Twenty five years ago this week, on December 8th, 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) simply ceased to exist. The heads of the Russian Federation, Belarus and Ukraine – Boris Yeltsin, Stanislav Shushkevich and Leonid Kravchuk – met in a government hunting lodge in Belarus, and, to the surprise of the world, signed the so-called Belovezha Accords to terminate the existence of the Soviet Union and establish a voluntary alliance, the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place. And, despite the best efforts of then USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev to keep the country together, the USSR was no more.
On December 25th, Gorbachev resigned, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolour was raised in its place.
The announcement of the Belovezha Accords on the 9th came as a huge shock to both its citizens and a world in which the USSR had been a central fact of geopolitical life for 69 years, a totalitarian, military and political superpower whose writ ran over its own 22 million sq km, and far beyond – one half of the Cold War.
But there was an inevitability to the dissolution of a union most of whose remaining 12 states had already declared independence and whose core, the Russian Federation, was teetering on the edge of economic and political disintegration.
Last week the anniversary was celebrated in Washington by a conservative thinktank, addressed by three of the accords’ signatories. This was, after all, the symbolic high point – albeit a bit of a damp squib moment – of the successful confrontation between the US and its arch-enemy, the triumph of capitalism over communism.
In Moscow the occasion appears to have passed largely unmentioned – Vladimir Putin in 2005 described the demise of the Soviet Union "as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century". Russia remains a world power, a superpower no longer. But its ruler still aspires to empire.