None of us has ever seen a spring like that of 1989.
Twenty years ago Her Majesty History relentlessly and resolutely invaded the closely-guarded territory of the communist empire and swept like a hurricane over the countries of the so-called Social Camp — Poland, Hungary, East Germany, etc. — triggering a ruinous “domino effect,” and broke into Communist Party and government institutions and the homes of millions of Soviet citizens. This wave immediately divided the “united Soviet people” into different, sometimes warring, nations, as well as ethnic, political, social and religious groups on the huge territory of the Soviet Union, shaking or shattering the dogmas of a reigning official ideology.
History, i.e., the discharged tectonic energy of deep-seated societal forces that defied the Kremlin and the KGB, brought about turmoil and rift in the governing bodies, families, the minds and hearts of people some of whom were superstitiously afraid of any changes (in the memory of 20th-century people, radical changes were always associated with misfortunes and wars), while others persistently dreamed of changes, for they were conscious of the existing social stalemate. Too evident were the death throes of a system that resembled a perpetual motion machine designed by a mad inventor: in spite of the well-done drawings and the inventor’s fiery promises, the machine, which had at first worked almost trouble-free on blood, began to show serious defects and faults — it was just a matter of time when it would grind to a halt.
As an eyewitness to and participant in those events, I offer my readers my biased comments on the unique period of hopes and changes.
1. ELECTIONS: THEORY AND PRACTICE
The elections of the Soviet people’s deputies in 1989 (held before the Polish elections the same year) was the first chance in 70 years for the ruling party, Mikhail Gorbachev, and, above all, the broad masses, to carry out reforms indispensable for saving the dying country.
But Gorbachev and his advisors took an insincere approach by crafting a labyrinthine and ambiguous law on elections: on the one hand, it created the illusion of a democratized regime and provided for a broadened representative base by way of infusing the “fresh blood,” i.e., the supporters of the “perestroika and glasnost” policy. On the other hand, the law introduced checks and balances that the authors believed permitted keeping parliament in control. It was planned to set up powerful filters for candidates who were deemed undesirable by the Party — the so-called district pre-election meetings that involved the regime’s loyal servants who could blackball any “undesirable” candidate.
To be on the safe side, quotas were established for the Communist Party; the Young Communist League; writers,’ artists’, and veterans’ unions; the Academy of Sciences; and other organizations, which made it possible for the “elect” people to run unopposed for parliament.
However, as it often happens in real life, this conjectural and cumbersome system failed to work in the planned mode: enraged over the ever-growing shortages and nomenclature privileges, voters from Vladivostok to Lviv (especially in large industrial and intellectual centers) managed to break through some barriers and elect representatives of the democratic opposition. The Day (and especially the night) the votes were counted sounded a distress signal for the Communist Party — a signal that the country’s self-confident leaders failed to read properly.
Likewise, the quotas for civic organizations were filled not only with Gorbachev’s followers but also with such independent globally acclaimed personalities as Prof. Andrei Sakharov.
Whatever the case, the 1989 elections showed that new — national, liberal democratic, great-power-chauvinistic, and Communist reformationist — forces were nascent in the country. This period, so much reminiscent of the times of the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War, saw the revival of the once destroyed political parties and movements in new forms and the outbreak of the once suppressed conflicts.
2. PERSONAL
The year 1989 was a turning point in my destiny, for it brought me the acute pain of grief and, almost simultaneously, the joy of an exhausting victory. My mother Ofelia Shcherbak, the daughter of a descendant of Polish insurgents and a Ukrainian woman, died in January 1989, in the heat of the election race. A strong believer, mother celebrated Orthodox Christmas and only then asked to be taken to hospital. One day, in an interval between the election rallies, I came to the Academic Hospital… and my heart sank: she was not there in the ward. She had been taken to the resuscitation department. It took me great pains to persuade the doctor to let me in there, and I could see my mother alive for the last time. Although she was stupefied by medications and her condition was deteriorating, she could still ask how her beloved granddaughter, my daughter, Bohdana was and whether I had been elected to parliament.
I committed a sin (for which I am still repenting) and said that I had been elected, although there still was a long and painful way to go. Bohdana was all right. Mother’s beautiful hazel eyes, already shadowed with otherworldly darkness, flashed out quiet satisfaction. My heart still bleeds as I recall that “white lie.” I consider my election to parliament as ante-mortem blessing from my mother.
