Leonid Kravchuk: biography, photos and interesting facts from life

Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich (born January 10, 1934) is a Ukrainian politician and the first President of Ukraine, who was in power from December 5, 1991 until his resignation on July 19, 1994. He was also Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and People's Deputy of Ukraine, -Democratic Party of Ukraine (united).

The fate of Western Ukraine - the birthplace of Leonid Kravchuk - in the middle of the last century

Where did Leonid Kravchuk begin his life? His biography began in the village of Bolshoy Zhitin in Rivne region in a peasant family. Then it was Polish lands. In the next ten years, in the native lands of Lönny, the power changed thrice. First, in September 1939, as a result of the Red Army's liberation campaign to western Ukraine, it was annexed to the Ukrainian SSR. Then in July 1941 fascist Germany conquered these lands for three years. And finally in the autumn of 1944 the Soviet power returned here. But it acted only during the day, and at night the western Ukrainian villages were under the rule of nationalists. And it lasted several years.

Can you imagine how all these vicissitudes reflected on the character of local residents, especially on the younger generation? In order to survive in such conditions, it was necessary to learn how to conceal one's thoughts, think one thing and say another, trust no one, do not believe anything. That's how a whole generation of post-war Western Ukrainian youth was formed, to which Leonid Kravchuk also belonged.

Childhood

The events of the war sharply affected the fate of our hero's relatives and himself. Lenny's father Makar Kravchuk, the former dashing cavalryman of the Polish army and a farm laborer of the Polish colonists, was mobilized in the Red Army in 1944 and, shortly after fighting, folded his head in Belarus that same year.

Mother came out again married and along with her stepfather managed to raise Leonid. They lived poorly, Leonid Kravchuk himself recalled that he walked barefoot until the first snow. However, deprivations only tempered the character of the future president.

Years of study

After graduation, Leonid Kravchuk moves to the city and enters the Rivne Cooperative Technical School. According to him, together with his fellow students, he rented a room without any comfort. Then in 1953, after graduating from a technical school with a red diploma, he gets the right to enter the Economics Department without examinations to the Kiev State University.

It was not easy to study there either, the scholarship was 24 rubles (although lunch in the student canteen cost 50 cents!). To survive, students at night went to unload the wagons with frozen fish at a nearby fish factory. Future President Leonid Kravchuk lived in a dorm room in a room for 12 people, but managed to learn "excellent" and receive an increased scholarship - as much as 30 rubles.

The only life-long meeting

At the university, Leonid met his future wife. A beautiful slim woman Tonya Mishura immediately blew his heart. They had much in common, both grew up without fathers, graduated from technical schools with honors and entered the university without examinations. Tonya reciprocated Leonid, already from the first year she began to take care of him, she cooked a meal for two in the student kitchen, and Leonid tried to get bonuses, wherever possible, to replenish their budget.

Major changes began in the country, and they seized Kiev students in their stream. When the virgin lands began to be developed, Leonid and Tonya after the third year went to the Kustanai region of Kazakhstan, where he had to work as a tractor driver, spending the night in a cold tent until the fall. Here Leonid caught cold, so much so that he lost consciousness and almost died. She was rescued by Tonya, who found a car and brought her beloved to the hospital, where he came to himself. After returning from the virgin land, Leonid and Tonya played a wedding. Their marriage continues to the present day.

First job

In 1958 Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich graduated from KSU and was assigned to Chernivtsi, where he began to read political economy in a financial technical school.

Household disorder also here pursued Leonidas, as an evil rock. Settled it in a female hostel, though in the "red corner". For those who are young and do not know what it is, we explain. So in Soviet institutions called a special (non-residential) room, decorated with Soviet symbols (bust of Lenin, the banner (if it was), various letters, pennants and other attributes of the Soviet style of life). Since the women's washbasin or toilet is not particularly crowded, the young teacher had to go every morning and every evening to the public square in a public toilet to wash, shave and fix a natural need. Fun? You just laugh. But Leonid suffered this mockery for three years.

