USSR / UKRAINE
Birth of a nation FOR THE FIRST TIME in its history, on December 1, 1991, the Ukrainian people had the right to democratic self-determination. For a long time before it could be expressed through a vote, dissidents had made Ukrainian aspirations for independence known through the pen, underground activists through their tracts and guerillas through the rifle. Almost all the citizens of the republic went to vote and 90% of them voted for independence - some 20% more than had been suggested by even the most states, but in the Ukraine this is not an anachronism.
While being one of the largest European nations in population and territory, it has not had its own state and has been harshly oppressed for several centuries. An irregularity of this size in the relations between modern nations could not last for ever. It was a factor of chaos in the world historical process, and an enormous obstacle to the overall process of the development of the productive forces and class differentiation, as was well explained in 1926 by Ukrainian writer and Communist militant Mykola Khvylovy.
In fact, the Ukraine was one of the first nations to take form on the European conoptimistic opinion polls. ZBIGNIEW KOWALEWSKI TRICNIEW VOWAI CWCKI A T THE same time, the voters elected Leonid Kravchuk as the republic's president. Kravchuk, a former leader of the nowdissolved Communist Party, won by a large margin over his main rival, Vyacheslav Chornovil, a former political prisoner and currently mayor of Lviv. Not only the whole of the Ukrainian people, but also a large proportion of the republic's national minorities, including the Russian minority, opted for an independent state.
The democratic attitude of the Ukrainian national movement towards the republic's various minorities the determination to respect their rights, including their right to cultural or even national-territorial autonomy - has borne its fruit. More than a simple act of the right of an oppressed people to self-determination, this is a historic act of reconstituting a nation. We do not live in the epoch of the formation of national tinent. This took place in the 18th century, during a tumultuous Cossack revolution and a popular war that freed the Ukraine from the grip of the Polish state, its feudal ruling class and its Catholic church. This democratic state of the free armed peasantry might well have radically upset the social order in Eastern Europe, but its inability to develop along a capitalist path led to the degeneration of the formidable political, social and cultural gains of that revolution and to their dismantling by the Tsarist empire. The nation was ground down by the oppression of the Muscovite bureaucracy into a mass of serfs and by Tsarist ukazes [edicts] to the condition of a "little Russian" people.
The Ukraine was reformed as a state
The Fall of the House of Gorbachev