On 17 July 1990, Leonid Kravchuk was elected Speaker of Parliament to succeed Ivashko. On 30 July, Parliament adopted a resolution on military service that ordered Ukrainian soldiers to return to Ukrainian territory « in regions of national conflict such as Armenia and Azerbaijan ». On 1 August, Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of dismantling the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. On 3 August, it passed a law on the economic sovereignty of the Ukrainian Republic. On 19 August, the first Ukrainian Catholic liturgy in 44 years was celebrated in St. George`s Cathedral. On 5 and 7 September the International Symposium on the Great Famine was held in Kiev from 1932 to 1933. On September 8, the first « Youth for Christ » was held in Lviv since 1933 with 40,000 participants. From 28 to 30 September, the Greens held their founding congress.
On 30 September, nearly 100,000 people marched in Kiev to protest against Gorbachev`s new trade union contract. In a prelude to World War II, several new republics emerged before the German invasion of 1941. The first was the Karelo-Finnish SSR which, on 31 March 1940, was established as a trade union republic by the Karelian ASSR, which was formerly part of the RSFSR. On March 4, 1989, the Memorial Society was founded in Kiev, which is committed to the victims of Stalinism and the society of purification of Soviet practices. The next day, a public rally was held. On 12 March, in Lviv, a pre-election meeting of the Ukrainian Union of Helsinki and the Marian Myloserdia Society (compassion) was violently dissolved and nearly 300 people were arrested. Elections were held on 26 March at the Trade Union Congress of People`s Deputies. By-elections were held on 9 April, 14 May and 21 May. Of The 225 members of the Ukrainian Congress, most were conservatives, although a handful of progressives were elected. The agreement made Russia the successor state of the Soviet Union and entrusts it with full responsibility for the USSR`s debt and nuclear arsenal. While Shushkevich called the agreement a pragmatic response to urgent challenges, former President Kravchuk became more philosophical, calling it « the culmination of Ukraine`s long road to independence » after a century in which 15 million Ukrainians had died under Soviet rule (Kravchuk spoke for the first half of his speech in Ukrainian, then slipped for the second into Russian). With regard to Mr Gorbachev, opinion polls indicated a near-universal agreement that it was time to continue – not because he had failed, but because there was nothing left to do.
The Baltic route or the Baltic channel (also chain of freedom in Estonian: Balti kett, lettic: Baltijas cea, Lithuanian: Baltijos kelias, Russian: ) was a peaceful political demonstration on August 23, 1989. [57] It is estimated that 2 million people joined together to form a 600-kilometre human chain in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944.