Ex-Belarus leader Shushkevich, the man who sacked Gorbachev, dies at 87
Former Belarus leader Stanislav Shushkevich, the man who broke the news to Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union was being consigned to history, has died at the age of 87, Belarusian media quoted his wife as saying on Wednesday. Shushkevich was one of the three main actors, with Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine's Leonid Kravchuk, at a meeting in a Belarusian hunting lodge in December 1991 at which they sounded the death knell of the former superpower led by Gorbachev. «The USSR as a geopolitical reality, and as a subject of international law, has ceased to exist,» they said in a joint statement announcing the formation of a new Commonwealth of Independent States.
Shushkevich recounted in later years that the other two leaders had jokingly nominated him to inform Gorbachev, which he did in an awkward call to the Kremlin while Yeltsin phoned U.S.
President George Bush. Gorbachev, who had survived a hardline coup in August 1991 but had been left gravely weakened, was forced to resign weeks later as the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin.
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