There are three well-established expressions among Ukrainians that connect with only one person in Ukraine – Leonid Kravchuk: “tailors”, “between raindrops” and “we have what we have”.

The first of them symbolizes the financial hardship of the “wild nineties”, when during Kravchuk’s presidency, after the collapse of the USSR, the standard of living in Ukraine deteriorated sharply.

The second statement is a phrase from an anecdote about the former president – about how he gave up his umbrella in the rain. And who characterized the first president as a man who found a safe niche for himself in the most difficult situations and always left ways for tactical retreat. He was often called a “sly fox” for that.

The third belongs to Leonid Kravchuk himself.

We tell you who Mr. Kravchuk was and what he remembers the most – from the first president to the head of the Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks on Donbass.

Leonid Kravchuk was born in 1934 in the village of Velykyi Zhytyn in the Rivne region, which then belonged to the Volyn Voivodeship of Poland. His father, Makar Kravchuk, served in the Polish cavalry. He and his mother later worked for Polish retired officers. His father died at the front in 1944.

Leonid Kravchuk was raised by his mother and stepfather.

In 1958 he graduated from Kyiv University. T. Shevchenko, majoring in economics and teacher of political economy.

At the same time, the rapid ascent of a boy from a peasant family began with the steps of the party career ladder.

After university, Kravchuk moved to Chernivtsi, where he taught political economy to students. And two years later he changed the teaching department to a place in the House of Political Education, later – in the Chernivtsi regional committee of the Communist Party. He began as a lecturer, and in 1967 became head of the department of agitation and propaganda.

After defending his Ph.D. dissertation at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1970, the young “apparatchik” Kravchuk continued his career in the highest party body of the USSR.

Before the collapse of the Union, Leonid Kravchuk went from the head of the sector of the ideological department to the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

In the last years of the USSR’s existence, he managed to be chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of the USSR and a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party for another year and a half, but in August 1991 he resigned from the Communist Party.

He supported the Act of Independence of Ukraine, promulgated in the Verkhovna Rada.

Leonid Kravchuk, one of those who signed the Bialowieza Agreement, called the collapse of the USSR natural and necessary.

“A really great historical event took place… Three great powers met in Belarus to propose a way to create a new commonwealth. This is the way to salvation. Saving peoples from confrontation, from interethnic wars,” said Leonid Kravchuk.

In the last years of his life, Kravchuk called his signature under the act of liquidation of the USSR the most important act in his life.

“This is the most important year, month, day and hour in my life – when I signed the collapse of the USSR. This is the most important thing I did. I managed to fulfill the will of the Ukrainian people. I have fulfilled the will of the Ukrainian people – to destroy the USSR, I am happy that I did it. ”

Leonid Kravchuk admitted that at the age of 33, having gained access to closed archives and unpublished works of Lenin, his vision of history underwent radical changes.

He also said that he was shocked by the Ukrainian archives during the Holodomor.

When asked by a journalist why he continued to build a party career in the 1970s, he admitted that public disagreement would lead to his release and imprisonment. So he decided to “fight inside the system.”

He called himself a negotiator between the Movement and the Communists, which ultimately led to the proclamation of Ukraine’s sovereignty as the constitutional composition of the Verkhovna Rada.

“I am proud that the last empire in the history of mankind has collapsed… I am proud that today there is an independent Ukraine,” said Mr. Kravchuk, who until recently headed the ideological department of the Central Committee.

Positioning himself as a non-partisan (but enlisting the support of some Communist Party activists), Leonid Kravchuk easily bypassed the nationalist Vyacheslav Chornovil in the December 1, 1991 election and became the first president of independent Ukraine.

Leonid Kravchuk’s presidency was one of the most controversial periods in Ukraine’s recent history.

Unemployment, chaotic privatization of state-owned enterprises, crime, hyperinflation, months and even years of delays in the payment of already meager wages – all this rapidly reduced the popularity of the first president in the eyes of Ukrainians, who yesterday seemed ready to live by the idea of independence.

