structural:reformatting
Western republics

On 26 March 1989, elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, 15 of the 46 Moldovan deputies elected for congressional seats in Moscow were supporters of the Nationalist/Democratic movement. The Popular Front of Moldova founding congress took place two months later, on 20 May. During its second congress (30 June – 1 July 1989), Ion Hadârcă was elected its president.

A series of demonstrations that became known as the Grand National Assembly (Romanian: Marea Adunare Națională) was the Front's first major achievement. Such mass demonstrations, including one attended by 300,000 people on 27 August, convinced the Moldovan Supreme Soviet on 31 August to adopt the language law making Romanian the official language, and replacing the Cyrillic alphabet with Latin characters.

In Ukraine, Lviv and Kyiv celebrated Ukrainian Independence Day on 22 January 1989. Thousands gathered in Lviv for an unauthorized moleben (religious service) in front of St. George's Cathedral. In Kyiv, 60 activists met in a Kyiv apartment to commemorate the proclamation of the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1918. On 11–12 February 1989, the Ukrainian Language Society held its founding congress. On 15 February 1989, the formation of the Initiative Committee for the Renewal of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was announced. The program and statutes of the movement were proposed by the Writers' Union of Ukraine and were published in the journal Literaturna Ukraina on 16 February 1989. The organization heralded Ukrainian dissidents such as Vyacheslav Chornovil.

In late February, large public rallies took place in Kyiv to protest the election laws, on the eve of the 26 March elections to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, and to call for the resignation of the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, lampooned as "the mastodon of stagnation". The demonstrations coincided with a visit to Ukraine by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. On 26 February 1989, between 20,000 and 30,000 people participated in an unsanctioned ecumenical memorial service in Lviv, marking the anniversary of the death of 19th-century Ukrainian artist and nationalist Taras Shevchenko.

On 4 March 1989, the Memorial Society, committed to honoring the victims of Stalinism and cleansing society of Soviet practices, was founded in Kyiv. A public rally was held the next day. On 12 March, A pre-election meeting organized in Lviv by the Ukrainian Helsinki Union and the Marian Society Myloserdia (Compassion) was violently dispersed, and nearly 300 people were detained. On 26 March, elections were held to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union; by-elections were held on 9 April 14 May, and 21 May. Among the 225 Ukrainian representatives to the Congress, most were conservatives, though a handful of progressives were also elected.

From 20 to 23 April 1989, pre-election meetings were held in Lviv for four consecutive days, drawing crowds of up to 25,000. The action included a one-hour warning strike at eight local factories and institutions. It was the first labor strike in Lviv since 1944. On 3 May, a pre-election rally attracted 30,000 in Lviv. On 7 May, The Memorial Society organized a mass meeting at Bykivnia, site of a mass grave of Ukrainian and Polish victims of Stalinist terror. After a march from Kyiv to the site, a memorial service was staged.

From mid-May to September 1989, Ukrainian Greek-Catholic hunger strikers staged protests on Moscow's Arbat to call attention to the plight of their Church. They were especially active during the July session of the World Council of Churches held in Moscow. The protest ended with the arrests of the group on 18 September. On 27 May 1989, the founding conference of the Lviv regional Memorial Society was held. On 18 June 1989, an estimated 100,000 faithful participated in public religious services in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, responding to Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky 's call for an international day of prayer.

On 19 August 1989, the Russian Orthodox Parish of Saints Peter and Paul announced it would be switching to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. On 2 September 1989, tens of thousands across Ukraine protested a draft election law that reserved special seats for the Communist Party and for other official organizations for parliamentary seats: 50,000 in Lviv, 40,000 in Kyiv, 10,000 in Zhytomyr, 5,000 each in Dniprodzerzhynsk and Chervonohrad, and 2,000 in Kharkiv. From 8–10 September 1989, writer Ivan Drach was elected to head Rukh, the People's Movement of Ukraine, at its founding congress in Kyiv. On 17 September, between 150,000 and 200,000 people marched in Lviv, demanding the legalization of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. On 21 September 1989, exhumation of a mass grave began in Demianiv Laz, a nature preserve south of Ivano-Frankivsk. On 28 September, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a holdover from the Brezhnev era, was replaced in this office by Vladimir Ivashko.

