The first President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, died at the age of 89.

In the last year, he spent several months in intensive care after undergoing heart surgery in June.

“Today, the first president of Ukraine, Leonid Makarovich Kravchuk, died. He was not just a politician. And not even just a historical figure. He was the person who knew how to find wise words and say them so that all Ukrainians could hear. This is especially important in difficult, crisis moments. When the future of the whole country can depend on the wisdom of one person. He survived the Second World War as a child, survived the occupation. Leonid Makarovich knew what freedom is worth. And with all his heart he wanted peace for Ukraine. I am sure we will realize this. We will achieve our victory and of our world,” Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s sixth president since independence, commented on Kravchuk’s death in a video message that has become nightly since the Russian attack.

Leonid Kravchuk, like, perhaps, all Ukrainian presidents, was an extremely controversial figure. But what distinguished him from the “heirs” in this post was his amazing ability to adapt to changing circumstances, played by the people in jokes.

Perhaps the most famous of them is about how Kravchuk, Boris Yeltsin and George W. Bush have to run from one building to another under a torrential downpour. The presidents of Russia and the United States finish wet to the skin, and the Ukrainian leader is absolutely dry. “And I’m careful, between the droplets,” he explained to his colleagues.

Leonid Kravchuk fought “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” for many years as the chief ideologist of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR, and then became the “father of independence” of Ukraine.

He triumphantly won the first presidential election in the history of Ukraine in the first round, but could not hold on to this post even for one term, losing early elections and becoming the first leader in the post-Soviet space to transfer power peacefully.

Kravchuk’s presidency was marked by five-digit inflation and the collapse of the Ukrainian economy, and his symbol was “Kravchuchka” – a kind of handcart, especially popular among shuttle traders in the first half of the 90s. But at the same time, many Ukrainians remember Kravchuk’s years – poor, but peaceful – with good nostalgia.

After his presidential term, Kravchuk initially advocated rapprochement with Russia and supported Viktor Yanukovych. Then he turned into a staunch supporter of NATO and defended the interests of Kyiv in the negotiations to resolve the conflict in the Donbass.

Leonid Kravchuk was born in 1934 in the village of Veliky Zhitin near the city of Rivne, then still in Poland. Kravchuk’s father died at the front in 1944. Later, he recalled that his childhood was poor: a piece of bread seemed like a real gift.

After graduating from school, Kravchuk, thanks to a commendable diploma, entered the Rivne cooperative technical school. In 1953 he graduated with excellent marks, which made it possible to enter the university without exams. Kravchuk recalled that he really considered two options: either study in Lvov as a military pilot, or in Kyiv as an economic one. In the future president of Ukraine, as will often be the case in his life, a pragmatist won, and he became the first student of a Kyiv university in the history of his village.

Already from the first courses, young Kravchuk worked in every possible way: for example, he went to raise virgin soil in Kazakhstan or even acted as a model. Much later, the President of Ukraine will claim that it was he who became the prototype of the monument to Mykola Shchors, which still stands in the center of Kyiv.

Around the same time, he began dating his classmate, Antonina Mishura. Kravchuk’s biographer Andrei Kokotyukha wrote that for a long time young people were just friends, but in the senior years of the university it became clear that if they did not marry, they would be sent to different places.

So the young family ended up in Chernivtsi in western Ukraine. There, Leonid first taught political economy at the financial college, and then he was invited to work in the regional party committee as a consultant on political education. The decisive argument in favor of a new place of work was that an employee of the regional party committee was entitled to an apartment – and owning one’s own living space was very relevant for the Kravchuks, who had just had a son.

The peak of Kravchuk’s Chernivtsi career was the chair of the head of the propaganda and agitation department of the local regional party committee.

