People were sitting on steps and standing in the aisles of the hall of the House of Teachers which hosted an evening in memory of Vyacheslav Chornovil. They had honest and lucid faces; they cried listening to the flow of funereal music in honor of Chornovil; they looked sad hearing the heartfelt verses of Atena Pashko, they prayed when “Vichnaya pamyat” (Eternal Memory) spasmodically choked the heart. They paid tribute to their hero, their reckless, valiant, and fair Slavko, the unrivaled general of political prisoner camps, a majestic figure, the mere existence of whom once filled their senses, giving hope and answers to the most difficult questions. They had lost Him.
Again, like a year ago, they experienced feelings of sorrow and injustice, feelings only music can express. And again, tears brought no relief. Because the place their hero, their titan, left has been occupied by dwarves, by withered shadows that, carefully choosing words, are molding the image of a “strategic genius,” the “actualized politician of concrete party work,” and “outstanding son.” “We will not betray his testament.” “Chornovil’s ideas should be in every home!” “Rukh is experiencing a renascence.” On the split: “Somebody was tempted by the tasty and convenient,” “the pimps of the national idea.” On the refusal to rename a Kyiv street: “Shame!” The struggle is ongoing, waged by far smaller figures.
Not so many people love Chornovil, for simple human feelings rarely come in a politician’s lifetime. But their life is carefully analyzed posthumously. There are far more people who do not like Chornovil because they know him too little. Or too much. But if his name is still to be used as a clarion call, if his testaments are to be used as justification of somebody else’s political inaptitude, if banal squabbling for premises is to be portrayed as a desire to set up a Chornovil museum, then what is left of the Hero? How can those who still love him preserve his memory and how can those who did not know him understand that he really was a Hero?
And how can we all explain to the Nation that it has a Hero, not an idol? In the times of perestroika, that is, pluralism from above, an organization was to emerge in opposition to the Communist Party. And emerge it did as a non-governmental organization, the People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika (NRU, Rukh is Ukrainian for movement), which comprised people of different persuasions ranging from dissident nationalists to liberal Communists.
Three tendencies were laid down when Rukh took shape: first, Rukh, as a single mass opposition organization comprising well- known political forces, was to increase its influence and electoral base; secondly, there was to be a distinction between figures with different political views within the organization; and thirdly, Rukh was to beget a wing that would try to turn a non-governmental organization into a political party.
All these tendencies led to the first big split in the early 1992 at the Rukh’s Third Grand Assembly. Rukh in fact became a political party headed by Vyacheslav Chornovil.
Having gained control of the organization, Chornovil and his trusted lieutenants also automatically acquired its electorate already aware of what may be called in modern political-science parlance the brand, Rukh people. Judging by the results of the 1991 presidential elections, this electorate accounted for almost a fourth of all voters. The 1994 parliamentary elections created a Rukh faction in Verkhovna Rada.
The factor of the almost automatically inherited electorate and the special personal features of Rukh’s single leader Vyacheslav Chornovil determined the main tendency in the further evolution of Rukh as a party.
Maybe it was natural that the opportunists, just preparing to enter big-time politics, managed to understand that membership in the Rukh leadership practically guaranteed a parliamentary seat, while Chornovil based his appointments policy, since he was chairman of the Lviv city council, on personal loyalty of his immediate entourage. Knowing this, they took advantage. This is why new names appeared in the party executive body and later on atop the party list during the 1998 parliamentary elections.
Simultaneously, rank-and-file romantic workers quietly left Rukh, for they were ready to forgive their leader for many things either out of personal affection or out of a strictly decent interpretation of party discipline, but they could not reconcile with constant contempt for their points of view, with his cavalier attitude toward their initiatives and assessments, and with the fact that they had no personal prospects in the party. “You see,” a former Rukh member says, “out of an hour that a faction meeting took, we only listened to Chornovil for 50 minutes. Only to his viewpoint, whether brilliant or mediocre. But he could not listen for more than ten seconds. These things would no longer do in 1996.” Rukh members like this quit the party quietly, without scandal, being aware that they were unable to break down the monolith of the rules Chornovil set and agreeing that it was his Rukh. Little by little, they were replaced by people who, encountering the same problems, would opt for a different tactic.
The Rukh ideology, usually judged by deeds and not by the program, boiled down to inertial anticommunism and Russophobia. Meanwhile, Rukh paid practically no attention to social, economic, and human-rights issues, or the problems of setting up a democratic state, which is, in principle, strange for the successors of the Soviet dissident movement. It became clear in due course that Rukh was simply bargaining with the authorities, with votes of the Rukh electorate and Deputies being the commodity, and executive portfolios and financial injections being the price.
