Soviet Union Dissolves: Three Leaders Sign End of Empire

The leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine met at a hunting lodge in the Belovezha Forest on December 8, 1991, and signed away a superpower. Boris Yeltsin, Stanislav Shushkevich, and Leonid Kravchuk declared that the Soviet Union "as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality" had ceased to exist, replacing it with a loose Commonwealth of Independent States. The agreement, reached without consulting Mikhail Gorbachev or the other Soviet republics, dissolved the world's largest country in a single afternoon. The Soviet collapse had been accelerating since the failed hardline coup of August 1991, when Communist Party officials tried to overthrow Gorbachev and reverse his reforms. Yeltsin's dramatic resistance from atop a tank outside the Russian parliament building rallied popular opposition and destroyed the plotters' credibility. One by one, Soviet republics declared independence. Ukraine's referendum on December 1, 1991, delivered a 92 percent vote for sovereignty, eliminating any remaining possibility of preserving the union. Yeltsin had a personal motive beyond geopolitics. As president of the Russian Federation, he held less formal power than Gorbachev, the Soviet president. Dissolving the USSR dissolved Gorbachev's job. The Belovezha Accords accomplished this with brutal efficiency. Yeltsin reportedly called U.S. President George H.W. Bush before informing Gorbachev, an extraordinary breach of protocol that underscored how completely the Soviet center had lost authority. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, 1991, and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. Fifteen independent nations emerged from the wreckage, inheriting a nuclear arsenal, a crumbling economy, and deep ethnic tensions. Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN Security Council seat and most of its nuclear weapons. The Cold War was over, but the aftershocks of the Belovezha agreement continue to reverberate through conflicts in Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltics three decades later.