Apparently, Kravchuk was a good propagandist: in 1967 he was sent to Moscow, to postgraduate studies at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU – a party university that trained personnel for the central institutions of the party. In 1970, Kravchuk returned to Ukraine and began working in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Over the next twenty years, he made a party career, rising from the post of head of the retraining sector to the second secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, in charge of agitation and propaganda. It was at this job that he found the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

In 1988, the Ukrainian Communist Party stopped pretending that there was no growing opposition in the republic, which a year later would take shape in the public movement “People’s Movement of Ukraine”, and decided to enter into a dialogue with it – including in open debates on republican television. There were, to put it mildly, few public politicians able to withstand such a dialogue among the Ukrainian Communist Party, so the party instructed its main ideologue-propagandist, that is, Kravchuk, to conduct such conversations.

Even in this incarnation, Kravchuk pursued his characteristic “sly fox” policy. This story is called characteristic: once Kravchuk comes to a meeting of the People’s Rukh, and there he is offered to hang a badge with a trident on the lapel of his jacket – a symbol of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, against whom Kravchuk fought in his position for almost half of his conscious life. Leonid Makarovich, nevertheless, accepts a small trident, hangs it next to the red badge of a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, but, sitting down on a chair in the presidium, takes off his jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair. Neither ours nor yours.

In 1990, the first partially free elections to the Verkhovna Rada were held in Ukraine. The oppositionists showed a brilliant result in the western part of the country and in total controlled about 120 out of 450 deputy mandates, but the majority in the Rada still belonged to the communists. The figure of Kravchuk was seen as ideal for balancing the interests of different groups of influence in the session hall, and in July 1990 he became the head of the Verkhovna Rada.

On July 16, 1990, the Rada adopted the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine. This document did not have the status of a constitutional act: it even retained the Soviet name of the Ukrainian SSR for the republic. But the very fact of its adoption allowed the Ukrainian authorities to withdraw from the preparation of a new union treaty, which Mikhail Gorbachev planned to sign on August 20, 1991.

However, this signing fell through anyway. The day before this date, the August coup began. The GKChP sent General Valentin Varennikov, Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR, to Kyiv, who immediately demanded a meeting with Kravchuk. A guest from Moscow immediately demanded that Kravchuk introduce a state of emergency in Ukraine. He, once again demonstrating his political style, asked the general for an official document with a seal that would confirm his authority. The conversation was carried on in a raised tone, Kravchuk recalled, but in the end it ended in nothing. Varennikov flew from Kyiv to Lvov, and Kravchuk on the same evening made a televised address in which he urged fellow citizens to remain calm and continue to work.

Many Ukrainians believe that this behavior of Kravchuk was the only correct one: in any case, there were no tanks and armed soldiers, as well as protests against the State Emergency Committee on the streets of Ukrainian cities, these events passed without casualties.

And a few days later, after the defeat of the State Emergency Committee, the Rada gathered for an extraordinary meeting. Under its walls there was a rally for many hours and many thousands of people. The communists were demoralized and almost unanimously supported the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, written by the opposition literally on their knees, on a piece of school notebook.

According to eyewitnesses, Kravchuk until the last doubted whether it was worth putting the act of independence to a vote: he allegedly had no confidence in the positive outcome of the vote and he suggested postponing the decisive moment for a couple of days. At that moment, one of the leaders of the Rukh, the poet Dmitry Pavlychko, approached the speaker’s chair and threatened to strangle him if the vote did not take place immediately. Kravchuk heeded the “request”, and the hall unanimously voted “for”.

The day of this vote, August 24, 1991, has since been celebrated in Ukraine as Independence Day.

A week later, the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada, given the support of the Ukrainian Communist Party of the August coup, decided to ban it. They say that after that, a delegation of the communist elite came to an audience with Kravchuk and stated that only the Supreme Court could decide on a ban on the Communist Party. “So you want to be judged too?” – Kravchuk allegedly reacted to the statement of former colleagues in the Central Committee.

At the same time, the Verkhovna Rada, under the leadership of Leonid Kravchuk, scheduled a referendum for December 1, 1991 to confirm the country’s independence, as well as the first presidential election in the country’s history.

