Stanislau Shushkevich: Belarus Became Independent For First Time In 200 Year

The historic Belavezha Accords are 27 years old.

On December 8, 1991, the Belavezha Accords created Belarus. Our country has been marching the way of independence for 27 years.

Stanislau Shushkevich considers the independence of Belarus and the removal of nuclear weapons from the territory of the country as the main results of the Belavezha Accords and his chairmanship in the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR. It was Shushkevich’s signature that was put in the first place in the document on the collapse of the USSR, Belsat reports.

“I understood that we were a colony of Russia, with which we border. And when the president of Russia signed the document that that formation was the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the president of Russia is the main person who is allowed to sign international agreements, signed them, then Belarus became independent from Russia de jure. It happened for the first time in two hundred years – since 1794,” – the then chairman of the Supreme Council and the signatory to the Belavezha Accords, Stanislau Shushkevich, recalls.

Eight months earlier, in March 1991, the Communist Party, which ruled the country of the soviets, organized an all-Union referendum that allegedly demonstrated the will of the people to save the USSR.

The Belavezha Accords became the continuation of the so-called “parade of sovereignties” of the former Soviet republics, in which Belarus was the tenth to declare its independence – after Russia, Georgia, the Baltic and other Soviet republics.

“We can get one hundred percent of those who want to return to the Soviet Union. To remove the relevant information, people who remember it would leave, well, they would be nostalgic about something else: about the GDL, about Belarus,” – political analyst Volha Kharlamava says.