Ukraine Declared Independence in This Chamber

The Verkhovna Rada building is a heavy neoclassical block on Hrushevskoho Street, its portico columns squared, its interior chamber a semicircle of dark wood benches under a stained-glass ceiling. On Saturday, August 24, 1991, an extraordinary session opened at ten in the morning. Three days earlier, the coup by Soviet hardliners against Mikhail Gorbachev had collapsed in Moscow. The chairman of the Ukrainian parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, a career Communist ideologist turned pragmatist, called the deputies to their seats. The debate ran eleven hours. Members of the People's Movement of Ukraine, the Rukh opposition, had been pushing for independence since the previous year. The larger Communist bloc, discredited by its Moscow leadership's role in the coup, faced an ultimatum from the opposition: back independence today or answer to the country tomorrow. The text of the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine was short, five paragraphs, adopted at 5:59 p.m. that afternoon. The vote was 346 in favor out of 360 deputies present. The Communist majority split, and most of it voted yes. The blue and yellow flag was hung outside the building for the first time. The Act made the declaration conditional on a national referendum, held on December 1, 1991. Ninety-two percent of Ukrainian voters, including majorities in every region of the country and 54 percent in Crimea, confirmed independence. Kravchuk was elected president the same day with 61.6 percent of the vote. On December 8, meeting in a hunting lodge in Belavezha Forest, Kravchuk with Boris Yeltsin and Stanislau Shushkevich signed the accord dissolving the Soviet Union. Moscow lowered the red flag over the Kremlin on December 25, and the USSR ceased to exist on December 26. The chamber where the vote was taken still functions as Ukraine's parliament. The original signed copy of the Act sits behind glass in the Museum of the History of Ukraine on Volodymyrska Hill, next to the pen Kravchuk used. Independence Day is observed every August 24 with the largest military parade of the year on Khreshchatyk, or, in wartime, with a moment of silence in this chamber and a reading of the Act's five paragraphs by the Speaker of the Rada, in the voice of a country that voted itself into being.