Ukrainian memories of the USSR's death

Kravchuk (left) applauds accords which buried the USSR

By BBC News Online's Stephen Mulvey

The two men who played the lead roles in the collapse of the Soviet Union - Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin - get short shrift from one of the supporting actors - the former Ukrainian President, Leonid Kravchuk - in memoirs written 10 years after the event.

Yeltsin was interested in me as an ally in the struggle for power

Leonid Kravchuk

Mr Kravchuk describes the Soviet leader of 1991 as an overbearing politburo dinosaur, who deludes himself that hectoring phone calls and bombastic speechifying might be enough to prevent Ukraine and other republics splitting away.

The Russian president he portrays as a man driven by personal ambition to sweep away the USSR - and hence his rival, Mikhail Gorbachev - while hoping to preserve as much as possible of Russia's "imperial" domination of the ex-Soviet states.

Kravchuk slowly realised possibility of breakaway

The way he tells the story, in two long excerpts from a forthcoming book published in a Ukrainian newspaper, his own motivation was very different.

"He [Yeltsin] was interested in me as an ally in the struggle for power. I attempted with his help to make our country's independence fully-fledged at last," Kravchuk writes.

Slow Evolution

He does credit Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, with the sense to realise that the USSR was destined for oblivion - however it is not completely clear when Kravchuk himself, let alone Yeltsin, came to this realisation.

Gorbachev... acquired a new decisiveness. Only the preservation of the Union would give him the chance to remain in big-time politics

Leonid Kravchuk

It seems to have been an understanding that slowly gelled, for both of them, in the autumn of 1991.

"Even after the collapse of the [August 1991] coup the Union still had a chance of salvation," Kravchuk writes.

"Gorbachev... acquired a new decisiveness. Only the preservation of the Union would give him the chance to remain in big-time politics."

Improvisation

This was why Gorbachev kept badgering Kravchuk over the telephone.

Ukrainians voted in droves for independence

He wanted him to sign up to the idea of a "renewed" union, but Kravchuk refused to discuss the issue until after a Ukrainian referendum on independence on 1 December.

In October, Gorbachev organised an appeal to the Ukrainian parliament calling on Ukraine to back the new Union treaty - and got Yeltsin and several other heads of republics to sign it.

But only the next month he records having prolonged discussions with Yeltsin and the leader of the Belarusian republic, Stanislav Shushkevich, in which they agreed "that the USSR was doomed, and should be replaced by a temporary non-state structure".

It was another month again before this structure, the Commonwealth of Independent States, was created - a historic step that was taken, as Kravchuk tells it, "with a significant degree of improvisation".

Pushcha accords

He got a call from Shushkevich on 7 December, who told him that Yeltsin was going to be in Belarus for other reasons, and inviting him to join them at a hunting lodge near Brest, known as Belovezhskaya Pushcha.

Gorbachev: Furious about Belovezhskaya accords

He assumed it was going to be just another round of discussions, and indeed the first evening was devoted to eating rather than making history. (Kravchuk does not comment on rumours that alcohol flowed in great abundance.)

But when the next morning Kravchuk briefed the others on Ukraine's decisive vote for independence, they began almost immediately to draft the famous Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords, which begin: "The USSR ceases its existence as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality."

Kremlin brush-off

A furious Gorbachev summoned all three authors to Moscow the next day, but only Yeltsin went.

The Soviet leader continued to bawl down the telephone at Kravchuk, refusing to face facts until he finally resigned on 25 December.

In no time at all, Kravchuk says, Yeltsin was taking an equally high-handed line.

"Undoubtedly, Yeltsin reckoned that would Moscow would continue to dominate one sixth of the globe," Kravchuk writes.

"Wherever we subsequently met, at numerous CIS events, he always considered himself fully in charge."

The point was brought home to Kravchuk on 30 December, when Yeltsin announced that he had already given instructions for a rapid transformation to market economics.

When Kravchuk reminded him that the founders of the CIS had agreed to co-ordinate their reforms, in order to minimise the disruption to their interlinked economies, he got the Kremlin brush-off.

Yeltsin simply replied, Kravchuk says, that the others should follow Russia's example.