Ukraine Nationalists Barely Avert Split

Rukh, the mass movement that spearheaded Ukraine’s drive for independence, emerged shaken but still intact Sunday from a three-day congress that narrowly averted splitting it in two over its future role in the new Ukraine.

A bitter debate among nearly 1,000 delegates grew so heated that at one point, Rukh’s two-term chairman, poet Ivan Drach, walked out of the meeting.

He returned only after back-room talks yielded a compromise creating a new collective leadership of Rukh, a “triumvirate” including Drach, his ally, Mikhailo Horyn, and their main challenger, former political prisoner Vyacheslav Chornovil.

The fractious battle for Rukh’s highest post boiled down to a fight over the movement’s position toward Leonid Kravchuk, president of this country of 52 million and once one of Rukh’s main adversaries as a member of the old Communist-dominated government.

Kravchuk’s decision last year to take up Rukh’s nationalist banner has split the movement, arguably the most powerful political force in Ukraine, into two camps: the self-styled “loyalists” led by Drach and Horyn, who think Rukh should back Kravchuk, and the opposition led by Chornovil.

“Kravchuk’s campaign platform was nearly identical to Rukh’s program,” Horyn pointed out, arguing that opposition to the president would put Rukh in opposition to its own principles.

The opposition role has now been taken over by “the Communist Party apparatchiks who still hold most of the local government posts and oppose the idea of building an independent, democratic, Ukrainian state,” Horyn said.

Rukh’s role should be to support Kravchuk in general while reserving the right to oppose his specific actions, he said.

Chornovil derided Horyn’s position as “suicidal” and argued that, on the contrary, Rukh should primarily be an opposition movement that supports the president only when he deserves it.

Although the loyalists ran the congress and include the majority of Rukh’s leaders, they counted for only a tiny minority of delegates. An overwhelming majority of the 986 delegates supported Chornovil.

The split came to a head Saturday. As debate reached a crescendo, the high-intensity lights in the auditorium dimmed and the video cameras, set up on stage to record the proceedings for later television broadcast, were turned off.

Drach got up from his seat on stage and walked over to the podium, interrupting the speaker. Just as Drach announced that he was about to read a statement, most of the loudspeakers went silent.

Over shouts of “We can’t hear anything!” from the auditorium, Drach read a typewritten protest from “members of Rukh from the moment of its creation.”

“We can no longer participate in elections that will lead Rukh to become an opposition,” said Drach, and he called on his supporters to walk out of the congress.

The protest, signed by prominent Rukh founders such as Drach, Horyn, Larysa Skoryk, Dmytro Pavlychko and Volodymyr Yavorivsky, was a bombshell that precipitated pandemonium. The delegates swiftly crowded the stage, shouting and arguing over what to do next.

Chornovil called for calm. “No one has the right to dissolve Rukh, not even Drach,” he said before disappearing into tense back-room negotiations that left the congress in chaotic suspension for two hours.

Rumors of the triumvirate compromise swept through the audience minutes before Drach and Horyn returned to the stage. There was little applause to greet them. Only when Chornovil joined them did the delegates burst into cheers and whistles that left little doubt that he is Rukh’s moral--if not formal--leader.