After Life as Dissident, Running for President of Ukraine Is Easy : Soviet Union: Polls show Chornovil running second in the Dec. 1 election. Independence is on ballot.

It was only noon, but this was the third campaign stop of the day, and Vyacheslav Chornovil’s voice, damaged by 15 years in labor camps and Siberian exile, had been reduced to a croaking whisper.

Wearing a blue suit, he stood amid the drill pressers at the Fiolent Radio Parts Factory, addressing 80 or so workers clad in greasy overalls. His broad forehead, accentuated by a receding hairline, glistened with sweat. He was face to face with one of the toughest audiences imaginable, a mainly Russian group of workers in this city in the Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that has belonged to the Ukraine only since 1954.

Shifting to Russian, he tried to win converts to the cause he has devoted his life to.

“Why does the Ukraine need independence?” Chornovil rasped. “You might as well ask why Ireland needs independence and why it fought so long to obtain it. For as long as the nation feels itself a nation, it will seek to be independent.”

Some of the workers strolled back to their machines unconvinced or overtly hostile.

“The Crimea will always be together with Russia,” one said.

“At least there was tolerance for a different point of view,” Chornovil commented.

With an energy as unrelenting as his wry sense of humor, Chornovil--a 53-year-old former dissident, samizdat (underground) journalist and now a regional power broker in the Ukraine--is seeking a prize he never dreamed would be within his reach: the leadership of his homeland.

“If, 10 years ago, someone had told me I would be a candidate for the presidency of the Ukraine, I would have said they were crazy,” he said during an interview in the seedy hotel room that has become his temporary headquarters here.

The most authoritative opinion poll available, conducted by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, shows Chornovil running second in the presidential race with 14%, compared to 38% for Leonid M. Kravchuk, chairman of the Ukrainian legislature.

But Chornovil, by all indications, is gaining.

During a swing last weekend through Odessa, he said that a recent poll of city dwellers gives him 22% of the urban vote, compared with 28% for Kravchuk. And surveys show that a large number of voters, from a quarter to a third, have not made up their minds.

Ukrainians will cast their ballots Dec. 1 in a landmark referendum on whether their homeland--which has 52 million people and more territory than France--should be independent, as Parliament proclaimed in August. Passage of the referendum seems assured.

They will also choose a president from among seven candidates--including another former political prisoner, a government minister and a manufacturer of wheelchairs.

Whoever becomes the Ukraine’s president will largely determine what “independence” means.

Chornovil was elected the head of government of the Lvov region in the western Ukraine last year. If he wins the presidency, he said, he will decline to support any measure that would perpetuate a formal union with other Soviet republics.

Through decrees, Chornovil said that he would lay a legal groundwork for a free market economy that will be functioning within a year. He will aggressively court Western investors, even guaranteeing capitalists profit, if that is what is needed to obtain foreign technology for the Ukraine.

“When I met with a group of businessmen from New Jersey, I told them, ‘Come and exploit us,’ ” he quipped during a call-in show on the Crimea’s television station.

The intentions of Kravchuk--whose former job as Ukrainian Communist Party secretary for ideology once put him in charge of harassing nationalists and human rights activists like Chornovil--have been kept unclear.

Kravchuk will not commit himself before Dec. 1. But if he becomes president, many Ukrainians, including Chornovil, believe that Kravchuk will rapidly engineer membership for the Ukraine in an economic community and a Union Treaty that resurrects political and economic ties with other Soviet republics.

“He is a sly politician, and he is trying to get us back into the union,” Chornovil asserted.

For many Ukrainians, it is the mustachioed son of a village schoolteacher from the Cherkassy region south of Kiev who personifies those political views, which they were long taught to reject--Ukrainian “bourgeois” nationalism, anti-communism, faith in the virtues of free enterprise. But Chornovil’s geniality, readiness to speak Russian to audiences who do not understand Ukrainian and the broad realization that the hour of independence has come dispel some of the mistrust.

“It seems that the terrible extremist we were warned about is not so terrible after all,” a moderator of the Crimean call-in show marveled after hearing him.

Chornovil’s support is solid in the regions of the western Ukraine. As Dec. 1 nears, he is carrying his campaign to the Crimea, another area where Russians and other non-Ukrainians make up a large part of the population. In doing so, the nominee of the grass-roots, pro-independence movement Rukh has exposed himself to insults, protests and rebuffs.

When the Lvov leader and his entourage drove into the Crimean port of Sevastopol, home of the Soviet navy’s Black Sea fleet, women carried protest signs reading “Crimea Is With Russia!”

In the Ukrainian south and east, Chornovil ran head on into a Communist Party machine that is still a potent political force.

Since the bungled August putsch in Moscow, Kravchuk has quit the party, and it has been banned here, but party members have managed to retain many jobs in government and economic management.

Krymskaya Pravda, the party-dominated daily newspaper in Simferopol, could not even bring itself to mention Chornovil’s name in its column the day after he addressed the Crimean legislature, held a news conference and met workers and students there.

Chornovil travels with a doctor, who carries a thermos of strong tea at all times to soothe the presidential hopeful’s throat. Chornovil suffers from pharyngitis, which his doctor says was aggravated in prison when a tube was shoved down his esophagus and he was force-fed to thwart a hunger strike.

The husky voice is a reminder of the price Chornovil paid for championing the Ukrainian cause decades before it was legal to do so. After he spoke out in 1965 against the arrest of leading Ukrainian intellectuals and published documents proving their innocence, he was arrested and launched on a 15-year odyssey through the gulags and Siberian exile.

Because of the large number of candidates in the race, if Kravchuk fails to get more than 50% of the votes on Dec. 1 and Chornovil comes in second as forecast, the two will battle in a runoff.

And Chornovil said he is certain that he will win if the other “democratic” candidates throw their weight behind him.

Whatever the voters’ verdict, he added, “I won’t lose this presidential campaign. In fact, I’ve already won it.”