general secretary of the central committee of the cpsu. stanislav ivanovych says, he turned white. well, because he understood what it means when the head of the verkhovna rada of ukraine flees ukraine a few months after being elected. ugh. and also on the day, on the days when the verkhovna rada of ukraine discussed the declaration on the sovereignty of ukraine. the congress of the cpsu and this session took place at the same time. during the congress of the cpsu, the verkhovna rada of ukraine approved a declaration on... the state sovereignty of ukraine in the absence of all party leaders, they were at the party congress, so i tell him, stanislav ivanovich, will you run for the post of chairman of the verkhovna rada? well, this is a logical question, and he tells me: one has already run for office, and what happened? i believe that i should stay with the party, fulfill my duties as the first secretary of the central committee. we spoke with you after my election. first from the icc, you were the first journalist

i spoke with, and i promised that i will lead the communist party of ukraine, i will not run for office, and you will at least go to kyiv in such a situation, he says, how can i go to kyiv, the congress of the communist party in moscow, how can i leave congress, i'm a communist, you don't understand, you don't understand, you're not a communist, well, i think, well, if you're such an idiot, i'm sorry, then i went on, i went on and met leonida makarovich a few minutes later . kravchuk and i say, velenin vakarovich, i have some interesting news for you, what kind of news, says vakarovich? i say, well, first of all, volodymyr antonovych will be the deputy of the central committee of the cpsu, he is leaving ukraine. leonid makarovich did not turn white, but reddened, i would say, from enthusiasm. so certain. so i tell him, you know, such an unfortunate situation, he says: yes, it's an unfortunate situation. for the party,

he was at that time, this is a problem, and you know, i say, leonid makarovich, and stanislav ivanovich gurenko, will not run for the position of general, chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, he tells me, how do you know, they did not talk, they had such a relationship, they did not communicate, gurenko and gravchuk, by the way, the first and the second, did not communicate, there was almost no communication, how do you know, well, i saw him a few minutes ago, i asked him if he would. .. to kyiv, will he be there? swamp? well, so this is his decision, he wants to stay in the party, he is a communist, vitaliy, you are not a communist, you don’t understand, all this nonsense begins, well, you are not a communist, i say, lenin mikayovych, maybe you will go to kyiv, to kyiv, he says , leonid makarovich, you are not a communist, vitaly, how can a communist leave the party congress, well, that's all, i left and ran away, unlike stanislav ivanovich, who told me everything,

leonid makarovich correctly left the congress, i think the next day he flew to kyiv, and was there elected chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, and if stanislav gurenko was elected chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, imagine this situation, on august 24, 1991, in the chair of the chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, not leonid koravchuk, but stanislav gorenko, i am not sure that we would pass the act of independence, that it appeared at all. and there would be a confrontation, there would be a struggle, ugh, moscow would try to promote gurenko, yeltsin would hardly want gurenko to remain at the head of ukraine, because he would believe that gurenko would claim some higher positions in moscow, that is, anything could have happened there , and this day, when i was running between the three of them to find out how it would end, and i hope that i told leonid makarovich the right yes, the vector of movement, here i am.. . i think

it was just a stellar time, but in any case, you described very specific manifestations of what is called a political miracle, that was the political will or sovereign will of the ukrainian people, it is extremely important, yes, but from some personnel decisions , personnel appointments could depend on a lot of things, well, look what an illustration, mikhail gorbachev demanded from the first secretaries of the central committee of the party of the union republics that they run for the position of president or chairman of the verkhovna rada and... how many people do you think fulfilled this assignment of his? no one? no, only volodymyr ivashko, well, he was the first member of the central committee, he was elected chairman of the verkhovna rada and he resigned as the first member of the central committee, i generally thought that this was complete apparatus idiocy. nazarbayev, karimov, niyazov, all remained in their positions as party leaders, because there was real power, vertical, and it is difficult gave vertical gurenko and as a result