So Kravchuk received an additional argument in order not to take part in the negotiations on a new union treaty, which Mikhail Gorbachev tried to revive: they say, there is nothing to discuss before the referendum.

And on December 1, 90.3% of Ukrainians voted for the independence of their country. 61.6% of the citizens who came to the polling stations supported Leonid Kravchuk, electing him as the first president of Ukraine.

A few days after the referendum and elections, Kravchuk began telephone contacts with Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich. On December 7, 1991, they met in Viskuli, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, supposedly to sign an agreement on economic cooperation between the three republics.

But very soon it became clear that the negotiations would not be limited to this treaty.

“At dinner, we decided to postpone official negotiations until the morning. At ten o’clock on December 8, we sat down at the negotiating table. It was then that we subconsciously felt that the fate of the Union would be decided today. Yeltsin did not say anything, but looked at me expectantly. Shushkevich,” Kravchuk later recalled.

“The Soviet Union was destroyed by Kravchuk and the Ukrainians,” Shushkevich said almost thirty years after those events.

After long meetings, which were accompanied by consultations with lawyers, the Belovezhskaya Pact appeared, which opened with a historical phrase, the authorship of which is attributed to one of Boris Yeltsin’s closest associates, Gennady Burbulis: “The Union of the SSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, ceases to exist.”

Kravchuk considered the collapse of the Union to be natural and necessary. “A truly great historical event has taken place. Three great powers met in Belarus to propose a path to the creation of a new commonwealth. This is the path to salvation. Saving peoples from confrontation, from interethnic wars,” he said upon returning to Kyiv.

“I am proud that the last empire in the history of mankind has collapsed. I am proud that today there is an independent Ukraine,” Kravchuk said later.

The signing of the Belovezhskaya Accords will be considered the most significant achievement of Kravchuk not only by the ex-president himself. A few years later, in 1998, he said, an illegal organization called the Union of Soviet Officers allegedly intended to kidnap him, take him to Moscow, and force him to retract his signature that ended the Soviet Union. Then, Kravchuk said, security was increased for him, and he himself began to sleep with the Colt in the bedside table.

But all this will come later. And on December 9, 1991, the day after Kravchuk returned to Kyiv, Mikhail Gorbachev called him, for whom the signing of the Belovezhskaya Accords was a surprise, and demanded to immediately come to Moscow.

“I’m not going to Moscow, because I’m the president of an independent state. I have a whole bunch of urgent things to do. And I don’t need directives,” Kravchuk allegedly replied and ended the conversation.

What made a person who spent a significant part of his life in leading positions in the Communist Party change his views and have a hand in the collapse of the Union? According to Kravchuk, his eyes were opened after he, already being a top ideologist of the Communist Party, got access to archival materials about the Holodomor by virtue of his position.

“After that, there was a breakdown, psychological, ideological and political. I stopped believing in what I was doing. I didn’t know how to change the situation, but I understood that something had to be done. And when the time came, I went to for Ukraine to become an independent state,” Kravchuk said.

When asked why, in this case, he continued to make a party career, and did not expose the Communist Party back then, Kravchuk answered that open disagreement would have landed him in prison, so he decided to fight “from within the system.”

However, the original question could be answered with another catchphrase of Kravchuk, although it was said on a different occasion: “Only the dead and fools do not change their point of view.”

The years of Leonid Kravchuk’s rule became one of the most difficult periods in the history of Ukraine. Inflation, which reached 10,200%, unemployment, chaotic privatization, rampant crime, many months of delays in paying already meager salaries quickly reduced the popularity of the first president in the eyes of Ukrainians, who until recently lived with the idea of independence.

Kravchuk himself, however, treated the reproaches addressed to him with irony and even said that he himself also had a “Kravchuchka” cart at home.

“I said and now I say: the one who took the “Kravchuchka” at one time went to Turkey or Poland and bought goods there, today he already has a small or big business. And the one who took the flag instead of the “Kravchuchka” is still behind money goes to rallies,” Kravchuk said in an interview with journalist Dmitry Gordon.