I was nominated as candidate MP by about 20 academic and industrial establishments of Kyiv in almost all the constituencies. I am still proud of winning at Kyiv’s Antonov Aircraft Factory: I was advised to speak in Russian here, but I refused and chose to address the people in Ukrainian. Despite the voters’ support and the highly professional (for those times) work of my team, I was blackballed at the district election meetings of the Zhovtnevy constituency and the Kyiv city national and territorial constituency. They could not allow a non-Party member, the leader of the Ukrainian “greens,” who called for investigating all aspects of the Chornobyl disaster, to run for parliament. I was almost ready to drop any further struggle and resign myself to the role of an outsider, to which the totalitarian system assigned me, when… a miracle occurred.
After passing for a third time the tight filter of district election meetings of Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky Constituency (consisting of Podilsky, Shevchenkivsky, and Radiansky districts), I was put on a six-candidate list and won the election. I thus kept the promise I gave to my mother. In those days I received invaluable support from the workforce unit of the Microprocessor plant, which had nominated me as candidate. Even today I am still grateful to those who backed me in the difficult days of the election marathon.
3. INTERREGIONAL GROUP AND REPUBLICAN CLUB OF DEPUTIES
In the very first days of the 1st Congress of Peoples’ Deputies I joined, without hesitation, the legendary Interregional Group of Deputies (MDG) headed by Andrei Sakharov, Boris Yeltsin, Gavriil Popov, and consisting of well-known Russian democrats and brilliant personalities, such as Yury Afanasiev, Anatoly Sobchak, Galina Starovoitova, O. Yablokov, and Yury Ryzhov. The very membership in the MDG was a signal to the authorities, which regarded the activities of the “Sakharovite” opposition not as a chance for the country tormented with lies and inefficient socioeconomic policies but as an evil scheme of backstage foreign forces targeted at the empire’s sacred foundations. The MDG also incorporated my parliamentary colleagues from Ukraine: R. Bratun, S. Riabchenko, I. Vakarchuk, V. Korotych, E. Kozin, R. Fedoriv, P. Talanchuk, V. Cherniak, Y. Sorochyk, and others.
At the same time, a group of Soviet people’s deputies from Ukraine, which included, in addition to the above-mentioned, V. Hryshchuk, S. Konev, V. Yavorivsky, and A. Yaroshynska, set up the Republican Club of Deputies (RDK) of Ukraine in Kyiv in order to strengthen links with the native land which saw important political developments and a fast dissemination of the idea of national sovereignty.
Gorbachev’s brainchild, the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, almost a third of whose members had gone out of the Communist Party control, was a bizarre, if not grotesque, medley of 2,250 deputies, including old Stalinist hawks; radical oppositional representatives of the Baltic republics, who favored immediate secession from the Soviet Union; Gorbachev-type liberal communists (such as Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze); white-turbaned Tajik mullahs; Armenian and Azeri nationalists brimming with mutual hatred (the Armenia-Azerbaijan war over Karabakh was already raging); Russian chauvinists who were just beginning to rise to power; and Ukrainian national democrats.
However, most of the deputies belonged to the “aggressive and obedient majority” of the “Soviet people.” There were very many representatives of Ukraine in that majority: party bosses, collective farm “barons,” cutting-edge factory workers and peasants, and well-known academics — otherwise good and decent people whom the System had brought up in the spirit of obedience and unflagging support of the CPSU leadership.
When I first came in May 1989 into the assembly hall of the Kremlin Place of Congresses, which hosted the 1st Congress of People’s Deputies, I got a feeling as if I were inside a bubbling political nuclear reactor just seconds before an unstoppable chain reaction: passionate arguments would break out here and there, everybody was trying to seize the microphone and cry out his own truth.
Incidentally, I sat in the fifth row of the Ukrainian delegation’s sector, and next to me in the same row on the right, in seat 15, among the Russian deputies, was Prof. Andrei Sakharov. I could watch him very well, and I remember being struck by the fact that the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb chose not to rise when the Soviet Union’s anthem was being played.
What astonished me was an almost physically obvious atmosphere of intolerance and hatred that dominated the congress: orthodox Bolsheviks and former political prisoners, the imperial-minded followers of the established ideology from the Union group and leaders of national movements from the union and autonomous republics, the monarchy-supporting Slavophile “sons of the earth” and West-oriented Moscow democrats, intellectuals and ignoramuses, academicians and lumpens, marshals and pop stars, the Greens, Blacks and Reds, angels and devils — all came together in an uncompromising battle which could result either in a new dictatorship and terror or in the breakup of the empire. There was no third way out.
