In the first days of May, a week apart, the Ukrainian Leonid Kravtchuk, 88, and the Belarusian Stanislav Chuchkévitch, 87, died, members of the trio responsible, in a reading of the work of historian Eric Hobsbawm, for the end of the 20th century.
Alongside the Russian Boris Yeltsin, they decreed the end of the USSR in 1991 and boosted the independence movements in Ukraine and Belarus, at the time in a degree of harmony with Moscow.
However, more than 30 years later, the tragedy of the Ukraine War highlights the failure of attempts at peaceful ties between the Kremlin and some of the former Soviet republics. Kravchuk and Chuchkevitch already warned of the risk of conflicts, even when articulating with Yeltsin’s Russian nationalism, responsible for dismantling the Bolshevik empire.
The British Hobsbawn amalgamated the concept of “brief” to the 20th century, pointing to the year 1914 and the First World War as its beginning, from the point of view of historical and ideological movements. It corresponded to the throes of that era the Soviet disintegration in 1991.
That year, in November, I landed in Kiev to interview Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of post-Soviet Ukraine. Moments of deep historical effervescence prevailed. The USSR, punished by the infeasibility of its system and by the biggest economic crisis since the Second World War, was on the verge of collapse.
Kravchuk symbolized the historic tide. From the head of ideology of the Ukrainian CP, he became an independence leader and pointed as a reference, instead of Vladimir Lenin, Mihailo Hruschevski, hero of the ephemeral independent Ukraine of the 20th century, between 1917 and 1918.
At the time of the interview, the Soviet structures, although decomposing, still existed. They circulated in Moscow, where I worked as a correspondent for the Sheet, rumors of a “pre-emptive strike” against Ukrainian separatism. I asked Kravtchuk whether the recently announced plan to create military structures specifically reflected the fear of expansionism engineered from the Kremlin.
“We are creating Armed Forces because an independent state has to have forces that can defend it,” he replied. And, on diplomatic projects, he pointed out: in the long term, integrate into European structures. The interview took place in the Ukrainian parliament amid preparations for the December 1 referendum. In that initiative, 92% of the votes ratified the declaration of independence approved in August by the parliamentarians based in Kiev.
The overwhelming support for the split paved the way for the meeting a week later in Belarus between Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Chushkevitch. The separatist avalanche strengthened regional leaders and isolated Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin.
Committed to weakening his arch-rival, Yeltsin (1931-2007) instilled separatism and, on December 8, 1991, led the meeting responsible for declaring the end of the Soviet era. It fell to Chushkevitch, the host, to call the Kremlin to communicate the historic decision.
“Gorbachev was very emotional,” said the Belarusian in an interview with Sheet, in Minsk, just over a month after the dissolution of the USSR. The leader said that he had always been treated informally by the Soviet interlocutor. “For the first time, I was addressed sir, over the phone.”
I asked whether the Russian empire would then be limited to historical records. “No,” he retorted. “Our history shows that imperial habits and methods existed during the Bolshevik regime as well as during Tsarism.”
