Belarus

Socialist-bloc leader 1934–2022 ○ COVID-19 complications

The nuclear physicist who demanded Chernobyl truth, hosted the meeting that dissolved the USSR, and called Gorbachev to tell him

Gorbachev asked, 'Have you thought about the international reaction?' I answered, 'Yeltsin is on the phone with Bush right now. Bush seems to be in favor!'

A nuclear physicist from Minsk, he was a professor at Belarusian State University and a specialist in radio electronics. In 1986, as a member of the Chernobyl investigation commission, he demanded the truth be made public against the Soviet cover-up and was removed, an experience that propelled him into politics. As chairman of the Belarusian Supreme Soviet in 1991, he hosted Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk at the Viskuli hunting lodge for what was billed as a discussion of oil and gas supplies; when the conversation turned to dissolving the USSR, he was the first to say he would sign, and he was the one who telephoned Gorbachev to inform him the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The first head of state of independent Belarus, he was ousted in 1994 by Alexander Lukashenko's corruption allegations and spent his final decades in Minsk as an unyielding opposition elder.

Socialist-bloc leader 1936–2020 ○ COVID-19

Belarus's first prime minister; co-signed the Belovezh Accords and later testified the Russian delegation alone arrived with a plan

'Neither I, nor Shushkevich, nor Kravchuk, nor Fokin knew such a document would be prepared and signed': Kebich insisted only the Russian delegation arrived with a plan for the Belovezh Accords.

A mechanical engineer from the Belarusian Polytechnic Institute, he rose through Minsk factories into the Belarusian Communist Party apparatus and became Chairman of the BSSR Council of Ministers in 1990. In December 1991 he co-signed the Belovezh Accords alongside Shushkevich, formally dissolving the USSR; he later testified that the Russian delegation alone arrived with a prepared plan while the Belarusian and Ukrainian sides did not know such a document would be drafted, revealing the tension between spontaneity and premeditation at the meeting. He lost the 1994 presidential election overwhelmingly to Alexander Lukashenko and thereafter served as a parliamentary deputy supporting Lukashenko's pro-Russian and constitutional-revision agenda.

Writers and artists 1948– ○ Living

A writer who recorded the Soviet century through voices of testimony

“I've been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life.”

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer and journalist who built a literature of collective memory by shaping testimonies from people who lived through war and social upheaval in Russian. War's Unwomanly Face and Zinky Boys brought the experiences of women and soldiers, often obscured by official heroic narratives, into view; Voices from Chernobyl recorded the human consequences of the 1986 disaster through survivors, bereaved families, and liquidators. Her work accepts the tension between documentary record and literary construction while placing individual voices at the center of historical understanding, and she received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.