Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich (born January 10, 1934) is a Ukrainian politician and the first President of Ukraine, who was in power from December 5, 1991 until his resignation on July 19, 1994. He was also the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and a People's Deputy Ukraine, elected from the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united).
The fate of Western Ukraine - the birthplace of Leonid Kravchuk - in the middle of the last century
Where did Leonid Kravchuk start his life? His biography began in the village of Bolshoi Zhitin in the Rivne region in a peasant family. Then it was the Polish lands. In the next ten years, power changed dramatically in Leni's native land three times. First, in September 1939, as a result of the liberation campaign of the Red Army in western Ukraine, it was annexed to the Ukrainian SSR. Then in July 1941 these lands were captured by fascist Germany for three years. And finally, in the fall of 1944, Soviet power returned here again. But she acted only during the day, and at night the Western Ukrainian villages were under the rulenationalists. And this went on for several years.
Can you imagine how all these vicissitudes affected the character of the locals, especially the younger generation? To survive in such conditions, one had to learn to hide one's thoughts, to think one thing and say another, not to trust anyone, not to believe anything. This is how a whole generation of post-war Western Ukrainian youth was formed, to which Leonid Kravchuk belonged.
Childhood
The events of the war had a profound effect on the fate of our hero's relatives and himself. Lenya's father Makar Kravchuk, a former dashing cavalryman of the Polish army and a laborer for the Polish colonists, was mobilized into the Red Army in 1944 and, after fighting for a short time, laid his head in Belarus the same year.
Mother got married again and together with her stepfather managed to raise Leonid. They lived in poverty, Leonid Kravchuk himself recalled that he walked barefoot until the first snow. However, hardships only tempered the character of the future president.
Years of study
After graduating from school, Leonid Kravchuk moves to the city and enters the Rivne cooperative technical school. According to him, together with his fellow students, he rented a room without any amenities. Then in 1953, after graduating from a technical school with a red diploma, he gets the right to enter the Kyiv State University at the Faculty of Economics without exams.
Studying there was also not easy, the scholarship was 24 rubles (however, lunch in the student canteen cost 50 kopecks!). To survive, studentsat night they went to unload wagons with frozen fish at a nearby fish processing plant. Future President Leonid Kravchuk lived in a hostel in a room for 12 people, but at the same time he managed to study "excellently" and receive an increased scholarship - as much as 30 rubles.
The only meeting of a lifetime
At the university, Leonid also met his future wife. The beautiful slender Sumy woman Tonya Mishura immediately captivated his heart. They had a lot in common, both grew up without fathers, graduated from technical schools with honors and entered the university without exams. Tonya reciprocated Leonid, from the first year she began to take care of him, cooked food for two in the student kitchen, and Leonid tried to get extra money wherever possible to replenish their budget.
Major changes began in the country, and they captured Kyiv students in their flow. When the development of virgin lands began, Leonid and Tonya, after the third year, went to the Kustanai region of Kazakhstan, where he had to work as a tractor driver, spending the night in a cold tent until late autumn. Here Leonid caught a cold, so much so that he lost consciousness and almost died. He was saved by Tonya, who found the car and took her beloved to the hospital, where he came to his senses. After returning from virgin lands, Leonid and Tonya got married. Their marriage continues to this day.
First job
In 1958, Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich graduated from KSU and was assigned to Chernivtsi, where he began to read political economy at the financial college.
Household disorder and here pursued Leonid, like bad luck. They settled him inwomen's hostel, though in the "red corner". For those who are young and do not know what it is, we explain. So in Soviet institutions, a special (non-residential) room was called, decorated with Soviet symbols (a bust of Lenin, a banner (if any), various letters, pennants and other attributes of the Soviet lifestyle). Since you don’t particularly run into the women’s washbasin or toilet, the young teacher had to run every morning and every evening to the city square to the public toilet to wash, shave and defecate. Funny? You just chuckle. But Leonid endured this mockery for three whole years.