Party career

Finally, in 1960, a young political scientist was noticed in the local Party organization and transferred to the Political Education House as a methodologist consultant. Then followed the transfer to the apparatus of the Chernivtsi regional committee of the CPU. Here our hero made a party career for 7 years, having served as the department head of the agitprop of the regional party committee.

Next, the usual for the USSR way of a large party organizer. First three years of postgraduate studies at the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, then eighteen years of gradual climbing through the ranks of the Central Committee of the Communist Party until the departmental agitprop department of the Central Committee, then the chief of ideology. Kravchuk becomes secretary of the Central Committee and advocates in the pages of the Ukrainian press for the preservation of Ukraine in the USSR. The peak of his party career is membership in the Politburo of the Central Committee and the post of second secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party.

How Kravchuk became chairman of the Verkhovna Rada

After the resignation in 1989 of Brezhnev's associate, Vladimir Shcherbytsky, the Ukrainian Communist Party was headed by a native of Poltava, Vladimir Ivashko, who made a party career in the Kharkiv region. In 1990, Ukraine held elections to the Verkhovna Rada. Ivashko was elected her deputy from Kiev. Since most of the deputies were Communists, it is only natural that in June 1990 they elected the leader of their party as the chairman of the Rada. Ivashko. After this, following the spirit of the times, they elected a new leader of the Communist Party S. Gurenko, so that the head of the parliament and the leading political force was not the same person.

Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich was elected a deputy from the Communist Party. His biography might well not have been replenished by other vivid events if Ivashko had not committed fatal stupidity that same month that played a decisive role in his fate and in the future of our hero. The fact is that at that time the President of the USSR M. Gorbachev, and also the general secretary of the All-Union Communist Party, was looking for a way to get rid of his party duties, dreaming to appear before the Western leaders (to whom he frankly cringed) exclusively in the form of state, and not communist Leader. Therefore, he came up with a new post in the party - the first deputy secretary general - and Ivashko invited her with a clear prospect of becoming the secretary-general in the future, subject to the cancellation of party hegemony in the USSR. Ivashko clearly did not "intui- de" what risks this appointment entails, refused the post of Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and left for Moscow.

His act aroused the indignation of the deputies. The first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Gurenko, put forward Kravchuk, the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, to the vacated post. His figure was clearly a compromise. On the one hand, he was a party worker, which aroused the confidence of pro-communist deputies, on the other hand, a native western Ukrainian, which, in the opinion of the nationalist-minded part of the deputies, was a pledge of pursuing an independent policy from Moscow. Of course, nobody spoke aloud about the state independence of Ukraine.

July 23, 1990 Kravchuk became chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, and therefore, the nominal head of the republic.

From the chairman of the parliament to the presidents

Who remembers now that difficult time after all the ups and downs of the last 25 years? Then, with the submission of Gorbachev, the idea of concluding a new union treaty between the republics that are part of the Soviet Union was actively discussed. Kravchuk was also a supporter of this approach, in contrast to the leader of the nationalists V. Chernovol, leader of the Narodny Rukh movement, who openly called for Ukraine's withdrawal from the USSR.

Even after the seizure of power in the country by putschists from the State Emergency Committee in August 1991, he continued to call for compliance with subordination to central allied authorities. So, at a meeting of the Verkhovna Rada on August 19 Kravchuk said: "On the territory of Ukraine, a state of emergency is not introduced. Therefore, we all continue to fulfill our usual duties in the same manner. "

And only on August 24, when the members of the State Emergency Committee were already in prison, when the President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking before the deputies of the Supreme Council, was publicly defamed by them, and Boris Yeltsin directly in the presidium at the same meeting signed a decree banning the Communist Party - only then The leadership of the Verkhovna Rada, headed by Kravchuk, under pressure from the majority of deputies, went to the Declaration of Ukraine's State Sovereignty of Ukraine, which was adopted, in the voting hall.

Soon the Constitution of Ukraine was changed to create the post of its President. Kravchuk was endowed with presidential powers, thus becoming both de facto and de jure the head of state. In the same year, December 5, 1991, voters formally elected him President of Ukraine in the first presidential elections, in which he defeated Vyacheslav Chernovol under the slogans of saving friendly relations with Russia, as well as preserving a single national economic mechanism in the post-Soviet space.

