The Triumph and Tragedy of Rukh
Thus began the Rukh-System face- off. The first round was won by Rukh which acted as opposition to the Communist Party. The national democratic tide could not be stemmed by either the old Brezhnev and Ukrainian nomenklatura or the new Communist Party leadership (Kravchuk, Hurenko, Ivashko). However, the latter emerged as more prepared for confrontation with the national democrats. Losing in the open struggle, it managed to shift this struggle to the ruling structures, where it was most confident. The national democratic romantics were offered such a tangible and specific thing as power. What happened thereafter can unequivocally be called tragedy.
The recent comrades-in-arms were torn apart by splits, confrontations, and quarrels. Of course, one cannot lay all the blame exclusively on the Party nomenklatura: the latter only turned to their advantage the numerous contradictions between the different segments of Rukh. Thus Rukh lost its unique opportunity to launch and spearhead the true broad transformations in society (as in East Central Europe and the Baltic states). However, Rukh failed to switch over from the ruination of the outdated Soviet structures to the creation of new sociopolitical and economic forms. In the final analysis, Rukh activists quarreled with each others, and lost both their impact on the ruling circles and the popular trust. They suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the System. This is the tragedy of Rukh.
Last fall we were supposed to rejoice: “Oh, what a date! The Popular Movement of Ukraine (Rukh) is ten years old.” But in reality, after the recent presidential elections, it is even difficult to say whether we have such a party, in spite of it having two wings and a faction in Verkhovna Rada. But a decade ago... A political structure formed by the Kyiv intellectual elite drew a powerful popular support that shook the empire’s foundations. This was especially felt in Western Ukraine, where the national spirit was always present.
As I remember, Volyn then also plunged into the whirlwind of rallies, demonstrations, and heated debates on the streets. Rukh was the motive force behind this mass agitation. At the head of this was a strangely modest person, only conspicuous by his premature gray hair: lecturer at the Lutsk Teacher- Training College, Mykhailo Tysky. Members of the coordinating council, among which there also were much more vociferous figures, nominated none other than him as the oblast’s first Rukh leader. We met Mr. Tysky in order to recall those turbulent times, and he also brought his just-published book, The Spring of Warnings and Hopes, a detailed documentary chronicle of those unusual and unforgettable events. What, then, has and has not happened to Ukraine’s most massive political organization over the past ten years?
THE ASCENT
The example was set by the Baltic states: popular fronts, national liberation organizations, and opposition political parties. Similar processes, too, were set in motion in Ukraine. At first there was the Ukrainian Language Association, the Memorial Historical and Enlightening Association, and the Lviv-based Lion Society. And the spring of 1989 saw a mushroom-like growth of various associations, leagues, pressure groups, etc. Communist Party bodies quite adversely reacted to them, although all these newly-formed entities only scared the authorities, without in fact influencing them. That was not yet opposition. It is Rukh that became a true opposition force.
It emerged in the first half of 1989 as a tentative conglomerate of three — general democratic, national patriotic (moderate and radical nationalists), and national communist (Mr. Tysky’s definition — Author) — political streams. The first strove for the maximum democratization of society, the second demanded immediate independence, and the third were also not against an independent Ukraine, but only with those in power. They were all united by the CPSU, the common enemy.
Rukh, at the level of territorial organizations, generally worked for concrete political purposes: the revival of national symbols, historical memory, and the Ukrainian spirit; paying tribute to the victims of communist terror; the adoption of a new Constitution; legalization of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Autocephalous Orthodox Churches; environmental control; and, finally, the active struggle for seats in legislative bodies. Meanwhile, in the eyes of the people, Rukh organizations opted mainly for civil disobedience, such as public rallies and picketing government institutions. This is why the most radical and eloquent orators would quickly become the de facto leaders of the Rukh organizations. They would soon, as Mr. Tysky writes, “rarely heed the opinion of the majority. They were more and more elated by the affection of the crowd, by the fact that they expressed the opinion of a few thousand mobilized people.”
Hence newborn Rukh assumed all the qualities of a hard-to-govern structure driven by spontaneous forces. In Lutsk as in other cities the seemingly spontaneous rallies often took unexpected turns not planned or foreseen at board meetings. This resembled a flow of water down the mountain slope: a raging torrent whirls and crushes everything in its path. To ruin thus became the essence of the original Rukh as a political structure. The long-lived bastions of communism in Ukraine received their destroyer.