Working full-time at the USSR Supreme Soviet (as I had promised my voters, I mostly worked at the Committee on Environment, where I focused on Chornobyl problems), we, MDG and RDK members, discussed the crucial political matters of The Day. For instance, in December 1989 the RDK passed several important resolutions. The resolution “On the Union of SSR” proposed “creating a truly voluntary union of sovereign states” and claimed that the new Union “shall be based on the principle that nations will exercise their right to self-determination in the forms of sovereignty that they may freely choose.” We demanded that the 3rd Session of the USSR Supreme Soviet and the 3rd Congress of USSR People’s Deputies put on their agendas the question of the condition of the USSR, the principles of its restructuring, and the drafting of a new Declaration and a new Union Treaty.
I can remember Gorbachev and [Supreme Soviet Speaker] Anatoly Lukyanov reacting angrily and negatively to our proposal — they were not going to discuss this very obvious and pressing problem. When they “woke up” and began to draw up an “updated” Union Treaty in 1990–91, it was too late.
In another resolution, “On the 1932–33 Famine,” we demanded “making an unambiguous political and legal assessment of the 1932–33 tragic events that resulted in a mass-scale manmade famine and the death of millions of people in Ukraine, Kuban, Don, Kazakhstan, and other regions of the country.”
We suggested that the Congress of USSR People’s Deputies form a commission to find out the true causes, circumstances, proportion, and consequences of the 1932–33 mass-scale famine and condemn the policy of genocide against our own people.
Naturally, the Kremlin leadership categorically turned down this proposal as well.
Until a certain moment, the Russian democrats, our MDG colleagues, supported (under the great influence of Sakharov and Starovoitova) our idea of sovereign USSR republics, particularly, Ukraine. A very dramatic point in this struggle was the MDG’s attempt at the 4th Congress of USSR People’s Deputies (December 1990) to push through a resolution moved by E. Kozin, an associate professor at the Sumy branch of the Kharkiv Polytechnic Insti-tute (Sumy territorial constituency), which called upon the Congress to recognize the declarations on sovereignty and independence passed by the parliaments of union republics.
That was a crucial moment in the history of the congresses of USSR People’s Deputies: it was a test of the highest legislative body’s attitude to the union republics’ aspiration to become sovereign states.
A negative response to the Ukrainian’s proposal immediately came from… another Ukrainian, H. Revenko: he claimed that the sovereignty of a republic, a nation, and an individual was unbreakable and did not need to be approved by anybody (!). One of the active Russian MDG members also came out against the resolution because, you see, the latter failed to mention the autonomous republics. A second later, a ruddy-cheeked political commissar, a colonel, with an ear-pleasing Ukrainian surname Petrushenko climbed the podium and shouted that the Interregional Group of Deputies must be urgently reregistered “because we (who? — Author) have petitions from very many deputies on the necessity of a parliamentary inquiry into the funding of one of our parliamentary groups by Western secret services.”
In spite of Lukyanov’s resistance, the resolution was put to the vote: 515 voted for and 1,197 against it. The reactionary majority buried the idea of a renewed sovereignty of the republics. It is very interesting to see the names of those who voted that day in the Kremlin (to tell the truth, my information on the Ukrainian deputies is incomplete).
“For:” Mykola Amosov, M. Belikov, B. Bondarenko, R. Bratun, Y. Burykh, I. Vakarchuk, Oles Honchar, R. Hromiak, I. Zelinsky, V. Kachalovsky, E. Kozin, S. Koniev, Vitalii Korotych, Vilen Martyrosian, Dmytro Pavlychko, H. Petruk-Popyk, Serhii Riabchenko, L. Sanduliak, Y. Sorochyk, P. Talanchuk, E. Tykhonenkov, V. Tkachuk, R. Fedoriv, V. Cherniak, V. Shynkaruk, Yurii Shcherbak, and Volodymyr Yavorivsky.
“Against:” S. Andronati, A. Vedmid, V. Venhlovska, A. Hirenko, S. Hubenko, V. Dykusarov, P. Druz, Y. Yelchenko, V. Ivashko, V. Kavun, M. Kasian, A. Kornienko, V. Kravets, H. Kriuchkov, V. Lysytsky, V. Masol, V. Myronenko, D. Motorny, M. Orlyk, Borys Oliinyk, Y. Parubok, Borys Paton, M. Pychuzhkin, V. Pliutynsky, L. Sukhov, V. Trefilov, V. Tsybukh, and Serhii Chervonopysky.
