Turning the pages back... July 31, 1996 (07/29/01)

Turning the pages back...

July 31, 1996

Five years ago, our Kyiv correspondent Marta Kolomayets filed a news story in which she reported that the Kyiv City Branch of the Communist Party had issued a statement denouncing Ukraine's 1991 declaration of independence as illegal. The move came just a month before celebrations of the fifth anniversary of that historic event.

In a brief statement released on July 31, 1996, the Communists alleged that Ukraine's August 24, 1991, declaration was made "in a state of increasing anti-Communist, nationalist hysteria."

Independence had been proclaimed by the Ukrainian Parliament in the wake of the August 19, 1991, putsch by Soviet hard-liners in Moscow who were attempting to prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union. At the special session called on August 24, 348 deputies voted for the declaration (one voted against, three abstained and 12 did not vote). The Kyiv Communist Party's statement noted: "Supporting in principle national sovereignty and the right of nations to self-determination, Communists could welcome the expression of the people's will, if indeed it were so." However, they noted, Ukraine and its people had become "fully dependent on U.S. geopolitics and an ever-growing Western influence."

The party said it supported a return to the decision reached on March 17, 1991, in a Soviet referendum that called for a sovereign Ukrainian state within a renewed union of socialist states.

The adoption of a new Constitution also had upset leftist forces in Ukraine five years ago. The Union of Communists of Ukraine issued a statement on July 30, 1996, which stated that the recently adopted fundamental law "legalizes social injustices and the robbery of the working people by bourgeois mafiosi." It also noted that "the Communists and Socialists who voted for the new Constitution betrayed the working peoples' interests."

More than 90 lawmakers refused to swear allegiance to the new Constitution on July 12, 1996, but their names were not made public, nor were they considered obligated to do so, because they were elected before the new Constitution was adopted, said Volodymyr Stretovych, a national deputy in Parliament who then chaired its Legal Committee.

Source: "Communist Party of Kyiv says independence declaration was illegal" by Marta Kolomayets, Kyiv Press Bureau, The Ukrainian Weekly, August 4, 1996, Vol. LXIV, No. 31.

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