Kravchuk was also criticized for the 1994 Budapest memorandum on the transfer to Moscow of the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, which ended up on the territory of Ukraine after the collapse of the Union.

Formally, on behalf of Ukraine, this agreement was signed by the second president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, but the lion’s share of the negotiation process fell on Kravchuk’s presidency.

In return, Kyiv allegedly had to receive guarantees of security and territorial integrity from the great world powers. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 invalidated that treaty.

However, there is less talk about the fact that the renunciation of nuclear weapons in the early 1990s was an ultimatum demand by Western countries to establish constructive relations with Kyiv.

Kravchuk himself believed that he acted correctly. “The nuclear weapons that were on the territory of Ukraine were foreign, Russian weapons -” button “in Russia, production in Russia. We could not do anything with these weapons,” he said in August 2011.

The first difficulties in relations between independent Ukraine and Russia began even then, during the presidency of Kravchuk. Particularly hot at that time were disputes about the status of the Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea. The statements of Moscow politicians, such as the mayor of the capital, Yuri Luzhkov, that the peninsula is part of Russia, were not paid attention then.

Another reason for criticizing Kravchuk is his refusal to dissolve the Verkhovna Rada, elected back in the Soviet Union, in 1990. Critics argue that if Ukrainians had elected a new parliament on a wave of popular enthusiasm, immediately after their country’s independence, Ukraine, like Poland, would have quickly implemented market reforms and moved closer to the West.

However, Kravchuk justified himself: there were no legal grounds for the dissolution of the Rada at that time, and besides, Russia could use the pre-election mess for destabilizing actions. And the national-patriotic opposition, writes Kravchuk’s biographer Andriy Kokotyukha, did not support the idea of early elections: the Rukhites, they say, have already managed to “grow” to their parliamentary seats.

On the other hand, Kravchuk is given credit for the fact that it was during his presidency that the country acquired almost all the necessary attributes of statehood – a state border, some kind of economic system, an army, a security service. It was under Kravchuk that mints in Great Britain and Canada printed the first hryvnias; however, they were put into circulation only in 1996, when they managed to ride inflation.

And Leonid Kravchuk, who for many years was the main ideologist of the Ukrainian Communist Party, according to him, was a deeply religious person and had warm relations with Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko), who headed the Kyiv cathedra since the early 1960s.

It is believed that after Filaret failed in the election of the Patriarch of Moscow in 1990, it was Kravchuk who greatly helped him in the implementation of the “Ukrainian project” – the creation and development of the Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate. Back then, in the early 1990s, Kravchuk believed that the ultimate goal of the development of Ukrainian Orthodoxy should be the creation of a Ukrainian autocephalous church, which would be recognized by other local churches, and even negotiated this with Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.

The balance of pluses and minuses of Kravchuk’s presidency is often described by the aphorism of his own authorship: “We can, we can” (in Ukrainian, we have what we have).

The economic situation in Ukraine was getting worse. The situation was aggravated by a quiet war at the top: the political system of the young state was imperfect, and the president, government and parliament tirelessly pulled the blanket of authority over themselves. Disputes raged in the regions about who was in charge: the elected head of the regional council or the representative of the president appointed by Kyiv.

Under such circumstances, there was no question of carrying out much-needed economic reforms in the country. In the end, in 1994, early presidential and parliamentary elections were announced in Ukraine.

Kravchuk was considered the favorite of the presidential race and even won the first round of elections. However, in the second round, the first president lost to the former prime minister, director of the Dnipropetrovsk Yuzhmash plant, Leonid Kuchma, who promised to re-establish an economic union with Russia, give Russian the status of an official language, and generally spoke Ukrainian with difficulty.

Those elections were the first campaign to show the extreme regional polarization of Ukrainian political sympathies: Kravchuk was supported by the west and part of the center of Ukraine, Kuchma was made president by the votes of the inhabitants of the industrial south-east of the country.