The two lists are quite eloquent, albeit incomplete. Such well-known Russian democrats as Yu. Afanasiev, Gennady Burbulis, and Mikhail Poltoranin voted “for,” as did Georgy Arbatov, Yevgeny Vielikhov, and Iosif Kobzon.
The future President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who sat next to me in the Supreme Soviet assembly hall, voted “for” (!), whereas such prominent Russian democrats as Sobchak and S. Stankevich abstained, and P. Bunich, S. Zalygin and T. Zaslavskaya voted “against.”
I am telling this story in such detail in order not to lavish praise or sling mud on somebody but in order to make it clear to the reader that it was very difficult to push the ideas of political sovereignty for USSR republics through the barriers put up by advocates of the empire.
4. UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN RELATIONS
What proved very fruitful was cooperation with the Russian democrats in the field of relations between Ukraine and the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR). This must have been the acme followed by malfunctions, for, after taking the same train, named Democracy, we got off at the station named Nation, where our paths gradually diverged in spite of the starry-eyed illusions of many participants in this process.
In 1990 it was decided at a session of the People’s Council of Ukraine, which also included a group of USSR people’s deputies from Ukraine (see their names above), to send MP groups to various union republics in order to forge ties with their parliamentarians. Ukraine’s People’s Deputy Volodymyr Kryzhanivsky and I went to Moscow, where we met representatives of the Democratic Russia parliamentary bloc. It was a high honor for me to prepare, at the request of my colleagues, a primary draft Statement on the Principles of International Relations between Ukraine and the RSFSR based on the Declaration of Political Sovereignty. (All the other versions of this draft, plus additions and amendments, are kept in my archive.)
A little later, Pavlychko, Riabchenko and I modified the Statement. The negotiations were held in Moscow with the consent of Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk and resulted in signing the document on August 29, 1990. The talks proceeded at the White House, the seat of the RSFSR government, where we were received by the then Chairman (Speaker) of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khazbulatov.
The Ukrainian delegation included USSR and Ukrainian SSR People’s Deputies I. Vakarchuk, I. Drach, I. Zaiets, V. Kryzhanivsky, L. Lukianenko, D. Pavlychko, V. Pylypchuk, S. Riabchenko, V. Shovkoshytny, Yu. Shcherbak, and I. Yukhnovsky. The Russian delegation consisted of USSR and RSFSR People’s Deputies Yu. Afanasiev, S. Kovaliov, V. Lukin, A. Murashov, L. Ponomariov, S. Filatov, M. Chelnokov, S. Shakhrai, F. Shelov-Kovediayev, V. Yugin, and O. Yablokov. The talks lasted for eight consecutive hours in a friendly atmosphere. There were no serious conceptual disputes, but there were some differences over terminology.
For example, almost all the Russian colleagues agreed with us on the use of the word “empire.” The Statement said that “the treaty on the formation of the USSR in 1922 in fact eliminated the political independence of both Ukraine and Russia and laid the groundwork for a Stalinist empire which became a concentration camp for all the peoples that populated it.” I wish I could see a document like this signed today by members of Russia’s State Duma! It was Afanasiev who especially insisted on using the word “empire.” But one of the negotiators objected that, formally, the Soviet Union was not an “empire” because there was no sovereign emperor. This ludicrous reasoning was ignored.
The interstate relations of Ukraine and Russia were supposed to be based on:
— sovereign equality of the parties;
— non-interference into internal affairs… and renunciation of the use of force as well as economic and other ways of pressure;
— inviolability of the existing borders… and renunciation of any territorial claims;
— mutually advantageous cooperation… and settlement of any disputes in the spirit of harmony.
The three-part Statement was unique not only because it was made public well before the signing of official documents, a year before the abortive coup in Moscow and proclamation of Ukraine’s political independence, and not only because it used, for the first time in political literature, the word combination “Commonwealth of Independent States.” The Statement was unique because a group of well-known political figures of Ukraine and Russia, most of whom belonged to Sakharov’s opposition grouping, so clearly spelled out, for the first time in the history of the two countries and peoples, the principles of coexistence between Ukraine and Russia as independent states and the problems they were to address.