Larysa Skoryk, former People’s Deputy of Ukraine, thinks somewhat differently. “Rukh quickly became a puppet,” she claims (Den, October 8, 1999), “Incidentally, it had been conceived as such... Unfortunately, Rukh has never been a self-sustained institution.” I think Ms. Skoryk is only partially right. Yes, Rukh was created by the Communists. On September 8, 1989, opening the Rukh foundation congress in Kyiv, the organizing committee chairman Volodymyr Yavorivsky said, “We still believe today that socialism with a human face is possible. We do believe this and are ready to wait until the Stalinist-Brezhnev mask gives way to the live and moving features. This is why the Popular Movement of Ukraine was founded by none other than Communists, the Ukrainian writers not yet cowed or put inside prisons and psychiatric hospitals.”
Yes, Rukh was born from the KPU (Communist Party of Ukraine) bosom. But in those times, no mass-scale political organization could emerge otherwise in Ukraine. Yet, it was an overtly opposition structure. First, because its statute did not enshrine the CPSU as a leading and guiding force. Secondly, this structure directly relied on the people, ignoring the Communist regime. Thirdly, it incorporated “liberal” Communists and overt anti-Communists, the latter being a clear majority. For example, at the founding Rukh congress, only 228 out of 1109 delegates were card-holding CPSU members. Moreover, Rukh also sheltered some overtly anti-Communist organizations, such as the Ukrainian Helsinki Union headed by Levko Lukyanenko. The Rukh leaders included not only CPSU members Ivan Drach, Volodymyr Yavorivsky, and Dmytro Pavlychko, but also, from the very beginning, such confirmed anti-Communists as Mykhailo Horyn, Serhiy Koniev, et al. Recent political prisoner Vyacheslav Chornovil also laid a concrete claim to leadership. His flamboyant extremely radical speech fascinated the delegates of the foundation congress. Thus the original vector of Rukh was quite clear: to work for democracy and hence against the CPSU domination.
Did Rukh become a puppet very fast? Was it conceived as such? I am sure all the persons mentioned would answer no. From its very inception, Rukh was put across as “movement for perestroika,” and restructuring meant, in the long run, exactly what then happened — the collapse of the USSR and Ukrainian independence. For this reason Rukh could not be the puppet of the then authorities. And the then KPU CC secretary Leonid Kravchuk immediately grasped this with his unique flair. He warned at one of the CC ideological department sessions, “There is a danger that NRU leadership may be seized by anti-socialist-, anti-Soviet-minded people. Thus Party committees should expand work with self-sufficient associations, rather than keep their distance from them.” This warning was quite right. As soon as Rukh was born, it launched a resolute struggle against the CPSU, as did the CPSU against Rukh.
The revolutionary fervor of Ukrainian sans-culottes had favorable repercussions on the people. Of course, not all followed them, but many nonetheless. “We easily gathered a 5,000- 10,000-strong rally by sticking three- four leaflets around the city,” Mr. Tysky recalls. This phenomenon showed that society objectively required a party which would oppose the CPSU and really express the interests of people and stand up for them against the authorities. Thanks to massive popular support, Rukh very quickly reached its peak.
It happened in March 1990 during the elections to councils and legislatures at all levels. For example, in Lutsk, most of the candidates backed by Rukh became deputies to the councils of Lutsk city and Volyn oblast, and Verkhovna Rada. What happened in Lviv was beyond anyone’s wildest imagination: the dissident and Helsinki Union member Vyacheslav Chornovil was elected chairman of the oblast council. This enabled Leonid Kravchuk, KPU CC ideology secretary, to say on March 31 that Rukh had achieved a success nobody could foresee, which it failed to repeat.
I wish the NRU leadership had then soberly assessed the situation, identified its friends and foes, and mapped out the path for further progress. But, instead, Rukh was on top of the world: look, we are in power at last! What Rukh lacked then was a critical appraisal of what it had achieved and the awareness, both on top and at the bottom, of the fact that only the first step was made toward genuine success... Normal acceptance of constructive criticism means immunity. In the absence of the latter, the organism begins to fall ill. This is equally true of an individual, organization, or a whole system. The Rukh leaders spurned criticism even within their own environment. And whosoever ventured to point to Rukh’s shortcomings from outside would immediately receive the stigma of a Communist Party hireling and agent- provocateur and be reviled by the traditional chant of “shame”. True, is it possible to criticize a downhill torrent? Thus Rukh was steadily forming its syndrome of total purity and correctness, which soon became the fatal corrosion in the organization’s foundation.
