Leonid Kuchma
Leonid Kuchma ran the largest missile factory in the Soviet Union, was president of Ukraine for eleven years, gave the country its constitution and its currency, was recorded on tape ordering a journalist dealt with, and ended his second term with a rigged election that a crowd in orange overturned in the square outside his office. He was born in 1938 in a village in the Chernihiv region, the son of a soldier killed in 1942, trained as a rocket engineer, and spent his career at Pivdenmash in Dnipropetrovsk, the plant that built the SS-18, of which he was general director from 1986; the Dnipropetrovsk network of managers and party men that produced Brezhnev produced him. Kravchuk made him prime minister in October 1992 to stop the collapse and he resigned within a year when parliament would not give him the powers, then ran against Kravchuk in 1994 on Russian, on the economy and on closer ties to Moscow, and won the run-off with the east and south. He then did the opposite of most of it. The constitution of June 1996, forced through parliament in an all-night sitting, made a presidential republic; the hryvnia in September ended the hyperinflation; the privatisations of the late 1990s made the oligarchs, several of them his relatives and friends, and the state was run by balancing them. Abroad he balanced too, signing the friendship treaty with Russia in 1997 that recognised the border and dividing the fleet, and the charter with NATO the same year, which became the multi-vector policy. He was re-elected in 1999 against a communist. In November 2000 an officer of his guard released hours of recordings from under the presidential sofa, on which a voice like his told the interior minister to do something about Gongadze, a journalist whose headless body had just been found in a forest; the tapes also had him approving the sale of a radar system to Iraq. Ukraine without Kuchma became the opposition's name. In 2004 he could not run again and backed Viktor Yanukovych, whose fraudulent run-off victory in November brought a million people to Independence Square; Kuchma, to his credit or his calculation, would not send troops, and the re-run in December elected Yushchenko. He was Ukraine's negotiator with Russia over the Donbas from 2015 to 2020, in his late seventies.
- Lived: 1938 CE – ?
- Nationality: Ukrainian
- Roles: president, politician
