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 retirement on July 19, 1994. He was also the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and People's Deputy of 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 Bolshoy Zhitin in the Rivne region in a peasant family. Then it was the Polish land. Over the next ten years, power changed three times in the homelands of Leni. 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, Nazi Germany seized these lands for three years. And finally, in the autumn of 1944, Soviet power returned again. But she acted only during the day, and at night the Western Ukrainian villages were ruled by nationalists. And this went on for several years.
Can you imagine how all these ups and downs affected the character of local residents, especially the younger generation? To survive in such conditions, it was necessary to learn to hide your thoughts, think one thing, and speak another, do not trust anyone, do not believe anything. And so a whole generation of post-war West Ukrainian youth was formed, to which Leonid Kravchuk belonged.
Childhood
The events of the war had a sharp impact on the fate of the relatives of our hero and himself. Leni’s father Makar Kravchuk, a former dashing cavalryman of the Polish army and a farm laborer among the Polish colonists, was mobilized into the Red Army in 1944 and, having not fought for long, laid his head in Belarus the same year.
Mother got married again and together with her stepfather managed to raise Leonid. They lived poorly, Leonid Kravchuk himself recalled that he went barefoot to the first snow. However, deprivation only tempered the character of the future president.
Years of study
After graduation, Leonid Kravchuk moved to the city and entered the Rivne Cooperative College. According to him, together with his fellow students, he rented a room without any amenities. Then, in 1953, after graduating from college with honors, he received the right to enter the Faculty of Economics at Kiev State University without exams.
Studying there was also not easy, the scholarship was 24 rubles (though, and lunch in the student canteen cost 50 cents!). To survive, students went to unload wagons of frozen fish at a nearby fish factory at night. The future president Leonid Kravchuk lived in a dormitory in a room for 12 people, but at the same time managed to study "excellent" and receive an increased scholarship - as much as 30 rubles.
The only meeting for life
At the university, Leonid met his future wife. Tonya Mishura, a beautiful, slender handbag, immediately filled 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, already from the first year she began to take care of him, prepared 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 Kiev students in their stream. When the development of virgin land began , then 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 that he lost consciousness and almost died. Tonya saved him, who found a car and took her beloved to the hospital, where he recovered. After returning from virgin land, Leonid and Tonya played a wedding. Their marriage continues to the present.
First job
In 1958, Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich graduated from KSU and was distributed in Chernivtsi, where he began to read political economy in a financial college.
Domestic disorder here pursued Leonid, like evil rock. They settled him in a female dormitory, though in a "red corner". For those who are young and do not know what it is, we explain. So in the Soviet institutions was called a special (non-residential) room, decorated with Soviet symbols (bust of Lenin, the 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 to the public square every morning and every night to wash, shave and relieve themselves. Fun? Just laugh yourself. But Leonid suffered this mockery for three whole years.
Party career
Finally, in 1960, the young political economist was spotted at the local party organization and transferred to the Political Education House as a consultant and methodologist. Then followed the transfer to the apparatus of the Chernivtsi regional committee of the Communist Party. Here our hero has been making a party career for 7 years, having risen to the post of head of the department of propaganda of the regional party committee.
Further, the usual for the USSR path of a large party worker. First, three years of postgraduate studies at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU, then eighteen years of gradual ascent through the ranks in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine up to the head of the agitation department of the Central Committee, then the department of ideology. Kravchuk becomes Secretary of the Central Committee and advocates the preservation of Ukraine as part of the USSR on the pages of the Ukrainian press. 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 had made a party career in the Kharkov region. In 1990, elections to the Verkhovna Rada were held in Ukraine. Ivashko was elected her deputy from Kiev. Since the majority of the deputies were communists, it is quite natural that in June 1990 they elected the leader of their party as chairman of the Rada, i.e. Ivashko. After that, following the spirit of the times, they elected the new leader of the Communist Party S. Gurenko so that the same person would not be the head of the parliament and the leading political force.
Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich was elected as a deputy from the Communist Party. His biography could well have not been supplemented with other outstanding events if Ivashko had not committed fatal stupidity that month, which played a decisive role in his fate and in the future of our hero. The fact is that at that moment, 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 (to whom he openly slandered) exclusively in the form of state, not communist the leader. Therefore, he came up with a new post in the party - the first deputy secretary general - and Ivashko was invited to it with a clear prospect of becoming the secretary general in the future, subject to the abolition of party hegemony in the USSR. Ivashko clearly did not “intuitively” what risks such an assignment carries, refused the post of Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and left for Moscow.