In recent years, and especially because of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Kravchuk has been accused of erroneously renouncing Ukraine’s nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union in exchange for guarantees of security and inviolability of borders. However, he himself was always convinced of the correctness of this decision.

“Nuclear weapons on the territory of Ukraine were foreign – Russian nuclear weapons: a button in Russia, the reproduction of nuclear weapons in Russia. There is nothing we could do with these nuclear weapons,” Leonid Kravchuk said in August 2011.

Although Kravchuk was preparing the Budapest Memorandum, it was signed by Leonid Kuchma.

President Kravchuk was also criticized for his unwillingness to lustrate the government, removing former party functionaries, one of whom was himself. Or at least KGB employees.

In an interview with BBC News Ukraine, Mr. Kravchuk explained his policy as follows: “If we lustrate those who cooperated with the KGB, they are units. there were thousands of leaders. Thousands, hundreds of thousands! ”

“That’s why we took a different path, we did our best to keep not just communists, not Marxists-communists, but national-patriots in the main positions. Although they did not always cope with their responsibilities,” Leonid Kravchuk said. .

In 1994, the country announced early presidential elections. This came after parliament first called a no-confidence referendum on President Kravchuk and parliament. But then everyone agreed on the need for early elections and the head of state and deputies of the Verkhovna Rada.

In this election, Leonid Kravchuk, gaining 45.1% of the vote in the second round, lost to the pro-Russian Leonid Kuchma.

The reasons for the loss were not only social tensions in society and Russia’s support for rival Kravchuk.

Shortly before the election, a scandal erupted over the 1993 transformation of the Black Sea Shipping Company into a private company, Blasco. The corresponding decree was signed by Leonid Kravchuk.

The Communists, who had a large faction in parliament in those years, accused Leonid Kravchuk of selling off the fleet and transferring significant funds to his son Alexander’s accounts. In the case investigated by the Prosecutor General’s Office, the head of “Blasko” Pavlo Kudyukin was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Despite the scandals, Leonid Kravchuk has always said that he did not abuse his power in high positions in the Communist Party and during his presidency.

“I, the secretary of the Central Committee, had an apartment of 54 square meters. I could not buy a car – even when I had money. I received 675 rubles. I wanted to buy a car for my son, had to stand in line for three years. When he became president, my wife “I drove a Lada, and the family did not have security,” he said in an interview.

Political scientists have paid tribute to the president’s behavior after losing the election. He was the first post-Soviet leader to hand over power democratically.

Ironically, many years later, Leonid Kravchuk called his biggest mistake the appointment of Leonid Kuchma to the post of Prime Minister of Ukraine, from which he later became president.

“Leonid Kuchma thought and always said: more power, more power. I always asked him: more power or the ability to use power, which is more important to you? He stood for more power. That was my biggest mistake when I proposed such a government, – he did not start real steps “, – Leonid Kravchuk declared.

Although years later their relationship was business or even friendly. They cooperated within the club of presidents and repeatedly, together with Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych, published a common position on various domestic and foreign policy issues.

After losing the presidential election for the next 12 years, Leonid Kravchuk focused on working in parliament and community service. However, the former president’s involvement in a number of political projects and the support of certain politicians looked controversial.

In the mid-1990s, Leonid Kravchuk’s career began an ambiguous stage – cooperation with Viktor Medvedchuk’s Social Democratic Party (United).

In 1998, the former president entered parliament as head of the SDPU (o) list.

In 2002, he was re-elected as a deputy on the list of the party he will lead in the Verkhovna Rada after Viktor Medvedchuk resigned as head of President Leonid Kuchma’s administration.

Mr. Kravchuk met the events of 2004 and the coming to power of the Orange Party, led by Viktor Yushchenko, on Viktor Yanukovych’s side, declaring himself his “VIP agitator.”

