Belovezh Accords and the dissolution of the Soviet Union

The Belovezh Accords and the dissolution of the Soviet Union are presented not as the outcome of a carefully prepared constitutional settlement but as a clandestine decision made by three republic leaders over vodka. The account stresses the gap between the historical weight of their act and the improvised, almost farcical circumstances in which they chose to end the state they claimed the right to dissolve.

Background and the Symbolic Collapse

The episode follows the signing of a document by Mikhail Gorbachev. Immediately afterward, the Felix Dzerzhinsky Statue in Lubyanka Square, outside the KGB headquarters, is toppled, and the red flag is replaced by the tricolor of the 1917 provisional government. The narrative then moves forward several months to the leaders’ secret meeting, setting the dismantling of Soviet symbols beside the political act that will make the dissolution explicit.

Boris Yeltsin travels from Moscow without telling Gorbachev what he intends to do. At a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest, he meets Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian president Stanislav Shushkevich. The secrecy is matched by a striking lack of preparation: none of the three has the slightest idea what a federation or confederation might entail.

The Meeting and the Decision

The three leaders repeatedly invoke one rationale while drinking huge quantities of vodka in the sauna: their republics created the Soviet Union in 1922, so they believe that gives them the right to dissolve it. The account gives no elaborate constitutional argument or plan for what should replace the union. Instead, the founding date itself becomes the basis for an abrupt reversal: those who point to their republics’ role in creating the state claim authority to end it.

Yeltsin becomes so drunk that Kravchuk and Shushkevich have to carry him to bed. Before he passes out, he calls George Bush Sr. to make sure the American president will be the first to hear the news. Yeltsin tells him that he and the others have worked something out and that the Soviet Union no longer exists. The declaration is momentous; its delivery, in the middle of a drinking binge and just before Yeltsin is carried away, is deliberately undignified.

Gorbachev’s Fate and the Episode’s Irony

Shushkevich, described as the least important member of the troika, is assigned the task of informing Gorbachev. Stunned by the news, Gorbachev asks what will become of him. The question shifts the scene from the fate of a vast political union to the personal future of the man it has displaced.

That future is unexpectedly secure. Gorbachev is granted a dacha and a foundation, and is allowed to earn exceptionally high fees giving lectures for the rest of his life. The narrator compares this lenient outcome with the historical fate of deposed czars. The contrast sharpens the account’s central irony: the Soviet Union’s end is announced through secrecy, improvised reasoning, and drunken spectacle, while its deposed leader emerges with a privileged retirement.