THE SPLIT
The absence of immunity in Rukh became evident for the first time as soon as March 24-25, 1990. On those days, the Transcarpathian town of Khust hosted the fourth session of the Grand Council of Rukh. They solemnly observed the 51th anniversary of the proclamation of independence of Carpathian Ukraine, then got down to their own business.
Mr. Tysky recalls, “The concluding part of the session was quite tumultuous. For instance, Helsinki Union leader Levko Lukyanenko announced... that their league would serve as the basis for the formation of the Ukrainian Republican Party (URP). Then he informed the Grand Council members that the URP organizing committee had already drawn up the future party’s program and constitution. The impulsive Vyacheslav Chornovil, interrupting the speaker from his seat, said he was leaving the organizing committee. He explained this by the fact that the constitution had been drawn up under Lukyanenko’s guidance. Then Dmytro Pavlychko took the floor. We were in for another sensational piece of news about the formation of the Democratic Party. So the two Rukh leaders made on that day the first step toward splitting in the most powerful organization then in opposition to the existing authorities. It became clear after these statements and the continuing backstage debates that the Khust session of Rukh’s Grand Council was destined to be the culmination of the past few years’ struggle for the national liberation, democracy and independence of Ukraine. The Ukrainian mentality again raised its head: no sooner had they started to design the foundation of a big common building than each of them got down to putting up a tiny cabin of their own.
However, it was to stretch a point to blame at that time Lukyanenko and Pavlychko for the split. They would rather be reproached for political short- sightedness, failure to understand the moment, and, moreover, for an elementary error. By then, Rukh had not yet completed even one year, and society had no groundwork for a multiparty system. In the long run, the latter was of no use because, among other things, the development of democracy in this country encountered the resistance of the Communist Party monolith. This monolith, although cracked over, was still quite strong: so to take it on, one had to have an equally powerful monolith force of the Rukh type. And the parties which spun off from Rukh only weakened it.
Of course, a multiparty system would have emerged one way or another in Ukraine. Unfortunately, it emerged prematurely and in the wrong way. The Rukh spin-offs could only have been justified if they, after becoming independent structural units, had remained under Rukh’s shelter and pursued a coordinated joint policy. But everything happened just the opposite. Each of the brand-new party leaders first of all tried to make sure that his personal mace pointed at least one or two degrees away from that of his colleague. Meanwhile, the common people wondered why similar parties with different names were sprouting in Ukraine one after another.
In general, the spin-off of parties, which structured the opposition camp, did not break down this camp’s front- line. On May 15, 1990, the newly-elected Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR began its proceedings. The Communists formed the group of 239, and the democrats in the People’s Council were 125 deputies. The bulk of the struggle shifted to Verkhovna Rada and the local councils, all of them having formed a democratic opposition. This played a decisive role in adopting the Declaration of Ukraine’s State Sovereignty on July 16. Meanwhile, Rukh was accumulating internal problems. What looked most dangerous was the ever-growing radicalism. It was high on the agenda of the Second All-Ukrainian Assembly of Rukh held in October 25, 1990, at the Ukraine Palace. In particular, Yuri Badzio, addressing the assembly, stressed that Rukh should be the organization of not simply opposition forces but of democratic opposition forces, that the psychology of intolerance existing in Rukh might lead to the creation of new myths which could in turn become the sprouts of new Bolshevism. Rational criticism again vanished into thin air.
By then there were 14 national democratic parties functioning in Ukraine. They were in fact under the Rukh wing but in obvious rivalry among themselves. This rivalry showed a growing tendency toward exasperation. To avoid the danger of collapse, this assembly decided to introduce the associate membership of various parties and NGOs, as well as individual admission to Rukh. And then something happened that could not be changed. Well after the NRU leadership was elected (chairman Ivan Drach; first deputy chairman, Political Council chief, Mykhailo Horyn), Levko Lukyanenko took the floor, as URP head, and said his party was quitting Rukh but was going to further cooperate with it. That was a true split.
The latter assumed quite concrete forms at the level of base organizations. The powerful oblast, city, and district level Rukh cells began to disintegrate into three parts, with one going to URP, the second to the Democratic Party, and the third remaining with Rukh as such. In Volyn especially the delegates to the report-and-election conference redivided their structure so much that they even decided not to elect a chairman of the NRU oblast organization but, instead, elected a collective five man ruling body which remained practically inoperative due to constant squabbles. Each party began to live a life of its own.
