Ukraine

Ukraine A country which formed part of the Russian Empire from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which during the nineteenth century was subject to intensive campaigns to replace its culture and language with those of Russia. Nevertheless, after the collapse of Tsarist Russia in the Russian Revolutions of 1917, independence was declared with the encouragement of the German occupying forces in January 1918. It was reoccupied by the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, and became a founding member of the USSR as the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (1922). As the USSR's most fertile agricultural state, it was particularly hard-hit by Stalin's economic policies and his neglect of agriculture, so that it bore the brunt of the ensuing famine of the late 1920s and early 1930s with around seven million people dead. It was devastated by German occupation 1941–4, but did not fare much better with the return of Stalin. Aided by Khrushchev and Kaganovich, he ordered the blanket deportation of 300,000 Ukrainians as punishment for alleged collaboration with the Germans. In 1946 Transcarpathia was added to its territory, as was the Crimea in 1954.

Gorbachev's reformist policies caused a resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism, so that in the wake of the August coup the President of the Ukrainian parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, proclaimed Ukrainian independence (24 August 1991). He was elected President in December 1991. The following years were characterized by rifts with Russia, in which the Ukraine jealously guarded its own independence against its overbearing neighbour. This was complicated, however, by Crimean demands for union with Russia. The government proceeded relatively cautiously towards privatization, but was unable to prevent the extensive economic dislocation that followed the breakup of the USSR and its other traditional markets in Comecon. The resulting popular frustrations resulted in the election in 1994 of a parliament composed largely of former Communists. In the same year, Kravchuk lost the presidential elections to Leonid Kutchma (b. 1938).

Kutchma tried to introduce reforms such as the liberalization of prices as well as privatization, but many of his reforms were vetoed by Parliament. Moreover, Kutchma was unable to establish the institutional authority of government. The system of taxation had virtually broken down by 1998. The state was unable to pay its salaries and pensions, and was brought to the verge of bankruptcy, 1998–2001. Kutchma successfully introduced a constitutional referendum in 2000 which increased his powers against the obstinate parliament. However, the weak state continued to be unable to assert its authority and prevent a series of political murders and popular protests fuelled by a decade of economic decline.