Dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991): End of the USSR

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the formal break-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December 1991. On 8 December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared that the union no longer existed, on 25 December Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president, and on 26 December the Soviet parliament recognised the end of the state. The collapse of the world’s largest country ended the Cold War era and created 15 independent states.

Background: a system in crisis

The Soviet Union was founded in December 1922 and by the 1980s was a superpower of about 290 million people, spread across 15 union republics and more than 100 nationalities. Its economy, however, had stagnated since the 1970s. Central planning struggled to deliver consumer goods, oil revenues fell sharply after 1985, and huge sums went on the military and on foreign commitments such as the war in Afghanistan.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who became General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, launched reforms to revive the system: perestroika (restructuring of the economy), glasnost (openness in public life) and, from 1988, democratisation. Contested elections to a new Congress of People’s Deputies were held in March 1989, and in 1990 the party gave up its constitutional monopoly on power. Gorbachev was elected by the Congress to the new post of President of the USSR in March 1990.

The reforms weakened the old instruments of control without creating a working market economy. Shortages worsened, inflation rose and living standards fell, while glasnost exposed the crimes of the Stalin era and the failures of the regime. In foreign policy Gorbachev ended the arms race, pulled troops out of Afghanistan in the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and accepted the fall of communist rule across Eastern Europe in the Revolutions of 1989.

The republics break away

Glasnost allowed long-suppressed national grievances to surface. In the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, annexed in 1940, popular fronts demanded independence. On 23 August 1989 around two million people joined hands across the three republics in the Baltic Way, and on 11 March 1990 Lithuania declared its independence. Ethnic conflicts erupted in the Caucasus, notably over Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

Crucially, Russia itself challenged the centre. On 12 June 1990 the Russian parliament, led by Boris Yeltsin, declared the sovereignty of the Russian republic, giving its laws priority over Soviet laws. Most other republics followed with similar declarations during 1990, a process known as the “parade of sovereignties”. In January 1991 14 people died when Soviet troops stormed the television tower in Vilnius, and more people died in Riga, but the crackdown failed to stop the Baltic movements.

Gorbachev tried to save the union by negotiating a new Union Treaty that would turn it into a looser federation. In a referendum on 17 March 1991, about 76 per cent of voters in the nine participating republics supported preserving a renewed union, although the three Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova boycotted it. On 12 June 1991 Yeltsin was elected president of Russia by popular vote, giving him a democratic mandate Gorbachev lacked. The new treaty was due to be signed on 20 August 1991.

The August coup

On 19 August 1991, the day before the signing, a group of senior officials calling themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency tried to stop the treaty. They included Vice-President Gennady Yanayev, KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov. Gorbachev was isolated at his holiday house at Foros in Crimea, and tanks entered Moscow.

The August Coup collapsed within three days. Yeltsin, standing on a tank outside the Russian parliament building, the White House, called for resistance, and tens of thousands of Muscovites gathered to defend it. Three young men were killed in a clash with armoured vehicles on 21 August. Key army and KGB units refused to storm the building, and the plotters gave up.

The coup destroyed what remained of central authority. Gorbachev returned to Moscow on 22 August, but power had shifted to Yeltsin and the republics. Gorbachev resigned as party leader on 24 August, and the Communist Party’s activities were suspended. Ukraine declared independence on 24 August, followed within weeks by Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and others. On 6 September the Soviet State Council recognised the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The Belovezha Accords and Alma-Ata

Through the autumn Gorbachev continued to negotiate on a “Union of Sovereign States”, but the republics’ leaders became steadily less interested. Meanwhile the Russian government under Yeltsin took over more and more of the union’s functions. Russian ministries absorbed Soviet ones, Russia took control of Soviet oil and gold revenues, and on 6 November 1991 Yeltsin banned the Communist Party on Russian territory. By late November the central government could barely pay its own officials, and the union existed largely on paper. The decisive blow came from Ukraine. In a referendum on 1 December 1991, about 90 per cent of voters supported independence, including majorities in every region, and Leonid Kravchuk was elected president. Without Ukraine, Russian leaders saw no point in a renewed union.

