aid from the West,’ she wrote. ‘How naive!’ 23
By autumn, Kiev was catching up. On 30 September, opening day of the Rada’s second session, the city was brought to a halt by its biggest anti-government demonstration yet:
The meeting opened at three o’clock near the Central Stadium. It began despite the fact that all the roads into Kiev had been closed, with armoured cars at the approaches to the city on the pretext that the soldiers in these military vehicles had come to collect the harvest. Ten huge army trucks were positioned on Repin, my street, alone . . .
At 5.00 p.m. a protest march departed from the stadium along Red Army and Khreshchatyk streets. At least 200,000 (and perhaps 500,000) people in enormously wide, tightly packed columns, singing and yelling slogans – ‘Freedom for Ukraine! Down with the CPU!’ – moved out on to Lenin Komsomol Square. The column came to a halt near the two monuments of Lenin and people began chanting ‘Down with the idol!’ Near one of the monuments a ring of defenders took up their positions, among them decorated veterans and, probably, KGB men in disguise. Foreign television correspondents paced about. Police stood in ranks around the second Lenin statue which, in April, had been decorated with a wreath of barbed wire . . .
My feet felt battered and burned from the long hours of standing and walking; my head was buzzing from all the shouting and slogans. Yet we could barely drag ourselves away . . . 24
Two days later students from Kiev and Lviv universities went on hunger strike, camping out under tents on what had been October Revolution and was now renamed Independence Square. They demanded new parliamentary elections, no military service outside Ukraine, nationalisation of all Party property and the removal of Vitaly Masol, the republic’s prime minister. Passers-by, not all of them enthusiastic, watched proceedings from behind rope barriers. ‘Some scolded the layabouts,’ wrote Pavlychko, ‘others passed flowers across the rope, still others said that it wouldn’t make any difference, and why were they wrecking their health?’ 25 On 10 October the students were joined by eight opposition deputies, and on the 17th, after a protest march by workers from the Arsenal weapons factory, scene of a pro-Bolshevik uprising in 1918, the government caved in. There would be no more military service outside Ukraine, a commission would be created on the nationalisation of Party property, and Masol would go. When the terms were read out in the Rada, deputies applauded.
With the marches and the hunger strikes, Kiev’s popular independence movement peaked. ‘Remember,’ a friend told me, ‘that a lot of these demonstrators came in buses from Lviv. We were proud of them, we would support them, definitely. But when they left, that was it.’ Rukh was splintering, leaving behind a slew of quarrelsome, disorganised factions. ‘The public,’ Pavlychko wrote despairingly in December, ‘doesn’t give a damn . . . it demands something to eat, but nothing very special, anything will do.’ 26 With her parents on New Year’s Eve, she decided that independence was still ten, twenty or even thirty years off. Her four-year-old daughter Bohdana might be the only one to live to see it.
What the Pavlychkos did not realise was that while the opposition lost momentum, the communists themselves were edging towards a change of heart. The shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Vilnius and Riga in January revealed a split between pro-Moscow hardliners, led by First Party Secretary Stanyslav Hurenko, and an emerging bloc of ‘national communists’ under Leonid Kravchuk, a former Party ideology chief and chairman of the Rada. While the Rada condemned Moscow for its ‘inadmissible . . . use of military force’, the Party’s Central Committee accused the Lithuanians of extremism and provocation. 27 In March Kravchuk joined forces with the opposition to vote in an ambiguously worded
By autumn, Kiev was catching up. On 30 September, opening day of the Rada’s second session, the city was brought to a halt by its biggest anti-government demonstration yet:
The meeting opened at three o’clock near the Central Stadium. It began despite the fact that all the roads into Kiev had been closed, with armoured cars at the approaches to the city on the pretext that the soldiers in these military vehicles had come to collect the harvest. Ten huge army trucks were positioned on Repin, my street, alone . . .
At 5.00 p.m. a protest march departed from the stadium along Red Army and Khreshchatyk streets. At least 200,000 (and perhaps 500,000) people in enormously wide, tightly packed columns, singing and yelling slogans – ‘Freedom for Ukraine! Down with the CPU!’ – moved out on to Lenin Komsomol Square. The column came to a halt near the two monuments of Lenin and people began chanting ‘Down with the idol!’ Near one of the monuments a ring of defenders took up their positions, among them decorated veterans and, probably, KGB men in disguise. Foreign television correspondents paced about. Police stood in ranks around the second Lenin statue which, in April, had been decorated with a wreath of barbed wire . . .
My feet felt battered and burned from the long hours of standing and walking; my head was buzzing from all the shouting and slogans. Yet we could barely drag ourselves away . . . 24
Two days later students from Kiev and Lviv universities went on hunger strike, camping out under tents on what had been October Revolution and was now renamed Independence Square. They demanded new parliamentary elections, no military service outside Ukraine, nationalisation of all Party property and the removal of Vitaly Masol, the republic’s prime minister. Passers-by, not all of them enthusiastic, watched proceedings from behind rope barriers. ‘Some scolded the layabouts,’ wrote Pavlychko, ‘others passed flowers across the rope, still others said that it wouldn’t make any difference, and why were they wrecking their health?’ 25 On 10 October the students were joined by eight opposition deputies, and on the 17th, after a protest march by workers from the Arsenal weapons factory, scene of a pro-Bolshevik uprising in 1918, the government caved in. There would be no more military service outside Ukraine, a commission would be created on the nationalisation of Party property, and Masol would go. When the terms were read out in the Rada, deputies applauded.
With the marches and the hunger strikes, Kiev’s popular independence movement peaked. ‘Remember,’ a friend told me, ‘that a lot of these demonstrators came in buses from Lviv. We were proud of them, we would support them, definitely. But when they left, that was it.’ Rukh was splintering, leaving behind a slew of quarrelsome, disorganised factions. ‘The public,’ Pavlychko wrote despairingly in December, ‘doesn’t give a damn . . . it demands something to eat, but nothing very special, anything will do.’ 26 With her parents on New Year’s Eve, she decided that independence was still ten, twenty or even thirty years off. Her four-year-old daughter Bohdana might be the only one to live to see it.
What the Pavlychkos did not realise was that while the opposition lost momentum, the communists themselves were edging towards a change of heart. The shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Vilnius and Riga in January revealed a split between pro-Moscow hardliners, led by First Party Secretary Stanyslav Hurenko, and an emerging bloc of ‘national communists’ under Leonid Kravchuk, a former Party ideology chief and chairman of the Rada. While the Rada condemned Moscow for its ‘inadmissible . . . use of military force’, the Party’s Central Committee accused the Lithuanians of extremism and provocation. 27 In March Kravchuk joined forces with the opposition to vote in an ambiguously worded
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