Thrust to the sidelines of history; Belarus's first head of state is now a pensioner forbidden to work in his own country.

KUPALINKA, BELARUS -- It hardly seems a fitting end for a man many consider a father of the nation.
Stanislav Shushkevich pads around his wood-walled dacha wearing coveralls, a lumberjack shirt and suspenders, his thick fingers dirty from a morning spent working around the small countryside cottage. He apologizes several times for the mess, and has to clean tools off the kitchen table to make space for us to sit and talk.

Like many Belarussians, gardening at his dacha has long been a hobby for him, but these days it's more than that for Mr. Shushkevich — it's almost all he has left.

The man who 13 years ago played a crucial role in dissolving the Soviet Union and leading Belarus to independence is now a poor, ordinary pensioner, marginalized and vilified by hard-line President Alexander Lukashenko.

It was Mr. Shushkevich who in December of 1991 invited Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk, the future presidents of Russia and Ukraine, to a dacha in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha nature reserve in western Belarus.

There they signed the document that effectively ended the USSR as a political entity. In the ensuing turmoil, Mr. Shushkevich became head of the Supreme Soviet and the newly independent country's first head of state.

“We didn't gather to start the collapse of the Soviet Union. We didn't even think of it at first. If we had thought about it before, I don't know if we would have had the strength to do it,” Mr. Shushkevich says now, opening a bottle of homemade red wine early in the afternoon. After the bottle is emptied, he confesses that the three leaders had a similar amount to drink but that they were not drunk the day they broke up the USSR.

He has a lot of time to reflect on his role in history, and recounting it at speeches to foreign universities is one of his chief sources of income now that Mr. Lukashenko has slashed his government pension to the equivalent of just $1.50 (U.S.) from the $200 a month to which he is legally entitled. He is denied permission to work in his own country and drives a battered red Zhiguli that looks at least 20 years old.

Mr. Shushkevich, 69, shrugs off his current situation; he brags of being self-sufficient and proudly shows off the newly installed hot-water tank at his dacha in this wooded region 50 kilometres west of Minsk. But he's clearly angry with the man who robbed him of the respect still given Mr. Yeltsin in Russia and Mr. Kravchuk in Ukraine.

“It's not a question of the people of Belarus forgetting me, it's just that Lukashenko is obscene,” he said. “I don't know of anyone else like him — maybe [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi or [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong-il, but those people are smarter.”

It's not just his own fate that bothers him. Mr. Shushkevich believes he left Belarus on a democratic path 10 years ago. He had just introduced the legal concept of private property, and a range of political parties was beginning to take root. The country had good relations with the West and had removed all nuclear weapons from its territory.

He believes the first presidential election won by Mr. Lukashenko in 1994 was free and fair. Mr. Shushkevich finished fourth in that vote, his popularity damaged by his refusal to answer allegations that he had stolen a box of nails from the state for private use at his dacha.
Since then, Mr. Lukashenko — dubbed by many as Europe's last dictator — has used Mr. Shushkevich as a foil, blaming him for all the country's ills.

“Shushkevich is a hostage of Lukashenko's politics,” said Svetlana Kalinkina, editor of the independent Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta newspaper. “His idea is that before him, everything was bad and someone has to be guilty for this.”
Under Mr. Lukashenko's rule the human-rights situation has dramatically worsened; many of those who oppose the President are either sidelined, as Mr. Shushkevich is, or, as in the case of a half-dozen key activists, have mysteriously disappeared and are now feared dead.

Despite the dangers, Mr. Shushkevich is still active in opposition. He heads a small movement called Hramada, which recently joined a six-party coalition fighting an uphill battle to keep Mr. Lukashenko from extending his rule past the current two-term limit. Mr. Shushkevich compares the political climate now to the one faced by his friend Lech Walesa, who led the Solidarity movement in Poland in the late 1980s.

“The situation is worse now than in Poland . . .” he said. “What we need is for the West to support us the way they supported Solidarity.”

The Globe and Mail; 21 April 2004