Alexander Tkachenko, the last speaker of the Verkhovna Rada with openly communist views, has died.
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He tried to challenge President Leonid Kuchma, but lost.
Tkachenko died on January 5 at the age of 85. For the last 10 years of his life he was seriously ill and moved in a wheelchair.
His death was announced on January 5 by journalist Nikolai Kanishevsky on Facebook. He worked next to Alexander Tkachenko as press secretary of the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada.
For the last 10 years of his life he was seriously ill and moved in a wheelchair. The preliminary farewell to the politician will take place on Saturday, January 6, in the ritual hall at the Feofaniya hospital.
What is known about Tkachenko?
He comes from the Cherkasy region. In the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, he worked in ministerial positions in the government of the Ukrainian SSR and was deputy chairman of the government. He has worked in parliament since 1994. He was a deputy from the Peasant Party, and since 2002 – from the Communist Party.
Tkachenko was in opposition to President Leonid Kuchma. Many people remember him for his phrase:
I’m not the first, but not the second.
This is how he answered the question of who is more important in Ukraine – the president or the head of parliament.
Tkachenko was elected Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada 18 times, because the parliament could not decide on a leader for three months. At this time, the term “speakeriad” appeared.
Tkachenko was a member of the “Kanev Four,” a political coalition of four opposition candidates in the presidential race in the fall of 1999 in opposition to the current president of the country, Leonid Kuchma.
In the summer of 1999, at the height of the election campaign, on the eve of the presidential elections – August 24, Independence Day, in the Cherkasy region, in the city of Kaniv, four politicians announced the creation of the first political coalition in the history of independent Ukraine – the “Kanev Four”.
It included deputies who had political experience and were in opposition to the authorities: Alexander Tkachenko, Yevgeny Marchuk, Alexander Moroz and the mayor of Cherkassy Vladimir Oleynik.
According to the agreements, they were supposed to nominate one candidate from the “four”. However, after Yevgeny Marchuk was announced as the only candidate, Alexander Moroz publicly abandoned the agreements and went to the polls on his own.
The consequences of the collapse of the Kanev Four was that in the presidential elections in Ukraine in the fall of 1999, voters had to choose one of two candidates: Leonid Kuchma or Petro Symonenko.
Source: Racurs
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