His act provoked the indignation of the deputies. The first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party Gurenko nominated the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Kravchuk to the vacant post. His figure was clearly a compromise. On the one hand, he was a party worker, which aroused the confidence of pro-communist deputies, and on the other hand, 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 spoke aloud about the state independence of Ukraine then.
July 23, 1990 Kravchuk became chairman of the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR, and therefore, the nominal head of the republic.
From the chairman of the parliament to the presidency
Who now remembers that difficult time after all the vicissitudes of the past 25 years? Then, at the suggestion of Gorbachev, the idea of concluding a new union treaty between the republics of the Soviet Union was actively discussed. Kravchuk also advocated this approach, in contrast to the nationalist leader V. Chernovol, the leader of the People’s Movement movement, who openly called for Ukraine to leave the USSR.
Even after the seizure of power in the country by the putschists from the Emergency Committee in August 1991, he continued to call for compliance with subordination to the central union authorities. So, at a meeting of the Verkhovna Rada on August 19, Kravchuk said: “A state of emergency is not introduced in Ukraine. Therefore, we all continue to carry out our usual duties in the same manner. ”
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 signed the decree banning the Communist Party right at the same meeting, only then the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada, headed by Kravchuk, under pressure from most of the deputies, went to introduce the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine into the voting hall, which was adopted.
Soon, the Constitution of Ukraine was amended 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, 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 economic mechanism in the post-Soviet space.
Presidency of Kravchuk
Unfortunately, he did not fulfill any of the slogans proclaimed before the election. 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, the Carbovanets, was introduced. This caused a natural rupture of economic relations between Ukrainian enterprises and partners within the USSR, therefore, a real inflation storm hit the country in the next three years. If at the end of 1991 the salary of the leading engineer of SKB Design Automation (Dnepropetrovsk) was about 200 Soviet rubles, then in 1994, at the position of the chief specialist of MSC Yuzhvetroenergomash, it amounted to about 2 million Karbovans with approximately equal purchasing power, t .e. the money supply in the country grew by at least 10,000 times.
The enterprises were massively closed, the streets of Ukrainian cities turned into improvised bazaars, where people tried to sell personal things and household items for nothing. From the house to the bazaar and back, citizens delivered the goods in two-wheeled carts, which the people aptly dubbed “Kravchuchki”. The country was rapidly heading towards the abyss. In these conditions, the Ukrainian elite went to limit the power of the President and the Parliament, transferring significant powers to the Prime Minister, including the right to issue decrees that had the force of law. Such an all-powerful premier was Leonid Kuchma. 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, managed to hold early presidential elections, at which Leonid Kravchuk was defeated. A photo of him during the presidency is shown below.
Political portrait of L. Kravchuk
Once on the same TV show, the writer and publicist Oles Buzin, recently killed in Kiev, asked Kravchuk how he, the former chief ideologist of the Communist Party, who was famous for his struggle with Ukrainian nationalists, could claim that today he is their political ally and even follower. To which Leonid Makarovich “without hesitation” answered: “Know what? His thought is not mіnyak, but bad, but dead. I’m not the same, not the other. ”
According to the logic of Kravchuk, everyone who did not give up their beliefs, even giving their lives for them, are fools. Throughout his long political life, he continuously maneuvers, changes his political position. At the end of 2004, at the talks with Yushchenko, he supported Yanukovych (for which, by the way, he was stripped 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 became more and more right-radical, moving closer to the views of frank Russophobes. So, recently he agreed to the point that Ukraine should separate Donbass in order to prevent its harmful influence on the Ukrainian nation. That’s the path that the former political commissar of the Ukrainian Communist Party, a fiery orator, who called from proletarian internationalism and the brotherhood of peoples, and now advocating a policy of segregation based on political and national characteristics, has passed.
Attitude to Kravchuk among the people
In short, people do not like our hero. This applies to the elite and ordinary people. As for the elite, a very eloquent example of such an attitude was given by Vladimir Litvin, who several years ago, when he was Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, in one of his television appearances, called Kravchuk “a professional, patented political prostitute.”
The symbol of the first Ukrainian Maidan of 2004, Grandma Paraska Korolyuk publicly scolded Kravchuk and even tried to confirm her attitude to him by action, so he was forced to retire from her under protection of the guard. This is part of the relationship 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 - is in full view in the Ukrainian political get-together.
Another question raises emphasis on 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, most likely the one by which he is known throughout the world.