Trash x perestroika3/20/2023 ![]() The following day, Kravchuk flew to Moscow where he witnessed the public humiliation of Soviet party leader Gorbachev by Boris Yeltsin, who had broken with the Communist Party and was spearheading the movement for democratization within the “sovereign” Russian Federation. And in Kazakhstan, its Communist leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, resigned from the party and ordered the “departization” of his vast Central Asian Republic, that is, stripping the Communist Party of its exclusive ruling role. In Estonia and Lithuania, the Communist Party was banned. 22, in the Soviet capital outside the KGB headquarters, angry crowds toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police. It was there that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was irrevocably set in motion by what occurred in response to the abortive putsch. The mood and responses in Ukraine and other non-Russian republics were, paradoxically, largely conditioned by what occurred in Moscow. This was not as surprising as it may now seem. ![]() When the danger had passed, the opposition – which had formed a coalition calling itself “Independent Democratic Ukraine,” began to demand that the Communist Party be stripped of its power and assets, and that independence be declared. There were mass protests against the putsch in Kyiv. The minority democratic opposition was unable to persuade him to convene an emergency session of the parliament until it was apparent the putsch had failed. ![]() The republic’s communist leaders, the most notable of whom at this stage was the speaker of the parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, vacillated. ![]() 19-22 had placed the progress in jeopardy. Let me share with you some insights drawn from my book The Ukrainian Resurgence (1999) which dealt with those critical years in Ukraine’s history.Īfter Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began relaxing political controls through his policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) during the final years of the 1980s, Soviet Ukraine gradually began loosening the strong conservative grip maintained by its leader rulers.īy early 1991, it had gradually caught up with the democratic and patriotic processes taking place in the other non-Russian republics, and Moscow itself, and was asserting the “state sovereignty” it had proclaimed in July 1990.īut the attempted putsch in Moscow by communist hardliners on Aug. But what actually happened on that historic day, and what were the unexpected dramatic circumstances that precipitated this momentous breakthrough? 24, 1991, the then still Soviet Ukrainian parliament declared Ukraine’s independence. ![]()
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