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Soviet Union’s collapse was chance for renewal, development — Walesa

On December 8, 1991, the leaders of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics met at the Viskuli countryside retreat to put signatures to an agreement to establish the CIS

WARSAW, December 8. /TASS/. The Soviet Union’s collapse was an inevitable result of development and gave the union republics a chance for renewal and movement forward, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Poland’s former president, Lech Walesa told TASS in an interview in connection with the 30th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s breakup.

"When I said that Communism and the Soviet Union would cease to exist, some theoreticians at the very top kept persuading me that only nuclear war would be able to change everything. I replied that everything could be done from the grassroots level and dismantled peacefully," Walesa said.

The former Polish leader described the Soviet Union’s breakup as a "chance for the republics to get rid of an unnecessary legacy, a chance for renewal, for freedom and for building something on a new basis."

"That state of things, that separation into two blocs and two systems collapsed. It collapsed because the technology we created required the elimination of all barriers. That separation impeded the world’s development and for that reason, it was to be eliminated. How to go about that business without great losses was a problem. We nearly managed it," he said.

Walesa believes that technological development encourages the emergence of new major structures resting upon such common values as freedom, pluralism, and a free market.

On December 8, 1991, the leaders of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics Boris Yeltsin, Stanislav Shushkevich and Leonid Kravchuk met at the Viskuli countryside retreat (in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha national park in Belarus) to put signatures to an agreement to establish a Commonwealth of Independent States. The preamble said that the Soviet Union as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceased to exist.

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