DUSHANBE, December 8, 2011, Asia-Plus – The 20th anniversary of the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union is marked on Thursday December 8.
In December 1991 the world watched in amazement as the USSR collapsed. On December 8, 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus — Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich — met in the Belavezha Forest, Belarus and declared that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had “ceased to exist” as “a subject of international law” and a “geopolitical reality.”
The leaders signed the so-called Belavezha Accords, establishing a voluntary successor union called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and effectively marking the end of the Cold War.
Between March 1990 and the end of 1991, all 15 Soviet republics had declared independence.
Experts and political scientists note that the 20th anniversary of the fall of the USSR offers an opportunity both to remember and to look ahead. According to them, the reasons for the USSR’s collapse are many, ranging from its mania for top-down economic control, to its oppression of its own people, to its efforts to hold an empire in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, to the courage and leadership of Russian dissidents and Western leaders.
In 2005, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
