Belovezha Accords

Background

The revision process began on 23 April 1991, when Gorbachev and the leaders of nine republics adopted a joint statement at Novo-Ogaryovo. In the all-Union referendum of 17 March 1991, 77 percent of voters backed preserving and reforming the USSR, though six republics did not take part. By late July 1991 a draft treaty on a Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics was ready, with signature set for 20 August. The failed coup of 19-21 August 1991 destroyed that timetable, and the republics thereafter moved toward independence on their own.

Signature and ratification

The three delegations met at Viskuli on 8 December 1991. There were six signatories: for Belarus, Supreme Soviet chairman Stanislav Shushkevich and prime minister Vyacheslav Kebich; for Russia, President Boris Yeltsin and first deputy prime minister Gennady Burbulis; for Ukraine, President Leonid Kravchuk and prime minister Vitold Fokin. The draft was written overnight, and the next day a fourteen-point statement was agreed, declaring that negotiations on a new union treaty had reached a dead end and that the central government's short-sighted policy had produced an economic and political crisis and a catastrophic fall in living standards.

The accords themselves declared that the USSR was ceasing to exist as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. Article 14 fixed Minsk as the seat of the coordinating bodies and terminated the activity of all Soviet institutions on the signatories' territory. Ukraine's Supreme Soviet ratified on 10 December by 295 votes to 10, Belarus's Supreme Soviet by 263 to 1, and Russia's Supreme Soviet on 12 December by 188 to 7, bringing the accords into force. On 21 December, eleven states signed the CIS accession protocol at Alma-Ata. Georgia and the three Baltic states did not join; the Baltic states regard their incorporation into the USSR in 1940 as illegal.

Legal basis and controversy

The accords were built on the status of the original signatories of the 1922 treaty that created the USSR. That treaty had been signed by the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SFSR, and three of those four republics still existed, which allowed the reading that they could dissolve the union while bypassing the other republics. This raised legal and political controversy over whether three republics alone had the authority to dissolve the entire Soviet Union; the signing of the Alma-Ata Protocol by eleven states settled the matter in practice.

The central government in Moscow denied the accords' legality and validity. Gorbachev argued that the fate of a multi-ethnic state could not be decided by the will of three republican leaders, but only by a constitutional process taking account of the participation of all the republics and the will of their peoples, and the day after the signing he issued a statement claiming, among other things, that Kazakhstan and others had avoided the talks. The central power was nonetheless already powerless. The remnant federal government lasted four more days, and on 25 December, with Gorbachev's resignation, control of the Kremlin passed to the Russian presidency. The final legal step came on 26 December, when the Soviet of the Republics, the upper chamber of the USSR Supreme Soviet, recognized the collapse of the union and voted to dissolve both itself and the union. The lower chamber, the Soviet of the Union, lacked a quorum after Russia recalled its deputies on 12 December and could not convene.

No order to arrest the participants was given. The Belarusian KGB reported on the preparations for the signing to Moscow, and special forces surrounded Viskuli, but Moscow only ordered the officers to hold their positions and await instructions; the order never came. Gorbachev later explained that he had feared the risk of civil war and that arrests would have looked like an attempt to cling to power.

Aftermath

Russia became the successor state of the USSR. On 25 December Yeltsin informed UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and that Russia would continue the USSR's UN membership, in particular its permanent seat on the Security Council, as successor state. Responsibility for the Soviet debt and nuclear weapons also passed to Russia. The Alma-Ata summit of 21 December likewise issued a statement supporting Russia's status as successor state in matters of UN membership.

The legal status of the accords remained contested. On 15 March 1996 the Russian State Duma adopted a resolution declaring that the Belovezha Accords signed by Yeltsin and Burbulis had no legal force in the Russian Federation; it produced no practical political outcome but did help set off talks on Russian-Belarusian integration. In September 1998 the Russian official Khasbulatov conceded that ratification of the accords had been the exclusive prerogative of the Congress of People's Deputies and that the Supreme Soviet's decision had been merely advisory. In the May 1999 attempt to impeach Yeltsin, a special State Duma commission found that the signing had violated Soviet and Russian constitutions and laws and concluded that there were grounds to charge treason, but the impeachment failed to win parliamentary support.

The CIS itself was created not as a state but as a regional international organization. On 31 March 1994 the CIS Economic Court ruled that the 1991 accords took precedence over the CIS Charter and that the Charter did not change the founding conditions of the eleven states that had ratified them. Membership continued to shift. Georgia annulled the accords, the Alma-Ata Protocol and the CIS Charter in 2008 and left the CIS in 2009. Ukraine took part in founding the CIS but has since withdrawn from many CIS agreements, and in 2014 its National Security and Defence Council decided to halt Ukraine's CIS chairmanship and declared the start of full withdrawal; Ukraine's foreign minister Klimkin said Ukraine could not withdraw because it had never been a member, while CIS secretary-general Lebedev said Ukraine had never sent notice of withdrawal and remained part of the CIS as of 2024. Moldova passed a law on 8 April 2026 annulling the Belovezha Accords, the Alma-Ata Protocol and the CIS Charter; it takes effect a year after formal notification to the CIS executive committee.

The original copy of the accords is reported to be lost. On 7 February 2013 the Belarusian foreign ministry told former Belarusian leader Shushkevich that the original had disappeared; he had sought it for work on his memoirs.