Q. When you signed the Belavezha agreement 25 years ago, how did you see the future of Belarus? Similar to how the country is today? More than anything else, the Ukrainian referendum sealed the fate of the Soviet Union and prompted Shushkevich to convene the Belavezha meeting. Kravchuk insisted that it was Boris Yeltsin who first proposed a meeting without Gorbachev, a claim that Shushkevich categorically denied (“And there is nothing wrong with my memory”). In the 1959 cooking debate, Nikita Khrushchev claimed that the grandchildren of then-US Vice President Richard Nixon would live under communism, and Nixon claimed that Khrushchev`s grandchildren would live in freedom. In a 1992 interview, Nixon commented that at the time of the debate, he was certain that Khrushchev`s claim was false, but Nixon was not sure that his own claim was correct. Nixon said events proved that he was really right because Khrushchev`s grandchildren were now living at large, referring to the recent collapse of the Soviet Union. [142] Khrushchev`s son, Sergei Khrushchev, was a naturalized American citizen. The reaction depended, in a way, on listening to the disturbing gunshots from Georgia or the fate of the bitter, albeit dignified, power of the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Mr Gorbachev. “Gorbachev was a real instrument of fate,” said Viktor Yerofeyev, a writer and literary critic. “He had just enough intelligence to change everything, but not enough to see that everything would be destroyed. He was brave enough to challenge his party, and prudent enough to let the party live until he lost power. He had enough faith in communism to be called his head, but enough doubts about it to destroy it. If he had seen everything clearly, he would not have changed Russia.

The treaty was the result of many internal political conflicts within the Bolshevik Party and governments within the Union. At first, Vladimir Lenin did not see that Russia`s October Revolution would end all external borders as such. [Citation required] This view was supported by Leon Trotsky and his supporters, who believed that Russia was only a first step in a future world revolution. However, as the Red Army approached the borders of the former Russian Empire and its borders (including the newly created borders of the territories that had declared independence after the October Revolution), it needed a pretext to cross them. [Citation required] One such method was the creation of an alternative government, a Soviet republic, which would then take power when the Red Army overthrew the existing government. .