Singular destiny than that of Stanislav Chouchkevitch, who died on May 4 in Minsk, at the age of 87, whose name will remain for many associated with a simple initials more than with a political action, however important. Stanislav Chouchkevich, then President of the Supreme Soviet of Soviet Belarus, was in fact one of the three signatories, with the Russian Boris Yeltsin and the Ukrainian Leonid Kravchuk, of the Belovej agreement (also called the Minsk treaty) ratifying, on December 8, 1991, the disappearance of the USSR as “subject of international law and geopolitical reality”.
Throughout his life, he will defend this decision, according to him inevitable, which avoided a “Yugoslav scenario”. It was also he who, after the fateful meeting, was responsible for warning Mikhail Gorbachev, while Boris Yeltsin called US President George Bush. At the time, only one member of the Belarusian Parliament voted against the ratification: a certain Alexander Lukashenko.
Born on December 15, 1934 to a father who spent eight years in the gulag, Stanislav Chouchkevitch had a prestigious career as a physics teacher and engineer. He was also, for some time, Russian teacher of Lee Harvey Oswald, future murderer of John Kennedy, on a language stay in Minsk. A member of the Communist Party, he entered politics after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, in the ranks of the opposition tolerated by the Soviet regime.
Propelled as the first president of the newly independent Belarusian state, Stanislav Chouchkevitch will try to bring his country closer to Europe and, above all, to strengthen the rule of law and democratic institutions. But even if the shock therapy was much less severe in Minsk than in Moscow, Belarusian public opinion did not forgive its leader for the deterioration in the standard of living and the disorientation following the fall of the Union.
In a modest HLM
In 1994, Chouchkevitch succumbed to a vote of no confidence launched by Alexander Lukashenko. The former kolkhoz director led a media campaign against all the highest Belarusian leaders, claiming to have evidence of corruption against them which would later prove to be non-existent. Regarding Stanislav Chouchkevitch, the charges related to the embezzlement of a box of nails that the president would have used to renovate his dacha…
This will not prevent Mr. Lukashenko from winning the 1994 presidential election, far ahead of Stanislav Chouchkevitch. Almost thirty years later, Alexander Lukashenko, who cultivates nostalgia for the Soviet era in the country and assumes his authoritarianism, is still in power and controls all the levers. In 1994, he launched a hunt for opponents, sometimes deadly, which has continued to intensify, and ended up putting his country back in the Russian orbit.
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