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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
- 1991The Novo-Ogaryovo Process and the New Union TreatyBelarusian representative participantAs Chairman of the Presidium of the Belorussian SSR's Supreme Soviet, he organized the republic's referendum and took part in the Novo-Ogaryovo talks.
- 1991The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSRBacker of the State Emergency Committee coupHe openly backed the State Emergency Committee coup in August 1991 and then resigned as chairman of the Supreme Soviet.
Rehabilitation and memory in independent Belarus
After backing the August 1991 coup attempt and resigning as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Dementey was pushed out of front-line politics during the dissolution of the USSR. He nonetheless returned to the institutions of independent Belarus: from 13 January 1997 to 19 January 2000 he sat in the Council of the Republic, the upper chamber of the National Assembly, by presidential quota, serving on its commission for international affairs and national security. The appointment illustrates how President Lukashenko absorbed Soviet-era cadres into his own power structure. In the same period Dementey published a memoir, Lessons of Life.
He died on 10 July 2018 at the presidential clinic in Zhdanovichi, two days after being hospitalised. Commemoration followed in his home region of Vitebsk: a bust was unveiled in Chashniki's Victory Square on 12 September 2020, marking the 90th anniversary of his birth and the town's 516th anniversary, and on 7 May 2021 the Chashniki Museum of History opened a permanent display devoted to him. A man who presided over the 1990 sovereignty declaration while opposing the Union's dissolution thus entered local memory as the last Soviet-era generation was being reassessed in post-Soviet Belarus.