Did it occur to anybody at the time that we had already had a similar thing in our history? Thus the 1990 events repeated, with an unbelievable precision, the events of fifty years before, when, after the death of Yevhen Konovalets, the powerful Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) split into the Bandera and Melnyk led OUNs. At that time, the radicals drifted apart from moderates in the same way, and the result is common knowledge. A little later, in May 1991, well-known Russian political figure Yuri Afanasiev came to Kyiv and told our democrats what they were supposed to know very well themselves: the creation of small feeble parties was only grist for the mill of CPSU which did not want to share power with anybody.
Those who launched the premature party restructuring became the first to fall victim to it. The URP to split twice from 1990 until 1998: at first, a group of extreme right-wingers headed by Stepan Khmara broke away, and, on the eve of the last parliamentary elections, provincial radical Bohdan Yaroshynsky split the party once more. The Democratic Party did not split after quitting Rukh but, as Mr. Tysky put it, it was constantly going thin, losing its members from one defeat to another.
And what about Rukh proper? As a unifying political organization, it finally died at its third congress on February 28- March 1, 1992, when Vyacheslav Chornovil, rank-and-file NRU member and nonparty chairman of the Lviv Oblast Rada, motivated in his brilliant speech the idea of Rukh’s de-partization. NRU deputy chairman Mykhailo Horyn vehemently defended the original version, such that all the newly-formed parties should be under one common roof. Whether Chornovil was more convincing, or more impact was made by the fact that by that time NRU chairman Ivan Drach was already a Democrat and Mykhailo Horyn first deputy chair of URP, the delegates agreed with the “rank-and-file NRU member” who was to become its chairman shortly.
Mr. Tysky states, “If Rukh had remained an organization that unified all democratic forces, we would have long ago been in power. Why did Vyacheslav Chornovil not understand this? Perhaps owing to his prison-camp past. His ambitions prevailed over common sense. Yes, he was wise. Yes, he was a hero. However, political affairs sometimes require collective wisdom, but he flatly rejected it as such. He instilled the principle of authoritarianism in Rukh, which brought about catastrophe. Out of a formidable force of 1989-1990, when Rukh prodded the authorities to independence, it was reduced to a tiny party which squabbles with others of the like, coaxing the rulers to give it some places, sop, benefits, i.e., throw a bone. This is degeneration.”
The NRU rift continues, for the tenth year running. Can it possibly be accidental? Two Rukh candidates simultaneously ran for President. Did they struggle for votes before the elections?
No, they criticized each other. Each of them tried to persuade us that he was more right and more legitimate. “Their participation in the elections was ludicrous,” my interlocutor concluded. Then he noted, “I am more than sure that the regime contributed to the Rukh split. It is a different question why it gave in so easily.”
UNDER THE REGIME
Its relationship with power is a separate page in the history of Rukh. The old Soviet and Party authorities hated Rukh, for it shook their age-old foundations. They tried to come to terms. The Rukh militants would answer in two words: shame and out. However, everything suddenly changed in March 1990 after the legislative elections. Rukh grabbed almost half seats in the Lutsk city council. Council chairman Anton Kryvytsky had foreseen this result, so he established a good relationship with the opposition leaders well in advance: he provided premises for the Rukh headquarters, furnished motor transport, and then took a Rukh member as his deputy. One of our boys, a democrat! But he was also one of the boys for the Communist part of the city council. For he used to be second secretary of the Lutsk KPU city committee.
At the Volyn oblast rada, the opposition only managed to win a third of seats. Mr. Pavlenko, first secretary of the KPU oblast committee, so hated by Rukh, had every chance to be elected rada chairman. Unexpectedly, Volodymyr Blazhenchuk, second secretary of the KPU oblast committee, contacted the Volyn NRU leadership and offered his candidacy. The first choice was turned down, and Blazhenchuk became oblast rada chairman! Now Mr. Tysky has nothing to do but complain: “Although we, democrats, had a third of deputies in the hall, we were offered only one seat in the presidium of the oblast rada and one seat in the oblast executive committee. A strange situation came about: Rukh seemed to be represented in power structures but was unable to influence anything. Any Rukh leader could open the doors of power- wielding offices by foot but could not become the master of any of those offices. The Lutsk-based Rukh radicals used their power mindlessly: they would occasionally hold public rallies, demanding: ‘Down with so-and-so...!’ Complaints were usually made against one bureaucrat or another. The administration head would quietly dismiss the bureaucrat.”
All this could be understood one way or another before August 24, 1991. Then began a hard-to-understand period of the Red power actively repainting itself in Ukrainian national colors. Rukh only took an auxiliary part in the preparation for referendum, for the authorities dominated. In the presidential elections, the nomenklatura of the already-banned KPU backed Leonid Kravchuk, while democrats, “as if they were rookies at the races,” in Mr. Tysky’s words, simultaneously backed many, such as Lukyanenko, Yukhnovsky, and Chornovil. Who put them up to this? Why could they not rally behind one candidate at such a decisive moment?
