Ukrainian Politician Deftly Sidesteps Communist Past

On first impression, Leonid Kravchuk’s campaign jingle seems to neatly sum up the man. It is the Beatles’ song, “Yesterday.”

After all, the glib, silvery-haired chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament was a cog in the now-banned Communist machine for three decades. As chief party propagandist in the Ukraine, he oversaw a squadron of newspapers and an army of agitators promoting socialism and “friendship of the Soviet peoples.”

But that was then, this is 1991.

In a sort of historical double take, Kravchuk, the one-time Leninist “internationalist,” has remade himself into the standard-bearer of Ukrainian independence. Even the Beatles, once denigrated as specimens of Western decadence, have been drafted to help.

Although many doubt the sincerity of the metamorphosis, few question Kravchuk’s ability to pull it off. As the Ukraine counts down the days until Sunday’s landmark referendum on independence and presidential election, Kravchuk, 57, is the leading candidate for president.

“I’d like to know when I spoke out against independence,” he told foreign correspondents Tuesday evening, casting himself as something of a Communist dissident. “The policies of the Communist Party and Kravchuk’s position are completely different things.”

In this year alone, Kravchuk’s strange political odyssey has taken him from promoting a “sovereign Ukraine in a new Union of Sovereign States” to a “confederation” to shunning attempts at rebuilding a Soviet economic and political community. Now, he says, the vital goal is “full-fledged and full-blooded independence for the Ukraine.”

“I cannot find any difference between our platforms,” comments rival presidential hopeful Vyacheslav Chornovil, who spent 15 years in prison and exile for championing Ukrainian nationalist causes. “Only my platform is 30 years old, and his is 3 months old.”

Apparently poised to become the head of Europe’s newest power, Kravchuk disclosed some of his intentions on Tuesday, telling reporters that the Ukraine will demand “real participation in disarmament talks” and will be in no hurry to dispose of 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and other nuclear weapons based on its territory.

In less than a year and a half, the onetime Communist has made a seamless transition from the closed-door world of the party plenum to the tumult of electoral politics. His videotaped campaign spot, which unrolls to strains of “Yesterday,” omits his party past and shows him playing soccer, pondering a chess game and romping with his grandchildren.

But some Ukrainians find it nerve-racking that the man who may become leader of the world’s next nuclear power has been so willing to alter his goals and principles. As proof that Kravchuk lacks scruples, his critics cite his conduct during the August putsch in Moscow.

For the first two days, unlike Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, Kravchuk did not speak out unequivocally against the State Emergency Committee and even seemed to sanction it in a television interview. It was only on the third day, when it was obvious that the coup was flagging, that Kravchuk publicly denounced the undertaking as illegal.

In his defense, he asserts that, despite threats delivered in person on the coup’s first day by a Soviet general, not a single junta order was implemented on Ukrainian territory. Besides, he says, he was not the Ukraine’s president and not empowered to act as Yeltsin did.

As Ukrainians ponder the choice they must make Sunday, the conclusion of many seems to be that in August, once again, Kravchuk talked his way out of a tight spot. Eloquence is a praised trait in the Ukraine, where a proverb promises that “a good tongue will take you all the way to Kiev.”

And Kravchuk’s career is proof.

He was born into a poor peasant family in a village in the Volhyn region of the western Ukraine in 1934. He began his Communist Party career in 1960 and by early 1980 was chief of the propaganda department of the Ukrainian Communist Party.

Under Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky, then Ukrainian party boss, the organization became a bastion of opposition to perestroika, and that was the line Kravchuk then had to promote. He became second party secretary in 1990, and in July he was elected chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament.

On Aug. 22, he rammed the independence declaration through a session of the Parliament that was debating his lack of resolute action during the putsch. Three days after Gorbachev resigned as Soviet Communist Party general secretary, Kravchuk announced he was leaving the party ranks. Later, he claimed he had actually quit on the first day of the coup.

Kravchuk’s watershed experience seems to have been an official visit to Switzerland last February. Many observers noted a change in what he reported back to the Parliament. Perhaps what startled him was to see that a little country like Switzerland could be independent and prosperous while the much bigger Ukraine was neither.

Times special correspondent Mary Mycio contributed to this report.