Frankly, I was struck and moved by the magnanimity of our Moscow colleagues who seemed to be prepared to drop forever the “Big Brother mentality” with respect to Ukraine and sincerely recognize its independence. (Later, some of them got back to the imperial great-power phraseology.)
5. GOODBYE, MOSCOW!
The Congress of USSR People’s Deputies and sessions of the USSR Supreme Soviet produced a dramatic effect: they exposed to Soviet citizens (thanks to TV and radio programs) a huge number of hitherto hushed-up problems — from the historical crimes of Stalinism to the political and economic flops of latter-day “real socialism.” Pandora’s box thus opened and terrified those who looked inside. The events in Tbilisi, Vilnius, and Riga rallied democrats together, for they renounced violence and condemned Gorbachev’s unprincipled policies. It was clear that something serious was brewing and that the destiny of Ukraine would be decided in Kyiv, not in the Kremlin.
In May 1991, before finally returning to Kyiv, I published the article “Requiem for Parliament” in the Moscow-based Literaturnaya gazeta, in which I called Lukyanov a perfidious Salieri to Gorbachev. I was told that the article had infuriated Gorbachev. I will take the liberty of quoting just one passage from this article:
“The tragic mistake of M. S. Gorbachev and those who stand behind (or guide) him is a stubborn attempt to keep intact the unitary-centrist model of the USSR in its original Stalinist purity and simplicity without taking into account any realities or any obvious signs of an ever-growing political earthquake. As if existing in two worlds — the Kyiv Ukrainian one, with its blue-yellow flags of independence and its stubborn desire to create a sovereign state, and the ghostly Kremlin world of illusions, — I can see very clearly the great and dangerous contradictions between them…
“I am afraid the Kremlin is still full of illusions that it is not too late to curb the evildoing separatists who are ‘bursting to grab power’ and to bring everything back to square one. Should this logic prevail, this will be a grandiose misfortune for this country. Will they really give in to the provocations of political paranoids who are calling for the introduction of the state of emergency, instead of listening to political realists, i.e., leaders of the union republics, who know what the ‘tank phase’ of the perestroika may result in?”
The article was published on May 15, 1991, three something months before the abortive coup, with Lukyanov as one of its masterminds, — an attempt that ended up in the final collapse of the USSR.
6. WE RECEIVED A UNIQUE CHANCE
Yes, we made a lot of mistakes: our rosy dreams and illusions vanished into thin air over the two years that I worked in the Kremlin. Yes, we were na ve and still unaware of the terrible and devastating power of money which has replaced the honor, conscience, and care about the state for many. Yes, we failed to keep all the promises we gave to our voters.
But we made some honest attempts to change — at least a little — the course of events for the better in a state that was tumbling down before our very eyes, to do our best to ward off the outbreak of a civil war on our land. Our hearts bled for Ukraine and its future.
We fought and achieved abrogation of the shameful (and now forgotten) Article 6 of the Constitution, which empowered the top leadership of one party to humiliate and rob a big country. We revealed the closely guarded Chornobyl secrets and brought those guilty of this and other disasters to moral trial.
On Jan. 13, 1991, the leaden-clouded day of bloodshed in Lithuania, we, a united team of the Russian and Ukrainian members of the Interregional Group, went out on the snowbound Red Square and raised high our parliamentary IDs in front of Lenin’s mausoleum so the dead man lying there and his dead entourage knew that their power came to an end. The country had got up from its knees.
What was on our mind was Politics and History rather than petty venal passions, miserable glamour, and television shows of political pigmies. We were not silent — by contrast with today’s drab button-pushers and voiceless legionnaires; we produced hundreds of documents, such as resolutions, draft laws, protest statements, and addresses; we spearheaded the first free demonstrations and spoke at mass public rallies to prove that we were right. We were honest to ourselves and our voters who I am sure understood this. And I am proud that my former voters say hello to me even today.
There is also a fraction of our modest efforts in the global geopolitical changes that have occurred in the past 20 years.
Is there a greater happiness than to see and welcome the advent of History and Freedom to your Fatherland? Is there a greater sorrow than to see power-hungry adventurists and aliens without kith and kin trying to stifle independence of the Ukrainian state created by the blood and hard work of previous generations?
Yurii Shcherbak was People’s Deputy of the USSR, member of the USSR Supreme Soviet, and member of Andrei Sakharov’s Interregional Group of Deputies in 1989–91.
