New Union Treaty

• 1. Introduction

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  The New Union Treaty was a document that might have saved a superpower. In the summer of 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was racing against time to hold fifteen republics together under a reformed federal system. A signing ceremony had been scheduled for the 20th of August. It never happened. What stands between that ceremony and the collapse of the Soviet Union is a story of referendums, backroom meetings on a country estate, and a coup carried out in a Crimean dacha. The questions at the heart of this story are not abstract: who controls natural resources, who can secede, and what does it mean to be sovereign inside a union that no longer commands loyalty?

• 2. Novo-Ogaryovo and the 9+1 Process

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  A governmental estate called Novo-Ogaryovo gave its name to the entire negotiating process. Gorbachev first floated the idea of a less centralized federal system at the Communist Party Congress of July 1990. A draft was submitted to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union on the 23rd of November 1990, and a drafting committee formally began work on the 1st of January 1991.

  Six of the fifteen Soviet republics refused to participate from the start: Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Their absence was not a minor footnote. These were republics already moving toward full independence, and their citizens largely boycotted the referendum that followed.

  On the 17th of March 1991, the nine participating republics held that referendum. Russia, Byelorussia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan all took part. Across those nine, 76 percent of voters supported maintaining the federal system. Opposition was strongest in large cities, particularly Leningrad and Moscow. Despite that majority, agreement on how to divide power between the center and the republics remained elusive.

  Gorbachev pressed forward. On the 23rd of April, the Soviet central government and the nine republics signed what became known as the 9+1 agreement, reached at Novo-Ogaryovo. The framework for a new kind of union was taking shape, though its precise boundaries were still bitterly contested.

• 3. A Disputed Map of Sovereignty

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  Ukraine complicated every calculation. By August 1991, eight of the nine republics had approved the draft treaty with some conditions. Ukraine was the exception. In the simultaneous Ukrainian referendum on the 17th of March, voters had backed joining the Union, but on the specific basis of the 16th of July 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine. The terms Kyiv insisted on were not the terms Moscow would accept.

  Below the level of the fifteen union republics, a separate contest was playing out. Most of the autonomous republics inside those republics wanted to raise their own status and sign the treaty directly. On the 12th of July 1991, the Supreme Soviet passed a resolution stating that each subject of the federation, including republics incorporated within other republics on a treaty or constitutional basis, possessed the right to sign the treaty text.

  As a compromise, the final draft allowed a state to join the Union as part of another state. But when the signing at Novo-Ogaryovo was set for the 23rd of July, only the nine republics received invitations. Leaders of eighteen of the twenty autonomous republics defined in the 1977 Constitution had participated in the drafting process, including all sixteen republics under the Russian SFSR and the Crimean ASSR reconstituted by the Ukrainian SSR. Adjara and Nakhchivan were the only exceptions. The question of autonomous republic status remained unresolved when events overtook the entire process.

• 4. What the Treaty Would Have Built

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  The text of the proposed treaty contained an introduction of basic principles followed by 26 articles. Its central ambition was to convert the Soviet Union into a confederation of sovereign and equal states built on democracy and rule of law, replacing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a political entity.

  A Presidential Council would be created, consisting of the leaders of the republics alongside the president of the Union, responsible for major federal decisions and coordination. A Union Constitutional Court would settle disputes over the exercise of powers by Union organs. Legislative power would remain with a two-chamber Supreme Soviet: a Soviet of the Republics elected by the national population, and a Soviet of the Union.

  The division of powers was perhaps the most consequential part. The central government would retain control of defence, foreign affairs, the financial system, energy resources as a whole, and the issuance of currency. The republics would control their own administrative and territorial structures, and, critically, they would gain ownership of their natural resources, with the exception of gold and diamond resources. Republics could also establish their own direct diplomatic and trade relations with foreign states.

  Gorbachev argued publicly that dismantling the union would end only in bloodshed. The name for the proposed state shifted as the political ground shifted beneath it. The August 1991 draft called it the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, preserving the Cyrillic acronym that spelled out the familiar USSR. By September 1991, the proposed name had changed again to the Union of Sovereign States, dropping the word Soviet entirely.

• 5. The Coup and the Collapse

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  On the 18th of August 1991, two days before the signing ceremony was to take place, hardliners moved against Gorbachev. They confined him in his Crimean dacha to prevent him from returning to Moscow. Their calculation was straightforward: the treaty, once signed, would encourage smaller republics to follow the path Lithuania had already mapped toward full independence.

  The August Coup collapsed quickly, overwhelmed by opposition from both smaller and larger republics, with Russia prominent among them. But the treaty it was meant to stop was now dead. The signing ceremony that had been scheduled for the 20th of August never occurred.

  What replaced the New Union Treaty was signed on the 8th of December 1991, at Belovezha. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords, which marked the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union. The republics became independent states. In place of the union, the leaders organized the Commonwealth of Independent States, an organization of twelve newly independent states.

  The Baltic states never joined the CIS. Georgia was absent until 1993, then withdrew in 2008 following the Russo-Georgian War. Ukraine, which never formally became a full member, ended its participation in CIS statutory bodies in 2018 amid the Russo-Ukrainian War. The Commonwealth born from the wreckage of the New Union Treaty carried with it from the start the fractures the treaty had failed to heal.