Leonid Makarovych Kravchuk (, ; 10 January 1934 – 10 May 2022) was a Ukrainian politician who served as the first president of Ukraine from 5 December 1991 to 19 July 1994. Kravchuk's presidency was marked by Ukraine achieving independence from the Soviet Union, the handover of its post-Soviet nuclear arsenal and an economic crisis that ultimately resulted in him losing re-election. Prior to his presidency, he was Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada. After leaving office, he served as a People's Deputy of Ukraine for the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united).
Born to a family of peasants in Volhynia, Kravchuk's early life was significantly impacted by World War II and the postwar nationalist insurgency. He joined the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1958 and rose through the ranks, working as a propagandist. He became Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in 1990, amidst the 1989–1991 Ukrainian revolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He opposed the 1991 Soviet coup attempt and subsequently led Ukraine to become independent from the Soviet Union.
Kravchuk became Ukraine's first democratically elected president in 1991. As president, Kravchuk formed an informal alliance between his national communists and national democrats, an ideological group succeeding Ukraine's Soviet dissidents. He sought to build a centralised state, opposing federalism, and established an independent Armed Forces of Ukraine, additionally giving up Ukraine's nuclear arsenal. He supported the possibility of Ukrainian membership in the NATO military alliance. Kravchuk's presidency saw the enrichment of the former nomenklatura and a failure to undertake economic reforms, caused by uncertainty over the correct measures to take. Ukraine's gross domestic product contracted by 40% during his time in office. In the wake of strikes by coal miners, Kravchuk called snap elections for Ukraine's parliament and presidency; he was defeated both times in 1994, being succeeded as president by Leonid Kuchma.
After his presidency, Kravchuk remained active in Ukrainian politics, serving as a People's Deputy of Ukraine from 1994 to 2006. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united) in 1998 alongside other national communists, and supported Viktor Yanukovych in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election and subsequent Orange Revolution. During the 2006 Ukrainian parliamentary election, he led the far-left, pro-Russian Ne Tak alliance, which failed to enter the Verkhovna Rada. Kravchuk later endorsed Yulia Tymoshenko for president and criticised Yanukovych as anti-democratic. From 2020 to 2022, he was Ukraine's representative to the Trilateral Contact Group, which sought to negotiate an end to the war in Donbas. During that time, both Kravchuk and his adviser, former Prime Minister Vitold Fokin, made controversial comments claiming Russia was uninvolved in the war.
Early life Leonid Makarovych Kravchuk was born on 10 January 1934 in the village of Velykyi Zhytyn () to an ethnic Ukrainian peasant family. At that time the village was part of the Second Polish Republic. It was annexed into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, when Kravchuk was a child. Kravchuk's father was connected to the Ukrainian nationalist underground, which resisted Polish rule over western Ukraine.
Kravchuk's family belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Mykhailivska Church in Velykyi Zhytyn, and he later recounted that his family was deeply religious. Kravchuk's birth and baptismal records, recorded by the church, have since been lost; local newspaper speculated in 2018 that it may have been removed or destroyed at Kravchuk's behest in order to improve his image in Soviet circles as an atheist. As a child, Kravchuk shared his family's religious beliefs, and the first recorded mention of his name was around the Christmas of 1942, when an article by Ulas Samchuk in Nazi collaborator newspaper Volyn noted him among local children singing koliadky and donating 40 karbovantsiv to the Ukrainian Red Cross Society. Kravchuk later recalled that he became an atheist in his childhood, a fact he said his mother sought to change by seating him under icons to pray. Kravchuk's parents worked under Polish landowners and his father served in the Polish Army before being killed in World War II.
Kravchuk's childhood was significantly affected by World War II, especially the activities of the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (; UPA), which was active between 1943 and the late 1940s in western Ukraine. The UPA was particularly concentrated in Kravchuk's native Volhynia. American historian and political scientist Alexander J. Motyl wrote in 1995 that "Unlike someone from the Sovietized parts of the country, Kravchuk was well aware of the armed struggle led by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and of the 'insurgent republics' that served as pockets of sovereignty in the forests of Volhynia[.]" Motyl noted that the presence of nationalist mass movements in western Ukraine, including the OUN and the nationalist-influenced Communist Party of Western Ukraine, likely influenced Kravchuk's outlook towards communism and nationalism in a way that most other Soviet politicians did not experience. Motyl also posits that Kravchuk's childhood experience living under German occupation was likely traumatic, and Kravchuk later recounted that at the age of eight, he had watched Jews being executed with a machine gun. According to Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, some newspapers since perestroika have claimed that Kravchuk secretly brought food to members of the UPA as a child.
