ABSTRACT
Independence met Ukraine in so unprepared a condition for several reasons. One was that the last time Ukraine had a genuine political class, a state administration, and something resembling a coherent society may have been in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Khmelnytskyi rebellion revived the Cossack elite, generated the Hetmanate state, and galvanized a sense of popular cohesiveness that resembled modern national identity. Gorbachev's destruction of the Soviet Union served as the backdrop to Ukraine's uncertain move toward independence. Although the Chernobyl disaster contributed to anti-Soviet sentiments, the leading nationalist organization, the Ukrainian Popular Front in Support of Perestroika (Rukh) emerged only three years later, in 1989. Leonid Makarovych Kravchuk's uninspiring biography contains no hint of the dramatic role he was to play in 1991. The son of Ukrainian peasants, Kravchuk was born in the Volhynian village of Velykyi Zhytyn near Rivne, then part of Poland, on January 9,1934.