Rukh not only lost the elections of December 1, 1991. On that day, Rukh ceased to be as such, for it ceased to move. The people were not aware of this, and Rukh continued to be a popular movement, i.e., it enjoyed popular support. But not for long. In the 1994 parliamentary elections, the Rukh-related parties performed individually and were simply beaten to a pulp. Since then, the NRU has not had the moral right to be called a movement, let alone popular.
Rukh stopped moving because the independence attained erased the image of an enemy to fight against. To build was now the objective. But what kind of a builder can a downhill stream make? It rushed down the valley and came to a standstill. Then it became a quagmire.
Mr. Tysky says, “Then came a kind of relaxation. I remember that about three months or so later there was no news and no instructions from Kyiv. The leadership and the primary cells were on their own. Our leaders began to squabble over who was a greater patriot and had greater merits before Ukraine. It was then that the third congress of Rukh was held.”
This was a ground-breaking congress not only because Rukh became a party. Addressing his greetings to this forum, recently elected President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk said he was ready for cooperation with NRU. It is difficult to say to what extent his offer was sincere. On the one hand, he needed the support of a mass political force, and on the other hand, he did not want this force to be in opposition to him. Rukh behaved strangely. It supported the President in some things and opposed in others. This was bad for Kravchuk but still worse for Rukh. Rukh thus put itself on its own outside the ranks of power, while Mr. Kravchuk began to rely on the old chameleon Communist Party functionaries. This might even have been planned. Meanwhile, it was opportune to make the following proposal to the head of state: Rukh supports the President, and the President gives Rukh some portfolios in the central and regional executive bodies; we immediately hold a fresh election, win a parliamentary majority, and steer the country onto the road of democracy and market transformations. And if Mr. Kravchuk had not accepted this, Rukh would have had to entrench itself in opposition.
Incidentally, Dmytro Pavlychko then proposed immediately re-electing Verkhovna Rada after the election of the first President. But even the like-minded members of the People’s Council did not heed him. There is no prophet in his own country.
It is absolutely clear today that the leaders of democratic parties simply did not understand at that time the essence of the regime established in Ukraine. The gaining of independence was considered the main thing; all the rest would follow by itself. But in reality, the second echelon of KPU functionaries rode piggyback to the helm of state. More flexible and cunning, devoid of any ideological persuasions or the faintest sentiments, such as national pride or love of the people, incredibly thirsty for power and money, these people promptly stole Rukh’s ideas of independence and did their utmost to keep Rukh away from real power. Those who managed to assume official office did not hold it long, as a rule, and resigned. They lacked either the administrative stamina or the ability to counter the continuous humiliations from their immediate superiors. They failed to fit in with a still totalitarian system. Both the democrats and people as a whole were (and still are) disoriented by the elections. Elections make one believe that power comes from the people. And only very few understand that the people only elect those required by the System. This Freemasonry, this Order of Teutonic Knights, has learned in the years of independence to work with the people so well that the latter do not even notice how they are being manipulated.
EPILOGUE
Rukh people once liked comparing themselves to the Polish Solidarnosc. The comparison is wrong. The Polish and our oppositions had many common, but still more different, features. Solidarnosc never experienced rifts of the kind Rukh did. Solidarnosc first won power and only then disintegrated into a number of political parties. Solidarnosc put its own leader at the state helm and made Poland a normal democratic European state.
Rukh achieved nothing.
For eight years out of ten, it held the place of legal opposition without being such in reality. Yet, in 1998 Vyacheslav Chornovil and his team easily made their way to Verkhovna Rada, forming one of its most influential factions. This is precisely the phenomenon of Rukh. Eight inglorious years later, the people still remember Rukh’s first glorious two. A crushing defeat in the recent presidential elections is the personal defeat of the candidates Udovenko and Kostenko, rather than of Rukh. Rukh, such as it was at the beginning, continues to live on in the people’s memory. For the people need a true people’s party, without Leftist hypocrisy, without the brazen lies of power-holders, and without fat-cat oligarchs. Rukh could still become such a party. But, to do so, it must either return to the year 1989 or start from scratch in 1999.
PS: Yuri Kostenko, leader of one of the Rukh factions, is trying to unite Rukh members into a new party. On December 18, Kyiv hosted the unifying and founding congress of Rukh, at which Kostenko’s followers discussed the basic goals and strategy of the new organization.
