December 8th marked 20 years since Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich met to pull the plug on the Soviet Union. However, the old guy had been dying a long and agonizing death, and so there is a disagreement about the official cause of death. Some cite perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev - he broke the back of the CPSU that held together the Soviet state. Others look to the parade of sovereignty, when Soviet republics declared independence one by one. Still others believe the putsch staged by the State Committee for Emergency Situation (GKChP) marked the end of the Soviet Union.
I won't dispute any of these versions, because I'm convinced that each of these events contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.
Even before these events, the socialist state was being bled to death by an aging and sclerotic Kremlin and the Afghan adventure. Paradoxically, it was Lenin himself who dealt the country a fatal blow, emasculating the core of its political structure - the Soviets. The Soviets of Workers and Peasants were first subjugated to the will of one class, the proletariat, then to the country's only party, the Bolsheviks, and then to the Central Committee of that party. Later they were ruled by decision of the Politburo and, under Stalin, by the will of one man and the political establishment in general.
All this is true, but let's return to the end of 1991, which proved fatal for the U.S.S.R. Gorbachev and some other politicians are still convinced that, despite everything, the Soviet Union could have been resuscitated by the signing of a new treaty. The Belovezh meeting slammed this window shut. The life of a country, like the life of a person, may flow by drops but it is the last drop that matters for history. This is why it is worth considering Gorbachev's version.
According to Sergei Shakhrai, one of the participants in the Belovezh meeting (as Yeltsin's advisor on legal policy at that time): "The issue of the Union's preservation was no longer on the agenda... The death certificate was issued on December 8. The three presidents who gathered in Belogvezhskaya Pushcha were like the doctor who has the sad duty of informing the relatives of a patient that has just died... Accusing the doctor who recorded the patient's death of killing him is stupid, to say the least."
It is stupid but only if the patient had really died by the time the death certificate was issued and if the intentions of our Belovezh doctors - Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich - were pure. But this is where problems start to crop up. All the experts who arrived in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, which is far away from Moscow, were interested in hastening the patient's death, and so it would be naive to blindly believe them, to say the least. Yeltsin was trying to realize his long-standing dream - Gorbachev's removal - leaving him free to do with Russia whatever he wanted. Kravchuk was getting an independent and, most important, wealthy Ukraine, and Shushkevich was also entitled to a big piece of the pie.
There are many suspicions about the Belovezh accords. First, the meeting was held in secret, as if there was a conspiracy. Obviously, everything had been done to evade the vigilance of the Soviet president. But there is more to it. Incidentally, the participants in this meeting wanted to invite Nursultan Nazarbayev but, as Gennady Burbulis (then Russia's Secretary of State) recalls, they decided not to for fear he might call Gorbachev.
The timing of the preparations for the Soviet Union's disintegration is also very important. Canadian journalist Michael Rose said he was under the strong impression that Burbulis did not share the common euphoria and that Russia was not at all rushing to sign a new treaty - the talks in Novo-Ogaryovo seemed to be a tactical maneuver to gain time. Rose recalls how they returned to this question a year later in Arkhangelsk. Although Burbulis said it was still too early to learn about all the details preceding the demise of the U.S.S.R. Rose decided to publish their conversation, which he thought was already of interest.
When Rose asked when the first contacts were made with the leaders of other union republics, Burbulis replied:
"In November 1990. Independent of the Union, Russia and Kazakhstan signed the first bilateral treaty in Moscow. I think this was an outstanding event because it made the first breach in the system... Later on, in February 1991, the idea of a four-way meeting emerged and was tested for the first time. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan... We saw that there was a rationale in this arrangement and started working on it... At this point it transpired that the idea [of the Soviet Union's collapse] could only be carried out if there were three republics involved... This has to do with Nazarbayev."
As I mentioned above, Nazarbayev could have told Gorbachev everything.
So, it is clear that our forensic pathologists had been secretly preparing to issue the Soviet Union's death certificate long before the Belovezh meeting. Isn't this an obvious conspiracy?
Here's the last quotation, or rather open confession, from the same interview with Burbulis:
"The brilliant and, most important, bloodless operation to destroy the empire compelled ultra nationalists to hate the man who had secretly carried it out. Allow me to reveal this secret for those who don't know - it was Gennady Burbulis."
I'm not an ultra nationalist, and I don't hate Burbulis. Moreover, I agree with his assessment - the ageing Soviet Union could not have survived. However, this old patient did not ask the participants in the Belovezh meeting to euthanize it. I'm convinced that the Soviet Union would have died on its own but in a more civilized manner. Incidentally, it was not President Gorbachev or the Soviet people that were the first to learn about the Soviet Union's demise. Yeltsin first reported it to the then U.S. President George W. Bush, who admitted that this call had put him into a very awkward position.
As for Burbulis's dubious boasting, it doesn't make him look any better. He is not even among the Soviet Union's first gravediggers - perhaps among the first hundred.
Impatient to occupy their thrones, Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich now have this on their conscience and all for nothing - grandpa would have died on his own.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
