On the night of May 4, Stanislav Shushkevich, the first head of independent Belarus, died in Minsk at the age of 87.

Stanislav Shushkevich was one of the authors of the Belovezhskaya Accords, which liquidated the Soviet Union. In his youth, he taught Russian in Minsk to Lee Harvey Oswald, who was later accused of assassinating American President Kennedy, received President Clinton in Belarus as the head of the country in January 1994, and already in the summer of that year Alexander Lukashenko became the head of the country to characterize the policy whom Shushkevich did not spare abusive words.

In December 2020, immediately after his 86th birthday, Stanislav Shushkevich went into strict self-isolation, left alone in a four-room apartment in an ordinary Minsk high-rise building. Covid in a prison cell was picked up by the son of a politician, Stanislav Shushkevich Jr., who was sentenced to 10 days of arrest for reposts critical of the authorities on the social network. The disease also mowed down Irina, the wife of the politician, who met her son from the prison.

By Christmas, however, the family got together.

Viskuli : a place with history

Viskuli is a fairly modest residence, built in the 1950s in Belovezhskaya Pushcha near the border with Poland for the hunting pleasures of the USSR leadership. Now it belongs to the Administration of President Lukashenka and is closed to the curious: once a BBC correspondent was almost expelled from the Pushcha for trying to take a photo of the building, and a few years ago, having allowed to take pictures on the next anniversary of the collapse of the USSR, they were allowed to see and to fix only an empty hall, in which there was neither a table nor any other hint of a historical event.

There is no museum here – Alexander Lukashenko has repeatedly called the collapse of the USSR a mistake and a catastrophe, and Stanislav Shushkevich until the end of his days remained not a political opponent, but a clear enemy of the first president of Belarus.

On December 7-8, 1991, the presidents of Russia (Boris Yeltsin), Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk) and Stanislav Shushkevich, chairman of the Supreme Council of Belarus (at that time – the first person of the country), as well as small delegations of politicians and experts from these countries, gathered in Viskuli. They were waiting for Nursultan Nazarbayev, but the President of Kazakhstan did not come.

On December 8, the Belovezhskaya Accords were signed, declaring the cessation of the existence of the USSR as a “subject of international law and geopolitical reality”, and the creation of the CIS was also announced.

The participants of this meeting repeatedly shared their opinions and details, some of the members of the delegations later tried to absolve themselves of responsibility for what had happened.

Stanislav Shushkevich always maintained that the collapse of the USSR was inevitable, and the signing of the Belovezhskaya Accords saved the Soviet empire from the “Yugoslav version.”

In an interview with the BBC, Stanislav Shushkevich told how he happened to report the decision in Viskuli to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

“You see, Kravchuk and Yeltsin jokingly told me: “You are the best friend of Gorbachev, so call him, explain what we want to do.” And then I say: “Boris Nikolayevich, so Kravchuk and I decided that you are the best be friends with Bush, call him.” Gorbachev read me a long moral and in the end he said: do you know what the international community will think about this? And I already heard that they are talking to Bush. And I say [to Gorbachev]: Yeltsin calls Bush, and he takes it very warmly. “After that there was a silent scene.”

“When you left Viskuli, weren’t you scared because of what happened?” BBC correspondents then asked Shushkevich.

“I was absolutely not afraid at any stage – arrival in Belovezhye, signing, departure – I was not afraid,” Shushkevich said. “But, to be honest, fear enveloped me when I was driving home in a car. we called it, “membership” – ZIL-11, a super-luxury car. I drove back and listened to the radio. I played it: everyone is talking about it, everyone is praising it. I listened in Polish: well, everything, the Union was destroyed, the devil knows what!

Then you know what I was afraid of? I think: hey, now I will arrive, I have the right to sign an international treaty, but I have to put it on ratification. I’ll put it on ratification, and the communists will take it and fill it up.”

But on December 10, 1991, the resolutions of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Belarus “On the ratification of the Agreement on the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States” and “On the denunciation of the Treaty of 1922 on the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” were adopted.

In 2013, it turned out that in Belarus, in the executive committee of the CIS, which then acted as the depositary (custodian) of the Belovezhskaya Agreement, there was no original of the documents signed in Viskuli – only a certified authentic copy.

The original may someday pop up somewhere on the auction…

Lee Harvey Oswald, officially recognized as the assassin of American President John F. Kennedy, spent two and a half years in Minsk and returned to his homeland in 1963, a little over a year after leaving the capital of Soviet Belarus.

The former American Marine Oswald came to the USSR at the age of 19, carried away by the ideas of Marxism and socialism; the Soviet authorities determined Minsk for him to live, allocating an apartment in a prestigious area near Victory Square and arranging it for the Lenin Radio Plant in Minsk – a few minutes walk from the provided apartment.

Stanislav Shushkevich was the senior engineer of the radio factory, who knew English and helped Oswald adapt.

