The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy

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