Kravchuk married a mathematics teacher, Antonina Mykhailivna Mishura, in 1957. First Lady of the United States from 1989 to 1993, Barbara Bush (wife of 41st American president George H. W. Bush), described Antonina in her memoirs: "She was the nicest young woman, a math teacher with absolutely no interest in politics". The two had one son. Kravchuk studied accounting at a vocational school in Rivne between 1950 and 1953 before attending Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University. Kravchuk graduated in 1958 at the age of 24, specialising in Marxist political economy, and began working as a teacher of political economy in the southwestern city of Chernivtsi before entering politics. He took part in the International Visitor Leadership Program, a professional exchange run by the US State Department, and later graduated from the in 1970.
Communist Party career Kravchuk joined the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1958 and became a member of the party apparatus in Chernivtsi Oblast in 1960. He later became a member of the Kyiv-based Central Committee of the CPU in 1970. Kravchuk became head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda in 1980, focusing on agitprop, and a candidate member of the CPU politburo in September 1989. He was finally promoted to second secretary of the CPU on 23 June 1990.
Kravchuk's activities as a member of the Communist Party were, from the outset, primarily involved in the spread of ideological propaganda, particularly what the party referred to as "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism". He celebrated the establishment of what he referred to as "political discotheques" in 1984 and advocated for greater amounts of books, films and works of theatre which negatively depicted imperialism and capitalism, in what Motyl described as an "unabashedly Brezhnevite" taste in media. In 1982, he advised the Central Committee to fight the Catholic Church's ostpolitik by destroying symbols associated with the banned Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, arresting its adherents and investigating churches, cemeteries and sermons for elements perceived as pro-Catholic.
Metamorphosis (1989–1991) As what would become the 1989–1991 Ukrainian revolution was in its early stages, Kravchuk was present at the in September 1989. Adrian Karatnycky, a human rights activist who was present at the convention, later remarked on "the anomaly" of Kravchuk's presence at the gathering, given its association with the Soviet dissidents. A month later, following the removal of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky from the position of First Secretary, Kravchuk was appointed to the secretariat within the Central Committee on 18 October 1989 and promoted to a candidate member of the Politburo. He would later be promoted to a full member of the Politburo and Second Secretary of the party in June 1990, followed by membership in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in July of the same year.
Between 1989 and 1991, Kravchuk underwent a significant ideological shift, in what has been described as a "metamorphosis" by Motyl and journalist Serge Schmemann. During this time, Kravchuk transitioned from a hardline propagandist against Ukrainian nationalism to a supporter of Ukrainian nationalism and one of Ukraine's leading statesmen. Kravchuk later stated that he had become anti-Soviet while studying at the , when he discovered documents revealing the existence of the Holodomor.
In 1988, Kravchuk began supporting Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of perestroika. Following Gorbachev's statements, Kravchuk called upon the party to "democratise its own agitation and propaganda" and advocated for communists to "learn democracy", as well as the decentralisation of power to the republics. Throughout 1989 and the summer of 1990, Kravchuk increasingly moved towards national communism, deliberately imitating previous Ukrainian national communists from the interwar period and 1960s. In March 1990, he stood in the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet election for the city of Yampil, Vinnytsia Oblast. He was elected in a landslide, winning 87.38% of the vote and defeating three other candidates in the first round of voting.
As a result of the election, the anti-communist Democratic Bloc captured 111 of 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Soviet or parliament). 92 Communist People's Deputies left the party in July of the same year to become independents associated with the Democratic Bloc, leaving the weakened Communist majority to call itself the Group of 239. The Democratic Bloc possessed disproportionate influence compared to its number of deputies; of the 190 deputies who were regularly active in committees, over half were from the democratic opposition; only six of the parliamentary presidium's 25 members were conservative members of the CPU; many of the Communist deputies were also directors of state-owned enterprises and therefore unwilling or unable to devote energy to the Verkhovna Rada; and most of the remaining communists were used to treating the Rada as a rubber-stamp and unfamiliar with working under a popularly-elected and powerful parliament.
First Secretary Vladimir Ivashko left Ukraine to take up a position in Moscow in July 1990, a month after being appointed to the position of Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada. Motyl notes the perplexing nature of Ivashko's decision; the People's Movement of Ukraine (; abbreviated Rukh) was gaining strength, Lithuania had declared independence from the Soviet Union and Russia had declared itself sovereign, meaning that Russian laws took precedence over their Soviet equivalents in case of conflict. Ukraine's politicians were left so incensed by Ivashko's perceived abandonment of Ukraine that the CPU voted in favour of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine on 16 July.