On 7–8 December 1991 Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich, chairman of the Belarusian parliament, met at Viskuli, a government hunting lodge in the Belovezha Forest in Belarus. As heads of three of the four republics that had founded the USSR in 1922, they signed an agreement stating that the Soviet Union, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, had ceased to exist. In its place they created the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose association with headquarters in Minsk.

Gorbachev condemned the agreement as illegal, but he had no means to resist it. The Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian parliaments quickly ratified it. On 21 December, at Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, the leaders of 11 republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, joining the CIS and confirming that the USSR would end. Only the three Baltic states and Georgia stayed outside. Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had hoped to preserve a union, played host.

The end of the USSR

On the evening of 25 December 1991 Gorbachev announced his resignation as President of the USSR in a televised address, saying he was stepping down because of the course that had been chosen. He handed over control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal to Yeltsin. At about 7.30 pm Moscow time the red Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin and replaced with the white, blue and red flag of Russia.

On 26 December the Soviet of the Republics, the upper chamber of the Supreme Soviet, adopted a declaration recognising that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Russia was accepted as the continuation of the USSR in international affairs, taking over its seat on the UN Security Council, its embassies and its foreign debts. Western governments quickly recognised the new states. In a television address on 25 December, US President George H. W. Bush paid tribute to Gorbachev and welcomed the independence of the republics. The transition at the top passed peacefully: there was no civil war between Russia and the other republics in 1991, and the Soviet armed forces, after a short period under joint CIS command, were divided among the successor states.

Consequences and legacy

The transition was hard for most former Soviet citizens. In Russia, price liberalisation in January 1992 was followed by hyperinflation, savings were wiped out, and output fell steeply through the 1990s. Life expectancy dropped, especially among men. Wars broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Tajikistan and Chechnya.

The fate of Soviet nuclear weapons caused great concern. Under the Lisbon Protocol of 1992 and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan gave up the weapons on their territory, which were transferred to Russia by 1996. US-funded programmes helped secure and dismantle weapons and materials.

The three Baltic states joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, while most other successor states remained closely tied to Russia. Interpretations of 1991 still divide opinion. In the West and in many former republics it is remembered as the end of an empire and the start of national independence. In Russia many people regret it; in 2005 President Vladimir Putin called the collapse a major geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

Several popular beliefs need qualification. Gorbachev did not set out to dissolve the union; he fought to preserve it. The Cold War is often dated as ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the arms agreements of 1990–1991, before the USSR itself disappeared. And while Western pressure and the arms race played a part, most historians emphasise internal causes, above all the economic crisis, the national movements and the struggle between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Even the United States was cautious: as late as 1 August 1991 President George H. W. Bush warned Ukrainians in Kyiv against “suicidal nationalism”.

Timeline

• 1985, 11 March: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party.
• 1990, 11 March: Lithuania declares independence.
• 1990, 12 June: Russia declares sovereignty within the USSR.
• 1991, 17 March: A referendum backs a renewed union in the participating republics.
• 1991, 19–21 August: The August Coup fails.
• 1991, 24 August: Ukraine declares independence.
• 1991, 1 December: Ukrainians vote for independence in a referendum.
• 1991, 8 December: The Belovezha Accords declare the end of the USSR and create the CIS.
• 1991, 21 December: Eleven republics sign the Alma-Ata Protocol.
• 1991, 25–26 December: Gorbachev resigns and the USSR formally ceases to exist.

Why it matters

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was one of the defining events of the twentieth century. It ended the Cold War rivalry that had shaped world politics since 1945, created 15 new or restored states and redrew the map of Europe and Asia. Its consequences, from nuclear security to borders and national identities, continue to shape international affairs today.