A much more serious and far-reaching initiative was, therefore, the creation of the
Union State of Russia and Belarus. The initiative for this Union State was taken on
April 2, 1996, by the two presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Aleksandr Lukashenko, and
a treaty was signed one year later. Apart from the economic benefits the Union was
supposed to bring to both countries the two leaders had their own, hidden motives:
“Lukashenko hoped to become president of a large Union State and . . . Yeltsin felt
guilty for presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union. . . . He wanted to
be remembered as the leader who started the reunification of the former Soviet republics
by signing the Union State agreement with Belarus.”[5] The Union of the two countries was an ambitious project, organized in grand style.
It included the creation of a series of common institutions, including a Supreme State
Council, a Council of Ministers, a Court, a House of Audit, and a bicameral parliament
consisting of a directly elected House of Representatives and an indirectly elected
House of the Union. Neither the House of Representatives, nor the Court, however,
ever came into existence. The reason for this was that the objectives of both sides
diverged too much. Belarus sought a rapprochement for economic and financial reasons;
Russia’s motivation was almost exclusively geopolitical. This did not prevent the
two countries signing, on December 8, 1999, an even more far-reaching “Treaty on the
Creation of a Union State of Russia and Belarus” that resembled the resurrection of
a mini-Soviet Union. The Union would have a common president, a flag, an anthem, a
constitution, a common currency, common citizenship, and a common army. It was a last
attempt of Lukashenko to realize his ambition to become president of the Union State
and—in this indirect way—to become the ruler of Russia. This ambition had to be taken
seriously, so seriously, indeed, that Anatoly Chubais, who was the chief of Yeltsin’s
presidential administration between July 15, 1996, and March 7, 1997, later said:
“It was total madness . . . . It was a constitutional coup d’état, a change of power,
not because of a political conflict, but quite simply because we had seen nothing
coming.”[6] According to the treaty the supreme power in the Union State of Russia and Belarus
would be shared by the two presidents and the presidents of the respective parliaments.
With an ailing Boris Yeltsin and the communist Gennady Seleznev as Russian Duma president,
Lukashenko would have had a real chance to become the