At the same time, he tried to be cautious and impartial in assessing political disputes.

Already in September 2005, Leonid Kravchuk initiated a high-profile scandal. He said that Viktor Yushchenko’s presidential campaign was financed by the disgraced Russian oligarch, the late Boris Berezovsky.

On the side of the opponents of the Orange Camp, Mr. Kravchuk supports some of the steps taken by Yushchenko’s team. For example, he, like Viktor Yushchenko, criticizes the idea of federalization of Ukraine and defends the Ukrainian language as the only state language.

But the conflict with Viktor Yushchenko’s supporters deepened in 2006, when in the next parliamentary elections Leonid Kravchuk again tried to break into parliament, leading the opposition bloc “NO!” together with SDPU (o) leader Viktor Medvedchuk, his deputies Nestor Shufrych and Mykhailo Papiev, as well as Yuriy Boyko and football official Hryhoriy Surkis.

The result of the bloc formed on the basis of the SDPU (o) was a failure – only 1% of the vote.

After losing the election, Mr. Kravchuk retired from politics and worked for his charity, Ukraine-Known Mission, chaired the United Ukraine Public Forum and the Ukraine-China Friendship Society, gave lectures, wrote articles and wrote letters. .

For example, in one such letter to President Yanukovych, written on the eve of the Euro 2012 football championship, Mr Kravchuk called on the authorities to step up their efforts to combat animal cruelty.

However, he did not stand aside from politics.

In the 2010 presidential election, he was Yulia Tymoshenko’s proxy. And after her arrest in 2011, he wrote a letter to President Yanukovych about “slipping out of the legal democratic path.”

In another letter to Viktor Yanukovych, the former president stressed: “As for the political elite, during the years of independence under savage capitalism, brutal political struggle for power, it has degraded, shrunk, and determined the interests of the Ukrainian people through office and money.”

However, Leonid Kravchuk soon called President Yanukovych the only Ukrainian leader who dared to make real reforms.

The ex-president sharply criticized Petro Poroshenko. He believed that for the fifth head of state, the main thing was his business, not the interests of the country.

The ex-president has always spoken warmly about Yulia Tymoshenko.

“I have rarely met a woman, or even a man, with such a character. It would seem that everything has failed and there is nothing to worry about. But she does not give up,” he wrote.

He also had sympathy for Volodymyr Zelensky. Immediately after his election as president, Leonid Kravchuk said: “Zelensky is a decent man, honest, responsible and educated. He has a good legal education, he has learned to communicate with people. If he still listens to the team, people who know the details of specific issues. it will quickly adopt the mechanisms of implementation and influence, “he said in an interview with Hromadske.ua.

Asked how he felt about the comedian becoming president, Leonid Kravchuk said: “I want to see an honest, decent man. We have not had enough of such people over the years.”

In recent years, the first president, along with other former Ukrainian presidents, has made many loud statements against Russia’s annexation of Crimea and against the actions of its northern neighbor in Donbas. Leonid Kravchuk also supported the Ukrainian Church, which was independent of Moscow.

In 1991, he appealed to Russian Patriarch Alexy II to grant autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Ukraine, led by Filaret. At that time, the UOC, which had not yet split, applied for independence.

Then Moscow refused and overthrew Filaret, and in 1992, with Kravchuk’s assistance, the UOC-Kyiv Patriarchate was formed, and the president asked for autocephaly from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

In 1992, he wrote a letter to Bartholomew, in which he stated the need for the Ukrainian state to have an autocephalous church that would not depend on the Moscow Patriarchate.

Already under President Poroshenko, together with Viktor Yushchenko, Mr. Kravchuk helped negotiate with the Ecumenical Patriarch on Ukrainian church issues.

Together, it all ended with the creation of an autocephalous church and the receipt of a tomos in 2019.