everything was like that, but look, here are the first elections, the second elections and so on, for example, the change of a whole day, yes, well, we can talk for a long time about the day of 1991, in general about the day. kravchuk about kravchuk's resignation, but the key story is when kuchma appeared, i would also like to just say that in the present day, the day of independence, so kuchma was essentially one of the creators of what was called the ukrainian sovereign state bureaucratic apparatus, that is, he passed law on civil service, he began to write out the so-called ranks to officials, he began to build good, bad for his own benefit and so on, well, but the special services, that is... he tried to create his own ukrainian kazakhstan, this is how we formulate this matter, where he succeeded to the end, we may or may not we understand, but maybe it was kuchma himself who managed to stop russian appetites, of course not him, but horbulin,

marchuk and so on, i.e. to stop the russian creeping expansion to the south, primarily about crimea, but not only about crimea, i.e. it somehow managed to block this story kuchma he is still alive, yes, here, he is dark, angel, light, angel, or just a humble director, burdened with colossal powers, colossal responsibility, taxed by agents, for example, well, if we are talking about the old man about the old derkach and so on, father, who found out that he was an agent working as a deputy of the verkhovna rada and so on and so forth, that is, he was taxed, but he tried to build. maybe autocratic, but ukraine, that's how he might have hoped to rule forever until 2030, for example, i'm not sure that he hoped to do forever, to be honest, but he was going to continue his reign there for sure at some point, i can we, it's

not like a two-minute answer, we 're going to have a break in literally two minutes, but before that break , i have to say that i indeed, i followed the appearance of leonid kuchma, because ... i met leonid kuchmo, just, i think, there a couple of days after leonid kuchmo was appointed as the prime minister of ukraine, and here it must be said that leonid kuchmo was needed by leonid kravchuk simply because leonid kravchuk precisely because he was a party ideologue, he did not understand anything about the economy at all, here i am gorbachev, well, he did not understand the economy at all, and the only thing he understood at the time of kuchma's appointment was that the first prime minister - minister of already independent ukraine. witold fokin doesn't understand anything in the new economy either, and by the way, when witold fokin appeared again on the political scene as masha fokin, that's right, that's right, a member of this delegation in the negotiations in minsk , we saw that it was absolutely soviet man

which remained soviet, imagine what he was like in 1900 there in the years 91-93, he was such a soviet official-intellectual who liked to... read books, talk about culture, but unfortunately, the economy as such, modern economics, economics, let’s say the gaidar-chubais economy, with which it was necessary to coexist, he did not know at all, and leonid kravchuk at some point came to the conclusion that he needed some person capable of organizing a reformist government that would not yield to the russian ambitions, because there was a war that russia would take over the ukrainian economy yesterday, we are now. let's take a break for a few minutes, then we'll continue about kuchma. vasyl zima's big broadcast. my name is vasyl zima, this is a big ether on the espresso tv channel. two hours of airtime, two hours of your time.

my colleagues and i will talk about the most important things. two hours to learn about the war, about the military, front, component. serhiy zgurets, and how the world lives. yuri fizer is already in front of me, and it's time to talk. about what was happening outside of ukraine, yury , good evening, two hours to keep up with economic news, time to talk about money during the war, the ustandarchevka next to me, and sports news, i invite yevhen pastukhov to the conversation, two hours in the company of favorite presenters, cultural news , alina chikchenina, our art watcher, is ready to talk, good evening, presenters, who have already become like movrodnidenko to many, next to me, ready to talk about the weather for this weekend, as well as distinguished guests of the studio, mustafa dzhemilov, the leader of the crimean tatar people, with us on communication mustafa, i congratulate you. good day events of the day in two hours. vasyl zima's big broadcast. a project for smart and caring people. espresso in the evening. we continue the saturday