Presidency of Kravchuk

Unfortunately, he did not fulfill any of the slogans he proclaimed before the elections. Although Kravchuk signed the treaty on the creation of the CIS, however, he did everything that the Verkhovna Rada did not ratify its Charter. In January 1992, a new Ukrainian currency, the Carbonan, was introduced. This caused a natural break in the economic ties of Ukrainian enterprises with partners within the USSR, so the country was covered by a real inflationary storm in the next three years. If at the end of 1991 the salary of the leading engineer of the SKB Design Automation (Dnepropetrovsk) was about 200 Soviet rubles, then in 1994, as chief specialist of MSC "Yuzhvetroenergomash", it amounted to about 2 million karbovanians with approximately equal purchasing power, t .e. The money supply in the country has grown no less than 10,000 times.

Enterprises massively closed, the streets of Ukrainian cities turned into improvised bazaars, where people for a penny tried to sell personal things and household items. From the house to the market and back, citizens delivered the goods in two-wheeled carts, which the people dubbed "kravchuchkami". The country swiftly rolled to the abyss. In these circumstances, the Ukrainian elite went on to limit the power of the President and Parliament, transferring considerable powers to the Prime Minister, including the right to issue decrees that had the force of law. Such an all-powerful premier was Leonid Kuchma. Naturally, a conflict arose between him and the President, as a result of which the prime minister first retired at the end of 1993, and then, supported by the support of the elite of Eastern Ukraine, succeeded in holding extraordinary presidential elections, in which he was defeated by Leonid Kravchuk. His photo during the presidency is shown below.

Political portrait of L. Kravchuk

Once upon a time, on one TV show, the writer and publicist Oles Buzin, who was murdered in Kiev, asked Kravchuk how he, the former main ideologist of the Communist Party, famous for his struggle with Ukrainian nationalists, can claim that today he is their political ally and even a follower. To which Leonid Makarovich "no more than thinking about it" answered: "Do you know? His dumy is not a bad thing, it's dead. I'm not the same or not. "

According to the logic of Kravchuk, all those who did not give up their beliefs, even giving their lives for them, are fools. Throughout his long political life he continuously maneuvers, changes his political position. At the end of 2004, at the talks with Yushchenko, he supports Yanukovych (for which he, incidentally, was deprived of the title of honorary doctor of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), then in the 2009 elections he becomes a trusted person of Yulia Tymoshenko, the rivals of the same Yanukovych.

Gradually, his position becomes more and more right-radical, converging with the views of outspoken Russophobes. So, recently he agreed that Ukraine should separate the Donbas for the sake of preventing its harmful influence on the Ukrainian nation. Such was the way the former political commissar of the Ukrainian Communist Party, a fiery orator who called from the high tribunes to proletarian internationalism and the brotherhood of nations, now acts as the politician of segregation on political and national grounds.

Attitude to Kravchuk among the people

In short, our people do not like the hero. This applies to the elite and ordinary people. As for the elite, Volodymyr Lytvyn gave a very eloquent example of this attitude, which, several years ago, when he was Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, in one of his appearances on television called Kravchuk "a professional patented political prostitute".

The symbol of the first Ukrainian Maidan in 2004, the grandparents of Paraska Korolyuk publicly cursed Kravchuk and tried even to confirm his attitude to him by the action, so he was forced to retreat from her under protection. It's about the attitude of ordinary people.

But Leonid Makarovich continues to be a favorite of the media, he is an indispensable participant in many television shows, continues to sit in the presidiums of numerous forums of many public organizations, in other words - is in the public eye in the Ukrainian political get-together.

Another issue is the emphasis on his person, namely, who is Kravchuk Leonid Makarovich? His real name, according to some sources, is not Kravchuk, but Blum, that is, he is supposedly a Jew. But the information is very doubtful. The real name of Leonid Kravchuk, most likely, is the one by which he is known to the whole world.