“The secretary of the party committee of the experimental workshop, Libezin, comes to my workplace: “Everyone comes to you to deal with articles in English, because you know English better than others. If so, then please learn the Russian language of an American who works in our workshop. He knows the language a little, but he needs to know better, – Stanislav Shushkevich wrote in his memoirs. – What can I say about “our student” Lee Harvey Oswald demonstratively? Nothing!”

They were allowed to talk about the weather, nature, and everyday topics. At the meetings there was always a third person – it was forbidden to communicate one on one.

“I have a purely emotional perception,” Stanislav Shushkevich said in an interview with RIA Novosti. “We had at least seven, but no more than ten classes. And all this was done in one month. I couldn’t even ask him where he came from. it was only possible to talk about cinema, about the weather. There were rumors that he was a deserter, that he had run away. I could ask, but whether Sasha (a colleague at the factory Alexander Rubenchik, who was present at the classes – BBC ) will lay me down, then whether Oswald himself will lay me down. Now it is difficult to imagine, but then it was quite natural. ”

Shushkevich remembered Oswald as a lethargic person who did not make “sharp gestures”.

“They’ll say in Belarusian: how wet you are (how wet it burns). And he didn’t show much interest in our classes. I felt that they were some kind of obligation for him. In the workshop we communicated at the level: hello – goodbye. I was afraid that my order would not get to him. Because he was a filthy locksmith. But at the same time he was meticulously accurate, “Shushkevich recalled.

Stanislav Shushkevich has repeatedly stated that he does not believe in the official version of the Kennedy assassination, in which Oswald was identified as the killer: “He was a martinet, to put it so bluntly. So they framed him.”

“To be frank, the official visit of US President Bill Clinton to Belarus in January 1994 was the result of my collusion with the US Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Belarus David Swartz,” Stanislav Shushkevich recalled in his book “My Life, the Downfall and Resurrection of the USSR.” I invited Clinton to pay an official visit to Belarus during my official visit to Washington. He promised to come and was ready to keep his word.”

Analysts at the time regarded the visit as a sign of encouragement for sovereign Belarus’ voluntary renunciation of nuclear weapons possession, which had no precedent.

Bill Clinton and his wife spent only eight hours in Minsk, which included negotiations with the head of the country Stanislav Shushkevich, Belarusian Prime Minister Kebich, laying wreaths at the Victory Monument and meeting with young people, as well as installing a memorial bench in the Kurapaty tract, the site of mass executions during the years of Stalinist repression.

Belarusian officials panicked about the latter: they were not given for approval the inscription that was supposed to appear on a commemorative sign from the United States in a place whose indisputability is still not recognized by the top leadership of Belarus. The KGB declared that it would not be able to ensure the safety of distinguished guests in the forest on the outskirts of Minsk at dusk (the American side took over security).

But Clinton accomplished that mission. Later, thanking for the organization of the visit, he promised to come to Belarus again. But none of the American presidents visited the country again.

Clinton’s bench, on which it is written in Belarusian that it is in memory of the Belarusian people from the American, was destroyed more than once by unknown vandals. For the last time, fragments of the bench were left lying at the entrance to the execution forest.

Shortly before being elected president, Alexander Lukashenko, who headed the “anti-corruption commission” in parliament, accused speaker Stanislav Shushkevich of abuse of his official position and appropriation of a two-kilogram box of state-owned nails to repair the dacha. The “box of nails” case was one of the reasons for Shushkevich’s dismissal from the post of chairman of the Supreme Council.

Shushkevich remained a member of parliament and soon signed an appeal to the Constitutional Court to remove Lukashenka from the post of president of the country; he did not recognize the results of the 1996 referendum on changing the Constitution of Belarus, and also became an active opposition figure and headed the Belarusian Social Democratic Hramada party.

Upon retirement, Stanislav Shushkevich was assigned a life allowance in the amount of 70-75% of the salary of the current speaker. In 1997, President Lukashenko canceled this resolution and signed a decree by which the pensions of the former leaders of independent Belarus were frozen, that is, they were not subject to indexation. After the denomination of 1999 and until 2015, when his wife Irina undertook to draw up an old-age pension for 80-year-old Stanislav Shushkevich, the former head of state received from 2 dollars to 40 cents per month (depending on the exchange rate).

“The pension, by the way, could be more, considering that I am an honored worker (science – BBC), a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the state award, but social services said that this is not the case,” the politician told the Belarusian portal TUT.by.

Stanislav Shushkevich was invited to give lectures by the leading universities of the world, he is the author and hero of numerous publications, films and books.

Journalists were ironic that in assessing the activities of President Lukashenko, Shushkevich often could not refrain from very unflattering characteristics that were difficult to mix during editing and editing.

He was critical, sympathetic and cheerful.

Shushkevich’s dacha, indistinguishable from the dachas of ordinary Belarusians, still requires more than just nails for repairs.