Translation. Region: Russian Federation –
Source: Official website of the State –
An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.
On December 8, 1991, at the government residence of Viskuli in Belovezhskaya Pushcha (Belarus), the heads of the three union republics, Boris Yeltsin (RSFSR), Leonid Kravchuk (Ukrainian SSR) and Stanislav Shushkevich (BSSR), signed the Agreement on the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
New chapter
The Agreement was signed by the leaders: Gennady Burbulis from Russia, Vyacheslav Kebich from Belarus, and Vitold Fokin from Ukraine. The meeting was held in strict secrecy and under the protection of a special unit.
The document's preamble contained a key provision: the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical entity ceases to exist, and Article 1 of the Agreement stated: The High Contracting Parties shall form a Commonwealth of Independent States. The document declared the parties' desire to develop cooperation in the political, economic, humanitarian, and cultural spheres. Article 14 designated Minsk as the "official seat of the coordinating bodies of the Commonwealth."
Parade of Sovereignties
On December 10, 1991, the Agreement was ratified by the parliaments of Ukraine and Belarus. On December 12, it was approved by the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, chaired by Ruslan Khasbulatov, who called on deputies to support the document. On the same day, the Russian parliament denounced the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR.
Only seven of the 246 members of parliament voted against ratification, five abstained, and 34 did not participate in the vote.
However, a number of deputies pointed out that, according to Article 104 of the 1978 Constitution of the RSFSR, such decisions should have been made by the Congress of People's Deputies, and not by the Supreme Soviet, since the matter concerned changing the state structure.
In April 1992, the Fifth Congress of People's Deputies of Russia refused three times to ratify the Agreement and remove references to USSR laws from the Constitution of the RSFSR. This standoff became one of the causes of the conflict between the president and parliament, which culminated in the dissolution of the Congress in October 1993. Only on December 25, 1993, with the adoption of the new Constitution of the Russian Federation, was the legal connection with the USSR finally severed.
Against the will of the people
In September 1998, Ruslan Khasbulatov noted at a State Duma committee meeting: "The document has not been ratified. From a constitutional perspective, this was a matter for the Congress. And what the Supreme Soviet adopted could only be advisory in nature." In 2003, the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs concluded that the Russian Federation was not de jure a founding member of the CIS, since the Agreement had not been ratified by the highest authority of the RSFSR.
On December 21, 1991, in Alma-Ata, eight more republics joined the Agreement, bringing the total to 11 of the 15 former Soviet republics. On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev announced the end of his term as President of the USSR. Thus, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, even though, in a March 1991 all-Union referendum, 76.43% of citizens of nine republics voted to preserve the USSR as a renewed federation. However, the decision to dissolve it was made without their participation by the then political elites.
The disaster of the century
On December 8, 1991, the Belovezh Accords ended the USSR. The country suffered unprecedented territorial losses without any war.
In his address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on April 25, 2005, President Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. For the Russian people, the dissolution of the USSR was a true tragedy, resulting in tens of millions of former citizens and compatriots finding themselves outside Russian territory and nearly triggering the disintegration of Russia itself.
In 2008, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko voiced a similar position, emphasizing that the demise of the USSR led to the collapse of the established bipolar global system. It was expected that the end of the Cold War would allow for a reduction in military spending and the redirection of the freed-up resources toward addressing pressing global issues, including food security, energy, and the environment. Instead, the planet entered an era of intense competition for control of energy resources and an active redistribution of spheres of influence, which continues to this day.
The wild 90s
Moreover, President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly pointed out the social and demographic failure associated with the collapse of the Union, comparing the decline in the birth rate in the mid-1990s with the situation in 1943–1944, when people died en masse on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War.
Indeed, in 1989, the USSR State Statistics Committee calculated that by the end of 2015, the population of the RSFSR would grow from 148.3 million to 165.7 million. Taking into account the slowdown in population growth, by the end of 2021, the Russian population would reach at least 169.4 million, or 171.9 million citizens including Crimea. In reality, the permanent population of Russia as of January 1, 2023, was 146.4 million, excluding Novorossiya, which had returned to its home port. This means that approximately 25 million people were lost to the poverty and wars of the post-Soviet period, not including the victims of the coronavirus epidemic. It took more than three decades to pull the country out of this catastrophe.
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