A chairman caught between preserving the Union and Belarusian sovereignty
“The Union would never have fallen apart if I had been in power.”
Nikolai Dementey was a Soviet and Belarusian politician who rose from agricultural administration through the Communist Party of Byelorussia to preside over its parliament. He chaired the adoption of the Byelorussian SSR’s Declaration of State Sovereignty in 1990 while continuing to support a reformed Union rather than its dissolution. After openly backing the August 1991 coup attempt, he resigned, becoming a representative figure of the Soviet order’s final crisis.
Career Timeline
- 1958–1962Instructor of the Vitebsk regional party committee, second secretary of the Vitebsk district party committee, and chairman of the district executive committee
- 1974Secretary of the Vitebsk regional committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia
- 1977Head of the agricultural department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia
- 1979–1989Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia, responsible for agriculture
- 1989–1990Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Soviet
- 1990–1991Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Byelorussian SSR
- 1997–2000Member of the Council of the Republic of Belarus
- 2005Published the memoir Lessons of Life