Party career
Finally, in 1960, the young political economist was noticed in the local party organization and transferred to the House of Political Education as a consultant-methodologist. This was followed by a transfer to the apparatus of the Chernivtsi Regional Committee of the Communist Party. Here our hero made a party career for 7 years, rising to the position of head of the propaganda department of the regional party committee.
Next, the path of a major party worker, usual for the USSR. First, three years of postgraduate study at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU, then eighteen years of gradual rise through the ranks in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine up to the head of the propaganda department of the Central Committee, then the head of the department of ideology. Kravchuk becomes secretary of the Central Committee and on the pages of the Ukrainian press stands up for the preservation of Ukraine as part of the USSR. The peak of his party career is membership in the Politburo of the Central Committee and the position of Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party.
How Kravchuk became Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada
After the resignation in 1989 of Brezhnev's ally Vladimir Shcherbitsky, the Ukrainian Communist Party was headed by Vladimir Ivashko, a native of the Poltava region, who made a party career in the Kharkiv region. In 1990, elections to the Verkhovna Rada were held in Ukraine. Ivashko was elected its deputy from Kyiv. Since the majority of the deputies were communists, it is quite natural that in June 1990 they elected the leader of their party as the chairman of the Rada, i.e. Ivashko. After that, following the spirit of the times, they elected a new leader of the Communist Party, S. Gurenko, so that the head of the parliament and the leading political force would not be the same person.
Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich was also elected a deputy from the Communist Party. His biography might well not have been replenished with other bright events if Ivashko had not committed a fatal stupidity in the same month, which played a decisive role in his fate and in the future of our hero. The fact is that at that moment the President of the USSR M. Gorbachev, and concurrently the Secretary General of the All-Union Communist Party, was looking for a way to get rid of his party duties, dreaming of appearing before Western leaders (before whom he frankly cringed) exclusively in the form of a state, and not a communist leader. Therefore, he came up with a new position in the party - the first deputy general secretary - and invited Ivashko to it with a clear prospect of becoming the general secretary in the future, subject to the abolition of party hegemony in the USSR. Ivashko obviously didn't "intuit" the risks of such an appointment, resigned from the post of Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and left for Moscow.
His act caused indignation of the deputies. The first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Gurenko, nominated Kravchuk to the vacant post of second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. His figure was clearly a compromise. On the one hand, he was a party worker, which aroused the confidence of the pro-communist deputies, on the other hand, he was a native Western Ukrainian, which, according to the nationalist-minded part of the deputies, was the key to pursuing a policy independent of Moscow. Of course, no one then spoke aloud about the state independence of Ukraine.
July 23, 1990 Kravchuk became chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, and therefore the nominal head of the republic.
From Speaker of Parliament to President
Who remembers now that difficult time after all the vicissitudes of the last 25 years? Then, at the suggestion of Gorbachev, the idea of concluding a new union treaty between the republics that were part of the Soviet Union was actively discussed. Kravchuk also supported this approach, unlike the nationalist leader V. Chornovol, the leader of the People's Movement movement, who openly called for Ukraine's secession from the USSR.
Even after the putschists from the State Emergency Committee seized power in the country in August 1991, he continued to call for observance of subordination to the central allied authorities. So, at a meeting of the Verkhovna Rada on August 19, Kravchuk said: “A state of emergency is not introduced on the territory of Ukraine. Therefore, we all continue to carry out our normal duties as usual.”
And only on August 24, when the members of the State Emergency Committee were already in prison, when the President of the USSR M. Gorbachev, speaking before the deputies of the Supreme Council, was publicly defamed by them, and Boris Yeltsin, right in the presidium at the same meeting, signed the Decree on the ban on the Communist Party - only then the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada, headed by Kravchuk, under pressure from most of the deputies, went to enter into the hall for voting of the Declaration on State Sovereignty of Ukraine, which was adopted.
Soon the Constitution of Ukraine was changed to create the post of its President. Kravchuk was endowed with presidential powers, thus becoming both de facto and de jure head of state. In the same year, on December 5, 1991, voters officially elected him President of Ukraine in the first presidential election, in which he defeated Vyacheslav Chernovol under the slogans of maintaining friendly relations with Russia, as well as maintaining a single national economic mechanism in the post-Soviet space.
