New Delhi: Stanislav Shushkevich, the former Belarus leader who broke the news to Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union was being dissolved, has died. He was 87. Belarusian media reported news of his death, quoting his wife, according to a Reuters report. Shushkevich was present with Russian leader Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine's Leonid Kravchuk at the December 1991 meeting where they announced the sacking of Gorbachev and the end of the superpower USSR. The meeting took place at a Belarusian hunting lodge.
"The USSR as a geopolitical reality, and as a subject of international law, has ceased to exist," they had said in a joint statement then, which announced the formation of a new Commonwealth of Independent States, according to reports.
It was Shushkevich who had made the call to the Kremlin to inform it of the decision.
He had recounted later how the other two leaders had “nominated” him to inform Gorbachev that his reign was over. Yeltsin phoned then US President George Bush.
Gorbachev was forced to resign weeks later.
Shushkevich had remained the leader of Belarus until 1994, when he lost the election to Alexander Lukashenko. He had not been keeping well of late, the Reuters report said.
State news agency Belta reported his death Wednesday in a bland six-paragraph chronology of his academic and political career, the report said.
Shushkevich had been a critic of Lukashenko, who he would say was backed by Moscow.
In an interview to Reuters in August 2020, Shushkevich had said: "Lukashenko serves the Kremlin because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to hold on. The Kremlin ... supports him.”
According to the report, Lukashenko signed a special decree in 1997 freezing Shushkevich's pension which was also not indexed to inflation. He raised it to $220/month in 2015.
Not only this, with Shushkevich continuously criticising Lukashenko for his crackdown on protests against him, all references to him were removed from the school history books in 2021.