The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy

Centrifugal tendencies in the regions were one of the challenges facing Kyiv in the run-up to the December referendum. The impact that those tendencies would have on Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors, Soviet and non-Soviet, was another. After the statement made in late August by Yeltsin’s spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, it had become clear that, depending on the results of the referendum, Russia was prepared to make claims on the Crimea and possibly on eastern regions of the country. Hungarians in Transcarpathia looked to their ethnic brethren across the border, and a Romanian movement was gaining strength in northern Bukovyna, a largely Ukrainian-populated region that had belonged to Romania during the interwar period. And if the Czechoslovak and Hungarian elites were not making any claims on current Ukrainian territories, the Romanian parliament was much less accommodating.