At the age of 86, in August 2020, Leonid Kravchuk became the head of the Ukrainian delegation to the Minsk Tripartite Contact Group for the settlement of the situation in Donbas.

This appointment by presidential decree has provoked much criticism. But Kravchuk himself assured that he would not allow any concessions from Russia on issues of Ukrainian sovereignty.

When our young boys and girls die defending the land, shedding blood day and night, defending the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine, I decided: if I can do something to speed up peace in Donbass, I will do it to the last breath. That’s why I agreed “, – Leonid Kravchuk admitted.

With the participation of the first president, Ukraine prepared a “Joint Action Plan” for the tripartite group on the complete cessation of the conflict and the creation of conditions for the elections to the ORDLO on March 31, 2021. However, this plan did not materialize.

“We can state that it is almost impossible to agree with the Russian Federation on resolving the situation in Donbass in the status they see themselves in and what tasks they set,” Leonid Kravchuk said in February 2021 and called for a change in the Minsk format of talks.

His statements about Russia were getting tougher. In particular, in April 2021, he stated that he would personally shoot in the event of an invasion of Russian troops by Ukrainian troops.

“I will shoot to the last – as long as the hands hold the weapon and as long as I see the enemy. I did not invite him – the son of a bitch. I came. I will kill him. What will happen next? I’m not interested, but I’ll kill him.” “, – noted Kravchuk”, – the ex-president assured on air of the Ukraine 24 TV channel.

In an interview with Dom TV, Leonid Kravchuk also accused France and Germany of fearing Russia and unwillingness to insist that it is a party to the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Leonid Kravchuk lived in the elite village of Koncha Zaspa, in a former two-story government dacha, which he had long ago bought from the state.

He lived with his wife, Antonina Kravchuk, who until retirement worked as an associate professor at the Faculty of Economics, Kyiv National University. Shevchenko.

In an interview with “New Time” in February 2019, he told about his life as follows: waking up, walking in any weather with his two dogs – a German Shepherd and a purebred find. After that, he spent about two hours in the gym, and then went to his office in the center of the capital.

He has always called reading books his favorite pastime.

But he was also fond of weapons and hunting. He admitted that the most expensive purchase in his life was a hunting rifle from Merkel.

“I’m not afraid of anything. I’ve been sleeping with weapons for a long time and even warned my bodyguards that if someone wants to visit me at night, I shoot to defeat. I’m not happy with uninvited guests,” he admitted in an interview.

Leonid Kravchuk underwent heart surgery twice, in 2017 and 2021 – stents were placed to restore normal blood circulation in the coronary arteries.

Many of Leonid Kravchuk’s quotes became winged. In general, as a former ideologue and propagandist, he did not go for the word in his pocket and was a desirable participant in political shows and interviews.

“We have what we have” – just one of many quotes from Leonid Kravchuk, which turned into a winged and even became the title of one of his books.

“Do you know what the biggest problem of our government is? Any sniffer believes that if he gets into parliament, he is already a great politician,” Kravchuk said in December 2008, commenting on the political situation in the country.

“Only the dead and fools do not change their point of view,” Leonid Kravchuk said in June 2009 when asked why he began supporting a broad coalition between Yulia Tymoshenko’s and Viktor Yanukovych’s parties if he argued for months that it was impossible. .

“Kiss, but don’t go to bed, don’t go to someone else’s house, have your own apartment. That’s the way politics should be,” Leonid Kravchuk advised the Ukrainian authorities in August 2010 to build relations with Russia.

He always called the establishment of Ukraine’s independence in 1991 the main achievement of his life.

Here is what he said in an interview with Voice of America in 2011:

“I did everything for Ukraine to become a state. Through democracy, through the All-Ukrainian referendum, through the establishment of relations in Europe, the world, and including our difficult neighbor – Russia, I did everything to make Ukraine become, be, and will be – now I can say this – an independent state. This is a real achievement. And no one can take it away from me. ”

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