Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 16 – Yesterday,
Stanislau Shushkevich, the former Belarusian president who promoted democracy
in his own country and the dissolution of the USSR, marked his 80th
birthday with a major interview in which he says that Karol Vojtyla, before the
latter became pope, showed him why communism had to be rejected and the Soviet
empire destroyed.
Shushkevich says that he “grew up a
Soviet man even though his father had been exiled to Siberia” but that as a
result of his experiences, he gradually came to understand “what the Soviet
system was” and why it had to be dismantled if Belarusians and all the other
peoples of “the evil empire” were to be free (charter97.org/ru/news/2014/12/15/130762/).
The former Belarusian leader said he
came to a full and final understanding of this in 1974 when he was at the
Jagellonian University in Cracow and heard four homilies delivered by the
Polish priest. “This man explained everything to me,” Shushkevich says, even
though the Belarusian said he feared the police would come and arrest Wojtyla
for his “anti-Soviet” words.
The Polish priest’s words never left
him and ultimately gave him the courage to speak out. Four years later, Wojtyla
became Pope John Paul II, and a decade after that, Shushkevich became the first
elected president of Belarus and then the co-signer of the Beloveshchaya
agreement that ended the USSR, his “most important achievement,” he says.
Reflecting on his past, Shushkevich
says his greatest regret is that he did not protest as much as he should have
against the shameful aspects of the Soviet system. “The worst thing I did was
to be silent” because “I lacked the courage to be a dissident” and to speak out
“like Sergey Kovalyev and Valeriya Novodvorskaya.”
But the Belarusian leader adds that
he is happy when he is “correctly understood” and when “there is no suspicion
that he “says one thing and does another,” when he has been able to help someone
even in a minor way, and because of the more open and democratic way he ran his
nuclear physics laboratory at the university, a way that he imported from
Poland as well.
Shushkevich says that he got into
politics by accident having promised friends that he wouldn’t withdraw his name
for one election or another in Gorbachev’s time. He had been quite content with
his work as a nuclear physicist, although that informed his commitment to
getting rid of nuclear weapons from Belarusian territory later.
The former Belarusian president also
gave his assessments of three key leaders with whom he has interacted. First of
all, he says that he “is a Yeltsin man,” respects his memory “for one very
simple reason.” Despite his mistakes on
Chechnya, the Russian president “was not hypocritical and was a true democrat
and fighter for human rights.” Moreover, “compared with Soviet politicians, he
was a very intelligent man.”
As far as Mikhail Gorbachev is
concerned, Shushkevich says he first “deified him” but then was terribly
disappointed when the Soviet leader tried to hide the Chernobyl nuclear
accident and its consequences for the peoples of Ukraine, Belarus and
Russia. Gorbachev deserves a memorial
for allowing Germany to be reunited, but he did many terrible things.
And concerning the current
Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenka, Shushevich said that he “didn’t
disappoint” him because he “never considered him an orderly and intelligent man”
given his proclivity to lie, his low level of culture, and his fundamental
ignorance of the way the world is.
Lukashenka has blood on his hands,
is clever but not intelligent, and not surprisingly has adapted well to the situation
that now exists in Belarus and Russia as well, Shushkevich says. As for the
future, the former Belarusian leader says that he “wants to see Belarus as a
free European country.
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