Dissolution of the Soviet Union

The Dissolution of the Soviet Union is recounted as both a historic rupture and an improvised act of political decision: in secret, Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich announced that the state was over, without a plan for what should replace it. The episode’s almost farcical informality—vodka, a sauna, an intoxicated president, and a late-night telephone call—stands against the scale of what it ended. Its aftermath is measured not only in the fate of Mikhail Gorbachev, but in the conflicting hopes and disillusionments that shaped post-Soviet Russia.

The symbolic unmaking of the old order

The narrative places the dissolution amid a sequence of visible reversals. The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet security police, is toppled in the square in front of the Lubyanka, the institution’s headquarters. The red flag gives way to the tricolor of the 1917 provisional government. These are more than changes of monument and banner: they make the collapse legible in public space, as the symbols of Soviet authority are displaced by emblems from an earlier, unfinished political history.

The account then shifts from the public spectacle to a decision made out of sight. A few months after the statue falls, Yeltsin leaves Moscow without telling Gorbachev what he intends to do. At a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest, he meets Kravchuk and Shushkevich. The contrast is sharp: the end of a union is decided not in a carefully prepared constitutional forum, but at a private gathering whose participants, the narrative emphasizes, have not worked out what a federation or confederation would mean.

The lodge meeting and the declaration

The three leaders justify their action by returning to the union’s origin. They repeat that their three republics created the Soviet Union in 1922 and therefore have the right to dissolve it. The narrative presents this as the rationale they use among themselves, not as the culmination of a considered blueprint. The meeting is held in utmost secrecy, and its informality is underscored by the huge quantities of vodka consumed in the sauna. No detailed replacement structure is ready; the decision precedes the institutional arrangements that might have given it shape.

Yeltsin becomes so drunk that Kravchuk and Shushkevich have to carry him to bed. Before losing consciousness, he calls George Bush Sr. so that the American president will be the first to hear the news. Yeltsin announces, “George, the guys and I have worked something out. The Soviet Union no longer exists.” The casual phrase “worked something out” compresses an event of immense consequence into the language of an improvised arrangement. The telephone call also turns the lodge decision outward: before Gorbachev is informed, the leader of the United States has been told that the Soviet Union is finished.

The task of telling Gorbachev falls to Shushkevich, whom the narrator describes as the least important member of the trio. Gorbachev, aghast, asks, “But then what will become of me?” The question reduces the dissolution to its personal consequence for the man displaced by it, while exposing how little provision the conspirators have made for the departing president—or, as the narrative suggests, for the political order beyond him.

Gorbachev’s fate and competing judgments

The answer to Gorbachev’s question is unexpectedly mild. He is to receive a dacha, a foundation, and permission to earn exceptionally high fees lecturing for the rest of his life. The narrator contrasts this comfortable retirement with the historical fate of deposed rulers in Russia, calling it exceptionally lenient by comparison. The dissolution thus removes Gorbachev from power without bringing the personal retribution that the country’s history might lead one to expect.

The book also sets the French public’s sentimental attachment to Gorbachev against the interpretation of the narrator’s mother, who was living in France but shared what he describes as the view of the immense majority of Russians. To her, Gorbachev was an apparatchik overwhelmed by forces he had unwillingly unleashed; Yeltsin embodied his people’s wish for freedom. Yeltsin had broken with the Communist system that had formed him, followed Andrei Sakharov’s coffin beside Yelena Bonner, become Russia’s first elected president, and defended the White House. He had outlawed the Communist Party and liquidated the union that had imprisoned its constituent nations. Within two years, the narrator says, he had become a major historical figure.

That account does not settle what the dissolution would achieve. The narrator frames the next question as whether Yeltsin could turn his momentum into democracy, a market economy, and a new society in a country long marked by backwardness and misfortune. The question preserves a distinction between ending the Soviet state and creating a viable successor. The lodge meeting supplies the first decision; it cannot, by itself, answer what kind of country will follow.

The post-Soviet inheritance

The book’s later scenes show the collapse’s inheritance not as a single political consensus but as rival responses to a disoriented society. Among the young, anger at the cynicism that has become a kind of religion in Russia draws thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, toward Eduard Limonov. His admirers are much younger than he is, but see in his adventurous life and prison endurance a legend they can emulate. Their devotion belongs to a world in which the old order has disappeared but has not been replaced by a shared account of justice, dignity, or purpose.

That discontent takes organizational form in the National Bolshevik Party. Branches appear in Krasnoyarsk, Ufa, and Nizhny Novgorod; when Limonov visits one city, party members meet him at the station, arrange accommodation, and spend whole nights listening to him. Zakhar Prilepin admires Limonov’s force and alertness, yet does not feel entirely at ease in his presence. Among the other members, by contrast, Prilepin finds loyalty, solidarity, and a willingness to go to prison for their ideas. Their moral code, the narrative says, stands diametrically opposed to the corrupt and disoriented world that succeeded the Soviet Union.

The party’s convention gives this dispersed following a public gathering. Although the organization has seven thousand members across Russia, only several hundred reach the meeting; some sleep at a bunker, others at a workers’ hostel. Finding a venue is difficult because owners withdraw their offers, apparently after police intervention. Delegates fear a bomb scare, harassment, or an outright ban, but the convention opens. Limonov sees the result of three years spent carrying copies of the party paper to train stations: people have arrived, and he recognizes them as brothers. The scene shows one response to the dissolution’s unsettled aftermath—a political community assembled around a leader and a counter-code of loyalty, defiance, and shared risk.

That opposition, too, later meets its limits. After Garry Kasparov does not run for president and the movement The Other Russia fails in the elections, Limonov creates Strategy 31, named for the constitutional right to demonstrate. Its supporters gather on Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first of months that have one; typically about a hundred demonstrators face five times as many police, and dozens are arrested. Limonov repeatedly spends a couple of days in prison. The sequence does not make these later movements a simple consequence of the dissolution, but it places them within the political landscape the collapse left behind: a state ended in one hurried meeting, while the argument over freedom, power, and the shape of Russia continued in streets, organizations, and prisons.