polyclub on the espresso tv channel. atsin borkovskyi. vitaly portnikov, we are talking about the foundation, about the basements of our ukrainian independence in various political spheres. and not only in terms of political dimensions, an extremely informative conversation, but literally a couple of minutes ago vitaliy told the secrets like this, that is, well, that means kuchma became the prime minister from. here is also interesting the moment when kravchuk appointed him prime minister, it was implied that kuchma would become yegor gaidaro's partner, and the first, and kuchma knew about it, he was ready, of course, he and gaidar knew about it, gaidar, i would say that i was very, very skeptical of vytold fukin, i once met with gaidar and the heads of the administration of the president of russia sergei filatov, vytol dafokin at the vnukov-2 airport and... i said so skeptically that the current leaders of ukraine, they are not able to carry out any real reforms, and that's it

you need someone with whom you can talk about reforms, they couldn't talk about reforms with fokkin. fokin is the former head of the state plan of the ukrainian ssr. for gaidar, this was already a characteristic. he simply understood that this person was not from the post-soviet soviet economy. and kuchva is the director of the plant. a completely different person. but what actually happened? kuchma was supposed to become... a partner of yehor gaidar, and he became a partner of viktor chornomrydan, because during that time gaidar left his post, performing the duties of the head of the government of the russian federation, and the head of the government victor chornobirdin became the head of the russian federation, and there suddenly incredible prospects opened up for leonid kuchma, he and viktor chernomer are simply the same director, this director, this one is married to a russian woman, this one is married to a ukrainian woman, that is, in fact, such soviet directors, i respect this one. this one respects that one, they quickly got along, chornomyrdin opened kuchma's door to boris

yeltsin, and everything was clear there too, yeltsin could really withstand a long feast, leonid kravchuk was a complete stranger to him as a person, that's all that yeltsin loved, hunting, vodka, sauna, that's all, well, kravchuk was different, he was a party ideologist, he could have been a partner of oleksandr yakovlev, let's say, gorbachev's adviser on... with yeltsin they could have to allow global issues to be solved in this way, of course, it was very important there to be able to drink as much as the host drinks and not, not to fall face down, and by the way, i have to say that i, being not the prime minister - minister of ukraine, and of course i trained as a journalist, because when i interviewed islam karimov, for example, it was a bottle of cognac for one person. and if you imagine that you are sitting opposite the president of the country and you , the problem here is not that you will fall on your face in

the sky, but the problem is that you can say something that you will regret for years later, if you succeed to regret, that is , it was such control, which, by the way, weaned me from alcohol, because i stopped drinking, it was just such a psychological shock that after all these interviews, i have not used alcohol for years after that, so that i know that he is not on me... action, i am just the very appearance of alcohol, i have to be like, how headstrong this soldier is, well, but kuchma and yeltsin could still relax with chornomyrden, and they quickly saw that this is a much better figure than, say, leonid kravchuk, who began to build a kind of sovereign ukraine there, who, from their point of view , simply led them around the finger, because he began to introduce his own currency, build his own army, from the united the command of the cis, did a lot, what, what they don't agreed in bialoveskaya pushcha, that is, he started

to build a real state, they did not want that, neither yeltsin, nor chornomyrdan, they wanted this union of countries, and therefore, by and large, they decided to support leonid kuchma, when it was 1994, kuchma at that moment was the head of the ukrainian union of entrepreneurs and industrialists, kravchuk never found it. prime minister, who could be a reformer, at that time the head of the ukrainian government was vitaly masol, the last prime minister of soviet ukraine, but kravchuk lost his way economic slums, absolutely, i.e. to appoint masol after kuchma, it was an absolute disaster, if kravchuk had thought economically on a large scale, he had a whole, i would say, wagon of reformers, but why wasn’t there a force scenario, well, why wasn’t there a force scenario yes we... from what, from what side? on the part of the russians, why didn't they do what they did against

