Historians have settled on December 26, 1991 as the formal end date of the Soviet Union — the day the Council of Republics of the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve it. The substantive decisions had already been taken: the Belavezha Accords of December 8 in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha forest on the Belarusian-Polish border, in which the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared that the USSR had ceased to exist — the Alma-Ata agreement of December 21, which brought in eleven more republics. Mikhail Gorbachev’s televised resignation on December 25 was the symbolic end; the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin at 7:32 p.m. that day.
The most detailed recent account is Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2021). The standard older treatment is Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted (2001). For the contemporary Russian view of these events, the State Department’s translations of speeches in the Russian press are a useful corrective.
The Lead-Up
The collapse did not come as a surprise to those watching closely. The political space for the Union had been narrowing for two years. The Baltic states had declared independence in 1990. The January 1991 crackdowns — in Vilnius on the night of January 13, when Soviet paratroopers and OMON special police killed 14 civilians at the television tower according to the Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office, and in Riga on January 20, when OMON killed five or six people at the Latvian Interior Ministry — produced a political split between the central government and the Russian Federation. The March 1991 referendum on the preservation of the Union returned a majority in favor — 76 percent, on a turnout of 80 percent — but most of the republics that had boycotted the vote were the ones whose independence was now the question.
The attempted negotiation of a new union treaty in the spring of 1991 was the last attempt to preserve a meaningful center. The draft treaty, which would have created a “Union of Sovereign States” with looser central authority, was to have been signed on August 20. The signing was preempted by the coup.
The August Coup
The August Coup of August 19–21, 1991 was the central event. The conspirators were eight senior Soviet officials: Vice President Gennady Yanayev, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, Oleg Baklanov (a Central Committee secretary), Vasily Starodubtsev (chairman of the Peasants’ Union), and Alexander Tizyakov (president of the Association of State Enterprises).
The coup began on the morning of August 19, when the conspirators announced that Gorbachev was ill and that Yanayev had assumed the presidency. A state of emergency was declared. Troops were ordered into Moscow. The Russian Federation’s response, organized by Boris Yeltsin from the White House (the Russian parliament), was decisive. Yeltsin issued a series of decrees declaring the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP) unconstitutional. He addressed the crowd from a tank on August 19. Three young men — Dmitry Komar, Ilya Krichevsky, and Vladimir Usov — were killed in the early hours of August 20 in clashes around the Garden Ring.
The coup’s central failure was its own incoherence. The conspirators never issued a clear set of orders; some units were told to enforce a curfew, others to defend specific buildings, others to wait. By the morning of August 21, several of the conspirators had begun flying back to Moscow. The remaining conspirators attempted to negotiate with Yeltsin and the Russian government; the negotiations went nowhere. Yanayev was discovered to be drunk, having spent much of the previous day in a daze. By the evening of August 21 the coup was over.
The coup’s political effect was larger than the event itself. Estonia declared independence on August 20; Ukraine held a special session of the Supreme Soviet and declared independence on August 24; the other republics followed over the following weeks. Gorbachev returned to Moscow on August 22. The center he had hoped to preserve was gone.
The Final Weeks
The end came in a series of decisions in December 1991. Ukraine held a referendum and a presidential election on December 1. The referendum on independence produced 90.32 percent in favor on a turnout of 84.18 percent. Leonid Kravchuk was elected president. The Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian leaders met in Minsk on December 7 and decided that a face-to-face meeting was necessary. The three met the next day, December 8, at the Viskuli hunting lodge in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha.
The Belavezha Accords, signed that day, declared that the Union had ceased to exist and established the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev, who was still in Moscow, learned of the agreement by telephone. The Alma-Ata summit of December 21 added the remaining republics. The CIS was not yet a coherent institution, but the political fact was clear: the Union was over.
Gorbachev met with Yeltsin on December 23 and agreed to a transitional arrangement. He appeared on Soviet television at 7:00 p.m. on December 25, 1991, and resigned. His speech was calm and measured:
“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 date of formal dissolution is generally given as December 26, 1991.
The Aftermath
The collapse of the Soviet Union produced 15 successor states. The transition was painful, particularly in Russia, where the introduction of price liberalization on January 2, 1992, produced hyperinflation of more than 2,000 percent in the first year. Russian GDP fell by roughly 40 percent between 1991 and 1998. The economic crisis was accompanied by a social crisis: life expectancy for Russian men fell by more than six years in the first years after the dissolution, recovering only slowly over the next two decades.
The political effects were larger. The end of the Union ended the Cold War. The transition of the 1990s produced the conditions for the Russian presidency of Vladimir Putin, which has been the principal challenge to the post-Cold War European security order since 2014. The dissolution is now more than three decades in the past. Its consequences are still being worked out in Eastern Europe, in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, and in the security architecture of the continent.