Belovezha Accords

• 1. Introduction

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  The Belovezha Accords were signed on the 8th of December 1991, in a state dacha near Viskuli, deep inside the ancient forest of Belovezhskaya Pushcha in Belarus. Six men gathered around a table in what had once been a hunting retreat belonging to General Secretary Brezhnev. When they left, the Soviet Union no longer existed.

  What makes this moment so striking is not just its outcome but its setting. The document that ended seven decades of Soviet power was not hammered out in Moscow, not debated in the Kremlin, not ratified by a broad congress of republics. It was drafted and signed by three leaders in a woodland dacha, far from the capital they were dissolving.

  The six signatories represented Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Belarusian Parliament chairman Stanislav Shushkevich and Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich signed for Belarus. Russian president Boris Yeltsin and First Deputy Prime Minister Gennady Burbulis signed for Russia. Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and Prime Minister Vitold Fokin signed for Ukraine. Three republics, three pairs of hands, one document that declared the USSR had effectively ceased to exist.

  What questions does this raise? Why those three? What legal mechanism let a trio of leaders dissolve an entire superpower? What did Gorbachev say when he found out? And what happened to the original document itself? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Gorbachev Unraveling

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  Mikhail Gorbachev launched his twin reforms of Glasnost and Perestroika in the 1980s with a specific goal: not to destroy the Soviet system, but to revitalize it. The result was the opposite. Nationalist, democratic, and liberal movements gained momentum across the republics as Communist Party control weakened.

  By 1991, the pressure had built to a point that forced Gorbachev into a corner. He and the heads of seven union republics pre-agreed on the 14th of November at Novo-Ogaryovo to sign a treaty creating something called the Union of Sovereign States. This new structure would have no constitution but would remain a subject of international law, much as the Soviet Union had been.

  That treaty was scheduled to be signed in December. But August intervened. A group of hardliners attempted a coup to remove Gorbachev from power and stop the transformation of the Soviet Union into what Shushkevich would later describe as "a confederation." The putsch failed, but as Shushkevich said in 2006, by December "the union had already been broken up by the putschists."

  On the 30th of November, Yeltsin told U.S. president George H. W. Bush that only seven states were ready to sign the draft union treaty. "Five Islamic and two Slavic," he told Bush. He said he could not imagine a union without Ukraine and that relations with Ukraine were more significant to Russia than those with the Central Asian republics. The Ukrainian referendum was scheduled for the 1st of December, just eight days before the Viskuli meeting.

• 3. The Burbulis Memorandum

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  Gennady Burbulis arrived to see Boris Yeltsin on the 24th of September 1991, while Yeltsin was on vacation at the Black Sea coast. He carried a document prepared by Yegor Gaidar's economic team: "Russia's Strategy for the Transition Period," which quickly became known informally as the Burbulis Memorandum.

  The memorandum's core argument was that Russia should pursue economic independence through a "soft" and "temporary" political alliance with other republics, rather than remaining embedded in a reformed union. The goal, in plain terms, was to create a truly independent Russian state, not merely a declared one.

  As the newspaper Kommersant reported on the 7th of October 1991, Burbulis later declared in the Russian parliament that Russia had a special role as the legal successor to the Soviet Union. He argued that the sequence of agreements mattered: a political agreement should come first, then an economic one. The newspaper noted that Burbulis appeared to be trying to persuade Yeltsin not to sign the economic community treaty as it stood at the time.

  The developers of Burbulis' statement were named as Yegor Gaidar, Alexander Shokhin, and Konstantin Kagalovsky. At the same time, a separate faction that Kommersant described as "isolationist patriots," including Mikhail Maley, Nikolai Fedorov, and Mikhail Poltoranin, was criticizing those who wanted to preserve the Soviet Union in any form. These competing currents inside Russia's leadership all converged on the December meeting at Viskuli, where Burbulis himself would be one of the six signatories.

• 4. The Legal Architecture

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  The Soviet constitution did, on paper, allow republics to leave the union. Article 72 of the 1977 constitution gave union republics the right to secede freely. The USSR Supreme Soviet passed a law on the 3rd of April 1990 that specified the process for doing so. But none of this legal scaffolding was used to dissolve the USSR.

  Instead, the three leaders turned to a different instrument: the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, read together with the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The logic was that the original signatories of the 1922 treaty had the standing to undo it. Three of the four original signatories were present at Viskuli. The fourth, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, had been dissolved back in 1936 and no longer existed to participate.