georgia, for example, we understand that they saw the prospect in the fact that it is possible to negotiate with those pro-communist or neo-communist elites, yes, well, because there is a master it was easier to negotiate with kuchma if they were not ready to fight with such a large system, well, one thing is like georgia, it is smaller there, one thing is to support civil wars. central asia, and the second is there, or moldova with transnistria, yes, and the second thing is the force open scenario that they went to in 2014, and why do you think that they did not prepare, they prepared in georgia. they did not fight with georgia, they fought for control over abkhazia, south ossetia, in ukraine they needed crimea and the black sea fleet, and they were preparing, the election of mishkov was a preparation for a power scenario, so mishkov appointed yevhen saburov, a citizen of russia, as the prime minister of crimea. myshkov appointed viktor minin, a citizen of russia, a person connected to the special services, and apparently

trained precisely for the power scenario, as the head of the crimean president's administration. i was with since 1988, he was a people's deputy of the ussr from the komsomol, he had nothing to do with ukraine and crimea, so when i saw him in the administration of the president of crimea, i immediately understood what it was all about, that is, they were preparing this scenario of the secession of crimea, what happened in 2014 14 back in 1992, but they did not go for it, because they decided that they would get ukraine, they acted in parallel, on the one hand, they were preparing the secession of crimea, on the other hand, they were preparing the overthrow of leonid kravchuk. kravchuk went to early presidential and parliamentary elections. if he won the presidential election. i think that after these elections, the secession of crimea would take place. but he lost the election. i saw with my own eyes

quite revealing scene for me. on the day it became known that kravchuk had lost the presidential elections of ukraine, i was at a reception that the then french ambassador in kyiv gave in a ukrainian house, and it was supposed to be a reception that, from the point of view of kravchuk's team , celebrated his re-election for a second term , and it turned out that it was an acceptance of kravchuk's defeat, and for the first time , the entourage of the new ukrainian president leonid kuchun, i.e. dmytro tabachnyk and some of his cronies, came to this acceptance. everyone understood that in this situation, dmytro tabachenko becomes almost the second person of ukraine. but, strangely enough, viktor minin, the head of president mishkov's administration, was at this reception. so viktor minin communicated with dmytro tabachnyk

as a subordinate. because i knew them both. ugh. and... viktor minyan was my, let 's say, good friend at the time, i was the first journalist who even interviewed him as a people's deputy of the soviet union, such things are not forgotten, as you understand when you are a young person, tomin from he did not hide from me that he absolutely, that is , someone there, conditionally speaking, i say conditionally, well , but someone there minin was already ready to cut the tasks to the right hand of someone, ukrainian president kuchma, of course he cut it, i was at... at kuchma's presentation certificate of the president of ukraine, minin was the main figure antabachnyk there. and i will also remind you of the people who were in kuchma's headquarters at that time, this is konstantin zatulin, yes, the head of the institute of cis countries, a people's deputy of the russian federation, this is vyacheslav yagrunov, also a supporter of such an imperial democratic of russia, a people's deputy of the russian federation,

kuchma's biggest ally from... russian politicians, in addition to chornomiroval of the russian union of entrepreneurs and industrialists, arkady volskyi is also a person connected to the special services, the former commandant of nagorno- karabakh, and these people treated it quite seriously, they treated to the idea of ​​restoring the joint industrial complex of ukraine and russia, it was the idea of ​​kuchma and volsky, and when i wrote an article in both moscow and kyiv that it was impossible because the ties were severed, because before... the economy, because this simply cannot happen, then both kuchma and volsky made statements in which they said that i was an agent of someone, a ukrainian nationalist, and that i was undermining the stability and friendship of the two peoples , i remember it well, it was a joint conference dedicated to my humble person, that is the key issue, that is, they having their appointed people to the highest political office, who had a direct influence on

the first persons of the state, and this applies not only to ukraine, but to our environment , that is, we say about... belarus, after all, we are talking about russia, and lukashenko on the day that kuchma also won the elections, that is the key story, why they did not start certain preparatory processes, which would have ended, for example, with the introduction of russian invaders, for example , to these or other settlements, or to crimea, or the deployment of these or other forces, well, look, they sincerely believed that they and kuchma would agree on everything, and that's why they started preparing this big agreement. kuchma, when he entered the office of the president of... ukraine, he was, was, and he and there are. he is a very intelligent person. i would say so , it is dangerous, i would never wish anyone to be leonid kuchma's enemy. in terms of his reaction in general to the fact that he, how he treats his enemies in general, but very smart, smart, smart, well, after all, he is the director of a huge

