1991, the USSR had been replaced by a loose economic community...
...There, the move toward independence is irreversible and the nation-building euphoria pronounced...
...Gorbachev was deliberately excluded when The American Spectator February 1992 27 ministers and presidents of the republics gathered in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, to discuss the post-Soviet economic community...
...Much has been written about Gorbachev's fabled reforms, but it was the failed August coup, that spelled the end of Communism and empire...
...In a series of whistle-stops, he won converts to the independence cause, walking in on meetings of thousands of skeptical coal miners or hundreds of skeptical Jewish and Russian intellectuals and leaving them amid raucous applause...
...In the southeastern coal-mining Don Basin, where one out of every two workers is Russian and 90 percent of the population is Russophone, support for statehood was 77 percent...
...The Bush Administration has relegated the U.S...
...And few have better anti-Communist credentials than Vyacheslav Chornovil, the charismatic, cerebral 53-year-old journalist-turned-political-prisoner who in 1990 was elected governor of Lviv province...
...Among them: • a possible conflict over ethnically Russian Crimea, which may eventually want to secede from Ukraine...
...Immediately after the collapse of the coup, the Russian president shut himself off from outside contact...
...And while Gorbachev may have been held against his will in his Crimean dacha, the real targets of the putsch were the growing democratic movement and the centrifugal independence forces in the republics...
...Youth culture, too, has become fiercely patriotic...
...Opposition could also be found in the KGB: in Donetsk, in southeastern Ukraine, the local KGB leadership told a miners' strike committee that it would not move against workers if they staged a general strike...
...We must create concrete mechanisms, take concrete steps toward statehood," he declared...
...In central Ukraine (95 percent pro-independence), democrats now run the city councils of the capital Kiev and the industrial city of Dniprodzerzhinsk...
...There is a need to conclude an agreement on the defense alliance of sovereign states...
...coming such a development as democratic, 19 percent worrying that, it undermines the defensive capability of the country, and 14 percent concerned that it might lead to civil war...
...When I first met the battle-hardened miners who led the region's strike movement in late 1989, they were suspicious of all politicians—democrats and Communists alike—and regarded the Rukh as extremist...
...But let's follow a civilized road...
...it is fueled mainly by practical economic interests, an awareness that prosperous Ukraine has an excellent chance of improving its lot if left alone...
...Ukraine's independence movement and its presidential election campaign allowed anti-Communist nationalists to make their case to the people...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 2
