Stanislav Shushkevich
Stanislav Shushkevich signed the paper that dissolved the Soviet Union and spent the rest of his life on a pension of about one dollar a month. He was a physicist, a professor at Minsk, and - by an accident he described often - the man who had taught Lee Harvey Oswald Russian during Oswald's years in the city. He came into politics through Chernobyl. Belarus took the largest share of the fallout of any Soviet republic, the authorities concealed the extent of it, and Shushkevich was one of the scientists who pressed for the truth; that made him a reformer without making him a nationalist. He became head of the Belarusian parliament in 1991, which made him head of state of a republic that had not asked to be independent. On 8 December 1991 he met Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk at a hunting lodge in the Belovezh forest, and the three of them signed an agreement declaring that the USSR had ceased to exist - three men in a forest ending a state of two hundred and ninety million people. What they signed was not only a dissolution. It created the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place, kept the existing republic borders as international ones, and left the nuclear weapons on Belarusian, Ukrainian and Kazakh soil to be argued over separately - which is how those borders and those warheads became the questions they still are. He was voted out in 1994 over an accusation involving a box of nails, and lost the presidential election that year to Alexander Lukashenko, who has governed ever since. His state pension, never recalculated after inflation, came to roughly a dollar a month, and he lived on lecture fees. He died in 2022, three months after Russian troops crossed into Ukraine from Belarusian territory.
- Lived: 1934 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Belarusian
- Roles: head_of_state, scientist