defense plant, he has a manner, it still exists, as it were and to say, to pretend that he is a simpleton, ugh, but he was never one in his life, he just successfully or unsuccessfully in different periods of his life played this favorite ukrainian manner of political fooling, that's it everyone thought very often. that this is pure coin, i remember that when leonid kuchma first came to this hotel of the former central committee of the cpsu in moscow, as the prime minister of ukraine, and he comes and there is this group of journalists who run to him with microphones, and here lenich looks at them and says: listen, where is your toilet here, says leni danylovych, and everyone tells me, oh, you have such a prime minister, and i already talked to him, i know that he is not such a prime minister, i just understand that he did not want to answer any of them. questions, and he decided to show them that he is like that, well, i am like that, i am like that, he is not like that, this is a huge problem of all people who communicated with kuchma, to think that he is like that, he is not like that, and

this, by the way, is the problem of tabachnyk, to think that he was like that, but then, in addition to the tobacconist, there was also medvedchuk, yes, but all the same, kuchma somehow managed to slip out of full control, but i don’t know if he wanted to appoint tobacconists, medvedchuks and so on, which ones he wanted to appoint a tobacconist, he believed that he would be a loyal person to him, but would he imposed, and this was part of his agreement with moscow, well, in the end, moscow even supported him during the presidential campaign, his advertising was broadcast on soviet television, it was expensive, expensive, not from the point of view of money, but from the point of view of the fact that our your compatriots watched moscow television, not ukrainian then, but somehow he really is, but he immediately turned to gorbulin, and gorbulin was one of the key players from the point of view of preventing the seizure of crimea later. namely gorbul and marchuk, of course, he began to create balances, tabachnik, razumkov, horbulin, the tobacconist

eventually got out of these balances, the whole moscow hop company, all these hidden ones, he just made it up, they didn’t get anything, and in the end for for several years he had such a yeltsin regime, and i think that it would have worked anyway, because this regime was based on his personal relationships. but in 1999 there was a disaster, ugh, chornomyrden lost power, his best friend yeltsin left politics at the end of 1999, and kuchma had to spend the last four worked with putin for years, and putin hated him, hated him, because kuchma... for him was the embodiment of this yeltsenism, he saw that kuchma was building ukraine absolutely for himself, not for him, and for putin ukraine was a mistake, that kuchma built such

a system in which you can't even get into crimea, because there is a vertical, uh, actually an authoritarian vertical, he tried to break it, you remember, yes, yes, and putin, as soon as he became president, he started to act against kuchma by means of his favorite special operations, that... chain mail, that the promotion of all these things, which moscow took advantage of after melnichenko's films, and they really began to impose medvedchuk on him, as a person who can be a mediator between him and the kremlin, because he himself cannot mean them, and they wanted a successor kuchma to appoint the same medvedchuk, and medvedchuk too, and kuchma understood it, kuchma felt it. that's what he did, well, he tried to nullify, to nullify medvedchuk's influences on himself, i think that he tried to use medvedchuk and medvedchuk's ambitions as a model

parliamentary-presidential republic, the idea there was very simple: if vitsya becomes my heir, and i will have nothing to catch, and you will have nothing to catch, well, by the way , this is what happened when president yanukovych was president in the 10th year that was due to medvedchuk's influence, nothing, that's why we need a parliament... a presidential republic, we will share the influences there, even if he becomes the president, we will isolate him, let's say, i whose some of my person will be the prime minister, you will be, uh, speaker of the parliament, he will be there the donetsk queen, that was the idea, and medvedchuk tried to explain this idea to vladimir putin and dmitry medvedev in 2004, and they sent him. he spoke on his own behalf, on behalf of kuchma, they agreed with kuchma on this, it was a joint approach, but putin and the medvedevs said that they did not need any parliamentary, presidential republic, that yanukovych should simply become kuchma's heir,

