The Complete Statesman
A few months ago in a televised interview Academician Ivan Kuras, former vice premier for humanitarian affairs and director of an Institute which was once called the Institute for Political Studies, was asked who in Ukrainian politics today did he look to as a model. Leonid Kravchuk, he answered instantly, explaining that whatever the system or political balance of forces, Kravchuk had always managed to remain among the top political figures of the country. This is quite true: Communist Party secretary for ideology, last chairman of Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, first president of independent Ukraine, and now a leading figure in the parliament, he has gone from Communist to a flirtation with those he now calls national-patriots, to liberalism, and now leader of the United Social Democratic group in the parliament. Through all these transformations, he has remained respected by all as perhaps the greatest master of that subtle art called politics that this country has known in centuries.
In the interview published on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the former president said that anyone could be proud of the role he played in 1991, and, in fact, in was not those who had long advocated Ukrainian independence who led this country to that goal. It is from those days that the legend arose about his never needing an umbrella because he could simply maneuver between the raindrops. In the face of a plethora of dangers from within and without that faced Ukraine during the years of his stewardship, he had to feel his way through a political minefield, and it was his legendary astuteness more than anything else that led this country to independence without the bloodshed other newly independent states have experienced. Many think that his failure to win reelection in 1994 is one of the central tragedies in the political history of independent Ukraine.
The central point this writer found in his jubilee interview was his comparison of the tragedy of the Cossack Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, when Bohdan Khmelnytsky won Ukraine independence only to set the stage for its gradual disappearance from the map by becoming a protectorate of Moscow with the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav. Could the SES Treaty, the growing corruption that everyone with any connection to the current parliament acknowledges, and the tendency to put short-term expediency over long-term strategy, set off a chain of events leading to a new figurative Battle of Poltava, ending any hopes for the nation’s independent development for centuries? None of us know, but Mr. Kravchuk clearly sees the danger as surely as he does the even more immediate danger of wooing the Communists in order to pursue tactical ends. He might have mentioned that one Herr von Pappen, a leading German conservative in Weimar Germany, thought he had found the perfect man to stop the Communists. He did: the champion’s name was Adolph Hitler, and we all know what happened as a result. For all his changes of ideology, party membership, and allies, Leonid Kravchuk remains true to one overriding strategic goal: defending and enhancing what, like a peacetime Bohdan Khmelnytsky, he achieved in 1991. Ukraine needs more such leaders.
