The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, but the dissolution had been in preparation since 1988. The proximate political mechanism was the so-called "war of laws" between the union government in Moscow and the republican governments in the union's fifteen constituent republics, each of which (under the 1924 and 1936 Soviet constitutions) had the theoretical right of secession. The theoretical right became operative when individual republics began passing laws that conflicted with union legislation, and refusing to remit taxes to the union treasury. By mid-1991, every union republic except Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan had passed declarations of either sovereignty (claiming the right of laws to override union legislation) or full independence.
The Baltic states
The three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — were the leading edge of the dissolution. Their incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had never been recognised by most Western governments (the United States maintained Baltic diplomatic missions in Washington continuously from 1940 onwards), and their populations had not assimilated to Soviet identity to the extent that the populations of the older Soviet republics had. The independence movements — Sajudis in Lithuania, the Popular Front in Estonia, the Popular Front in Latvia — were organised in 1988. The Baltic Way demonstration of the 23rd of August 1989 (the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) saw approximately two million people form a human chain six hundred kilometres long through the three republics. Lithuania declared independence on the 11th of March 1990. Estonia and Latvia followed with somewhat softer initial declarations and full independence proclamations in 1991.
The Soviet response was mixed. Gorbachev opposed Lithuanian independence and imposed an economic blockade in March 1990 (which did not break the Lithuanian leadership). In January 1991, Soviet troops attempted to take the Vilnius television tower and the Riga interior ministry; thirteen Lithuanians and five Latvians were killed in the resulting clashes. The international response, particularly from Iceland and the Scandinavian states, was substantial. The Baltic states held referenda on independence in February-March 1991 in which large majorities (including, in Estonia and Latvia, substantial fractions of the Russian-speaking populations) voted to leave. Their full international recognition followed the failed August coup.
The Russian republic
The decisive shift was the political emergence of the Russian Federation — the largest of the union's republics, containing about half its population and two-thirds of its territory — as a competitor with the union government rather than a constituent of it. The new Russian Congress of People's Deputies, elected in spring 1990, elected the former Sverdlovsk party leader Boris Yeltsin as its chairman in May 1990, by a narrow margin against Gorbachev's preferred candidate. The Russian Federation declared its state sovereignty on the 12th of June 1990, asserting the priority of Russian law over Soviet law on Russian territory. Yeltsin's resignation from the Communist Party in July 1990 was a public break with Gorbachev. The first direct election of a Russian president in June 1991 gave Yeltsin a substantial popular mandate that Gorbachev — who had never been directly elected — could not match.
The August coup
By the spring of 1991, Gorbachev was attempting to negotiate a new Union Treaty that would have substantially decentralised the union — restoring some powers to the centre while transferring others permanently to the republics. The treaty was due to be signed on the 20th of August 1991. On the 18th of August, a group of senior Soviet officials — the so-called State Committee on the State of Emergency (the GKChP), led by the vice-president Gennady Yanayev, the prime minister Valentin Pavlov, the KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, the defence minister Dmitry Yazov, and the interior minister Boris Pugo — placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his Crimean dacha at Foros, declared a state of emergency, and announced that they were taking power on the grounds that Gorbachev was "unable to perform his duties for health reasons."
The coup failed within three days. The decisive factor was Boris Yeltsin's public refusal to recognise the new authorities and his appearance — standing on a tank outside the Russian parliament building (the White House) on the morning of the 19th of August — that became the visible image of resistance to the coup. Large crowds of Muscovites surrounded the parliament building. The military commanders charged with implementing the coup were reluctant to use force; the KGB commando units assigned to storm the parliament refused their orders. Three young Muscovites were killed in a confused armoured-vehicle incident in the night of 20-21 August, but the coup leaders, unable to consolidate physical control of the capital, lost their nerve. Gorbachev returned to Moscow on the 22nd. The coup leaders were arrested. Pugo committed suicide.
The coup's political consequences were the opposite of its intent. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union — formally implicated in the coup through the participation of its senior officers — was suspended by Yeltsin on the 23rd of August and effectively destroyed; its property was nationalised in the Russian Federation by the end of the year. Gorbachev resigned as general secretary on the 24th of August. The Soviet flag continued to fly over the Kremlin, but real political authority within the union's centre had collapsed.
Belovezha
Through the autumn of 1991, the union's republics declared independence in rapid sequence: Ukraine on the 24th of August (confirmed by a referendum of the 1st of December in which over ninety percent voted for independence), Belarus on the 25th, Moldova on the 27th, Azerbaijan on the 30th of August, Uzbekistan on the 31st, Kyrgyzstan on the 31st, Tajikistan on the 9th of September, Armenia on the 21st of September, Turkmenistan on the 27th of October, Kazakhstan on the 16th of December. Only the Russian Federation did not formally declare independence — it was, on most legal analyses, the continuator state of the union.
The formal end came on the 8th of December 1991. The presidents of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Belarus — Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislau Shushkevich — met at the Belavezhskaya Pushcha state hunting lodge in the Belarusian primeval forest near the Polish border. They signed an agreement declaring that the USSR "as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, has ceased to exist" and establishing in its place a loose Commonwealth of Independent States. The agreement was telephoned to the American President George H. W. Bush (Yeltsin's call) and the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (Shushkevich's) in approximately that order. Eight more republics joined the Commonwealth at Alma-Ata on the 21st of December. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin on the evening of the 25th of December 1991. The Russian tricolour was raised in its place at 7:32 p.m. Moscow time. Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president on the same day. The Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union held its last session on the 26th of December and formally voted the country out of existence.
The Soviet Union, after sixty-nine years and one day, was over. The next chapter takes up the fifteen successor states and the long shadow of the Soviet inheritance.
"The Soviet Union has ceased to exist." — Belovezha Accords, 8 December 1991
End of Chapter IX