MINSK – The powerful Soviet Union may still exist after all — at least on paper: Former Belarusian President Stanislav Shushkevich says the historic 1991 document that proclaimed the death of the communist empire is missing from the archives.
Shushkevich discovered that the document was gone while working on his memoirs. He believes it was stolen — possibly by a former Belarusian official — probably with the intention of selling it to a collector.
“It’s hard to believe the disappearance of a document at such a level, but this is a fact,” Shushkevich said, who signed the agreement along with the leaders of Ukraine and Russia. “I am writing my memoirs in Belarusian, and I wanted to take a copy in Belarusian. “But I was just given a photocopy in Russian, without explanation. I can conclude that the original is not in Minsk. I suspect it has been stolen to sell it at a high price. And I can even guess who has done this,” he added, though he did not provide further details.
Shushkevich, a leading foe of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, said the agreement should have been in the Foreign Ministry archives. He said each side received an original copy in their national language.
Officials with Belarus’ government and the Russia-dominated alliance of former Soviet nations confirmed late Wednesday that they only have copies.
“We don’t know where the original is,” said Vasily Ostreiko, the head of the archive department of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which is headquartered in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. “We have a copy of that document. It’s certified in line with international standards, but it’s still a copy.”
The document’s disappearance reflects the chaos that surrounded the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, a superpower of 300 million people that sprawled over nearly a dozen time zones and encompassed what is now 15 nations.
On Dec. 8, 1991, Shushkevich hosted then Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk for secret talks at a government hunting lodge near Viskuli, in the Belovezha Forest. The three signed a deal declaring that “the USSR has ceased to exist as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality” — defeating Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to hold the Soviet Union together.
The agreement also announced the creation of the CIS, a loose alliance joined by nine other former Soviet republics that month. Gorbachev resigned on Dec. 25, 1991, and the Soviet empire that had ruled with an iron fist for almost 70 years ceased to exist.
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