UKRAINE MOURNS CHORNOVIL (04/04/99)

UKRAINE MOURNS CHORNOVIL

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Tens of thousands of people bid a final farewell to Vyacheslav Chornovil on March 29 in an emotional display of respect that this country held for the former Soviet political dissident and leader of the Rukh Party.

As Ukraine observed a national day of mourning, people from all over the country traveled to the nation's capital - police reported a figure of 10,000 - to join with tens of thousands more Kyivans in what many consider the largest funeral this city has ever seen.

Mr. Chornovil, 61, longtime leader of the Rukh Party, died in an automobile accident late on March 25 while returning from a political meeting in Kirovohrad with Hennadii Udovenko, former foreign affairs minister and now national deputy, whose candidacy for president Mr. Chornovil was supporting.

Under a piercingly blue spring sky, crowds approaching 50,000 lined the streets to witness the funeral procession, jammed St. Volodymyr Sobor to hear the funeral service and squeezed through the front gates of historic Baikove Cemetery, where they climbed atop monuments and grave markers to get a view of the late Rukh leader's final resting place.

"Kyiv has not seen a funeral like this in a long time," one middle-aged woman said as she waited on the streets of Kyiv for the funeral procession to pass by. Her remarks were echoed by National Deputy Yaroslav Kendzior.

Outside the Teacher's Building, where the Ukrainian government proclaimed an independent Ukraine in 1918, nearly 20,000 mourners, many teary-eyed, some obviously overwrought, gathered to view the open casket inside. They began arriving before daylight to pay respects to the former political prisoner and democratic leader who committed more than 30 years of his life to the fight for an independent Ukraine.

The viewing lasted nearly three hours, during which some 8,000 people passed by the casket. The building was opened an hour earlier than had been planned because of the immense crowd and the nearly one-kilometer-long queue that had already formed by 9:30 a.m.

Inside and outside, the walls were lined with hundreds of wreaths: large official arrangements from foreign governments, the president, the Cabinet of Ministers, the Verkhovna Rada, and the many regional and local Rukh organizations, as well as small personal tributes.

Mr. Chornovil's body lay in a simple oak casket, which was surrounded by flowers tossed by the bereaved as they took a last look at the man who was a major political force in newly independent Ukraine's turbulent first eight years.

A state honor guard of four national guardsmen stood stiffly at attention at each corner of the casket. Outside, a military detachment, which also included an orchestra, waited to escort the body to the church and then the cemetery.

Officially, Ukraine was represented by President Leonid Kuchma, who arrived with Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko and Verkhovna Rada Chairman Oleksander Tkachenko to pay his respects. After standing before the casket in a moment of silence, the three Ukrainian leaders, with whom Mr. Chornovil had tussled often in the political arena, approached Mr. Chornovil's widow, Atena Pashko, and offered words of condolences. They then left the building to await the arrival of the casket at St. Volodymyr Sobor, the site of the funeral moleben.

Most leaders of the Verkhovna Rada's 14 factions attended, as did most national deputies from Ukraine's Parliament and most ministers from the government. Notable by their absence were Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko and Progressive Socialist leader Natalia Vitrenko.

Some members of Ukraine's staid political elite had trouble concealing their emotions for a man whom people loved or hated, but toward whom they had difficulty being indifferent. A red-eyed Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of Ukraine and current member of Parliament, with whom Mr. Chornovil had clashed also, removed his glasses and brushed away tears after paying his respects. National Deputy Vitalii Zhuravski, head of the Christian Democratic Party, sobbed.

Official delegations from the United States, led by Ambassador Steven Pifer, and Poland, which included members of the Polish Parliament, also paid their respects and offered condolences to the bereaved.

Approaching Mr. Chornovil's widow, Ambassador Pifer presented a letter of condolences from President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Chornovil's fellow former dissidents were present in abundance, among them Lev Lukianenko, Ivan Hel, Yurii Badzio, the Horyn brothers and Iryna Kalynets.

Ms. Kalynets hugged and consoled Mr. Chornovil's son Taras, who of all the family members seemed to be the most distaught.

That day, however, the common people lining the streets best expressed the love that the Rukh leader evoked in a large portion of the populace. They arrived by the thousands from all regions of Ukraine. Whether dressed in the natty attire that marks the new Ukrainian middle class, or in the drab, crumbled sport coats and babushky (kerchiefs) common to the villages of Ukraine, they cried and prayed in memory of Mr. Chornovil.

They tossed flowers and sang hymns as the casket proceeded up Volodymyrska Street from the Teacher's Building (once the headquarters of the Central Rada) to St. Volodymyr Sobor, where Patriarch Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate led the funeral service, and afterwards, along the route from the cathedral to Baikove Cemetery, the historic final resting place of many of Ukraine's cultural, religious and political elite.

