ANALYSIS: Leaders recall dissolution of USSR (12/30/01)

ANALYSIS

Leaders recall dissolution of USSR

by Jan Maksymiuk
RFE/RL Newsline

Ten years ago, on December 8, 1991, Belarus Supreme Soviet Chairman Stanislau Shushkevich, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a document stating that "the Soviet Union as a geopolitical reality [and] a subject of international law has ceased to exist." The document simultaneously announced the creation of a new entity in the post-USSR territory - the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The document - now widely known as the BelaVezha Agreement - was signed in a government villa in Viskuli in Belarus's Belavezhaskaya Puscha (Belavezha Forest), which is Europe's only primeval wooded area. On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, stepped down, delivering a coup de grace for the 69-year-old superpower that was vilified for posterity by U.S. President Ronald Reagan as "the evil empire."

Commenting on that momentous event to a number of media outlets last week, Messrs. Shushkevich and Kravchuk both admitted that they did not expect any historic act to take place during their meeting with Mr. Yeltsin in Viskuli on December 7-8, 1991.

"Nothing had been done [in advance], all was written down on the spot [in Viskuli]," Mr. Shushkevich told the Mensk-based newspaper "Nasha Svaboda" on December 7. "In any case, if something had been prepared beforehand, I didn't know about that. Of course, there were some prepared documents, but not for the agreement [on the dissolution of the USSR]. The talks between the government delegations concerned economic issues."

In the Kyiv-based newspaper Fakty on December 7, Mr. Kravchuk added an interesting detail to the meeting in the Belavezha Forest. "After we considered everything in the evening of December 7 in Belavezha, Mr. Yeltsin ordered his team to draft a document - a statement or declaration. We had not yet decided on a name for the document. Mr. Yeltsin's aides wrote that document and left it for a woman to type it up in the morning (we had only one typist in the Belavezha Forest). Since her office was already locked, they slid the document into the office through a slit under the door. But in the morning the typist said: 'I haven't found anything.' There was no document! It turned out that a cleaning woman, who came to the office earlier, saw some papers on the floor and swept them away. Korzhakov [first deputy chief of Russia's Main Protection Directorate] was sent to look for the missing document. ... Frankly speaking, I didn't know then that the draft agreement was lost. I was told about that only recently by [former Russian Foreign Minister] Andrei Kozyrev."

Mr. Kravchuk dismissed the rumors circulating, especially among post-Soviet Communists that Mr. Yeltsin was talked into signing the Belavezha Agreement after he had too much to drink. "We came to the forest on December 7 in the evening. We had a dinner. During the dinner, yes, there was Belavezha vodka [Belarus's fine herbal vodka]. I drank it, too. I don't know what Mr. Yeltsin was doing after we parted. But on December 8 in the morning, when we met to work on the document, Mr. Yeltsin was as sober as a judge. I'm not exaggerating! He was in good form, vigorous, he had ideas. ... All of us [present there] saw him and everybody can confirm that Mr. Yeltsin and all of us were fully aware [of what we were doing]."

Mr. Kravchuk underscored the impact of Ukraine's independence referendum on the adoption of the Belavezha Agreement. A week earlier, on December 1, 1991, more than 90 percent of Ukrainians supported the country's independence in a referendum. The same day, Mr. Kravchuk was elected as the first president of independent Ukraine with some 63 percent of the vote.

"I said there: Ukraine voted for independence and elected me as president. So, may I have a position different from that of the people? [It would be] ridiculous. Therefore, I am obliged to act as the people willed. ... In other words, the December 1 referendum had a historic importance. If there had been no Ukrainian referendum, the Belavezha Forest meeting would have produced no result," Mr. Kravchuk said.

After the agreement was signed, Mr. Yeltsin telephoned U.S. President George Bush and told him what had happened. And then Mr. Shushkevich briefed Gorbachev.

"He [Gorbachev] inquired in a very haughty manner, 'Have you considered how the world will react?' I said Mr. Yeltsin was on the phone to President Bush and he had taken it well," Mr. Shushkevich told Reuters.

Today, Mr. Shushkevich assesses the Belavezha Agreement as historic not only for Belarus and Ukraine, but also for Russia itself. Until that day, Russia - which was automatically associated or even identified with the Soviet Union - did not exist as a separate political entity.

"The Belavezha Agreement has an all-important, historic significance in terms of our sovereignty. For the first time in the past 200 years, Russia recognized Belarus's independence, as well as that of Ukraine. This is what the Belavezha Agreement meant to me and Mr. Kravchuk. But we also recognized the independence of Russia - its independence from the Soviet Union. So here you have the [whole] meaning of the Belavezha Agreement," Mr. Shushkevich told Nasha Svaboda.

Jan Maksymiuk is the Belarus, Ukraine and Poland specialist on the staff of RFE/RL Newsline.

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