The Belavezha Accords mark the dissolution of the Soviet Union in a scene presented less as a carefully prepared constitutional settlement than as a secret, improvised decision by three republic leaders. At a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest, Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich invoked their republics’ role in creating the Union to claim the right to dissolve it. The abruptness of the decision, and the way Mikhail Gorbachev was informed only afterward, give the event its defining political and dramatic force.

From public collapse to a secret meeting

The account places the meeting after a visible sequence of symbols giving way. The Felix Dzerzhinsky Statue in Lubyanka Square, outside the headquarters of the Committee for State Security, is toppled; the red flag is replaced by the tricolor of the 1917 provisional government. A few months later, the decisive gathering takes place in secret at a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest. Yeltsin leaves Moscow without telling Gorbachev what he intends to do.

The three participants are the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Their discussion, as recounted here, is not underpinned by a worked-out institutional plan: none of them has the slightest idea what a federation or confederation might look like. Instead, they return to a single historical argument. Their three republics created the Soviet Union in 1922, they say, and therefore have the right to dissolve it. The account stresses the gap between the scale of the decision and the scant preparation behind it.

The decision and its announcement

The meeting is rendered as a drinking binge as much as a political conference. The presidents drink heavily in the sauna while repeating their justification. Yeltsin becomes so drunk that Kravchuk and Shushkevich have to carry him to bed. Before he loses consciousness, however, he calls George Bush, senior, to ensure the American president is the first to hear the news: “George, the guys and I have worked something out. The Soviet Union no longer exists.”

That call gives the decision an audience abroad before Gorbachev, still the Soviet president, has been told. The asymmetry is pointed: the man presiding over the Union is excluded from the meeting that announces its end, while Yeltsin makes a point of notifying the American president. The accord’s portrayal thus turns a political transfer of power into a sequence of personal choices, messages, and omissions.

Gorbachev learns what has happened

The task of informing Gorbachev falls not to Yeltsin, the most powerful of the three, but to Shushkevich, described as the least important member of the troika. Shushkevich tells him that the Soviet Union no longer exists. Gorbachev’s reported response is: “But then what will become of me?” The question makes the collapse of the state personal: alongside the fate of the Union is the immediate fate of the leader it has displaced.

The account then contrasts Gorbachev’s alarm with the relative leniency of his subsequent circumstances. He is granted a dacha and a foundation and is able to give highly paid lectures for the rest of his life. Set against the account’s reference to Russian history since the Middle Ages, this is presented as an exceptionally gentle fate for a deposed ruler.

Political afterlife

The dissolution also becomes a point of reference in later political arguments about the republics and the people left outside Russia. At a National Bolshevik Party convention, Eduard Limonov describes the former Soviet republics as territories abandoned by Gorbachev and argues that the breakup left 25 million Russians without their former place in the Union. He cites 900,000 Russians in Latvia, 11 million in Ukraine, and 5 million in Kazakhstan, presenting their situation as the basis for a new political struggle on the Union’s periphery.

Those claims belong to Limonov’s later rhetoric, not to the negotiations at the hunting lodge. Their place in the account nevertheless shows how the dissolution acquired competing meanings: for the three presidents, a decision justified by the founding republics’ authority; for Limonov, a rupture that abandoned Russians beyond the new borders. The scene of the three leaders drinking and deciding without a replacement plan stands in sharp contrast to the far-reaching consequences that later political movements would attach to their act.