All this caused a gradual dwindling of the Rukh electorate from 9.5% in March 1998 to 3.3% in the 1999 presidential elections when two Rukh candidates ran for office.
Rukh has reaped every ear of the crop it sowed during perestroika. It sowed nothing afterward.
The moment when Rukh began to sell this harvest to the authorities and bargain over the price was in fact the beginning of its end. Incidentally, this bargaining was not very successful for the party. Before 1998, Rukh had only one ministerial office and, for a short period of time, two gubernatorial seats in Western Ukraine. It also had to be content with the results of small-time lobbying. This state of affairs could not suit the pragmatic Rukh members who are businesspeople for whom the pursuit of career and money is their lifetime dream. This and the absence of any literary gift was perhaps the only thing that distinguished them from the old Rukh. This only increased their discontent over Chornovil’s monopoly on contacts with the authorities. In the most “lucrative” moment, during the saga of electing a Speaker, Chornovil personally collected and filled out his fraction’s ballots as he saw fit.
The predictable anticommunism of Rukh allowed the authorities to manipulate the party, for the Rukh Deputies voted automatically against “communist” projects. This somewhat brought down Rukh’s political price, and, to bring it up, the party leader even negotiated with Hromada. NDP People’s Deputy Karpov once said that both the Communists and Rukh were fed from Pavlo Lazarenko’s hand.
Rukh’s opponents were wrong when they said this country was ruled by Rukh, but they were close to the truth using the expression, Rukh power. For it is Rukh that blessed that power in foiling attempt to block the adoption of the Constitution in 1996.
In the long run, Rukh split into two parts. One comprised those who remained loyal to Chornovil: the overwhelming majority of them were people of political yesterday, unable to modernize the national democratic idea and to put party building principles outside the eternal struggle of personalities rather than ideas. The other included pragmatists and the bourgeoisie who came under the slogans of loyalty to Chornovil which they adhered to only so long as he satisfied their career-related or financial ambitions. Having split from Rukh and forming a new party, the Ukrainian Popular Movement (UNR), they felt on themselves all manifestations of intolerance on the part of Chornovil’s Rukh, the intolerance they had been displaying themselves, together with their leader, only the day before toward their counterparts in other national democratic parties.
Today, in paying last respects to Chornovil, we also pay our last respects to Rukh. Its evolution ended with this final split, which came down to trite squabbles. For most voters, the Rukh identification sounds ironic. All Hennady Udovenko can do to defend himself is to claim that his party is being persecuted and harassed in the press, which, you see, has a negative effect on people.
Forecasting their probable defeat in the future parliamentary elections, the two Rukhs are conducting talks today to forge blocs with more promising and financially sound parties: NRU with Reforms and Order and UNR with Fatherland. Both Rukhs could sink into oblivion, dissolved in these blocs.
Those who canonize Chornovil today will try not to remember that the groundwork of this process was laid not after the last political romantic’s death but in the last years of his life. This is the groundwork built with such separate bricks as intolerance toward political opponents, now to be called struggle for ideological purity; careless selection of political friends, now to be cloaked as struggle against treason; and a condescension toward the all those gray but manipulative people who sing hosannas, who now take the status of true disciples and monopolize the right to cherish the memory of Chornovil.
But we are also going to remember him as the hero of a still nonexistent nation which he awakened and taught with the greatness of his spirit and his mistakes alike, as one of those who used to lay those bricks which shook, after his departure, what he had built in his final years as one who left us a question: would he has been able to prevent the destruction of this edifice if he had lived?
INCIDENTALLY
Representatives of both splinters of Rukh criticize the decision of the Kyiv city council to abrogate the contract on Rukh rental of the Honchar Street building housing the office of the central executive committee of NRU and then UNR.
NRU spokesman Dmytro Ponamarchuk characterized this decision as shameful for the whole Ukrainian people. He declared that the building at 33 Honchar Street, “belongs to NRU according to all the documents.” Mr. Ponamarchuk said the decision of the city council made “forces Rukh to resort to radical steps,” noting this can mean the beginning of an agitation campaign to unseat city mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko. He added that Rukh would demand that public prosecutors appeal against the city council decision. The Rukh spokesman also expressed indignation that the city council had “quashed” the decision to rename Kyiv’s Komintern (Communist International) Street in honor of Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil.
In his turn, deputy chairman of UNR, Mykhailo Ratushny, noted, commenting on the city council decision, that UNR had known that “some quite serious corrupt financial circles were interested in taking hold of these premises and opening an office and a jewelry shop there,” Interfax- Ukraine reports.
According to Mr. Ratushny, the city council had the legal right to make this decision. Yet, he stressed that the parliamentary committees on privatization and the budget would “look more carefully into the privatization of Kyiv municipal property.”
