Stanislav Shushkevich

Stanislav Shushkevich is presented as the Belarusian president and the least prominent member of the trio that secretly agrees to dissolve the Soviet Union. His decisive role comes after the meeting: he is assigned to tell Mikhail Gorbachev that the state he leads no longer exists, carrying the decision from a vodka-soaked gathering into the Kremlin’s aftermath.

Position in the Belovezh Meeting

A few months after the Felix Dzerzhinsky Statue in Lubyanka Square is toppled, Shushkevich joins Russian president Yeltsin and Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk at a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest. The meeting is held in utmost secrecy. The three leaders drink heavily in the sauna and repeat a justification for their action: because their republics created the Soviet Union in 1922, they have the right to dissolve it. The account emphasizes that none of them has the slightest idea what a federation or confederation might be, framing the decision as momentous but improvised.

Shushkevich is not presented as the gathering’s dominant figure. The narration calls him the least important of the three, a description that makes his subsequent assignment striking: he, rather than Yeltsin, must communicate the dissolution to Gorbachev.

The Messenger to Gorbachev

Yeltsin becomes so drunk that Shushkevich and Kravchuk have to carry him to bed. Before passing out, Yeltsin telephones George Bush, the senior, to be the first to tell him that the Soviet Union no longer exists. The account sets this dramatic call against the task given to Shushkevich: delivering the news to the Soviet president himself.

Shushkevich affirms that Gorbachev is aghast when he hears the news and answers, "But then what will become of me?" The brief exchange shifts attention from the dissolution of a state to the fate of the man displaced by it. Shushkevich’s part is therefore defined less by an extended speech or an independent political argument than by being made the direct intermediary between the secret decision and its bewildered recipient.

Narrative Significance

The episode places Shushkevich at the threshold between the clandestine gathering and its immediate human consequence. In the sauna, the three republics’ leaders reduce the dissolution to a repeated claim about their founding role; afterward, Shushkevich has to convey what that claim means to Gorbachev. His relative lack of prominence within the trio contrasts with the weight of that duty.

The account does not develop Shushkevich’s motives or describe his later life. Within this scene, his significance is precise: he is the person chosen to tell Gorbachev that the Soviet Union has ended, and his report draws out Gorbachev’s shocked question about what will become of him.