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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Leonid Makarovych

9 February, 1999 - 00:00

The center of this week's issue is our interview with former
President Leonid Kravchuk, the longest feature The Day has yet given.
The subject merits it.

As President, Kravchuk could be criticized, especially for his handling
of the economy. His reluctance to embark on economic reform gave the existing
power structures, bureaucrats, and official captains of socialist industry
time to adapt in such a way that it will be well-nigh politically impossible
for anyone to turn this country around economically. But perhaps it could
not have been otherwise; following the Polish model of shock therapy would
have brought him into conflict with the very nomenklatura from which he
came, and who knows whether the country's stability could have been preserved.
Besides, nobody really understood the nature of the Ukrainian economy and
its problems back then.

Leonid Kravchuk is a classical consensus politician, precisely what
this country needed in making the transition from Soviet republic to independent
state. He has never been afraid to talk openly with anyone about anything,
and he has never stopped short of trying to find a solution to a given
problem all parties could live with, in his favorite word, to find accord.
Historians will write that he held this country together when it could
have fallen apart. It still could. His failure to win reelection may turn
out to be one of the central tragedies in independent Ukraine's short history.

One should also note two similarities between the former President's
interview and that of Petro Symonenko, also in this issue: that the Ukrainian
political process has become totally venalized and that the choice in the
next presidential election will come down to one between an ineffectual
incumbent and the hard Left. If the latter is true, it would be an even
bigger tragedy than the former, for that would leave the country completely
without hope: either another half-decade of ineffectual pseudo-reforms
or turning into something akin to Belarus. Leonid Makarovych would do well
to reconsider whether a third option is really so unrealistic as he seems
to think, if only because it is so painfully and obviously necessary.

 

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