  The Vienna Convention was not merely theoretical scaffolding. For Belarus it had entered into force on the 1st of May 1986, and for Ukraine on the 14th of May 1986, meaning both countries were already bound by its treaty law principles at the time of signing.

  The preamble of the Belovezha document stated plainly that "the USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence." The accords ran to 14 Articles and an introduction. Article 6 specified that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus would form a "common military and strategic space" with "united armed forces." Immediately after signing, Yeltsin called U.S. president Bush and read him Article 6 aloud, saying: "Dear George, I am finished. This is extremely, extremely important. Because of the tradition between us, I couldn't even wait ten minutes to call you."

• 5. Ratification and Resistance

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  On the 10th of December, just two days after the signing, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and the Supreme Council of Belarus both ratified the agreement. The Russian Supreme Soviet followed on the 12th of December, also formally denouncing the 1922 treaty and recalling Russian deputies from the USSR's Supreme Soviet.

  Gorbachev did not accept this quietly. His statement cut to the central objection: "The fate of the multinational state cannot be determined by the will of the leaders of three republics. The question should be decided only by constitutional means with the participation of all sovereign states and taking into account the will of all their citizens." He called the document's hasty appearance of serious concern, noting that it had not been discussed by populations or by the Supreme Soviets of the republics in whose name it was signed.

  The legitimacy question was not fully resolved until the 21st of December 1991, when representatives of 11 of the remaining 12 Soviet republics, all except Georgia, signed the Alma-Ata Protocol. This document reiterated both the end of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the CIS. With 11 republics now agreeing the Union no longer existed, the plurality needed for its continued existence as a federal state was gone.

  Three days after Alma-Ata, Gorbachev met privately with Yeltsin and accepted the fait accompli. He had already stated he would resign once he knew the CIS was a reality. On the 25th of December 1991, he resigned and handed control of the Kremlin to Yeltsin's office. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin Senate for the last time. The Russian flag was raised in its place. That same evening, U.S. president Bush gave a short television address marking the end of the Cold War.

• 6. Russia at the United Nations

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  On the 25th of December 1991, Russian president Yeltsin sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. The letter stated that the Soviet Union had been dissolved and that Russia would, as its successor state, continue the Soviet Union's membership in the United Nations.

  The request was specific and deliberate. The document asked that the name "Soviet Union" be replaced by "Russian Federation" across all UN records and entries. The stakes were high: if the former republics had all been treated as equal successors to the Soviet Union, or if the Soviet Union was regarded as having no successor at all, Russia would not have been able to retain the Soviet Union's permanent seat on the Security Council.

  The Alma-Ata Summit of the 21st of December had already issued a statement supporting Russia's claim to this successor status. The Secretary-General circulated Yeltsin's request to member states and received no objection. The Russian Federation took the seat.

  On the 31st of January 1992, Yeltsin personally attended a Security Council meeting as Russia's representative, the first such meeting in which Russia occupied the permanent seat originally granted to the Soviet Union under the UN Charter. Also on the 25th of December, the Russian SFSR adopted a law renaming itself "the Russian Federation" or "Russia," both names becoming equally official following the ratification of the Russian constitution in 1993.

• 7. Aftermath and Loose Ends

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  The 1993 Russian constitutional crisis had, according to some Russian politicians, one of its roots in the Belovezha Accords. The Congress of People's Deputies had repeatedly refused to ratify the Belovezhskaya Agreement and to remove references to the USSR's constitution and laws from the Russian constitution itself.

  Georgia took a different path from the other republics. It denounced the Belovezha Accords, the Alma-Ata Protocol, and the CIS Charter in 2008 and formally left the CIS in 2009.

  Ukraine's legal status within the Belovezha framework has remained contested. The CIS secretary general Sergey Lebedev stated that Ukraine has the right to withdraw from the agreement by sending a formal notification, but as of 2024 Ukraine has never sent such a notification. Ukrainian foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin offered a different reading, saying Ukraine could not withdraw from the CIS because it had never become a part of it. Yet the depositary records held in the Archive of the Government of Belarus show the agreement remains in force for Ukraine as of 2025, without reservations.

  Moldova passed legislation to denounce the Belovezha Accords, the Alma-Ata Protocol, and the CIS Charter on the 8th of April 2026. That withdrawal will take effect one year after formal notification is delivered to the CIS Executive Committee.

  And the original physical document? Stanislav Shushkevich, the Belarusian Parliament chairman who was one of its signatories, was told by his country's foreign ministry on the 7th of February 2013 that the original accords had gone missing. He had been trying to obtain the original copy to help write his memoirs.