Head of the Belarusian State in 1991, he had signed with Russian Boris Yeltsin and the Ukrainian Leonid Kravtchouk the Belovej agreement ratifying the disappearance of the USSR. He died on May 4, at the age of 87.
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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 a political action however important. Stanislav Chouchkevitch, then president of the Supreme Soviet of Soviet Belarus, was indeed one of the three signatories, with Russian Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian Leonid Kravtchouk, of the Belovej agreement (also called Minsk Treaty) enduring, On December 8, 1991, the disappearance of the USSR as “subject of international law and geopolitical reality”.
Throughout his life, he will defend this inevitable decision, which avoided a “Yugoslavic 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 deputy for the Belarusian Parliament voted against ratification: a certain Alexandre Loukachenko.
Born on December 15, 1934 of a father who will spend eight years at the Goulag, Stanislav Chouchkevitch made a prestigious career as a physics and engineer teacher. He was also, for some time, a Russian professor of Lee Harvey Oswald, future murderer of John Kennedy, on a linguistic stay in Minsk. 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 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 shock therapy was much less severe in Minsk than in Moscow, Belarusian opinion did not forgive its leader the degradation of 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 distrust launched by Alexandre Loukachenko. The former director of Kolkhoze led a media campaign against all the highest Belarusian leaders, claiming to have evidence of corruption which will later prove to be non -existent. Regarding Stanislav Chouchkevitch, the accusations focused on the diversion of a box of nails that the president would have used to renovate his datcha …
This will not prevent Mr. Loukachenko from winning the 1994 presidential election, far ahead of Stanislav Chouchkevitch. Almost thirty years later, Alexandre Loukachenko, who cultivated in the country nostalgia for the Soviet era and assumes his authoritarianism, is still in power and controls all the levers. In 1994, he launched a hunt for opponents, sometimes deadly, who has continued to intensify, and ended up replacing his country in the Russian orbit.
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