Lukashenka: “If Gorbachov Gave a Command, KGB Would Arrested Everybody” :: Charter'97 :: News

Yesterday the Belarusian TV transmitted an interview of Alyaksandr Lukashenka to Russian TV Channel NTV. The interview was recorded on September 11 for a programme dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the USSR collapse and creation of the CIS. This time Lukashenka stated that the chairman of the Supreme Soviet Stanislau Shushkevich didn’t have a right to sign the Belavezha Accords, and that if in December 1991 Mikhail Gorbachov called to Minsk, the Belarusian KGB would arrest Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich.

The chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus Stanislau Shushkevich didn’t have a right to sign the agreements, Lukashenka stated. “Yeltsin was a president. He could sign something... And our [leader] didn’t have such a right. This document should be deeply analyzed and went into… If the Supreme Soviet would have learnt about that earlier, Shushkevich most likely would have been dismissed from office,” the Belarusian leader believes.

“And they were writing everything on the go, they were lucky to have clever people there.” A. Lukashenka said. “We should do justice to Shakhraj and Burbulis, and our foreign minister Krauchanka was not a fool too. They were writing in progress, and it is seen by the documents they created that this way. But they knew, the Russians, which documents should be adopted. They scribbled signatures [to the documents] hastily, drank, celebrated, phoned whom they should and said that there was no such country any more, and departed”.

According to A. Lukashenka, “if there was at least one phone call to Belarus from Moscow, even not from Gorbachov, if he gave a command to the KGB and an order would be given to arrest them all”, it would be done “in a few minutes”. “In Belarus government agencies were disciplined and carried out orders from the center accurately”, A. Lukashenka said.

“Belarus was a very Soviet-style republic. And even now in its essence it is a Soviet one… Not only because the Soviets have been preserved… A Soviet one means an international one which carries out respective social policy, and so on. Belarus was planned to live in one Soviet Union. In 1991, when the fever has got the country in its grip, there was no such crisis in the economy. There were manageable elements of a crisis… We had everything; we only lacked planned firm and purposeful guidance. Everything was liberated, and it was easy to crease a crisis in any direction,” A. Lukashenka believes.

“A system of power was not limited by anything, it was ill-considered, and couldn’t be controlled… Unbalanced, unrestrained power,” that was the reason for the USSR’s collapse, according to Lukashenka. This position was expressed in an interview to the NTV channel.

“It was good when sober-minded people headed the country, as there were periods when we developed in a right way,” A. Lukashenka said. “But when they dies while being in office, it was bad”.

“I am an adherent of a strong power, but not in such a state. It is impossible to govern from Moscow. It’s not like in Belarus, when I see from here what is going on in Vitsebsk and Minsk, I see it perfectly. But the power should have been modernized in the Soviet Union, It was simply decaying,” A. Lukashenka believes.

Besides, as said by him, “immeasurable riches” of the USSR “was corrupting everybody inside the country”. “This all was inherited by Russia. It can bring Russia to destruction. This is the main thing, and not that we were lacking something. We had everything needed,” A. Lukashenka is convinced.