New Union Treaty

Why the treaty was needed

The New Union Treaty was a 1990 draft treaty that would have replaced the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR in order to salvage and reform the Soviet Union. Gorbachev proposed a less centralised federal system at the party congress in July 1990; a draft was submitted to the USSR Supreme Soviet on 23 November 1990, and a drafting committee began work on 1 January 1991. The work was carried on at Novo-Ogaryovo, a government estate outside Moscow, where Gorbachev met the leaders of the union republics, and it became known as the Novo-Ogaryovo process. Six of the fifteen Soviet republics did not take part in the drafting: Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The March referendum and the 9+1 agreement

When agreement could not be reached on the distribution of power between the union and the republics, Gorbachev appealed for popular support. On 17 March 1991 the nine republics that participated in the drafting (Russia, Byelorussia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) held a referendum in which 76 percent of voters supported maintaining the federal system, a majority in all nine; opposition was greatest in large cities such as Moscow and Leningrad, while the other six republics, already moving towards independence, largely boycotted the vote. Building on that result, an agreement between the central government and the nine republics, known as the 9+1 agreement, was signed at Novo-Ogaryovo on 23 April. From the 9+1 meeting, the talks over the new union treaty, and a summer of drafting deadlocked over taxes and powers, the signing was set for 20 August.

What the draft provided

The text contained an introduction of basic principles followed by 26 articles. It proposed a Union of Sovereign and Equal States based on democracy and the rule of law as successor to the USSR: a voluntary association of sovereign republics with a common federal government, in which a member joined either directly or as part of another state, with relations between such states regulated by treaties. It provided for a Presidential Council of republic leaders and the union president, and a Union Constitutional Court; legislative power would be exercised by a bicameral USSR Supreme Soviet; defence, foreign affairs, the financial system, energy resources and overall coordination would fall to the centre, issuing its own currency, while the republics would determine their own state and administrative structures, own their natural resources except gold and diamonds, establish direct diplomatic and trade relations, and hold the right to freely secede.

Changes of name and a first draft

The first draft of the treaty went out in July 1991, and the proposed state was named the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics (Soyuz Sovetskikh Suverennykh Respublik), which would have preserved the acronym USSR. By September 1991 support for continuing the Soviet system had shifted towards turning the union into a confederation of sovereign states, and the final draft renamed the state as the Union of Sovereign States (Soyuz Suverennykh Gosudarstv). On 1 November 1991 a working group under Gorbachev's adviser Georgy Shakhnazarov submitted an alternative draft defining the new union as a confederative state. On 14 November the State Council adopted the compromise formula "democratic confederative state"; on 25 November Yeltsin, Shushkevich and Karimov refused to initial the draft, and on 27 November the fifth and last published version of the treaty appeared.

How the signing was stopped

By August eight of the nine republics except Ukraine had approved the draft with some conditions; Ukraine did not agree to its terms. A signing ceremony with the members of the union centre, starting with the RSFSR and then other republics, was scheduled for 20 August 1991, a date fixed when Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev met at Novo-Ogaryovo in the night of 29 to 30 July. The signing was prevented by the August Coup on the eve of the ceremony and the treaty was never signed. On 18 August the hardliners confined Gorbachev at his Crimean dacha to stop him returning to Moscow to sign the treaty, and the coup of 19-21 August collapsed in the face of popular resistance across the country.

The August coup and the end of the treaty

After the coup collapsed, the talks went on from September to December in an attempt to revive the union treaty, and on 2 September 1991 the plan was floated to conclude a treaty of a union of sovereign states, letting each republic decide its own form of participation and creating a State Council, with the Congress of People's Deputies asked to suspend parts of the Soviet constitution. On 5 September the Congress wound up its work and passed a law on Soviet state bodies in the transitional period that substantially changed the structure of power. Negotiations continued through October and November in the State Council, and the reform of the union treaty was finally buried by the Belovezha Accords on 8 December 1991.

Outcome and assessment

Ukraine's independence referendum on 1 December 1991 stood at 90.32 percent, removing a decisive republic from the project; on 8 December Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords declaring the Soviet Union's existence at an end and setting up the CIS, and on 21 December eight more republics joined at Alma-Ata. The Novo-Ogaryovo process ended when Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president on 25 December 1991, and the next day the USSR Supreme Soviet announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and dissolved itself. Whether the union treaty had been a workable alternative that could have saved the union, or a document already too late, is argued to this day.