because they knew . yanukovych is a much more controlled figure for them, and then a group of deputies did not vote for the project of the parliamentary-presidential republic, a group of deputies from yanukovych, our ukraine yushchenko supported this project, but there were several people there, among them, if you look at all these surnames, you can see that most of them are now in the city of heroes, moscow, andriy derkach , he voted against, being a representative of this whole. the elites, i.e. putin, medvedev and yanukovych, failed kuchma's idea of ​​a parliamentary-presidential republic, and we returned to it only as a result of the first maidan, so that kuchma in in this regard, he was always in such a situation of fighting with putin for his own self-preservation, and he tried

to use his connections. with the yeltsin family, he believed that they had some influence and would help him, maybe you remember that when the yeltsin center was opened in yekaterinburg, putin, medvedev and kuchma were there, kuchma was invited as a family friend yeltsin already after yeltsin's death, but their influence decreased, and even more so they could not actually do anything when it came to foreign policy, and it was already foreign politician, after the crimea i met with ledina. i asked him if he talked to putin after the annexation of crimea, he just got mad, he said that he never talked to him in his life after that, that it is for him as the president of ukraine, because he is the president of ukraine, it is personal insult, what happened, he will never talk to these people in his life, well, personally, that is , it became clear to him that these some personal

contacts that you... did not have, they were cut off, i remembered this episode, we once saw each other in three places: leonid kravchuk, leonid kuchma and i, at one of the diplomatic receptions, and leonid kravchuk and i were just talking, kuchma was already the head of the delegation at the negotiations in minsk, and he behaved quite harshly at that moment, and kravchuk and i discussed that it was somehow strange, we his always with... knew and in general it seemed that this is a person who is exclusively on his own, somehow focused and very soviet, he behaves this way with russians, just like that, like a ukrainian nationalist, and all his recent articles are like ukrainian nationalists such other and then leonid kuchma came up to us, asked what we were talking about so cheerfully, i am honest with him, i have always been honest with them, they are after all the presidents of ukraine, he said that we

are talking about him, that we wonder what he has there is a state one... and here leonid kuchma says, i am surprised that it took both of you 20 years to understand this. and this, by the way, is an aphorism that again speaks about the mental abilities of this person. and look, that is, it is paradoxical, that is, i do not know whether it is the influence of the sacrum, whether it is the sacrum of power, whether it is a feeling responsibility, god forbid, but maybe, the finger of god, we don't know how this whole mechanism works, but a communist party figure becomes a ukrainian statesman. we are talking about kravchuk, the soviet communist director, who was covered from all sides by various medvedchuks, tobacconists and so on, he becomes a ukrainian nationalist and a kind of mini atataturk, and the list goes on and on, and we now see the implementation of the concept of the army, the language faith, well, literally, and in my time, i remember our family very well a conversation with you when volodymyr zelenskyi

won. elections, you said that he has no other way, if he wants to be the president of ukraine, he will be a ukrainian nationalist and the army, language, faith will be on the table for him, i remember our private conversation with you, before the elections he said this and many people reproached me, how could you say such a thing, that no matter who is elected as the president of ukraine, he will follow this path, well, that's why you contributed to the victory of zelensky, i did not contribute to anything, i simply said that there is no alternative, because in ukrainian the president has a simple choice, either to be the governor of the kursk region, i apologize, or to be the president of ukraine, and no one wants to be the governor, because, by the way, there are no guarantees that you will be left with the governorship, that 's the problem, that when you are elected the president of ukraine, this is also a certain crime, but yanukovych wanted to become the governor of the kurdish region, by the way, he flew out like a cork from a bottle, not against the wishes of moscow, but the wishes of the ukrainian people, that's why he is the only vector, and really.