On 1 October 1989, a peaceful demonstration of 10,000 to 15,000 people was violently dispersed by police constables in front of Lviv's Druzhba Stadium, where a concert celebrating the Soviet "reunification" of Ukrainian lands was being held. On 10 October, Ivano-Frankivsk was the site of a pre-election protest attended by 30,000 people. On 15 October, several thousand people gathered in Chervonohrad, Chernivtsi, Rivne, and Zhytomyr; 500 in Dnipropetrovsk; and 30,000 in Lviv to protest the election law. On 20 October, faithful and clergy of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church participated in a synod in Lviv, the first since its forced liquidation in the 1930s.

On 24 October, the union Supreme Soviet passed a law eliminating special seats for Communist Party and other official organizations' representatives in parliament. On 26 October, twenty factories in Lviv held strikes and meetings to protest the police brutality of 1 October and the authorities' unwillingness to prosecute those responsible. From 26 to 28 October, the Zelenyi Svit (Friends of the Earth – Ukraine) environmental association held its founding congress, and on 27 October the Ukrainian Parliament passed a law eliminating the special status of party and other official organizations as deputies of parliament.

On 28 October 1989, the Ukrainian Parliament decreed that effective 1 January 1990, Ukrainian would be the official language of Ukraine, while Russian would be used for communication between ethnic groups. On the same day, The Congregation of the Church of the Transfiguration in Lviv left the Russian Orthodox Church and proclaimed itself the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The following day, thousands attended a memorial service at Demianiv Laz, and a temporary marker was placed to indicate that a monument to the "victims of the repressions of 1939–1941" soon would be erected.

In mid-November, The Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society was officially registered. On 19 November 1989, a public gathering in Kyiv attracted thousands of mourners, friends, and family to the reburial in Ukraine of three inmates of the infamous Gulag Camp No. 36 in Perm in the Ural Mountains: human-rights activists Vasyl Stus, Oleksiy Tykhy, and Yuriy Lytvyn. Their remains were reinterred in Baikove Cemetery. On 26 November 1989, a day of prayer and fasting was proclaimed by Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky, thousands of faithful in western Ukraine participated in religious services on the eve of a meeting between Pope John Paul II and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Gorbachev. On 28 November 1989, the Ukrainian SSR's Council for Religious Affairs issued a decree allowing Ukrainian Catholic congregations to register as legal organizations. The decree was proclaimed on December 1, coinciding with a meeting at the Vatican between the pope and the Soviet General Secretary.

On 10 December 1989, the first officially sanctioned observance of International Human Rights Day was held in Lviv. On 17 December, an estimated 30,000 attended a public meeting organized in Kyiv by Rukh in memory of Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, who died on 14 December. On 26 December, the Supreme Soviet of Ukrainian SSR adopted a law designating Christmas, Easter, and the Feast of the Holy Trinity official holidays.

In May 1989, a Soviet dissident, Mustafa Dzhemilev, was elected to lead the newly founded Crimean Tatar National Movement. He also led the campaign for the return of Crimean Tatars to their homeland in Crimea after 45 years of exile.

On 24 January 1989, the Soviet authorities in Byelorussia agreed to the demand of the democratic opposition (the Belarusian Popular Front) to build a monument to thousands of people shot by Stalin-era police in the Kuropaty Forest near Minsk in the 1930s.

On 30 September 1989, thousands of Belarusians, denouncing local leaders, marched through Minsk to demand additional cleanup of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster site in Ukraine. Up to 15,000 protesters wearing armbands bearing radioactivity symbols and carrying the banned red-and-white national flag used by the government-in-exile filed through torrential rain in defiance of a ban by local authorities. Later, they gathered in the city center near the government's headquarters, where speakers demanded the resignation of Yefrem Sokolov, the republic's Communist Party leader, and called for the evacuation of half a million people from the contaminated zones.