THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF UKRAINE'S INDEPENDENCE

Turning the pages back...

August 19, 1991

Just five days before Ukraine declared its independence, hard-line Communists set in motion the chain of events that would finally bring about the historic event. On August 19, 1991, the Moscow press reported that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev could no longer perform the duties of his office for health reasons. Despite the official media stance, President Gorbachev had been arrested and sequestered while in Crimea by the "putschists," a group of Communist party members seeking to save the crumbling empire through a last ditch effort.

President Gorbachev's deputy, Gennadii Yanayev, immediately took over as acting president and declared a state of emergency. The GKChP, the Russian acronym for the eight person State Committee for the State Emergency in the USSR, was introduced as the new governing body for the Soviet Union. The takeover was perpetrated by a powerful group of conspirators that included the head of the KGB, the defense minister, the minister of internal affairs, the Soviet prime minister and the supreme Soviet of the USSR.

At first, Ukrainian leader Leonid Kravchuk remained non-committal regarding his position on the coup. Once it became clear that the coup had failed, Kravchuk agreed to call an extraordinary session of the Ukrainian parliament. At that meeting, on August 24, the Declaration of Independence was passed. The opening line cited the failed coup as one of the driving forces behind the landmark declaration, saying, "In view of the mortal danger surrounding Ukraine in connection with the state coup in the USSR on 19 August 1991..."

Source "The Ukrainian Resurgence" by Bohdan Nahaylo. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 19, 2001, No. 33, Vol. LXIX

| Home Page |