The People's Movement of Ukraine, or Rukh, which spearheaded the drive to independence, has split into warring factions just eight months before the 1999 presidential election. Despite a lackluster performance at the polls in the 1998 parliamentary elections, it was still Ukraine's second-biggest party after the Communist Party. The split means that democratic parties will have even less influence on the presidential election than was already forecast. Instead, the fight for the presidency will be contested by business clans and left-wing parties.
The public rift in Rukh began in parliament on Feb. 19 when 30 out of 48 deputies of the Rukh faction announced they had removed Vyacheslav Chornovil as their parliamentary leader, choosing instead Yury Kostenko. The next day, 30 of the 55 members of the Rukh executive met and voted – 29 for and one abstaining – to replace Chornovil as party leader at the party congress scheduled for Feb. 28.
The fight spilled out of parliament, as each faction began to seize the organization's property. Kostenko's group seized the building housing the secretariat on Honchar street in Kyiv, while the Chornovil loyalists held onto the staff offices on Peremoha. Adding to the public confusion, both sides in the conflict sent faxes to journalists using the same 'Rukh-Press' letterhead. A similar fight for Rukh buildings is taking place across Ukraine.
After being conspicuously absent from parliament on Feb. 19, Chornovil called a press conference on Feb. 22 in Kyiv and let loose a tirade of accusations against the rebels. He called them hekachepisty, comparing them with the General Committee on the Emergency Situation (GKChP), which orchestrated the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991.
Chornovil claimed the Rukh rebels were in the pockets of President Leonid Kuchma and that government ministers were bribing them to the tune of $40,000 per month. He accused the rebels not only of petty thievery – taking Hr 4,000 from a Rukh office – but also of taking a million dollars offered by Rukh deputy Oleh Ishchenko, whom Chornovil called a 'gas oil shark,' to oust him from the leadership of Rukh. He alone, he said, was the rightful leader of the Rukh faction, even with just 17 deputies, and called a Rukh party congress for March 7 to oust the rebels.
Chornovil's demagoguery, as demonstrated at the press conference, is the reason why the rebels had to oust him. His tendency to make unsubstantiated accusations on the hoof, which was of questionable value even when used against ideological opponents, fell flat when used against fellow Rukh members. Chornovil is a loose political cannon. His abrasive style is autocratic and whimsical. He prefers to make policy deals on his own without regard to either the majority of the Rukh faction or its executive.
Why did it take so long for the majority of the Rukh leaders to oust him?
The reasons can be found in his image as a life-long fighter against the former totalitarian regime. Chornovil began his political opposition activities at Kyiv University in 1958 when he was kicked out for having unorthodox views. Until the arrival of perestroika 30 years later, he was hounded by the regime, spending 18 years in concentration camps and in exile in Siberia.
When the political thaw began in 1987, he returned to Ukraine, where he joined like-minded oppositionists in forming the Ukrainian Helsinki Group to agitate for the implementation of the human-rights accord signed by the USSR in Helsinki in the 1970s.
Chornovil made his debut on the national scene in 1989 at the first Rukh congress in Kyiv. The congress was organized by the official writers union as Ukraine's answer to perestroika. Behind the scenes it was an attempt by the reformist section of the Communist Party led by Leonid Kravchuk, then the Ukrainian party's chief of ideology and later the first president of Ukraine, to form a popular movement to support political reform. What was to be a broad movement encompassing the whole political spectrum turned into a one-man band the moment Chornovil appeared on the podium. His young, fanatical supporters welcomed him like a pop star, if not a new Messiah.
Within two years, Chornovil had hijacked Rukh, pushing out other dissidents such as Lev Lukyanenko, who had spent even longer in Soviet prisons for his opposition activities. In 1991, in Ukraine's first presidential election, Chornovil came second to Kravchuk with 22 percent of the vote. He stood against three other former Rukh members, including Lukyanenko, who received another 6 percent of the vote. If all four democratic candidates had instead supported a single candidate, Rukh could have been a credible opposition.
However, by the run-up to the election, Chornovil had so alienated many of his political allies that he conducted his presidential campaign from a van. In the van, traveling across Ukraine, sat Chornovil, his organizer Mykhailo Boychyshyn (who was later kidnapped and presumed dead), a bodyguard and a doctor. Chornovil was in poor health and had frequent heart problems before and following the campaign.
During the campaign, Chornovil, the former Soviet prisoner, tasted the sweet smell of success in Odessa when he lectured about 300 members of the local KGB – his former tormentors – on the need to respect human rights and to support an independent Ukraine.
In contrast, Kravchuk had the whole media and government apparatus working on his behalf. In this unequal David-and-Goliath fight for power, Chornovil's image as a fighter grew among the up-and-coming politicians who form today's Rukh leadership. It is only when one sees through the saintly halo not the liberator but the Machiavellian that disillusionment appears.
Almost 10 years after the first Rukh congress, when the young activists went wild over him, another group of young activists at the December 1998 Rukh party congress booed him for seizing the chairman's microphone and not allowing them to speak. There are policy causes for the split. Yury Khomych, writing in the Feb. 20 edition of the weekly Zerkalo Nedeli, gave three reasons why the majority of Rukh members of parliament and executive rebelled.
'First, [Chornovil's] indecently open support for Leonid Danylovych [Kuchma]. Second, the indecently frequent contact with Leonid Danylovych and his close assistants. Third, the fact that [Chornovil] began frequently to fail to keep promises given to his party colleagues,' Khomych wrote.
But the real cause of the split is Chornovil's personality. He cannot even retire gracefully from politics. The agony of Rukh will continue until he leaves the political stage.
Jaroslav Koshiw is the deputy editor of the Kyiv Post.
