By Mark Trevelyan

LONDON, (Reuters) – Stanislav Shushkevich was a former Belarusian leader who announced to Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union would be relegated to history. His wife said this Wednesday.

Shushkevich and Boris Yeltsin (Russian president) were the other two main characters at a December 1991 meeting in Belarusian hunting Lodge, when they signaled the death knell for the ex-superpower of Gorbachev.

In a joint declaration, they declared that the USSR had “ceased to exist” as a geopolitical reality and subject of international law.

Shushkevich later told how the leaders of the group had jokedly asked him to inform Gorbachev. This he did, in an embarrassing call to the Kremlin as Yeltsin called U.S. president George Bush.

Gorbachev had survived an August 1991 hardline coup but was left severely weakened and was eventually forced to resign as soon as the Soviet flag was raised for the final time above the Kremlin.

Shushkevich governed Belarus up to 1994, when Alexander Lukashenko became the President.

He was still a fierce critic of Lukashenko. After the 2020 election dispute, he supported massive protests against Lukashenko. But, due to declining health, he decided not to participate in those demonstrations.

Shushkevich, during a August 2005 interview with Reuters, correctly forecast that Lukashenko would remain in power, backed up by Moscow and his military.

“Lukashenko serves the Kremlin because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to hold on. The Kremlin … supports him,” he told Reuters by phone from his dacha.

“In such conditions, it’s difficult for the beaten and tortured Belarusian opposition to struggle with Russia.”

In 1997, Lukashenko made a special decree that Shushkevich’s pension would be frozen and not adjusted to inflation. He raised the monthly pension to $220 in 2015 after its value had fallen almost to zero.

Shushkevich was expelled from school history books 2021, after he repeatedly protested against Lukasenko’s crackdown.

The state news agency Belta reported his death on Wednesday, in an uninteresting six-paragraph chronology detailing both his political and academic career.