Kravchuk's Presidency
Unfortunately, he did not fulfill any of the slogans proclaimed by him before the elections. Although Kravchuk signed an agreement on the creation of the CIS, he did everything to prevent the Verkhovna Rada from ratifying its Charter. In January 1992, a new Ukrainian currency was introduced - karbovanets. This caused a natural break in the economic ties of Ukrainian enterprises with partners within the USSR, so a real inflationary storm covered the country in the next three years. If at the end of 1991 the salary of the leading engineer of the Design Automation Design Bureau (Dnepropetrovsk) was about 200 Soviet rubles, then in 1994, as the chief specialist of the MSC"Yuzhvetroenergomash" it was about 2 million karbovanets with approximately equal purchasing power, i.e. the money supply in the country has grown by at least 10,000 times.
Businesses closed en masse, the streets of Ukrainian cities turned into impromptu bazaars, where people tried to sell personal belongings and household items for next to nothing. Citizens delivered goods from home to the market and back in two-wheeled carts, which the people aptly dubbed "Kravchuchki". The country was rapidly heading towards the abyss. Under these conditions, the Ukrainian elite went to limit the power of the President and Parliament, transferring significant powers to the Prime Minister, including the right to issue decrees that had the force of law. Leonid Kuchma became such an all-powerful prime minister. Naturally, a conflict arose between him and the President, as a result of which the prime minister first resigned at the end of 1993, and then, relying on the support of the elite of Eastern Ukraine, he achieved early presidential elections, in which he defeated Leonid Kravchuk. A photo of him during his presidency is shown below.
Political portrait of L. Kravchuk
Once upon a TV show, the recently murdered writer and publicist Oles Buzina asked Kravchuk how he, the former chief ideologist of the Communist Party, famous for his fight against Ukrainian nationalists, could claim that today he is their political ally and even a follower. To which Leonid Makarovich “without hesitation” replied: “You know what? Don’t change your mind or you’re stupid, ordead. I'm not the same and not the other.”
According to Kravchuk's logic, everyone who did not give up their beliefs, even giving their lives for them, are fools. Throughout his long political life, he constantly maneuvers, changes his political position. Either at the end of 2004, in negotiations with Yushchenko, he supports Yanukovych (for which, by the way, he was deprived of the title of honorary doctor of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy), then in the 2009 elections he becomes a confidant of Yulia Tymoshenko, a rival of the same Yanukovych.
Gradually, his position is becoming more and more right-wing, moving closer to the views of outright Russophobes. So, recently he has agreed that Ukraine should separate the Donbass in order to prevent its harmful influence on the Ukrainian nation. This is the path followed by the former political commissar of the Ukrainian Communist Party, a fiery orator who called from high tribunes for proletarian internationalism and the brotherhood of peoples, and now he is actually advocating a policy of segregation along political and national lines.
Attitude towards Kravchuk among the people
In short, our hero is not loved by the people. This applies to both the elite and ordinary people. As for the elite, a very eloquent example of such an attitude was given by Volodymyr Lytvyn, who a few years ago, when he was the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, in one of his speeches on television, called Kravchuk a “professional patented political prostitute.”
The symbol of the first Ukrainian Maidan in 2004, grandmother Paraska Korolyuk publicly scolded Kravchuk and even tried to confirm her attitude towardshim by action, so that he was forced to retreat from her under the protection of protection. This is about the attitude of ordinary people.
But Leonid Makarovich continues to be a favorite of the media, he is an indispensable participant in many television shows, continues to sit on the presidiums of numerous forums of many public organizations, in other words, he is in full view of the Ukrainian political crowd.
One more question causes an accentuated attention to his person, namely, who is Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich by nationality? His real name, according to some sources, is not Kravchuk at all, but Blum, that is, he is supposedly a Jew. But this information is very doubtful. The real name of Leonid Kravchuk is most likely the one by which he is known to the whole world.
