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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 de facto president of the Union State. The Russian press wrote at that time, therefore, that “Lukashenko intends to realize his integrationist plans not with Boris Yeltsin, but through his allies in the Duma.”^[7]