Kravchuk did not cling to power and became the first post-Soviet leader who, having lost the elections, “handed over the watch” to his successor in a peaceful and legal manner.

Even after ceasing to be president, Kravchuk remained in active politics for a long time. For the next 12 years, he was invariably elected to the Verkhovna Rada.

At the same time, many Ukrainians did not hesitate to call him a opportunist. In 1998 and 2002, Kravchuk was elected to the Verkhovna Rada at the head of the list of the party of Viktor Medvedchuk, the Ukrainian politician and godfather of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who headed the pro-Russian party Opposition Platform – For Life, banned since the beginning of the war, and even before the invasion began, he was accused of state treason.

On the eve of the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, Kravchuk supported Viktor Yanukovych, calling himself his “VIP-agitator”, and in September 2005 he said that Viktor Yushchenko’s campaign was allegedly financed by Boris Berezovsky. At the same time, he sided with the “orange” ones, speaking out against the federal structure of Ukraine and for maintaining the status of the Ukrainian language as the only state language.

In the 2006 parliamentary elections, Leonid Kravchuk entered into the last political alliance with Viktor Medvedchuk, heading the pro-Russian bloc Ne Tak! This project won only 1% of the vote, and Kravchuk left active politics after that campaign.

Nevertheless, he continued to be an active commentator on Ukrainian political life.

Kravchuk never made a secret of his sympathy for Yulia Tymoshenko and even wrote an open letter to Viktor Yanukovych after her arrest in 2011, in which he warned against “Ukraine’s slipping away from the right-wing democratic path.”

This did not prevent him from maintaining warm relations with the same Yanukovych and regularly attending traditional hunting gatherings in the president’s country residence.

Kravchuk criticized Petro Poroshenko, arguing that for this, personal business is more important than the state.

Immediately after Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president, Kravchuk said in an interview with Hromadske.ua: “Zelensky is a decent person, honest, responsible and educated. We have been missing just such people all these years.”

After the start of the conflict in Donbass, Kravchuk, who during the time of independent Ukraine was involved in pro-Russian political projects, took a sharply patriotic stance.

In his probably last lifetime interview given to LB.ua, Kravchuk said that the main mistake of his presidency was that he trusted Russia.

“I thought that Russia was changing and would eventually change. That Russia would apply to other states not a forceful component, but a diplomatic one – would negotiate with them. She remained the same. And I knew a lot of what I had to do conclusions. I did not,” Kravchuk said.

In several interviews with journalist Dmitry Gordon, he even stated that he was ready to shoot to kill if “someone with parachutes” parachuted near his house in Koncha-Zaspa near Kiev.

“The weapon is cleaned and prepared. I will shoot to the last – as long as my hands hold the weapon, and as long as I see the enemy. I didn’t invite him, the son of a bitch, to my place,” Kravchuk said, adding that he still goes hunting and gets caught at the target from 150 meters.

Kravchuk also changed his position on Ukraine’s membership in NATO.

“Ukraine should be in NATO. Ukraine has no other option, since today it is defending its land from the Russian aggressor,” he said in March of this year.

Probably, knowing about this position of Kravchuk, in the summer of 2020, President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed him head of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group to resolve the situation in Donbas. However, over the past year, the “Minsk negotiations” still could not get out of the impasse.

Yes, and Kravchuk himself realized that his mission was rather hopeless.

“We can state that it is impossible to reach an agreement with the Russian Federation on a settlement in the Donbas, given the status they see themselves in and what tasks they set for themselves,” he said in February of this year.

At the end of June, it became known that Leonid Kravchuk underwent heart surgery. Soon, his press secretary reported that the ex-president was in intensive care with “very slow dynamics of improvement.”

At the end of August, former President Viktor Yushchenko said that Leonid Makarovich was “fighting.”

The death of Leonid Kravchuk became known on May 10, the third month of the war. Where he died has not yet been reported; The Interfax-Ukraine agency notes that since last year Kravchuk had been in a coma in a foreign clinic, and after that he also underwent rehabilitation outside Ukraine.