Tuesday 10 June 2014 The man who convened the meeting that buried the Soviet Union in 1991 has warned that it is being restored in his native Belarus and across the post-Soviet space. Stanislav Shushkevich – the politician who hosted the 1991 summit at which Belarus, Ukraine and Russia signed the USSR into obsolescence and paved the way for independence – said a mixture of despotic leaders, KGB-revivalism and Putin’s Ukraine interference all remind him of the worst of the Soviet Union. “What we see now is the restoration of Soviet order, in Belarus most of all,” Shushkevich said in his study in the modest central Minsk apartment. “Look what happened in Ukraine. It was just the same as in Soviet times in 1990 when they tried to restore control over the Baltic republics with special services. It’s all a play by Russian special services. And in Belarus it’s just like Soviet order, collective farms, it all works like a Soviet regime.” Shushkevich ran against Alexander Lukashenko in the 1994 elections in Belarus. He says that although that vote was widely regarded as free and fair, everything since has been a sham. “Lukashenko’s first win was honest,” he says. “He was a populist and he won properly. But 1994 was the first and last proper election. Everything since has been nothing more than an operation by special services.” Lukashenko’s first win was honest... but 1994 was the first and last proper election The 79-year-old former physics professor still nominally heads up a political movement, but he concedes that it’s pointless. “Because we have a law that doesn’t permit parties to function normally. Now it’s the KGB who control the electoral process. There are no elections, just a re-appointment.” Belarus is not alone in finding that Soviet habits die hard. The five central Asian republics have made scant progress towards democratic reform in the two decades since independence. Three - Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - are still led by Soviet era communist party bosses. Azerbaijan is run by a family dynasty, Turkmenistan by a despot who took over from another despot. Apart from the Baltic troika, which are now part of the EU, the countries with the best records in holding democratic elections are Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. All have lost chunks of their territory to pro-Russian separatists. Belarus is to join Russia and Kazakhstan in a tariff-free trade union from January 2015, but Shushkevich is sceptical, seeing the move as more of a political demarche by Moscow than a project with compelling economic promise. Russian President Vladimir Putin is keen to draw other former Soviet republics into the Eurasian union, but Shushkevich says that real economic development would come from liberalisation of the Belarus economy, 80% of which is still in state hands. “For the economy to mature it needs to be liberalised. But liberalisation cannot be allowed, because it would be the end of Lukashenko. So I am pretty pessimistic about democratic prospects.” Now it’s the KGB who control the electoral process. There are no elections, just a re-appointment He says the best hope for democracy is the large numbers of young people who go abroad to study and come back with different ideas of how a political system can be developed. “If we have young, politically literate people coming through, that is the way to democratise.” For Shushkevich the reversion to Soviet ways is a big disappointment from the heady days of 1991, when he hosted Boris Yeltsin of Russia and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine at the meeting in which the Soviet Union was formally buried. Yeltsin and to a lesser extent Kravchuk were since severely discredited by their terms in office, but Shushkevich denies that there were any ulterior motives in their December 1991 act of dissolution. “We did our work. And however much they explain it by [the fact that] there was drinking, or wanting to make money out of it, is just nonsense,” he says. Shushkevich has a second more curious footnote to add to the history books. In the early 1960s, he briefly taught Russian to Lee Harvey Oswald, who was staying in Minsk at the time. He says he didn’t get to know Oswald well but remains convinced of one thing: “The man that I knew then was absolutely not capable of doing such a thing.” theguardian/world/2014/jun/10/soviet-union-comeback
Posted on: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 10:20:51 +0000
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