The Soviet Union was formally dissolved on December 26, 1991, when the Council of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence. The decision was a formality by then. Three weeks earlier the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus had met at a hunting lodge in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha forest and declared that the Union had ceased to exist; the following week eleven more republics joined them at Alma-Ata. On December 25 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president. The Soviet flag came down from the Kremlin at 7:32 p.m.
Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2021) is now the most ambitious single-volume account. Zubok argues that the Union was killed not by external pressure and not by mass protest, but by its own ruling elite, who by 1991 had concluded that the Soviet state was an obstacle to their interests. Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted (2001) gives more weight to the structural weakness of the system.
The Background: A Union in Slow Motion
The Gorbachev reforms, intended to save the Soviet Union, were the proximate cause of its destruction. Glasnost released the political energy of more than a hundred nationalities. Perestroika accelerated the economic crisis by weakening central control without creating a working market. The 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe stripped the Soviet Union of its external empire, the only thing that had kept the republics inside the Union by force for seventy years.
The Lithuanian Supreme Council declared the restoration of independence on March 11, 1990 — exactly seventy years after the Soviet ultimatum that had brought Lithuania into the USSR. Estonia and Latvia followed with declarations in the spring. The Soviet Union did not recognize them. The Russian SFSR, under Boris Yeltsin, did. The contest between the two governments was the defining political fact of the next eighteen months.
The Baltic Crackdown: January 1991
Two events in January 1991 are often confused; they should be kept distinct.
The first was in Vilnius, on the night of January 13. Soviet paratroopers and OMON special police from Riga attacked the Lithuanian parliament building and, separately, the Vilnius television tower. The Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office has concluded that 14 civilians were killed, with several hundred wounded. The first to die was Loreta Asanavičiūtė, struck by a vehicle as she drove past the tower. Russian sources have at times given lower figures; Lithuania’s total for all January events has been reported as 14 to 15 dead.
The second was in Riga, on January 20. OMON special police from Riga attacked the Latvian Interior Ministry, killing five people, with a sixth dying later of injuries, according to the Latvian official count. The operations were coordinated and part of the same hardliner effort to crush Baltic independence.
The two events radicalized Baltic publics and produced a public split between the central government and the increasingly assertive Russian Federation. Gorbachev’s claim to be the voice of reform was severely damaged, though the precise extent of his advance knowledge remains disputed.
The Failed August Coup
The climactic event was the coup of August 19–21, 1991. Eight senior officials — Vice President Gennady Yanayev, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, and three others — declared Gorbachev ill and announced a state of emergency. They sent a delegation to Foros, the Crimean resort where Gorbachev was vacationing, and demanded his signature on a declaration of emergency. Gorbachev refused. The delegation left him under house arrest.
In Moscow the coup was met by the resistance Yeltsin had been organizing for months. The Russian White House became the headquarters of the opposition. The three tank crews that mattered most were those that decided to stay on the bridge rather than advance on the building. Three young men — Dmitry Komar, Ilya Krichevsky, and Vladimir Usov — were killed in the early morning of August 20.
The coup leadership never issued coherent orders. By the morning of August 21, the conspirators had begun flying back to Moscow. The next day the State Committee on the State of Emergency was dissolved; within weeks most of its members were in custody. Yanayev, an alcoholic who had been appointed acting president on the assumption that he would be malleable, had spent much of the coup drinking and watching soap operas on a portable television.
The failure of the coup did not save the Union. It destroyed what was left of central authority. Estonia declared independence on August 20; Ukraine, after a special session, on August 24; the other republics followed over the following weeks. The new union treaty Gorbachev had been working on was not signed.
The Belavezha Accords
The final act began in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, a forest reserve on the Belarusian-Polish border. On December 8, 1991, Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus met at the Viskuli hunting lodge. The three leaders signed the Belavezha Accords, declaring that the Union had ceased to exist and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States as a successor organization. The text is direct. The signatories “established that the activities of the institutions of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the territories of the States members of the Commonwealth are terminated.” Ukraine, they noted, had not signed the new union treaty that Gorbachev was still trying to negotiate; without Ukraine, the Union was not the Union.
Eleven more republics joined the CIS at a summit in Alma-Ata on December 21, including the Central Asian states that Gorbachev had hoped to keep inside a reformed Union. On December 25 Gorbachev appeared on Soviet television:
“Dear compatriots, due to the situation that has developed in connection with the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am discontinuing my activities as President of the Soviet Union. I am doing this out of considerations of principle. I firmly hold to the conviction that the destinies of our peoples and the common interests of the security of Europe and the world require that a policy be pursued, not on the basis of ambitions, but on the basis of reason, common sense, and openness.”
The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin at 7:32 p.m. The next day the Council of Republics voted to dissolve the Union.
The 15 Successor States
The successor states are Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — the three Caucasian states — Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan — and the five Central Asian states — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. They inherited the Soviet Union’s external debt and assets; they negotiated the disposition of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, completed by 1994 with Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine turning their warheads over to Russia.
The Baltic states joined NATO and the EU in 2004. Ukraine’s path was the most tragic: independent in 1991, the victim of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Euromaidan of 2013–14, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the full-scale Russian invasion of February 24, 2022. Central Asia remained under Soviet-era elites; the Caucasus became a region of frozen conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Legacy
The dissolution ended the Cold War. NATO expanded; the European Union expanded; the UN and the OSCE expanded. None has been able to absorb the security dilemmas left by the collapse.
The economic costs were enormous. Russian GDP fell by roughly 40 percent between 1991 and 1998. Ukrainian output fell by more than 60 percent. The life expectancy of Russian men dropped by more than six years between 1991 and 1994 — an event without peacetime parallel in modern industrial history. The transition of the 1990s is a central fact of Russian politics. Vladimir Putin’s return to a confrontational posture toward the West is in part a response to it.
The dissolution also produced a conceptual problem. The Soviet Union had been, in international law, the continuation of the Russian Empire. The Russian Federation inherited the Soviet Union’s seat on the Security Council and most of its treaties; it accepted the Soviet Union’s foreign debt in 1992. The successor state thus inherited the obligations of a great power, including, in the official Russian reading, a sphere of influence in the former Soviet space. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is, in this sense, the latest episode of the dissolution.
Key sources
- Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2021). The best current account, by a former Soviet scholar.
- Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2001). A more skeptical take on the inevitability thesis.
- Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (Ecco, 2009). The most comprehensive single-volume treatment of the communist system as a whole.
- David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (Random House, 1993). A vivid on-the-ground narrative of the last eighteen months.