Meeting in the Belovezh forest on December 8, Yeltsin, Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk, and Belarusian parliamentary chair Stanislav Shushke-vich nullified the 1922 USSR Union Treaty. The remaining republics were caught by surprise, but they quickly signed onto the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) structure formed by the Belovezh Accords. Gorbachev was left out of the discussion and not invited to the first CIS meeting on December 21. Faced with the inevitable, Gorbachev resigned on December 25. Barely 40 of the 173 Council of Republic deputies reported to work
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on December 26, where they formally voted to dissolve the USSR. The Soviet Union was no more. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; UNION TREATY
Beissinger, Mark R. (1991). “The Deconstruction of the USSR and the Search for a Post-Soviet Community.” Problems of Communism 40(6):27-35. Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. New York: Oxford University Press. Dunlop, John B. (1993). The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Matlock, Jack F., Jr. (1995). Autopsy on an Empire. New York: Random House.
Although the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November 1917, it was not until 1922 that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed. At that time there were only four Soviet republics-the Russian republic (officially called the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic or RSFSR), Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia. The name, USSR, was chosen deliberately to avoid that of any particular nation or country, since the hope of its founders was that, gradually, more and more countries throughout the world would join its ranks.
The USSR came to embrace almost every part of the Russian Empire at its most expansive. The Baltic states were forcibly incorporated in 1940, and in the post-World War II Soviet Union there were fifteen Union Republics. Some of them contained so-called Autonomous Republics which, like the Union Republics, were named after a nationality for which that territory was a traditional homeland.
According to the Soviet Constitution the USSR was a federation, but in reality many of the basic features of a federal system were lacking. The deficits included the lack of a clear definition of what lay within the jurisdiction of the component parts of the federation and what was the sole responsibility of the central authorities, the lack of any real autonomy for the fifteen republics, and the absence of an independent judicial body that
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could adjudicate in cases of dispute between the republics and Moscow. Moreover, the doctrine of democratic centralism that governed relations within the Communist Party (and in Brezhnev’s time was made a principle of the organization of the entire Soviet state) made a mockery of the federal principle. Democratic centralism was interpreted by Soviet communists to mean that the decisions of higher party organs were unconditionally binding on lower party bodies, and that they applied to the subjects of the federation, such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or Latvia, just as much as to a Russian province.
In practice, the degree to which the nationals of the various Soviet republics ran their republics, and the extent to which they were given some latitude to introduce local variation, changed over time. It was, however, only during the perestroika period that the federal forms gained legitimacy. Pressure grew from below, burgeoning from arguments in favor of a genuine federalism to press for a loose confederation and culminated in demands for complete independence. With the liberalization and partial democratization of the Soviet system after 1985, the fact that the Soviet Union had been divided administratively along national-territorial lines gained immense significance. Institutions that had made modest concessions to national consciousness in the case of nations of long standing (such as Armenia) and had contributed, unwittingly, to a process of nation-building in parts of Soviet Central Asia, began to use the resources at their disposal to pose fundamental challenges to the federal authorities in Moscow.
Not all the republics demanded independence, however, the three Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were in the vanguard of the independence movement, and separatist sentiments also grew in Georgia. Ukraine was divided and only later fully embraced independent statehood. The Central Asian republics had independence virtually thrust upon them when Boris Yeltsin joined the leaders of Ukraine and Belorussia in December 1991 to proclaim that the USSR would cease to exist. Surveys of public opinion in Russia both before and after 1991 showed a majority of Russians in favor of preserving the Union, but in the aftermath of the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev of August 1991, Yeltsin chose to assert Russia’s independence from the USSR. Since Russia comprised approximately three-quarters of the territory of the USSR and roughly half of its population, this was the final blow to the state. The flag of the Union was lowered from the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, and replaced by the Russian tricolor. By the end of the month the USSR had ceased to exist.
A distinction can be drawn between the dismantling or transformation of the Soviet system, and the disintegration of the USSR. From the standpoint of democracy, the former was a necessity. The breakup of the Soviet Union was more ambiguous in respect of democratic developments. Some of the republics-notably the three Baltic states-became relatively successful democracies once they had gained their independence. A number of other successor states to the USSR became more authoritarian than they were in the last years of the Soviet Union.
During most of its existence the USSR was a major player on the international stage. While maintaining a highly authoritarian regime-except for the years of high Stalinism, when it is more appropriately termed totalitarianism, and the perestroika period that saw the development of political pluralism-the Soviet state was able to project its power and influence abroad. Its success in doing so depended more upon military might than on its economic achievements or political attractiveness.
Nevertheless, the USSR played the major part in the defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe in World War II and earned the gratitude of many citizens of Western Europe. The Soviet “liberation” of Eastern Europe, by contrast, led to the imposition of Soviet-style dictatorial regimes in that half of the continent and the suppression of freedom within East-Central Europe for another four decades. The interaction between the Soviet Union and what was known as the Communist bloc led ultimately, however, to important two-way influence once serious reform got underway in Moscow in 1987-1988. The changes in the USSR emboldened reformers and advocates of national independence in East-Central Europe. The fact that Soviet troops stayed in their barracks as the countries in the Eastern part of the continent broke free of Soviet tutelage in 1989 encouraged the most disaffected nationalities within the USSR itself, with the Lithuanians in the vanguard, to demand no less for themselves than had been attained by Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs. Thus, the Soviet control over Eastern Europe that had once seemed a source of strength of the USSR turned out, in the last years of the Soviet regime, to add to its own entropic pressures.
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Following the disintegration of the Union, the permanent place on the United Nations Security Council, which had belonged to the USSR since the formation of the United Nations, passed to the largest of the Soviet successor states, Russia. See also: BOLSHEVISM; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION; UNION OF SOVEREIGN STATES
Kotkin, Stephen. (2001). Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McAuley, Mary. (1992). Soviet Politics 1917-1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nove, Alec. (1993). An Economic History of the USSR 1917-1991. New York: Penguin. Schapiro, Leonard. (1971). The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd ed. New York: Random House. Service, Robert. (1998). The History of Twentieth Century Russia. New York: Penguin. Suny, Ronald G. (1994). The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
ARCHIE BROWN