Patriarch Filaret, speaking before the beginning of services at the sobor, touched on the controversial and painful last days of Mr. Chornovil's life, when he was ousted as the chairman of the Rukh Party by a group of young members of Parliament. His refusal to accept his removal caused a political split within the party that has led to the creation of two Rukhs.

"Now is the time for all democratic and centrist forces to unite. ... There must be only one Rukh," said Patriarch Filaret to the masses jammed into the Orthodox cathedral.

He echoed statements made earlier by Mr. Chornovil's press secretary, Dmytro Ponomarchuk, who was with Mr. Chornovil in the ill-fated automobile that broadsided a giant tandem trailer outside Kyiv late on the night of March 25, and who escaped death only because he was asleep in the back seat as the car went under the trailer.

"The best tribute to Vyacheslav Chornovil would be if both Rukhs united in his memory," said Mr. Ponomarchuk from his hospital bed two days after the fateful night.

The crowd that stood outside the Teacher's Building on the morning of the funeral did not seem ready to accept that proposal, at the time. As the official delegation from the Rukh Party that had broken ranks with Mr. Chornovil arrived to pay its respects, the crowd broke into chants of "Shame, shame," and shouts of "traitors" and "schismatics."

The delegation, led by new party leader Yurii Kostenko, quickly shuffled into the building, stopped briefly at the casket and shuffled out. None of them approached Ms. Pashko to offer condolences, and no representative from the Kostenko Rukh was seen later, either at church or the cemetery.

After the one-hour funeral service at St. Volodymyr Sobor - which the thousands who could not get inside the church heard on large speakers set up outside - funeral organizers utilized a hearse to carry the casket for the two-hour walk to the cemetery.

At Baikove the main gates of the historical cemetery were quickly closed to keep the masses out after the official funeral participants had entered, but then reopened minutes later, when the surging crowd looked as if it might break down the barrier.

One elderly lady, overcome by emotion and having lost self-control, fought through the densely packed crowd with two carnations in hand, screaming: "Let me see him, let me see the Ukrainian Jesus. I have the flower of his soul in my hand."

Overall, however, the crowd was subdued and respectful.

Mr. Udovenko, the former minister of foreign affairs, who directed the funeral arrangements as the head of the Verkhovna Rada's ad hoc funeral committee and who witnessed the tragic death of Mr. Chornovil from a car trailing the Chornovil automobile as the group returned to Kyiv that fateful night, led a public meeting at Baikove.

There were political moments - statements by some Rukh leaders who had stuck by Mr. Chornovil condemning the political schism and the Rukh Party led by Mr. Kostenko, but for the most part the speakers, politicians, former political dissidents and foreign guests recalled and paid homage to the memory of a person they loved and respected.

National Deputy Mykhailo Kosiv of the Rukh Party summed up best why so many had turned out to pay their respects to a man whose time as a political leader was marked by much controversy. "It took such a tragic death for people to realize who it was that we had among us," said Mr. Kosiv.

Another Rukh national deputy, Lila Hryhorovych, called Mr. Chornovil the Ukrainian Washington and likened him to Nelson Mandela. "Our Washington, the great Vyacheslav Chornovil, unfortunately, did not reach his final destiny as did a similar figure, Nelson Mandela," said Ms. Hryhorovych.

Viktor Pynzenyk, a national deputy who leads the Reform and Order Party, which had formed a coalition with Mr. Chornovil to support Mr. Udovenko for the presidency, said that Mr. Chornovil changed people. "Anybody who met Vyacheslav Maksymovych could not help but be affected by his energy. He simply fired up people with his ideas and his tenacity," said Mr. Pynzenyk.

A member of the Armenian Parliament, who had spent time in the Soviet gulag with Mr. Chornovil, recalled how even in prison he was a leader and organizer.

Kyiv Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko announced that a street in Kyiv would be renamed in memory of Mr. Chornovil.

Then, as the casket was lowered into the ground, the army orchestra struck the first notes of the Ukrainian national anthem and a seven-gun salute went off in honor of the man about whom Mykhailo Horyn had said just moments before: "History will show that without him today's independent Ukraine would not have been possible."

In an irony of fate and history, Mr. Chornovil's burial site at Baikove Cemetery lies some 30 yards from the grave of the former head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the person who was part of the regime that persecuted and incarcerated the rights advocate for 20 years.

However, Mr. Chornovil still will be in opposition, even if symbolically: his grave lies on the opposite side of the walkway.

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