The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy

retaliation. Later that month, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces Command near Moscow saw a blip on his radar screen indicating a missile headed toward the USSR. Then he saw what appeared to be four more missiles headed in the same direction. Suspecting a computer malfunction, he did not report the image to his superiors. Had he done so, nuclear war between the two powers might well have become a reality.

To his suicide note Akhromeev attached a fifty-ruble banknote—money he owed the Kremlin cafeteria for lunches there.

read out the text: “In view of the mortal danger hanging over Ukraine in connection with the coup d’état of 19 August 1991 in the USSR, and continuing the thousand-year tradition of state-building in Ukraine, . . . the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic solemnly declares the independence of Ukraine and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state—Ukraine . . . . This act takes effect from the moment of its approval.”30 Kravchuk asked the deputies to vote.

Ukraine’s parliament voted for independence, a similar declaration was made by Belarus; on August 26 came one by Ukraine’s other neighbor, Moldova. Faraway Azerbaijan would proclaim its independence on August 30. It would be followed the next day by Kyrgyzstan and a day later by Uzbekistan.

member states of the Commonwealth is terminated,” read the final paragraph of the agreement. It was a natural concluding statement for a document that began with the following declaration: “We, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation (RSFSR), and Ukraine, as founding states of the USSR that signed the union treaty of 1922 . . . hereby establish that the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceases its existence.”25 The idea that the three founding republics of the Union could not just leave it but had to dissolve it altogether belonged to Yeltsin’s legal adviser Sergei Shakhrai. The Soviet constitution guaranteed the right of republics to leave the Union—a right realized in September 1991, after long struggle, by the three Baltic republics. But Shakhrai’s argument went further: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus were not only leaving the Union but dissolving it. The Soviet Union had been formed in December 1922 by four Soviet socialist republics: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Federation, which included the future republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. When the Transcaucasian Federation was abolished in 1936, it was up to the three remaining founding members of the Union to decide the question of its future existence—so went Shakhrai’s argument.26 According to Kebich, the statement