Movement in Ukraine Seeks Independence

The biggest grass-roots movement in the Ukraine decided Sunday to seek full independence for the rich Soviet republic, dimming Kremlin hopes that Ukrainians would ultimately choose to remain united with their brother Slavs, the Russians.

The movement, known as Rukh, changed its program at a congress that capped a tumultuous month of strikes, political fasts and protests in the republic, long known as the country’s breadbasket.

“Let the atomic energy in our souls be devoted to creating a sovereign, independent Ukraine,” Ivan Drach, a poet and the movement’s leader, said, recalling the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl that helped galvanize the nationalist movement here.

The congress, attended by 2,300 delegates, proclaimed the restoration of Ukrainian independence and the formation of a democratic republic as Rukh’s goals, but it committed itself to a nonviolent transformation in the Soviet Union’s second-largest republic.

“The only path out of the current crisis is the path of the disintegration of the Soviet Union,” Volodymyr Chernyak, a Rukh leader, told a post-congress news conference.

Although Rukh--Ukrainian for “movement”--has expanded since last spring and now claims 630,000 members and 5 million supporters, the events of the month showed the heavy battle still under way between the movement’s radicals and the conservative Communist Party members who dominate the Ukrainian government.

The stakes are high--control of a republic with a population of 52 million in an area the size of France, which produces one-third of the Soviet Union’s vegetables, a fourth of its coal and a fifth of its industrial goods.

The advantage has seemed lately to seesaw back and forth between the two camps.

Radicals called a political strike Oct. 1 that largely fizzled. Their attempts to get the Ukrainian legislature to back up with new laws the daring declaration of sovereignty it passed last July also failed.

But tens of thousands of people did turn out for marches to press for faster moves toward Ukrainian sovereignty and the resignation of the republic’s top conservative leaders.

And, beginning Oct. 2, a vital new force entered Ukrainian politics.

More than 100 members of two Ukrainian student groups that had spent the summer quietly organizing and learning from their East European counterparts took to the central October Revolution Square in Kiev, launching a hunger strike and throwing up a tent city to accommodate the hundreds who eventually joined them.

Elsewhere in the capital and in other Ukrainian cities, students barricaded themselves inside buildings and boycotted classes in solidarity.

The students had six basic demands: that Prime Minister Vitaly Masol resign; that the Ukraine refrain from signing a new federation treaty with Moscow, and from sending its youths to serve in Soviet army units outside the republic; that Communist Party property be nationalized; that Parliament be dissolved and new elections be held.

Day after day, the tent city on the plaza beneath a giant statue of V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader and founder of the Soviet state, attracted thousands of visitors, who brought mattresses or just stopped to talk.

When it was clear that the students were gaining more backing with each passing day and workers had begun joining the marches in their support, lawmakers capitulated Oct. 17 on almost every point.

The students were euphoric, and Drach, whose years of struggle against Communist rule in the Ukraine have made him a nationalist hero, said they had every right to be.

“With their courage to stand between two deaths--a hungry, cold death on the concrete and death brought by tanks--they supported all of us and raised the heads of their fathers and mothers,” Drach said in an interview. “They changed our politics.”

But Oles Donij, a gangly, 21-year-old history major who led the hunger strikers, was less optimistic.

“The action showed that the Ukraine is not yet able to follow Eastern Europe,” he said. “The students did everything they could, but people are not yet ready to respond, especially the intellectuals.”

If the students were less effective than the East Europeans who brought down whole governments, they at least gained Ukrainian youth some fame as the most active and best organized in the Soviet Union, where young people are notoriously apathetic toward politics.

Several delegates to the Rukh congress from the eastern Ukraine, which is far more “Russified” and conservative than the nationalist western Ukraine, said the students made a difference in Kiev, but not in the outer reaches of the republic.

“It was like throwing a stone in the water,” said Sergei Savchenko of Dneprodzerzhinsk. “In the periphery, it has less and less effect.”

“It’s still pretty inert” in Dneprodzerzhinsk, Savchenko said. “It’s a population of slaves that cry out for their sausage and don’t need anything else.”

“My area was the epicenter of stagnation,” said Leonid Litvinenko, a gymnastics teacher from the industrial city of Dnepropetrovsk, adding that until recently, anyone who tried to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian there was looked at “as if they were a wild animal.”

Rukh’s former line--that it backed perestroika and was seeking only “sovereignty” for the Ukraine--had been kept purposely moderate so as not to alienate these outlying regions and many people in Kiev.

Much of the Rukh congress, the second since its founding in September, 1989, was devoted to the eastern Ukraine and the broader question of how to win over the estimated 40% of the republic’s population who are not ethnic Ukrainians.