The Soviet Union was formally dissolved on 26 December 1991, when the Soviet of the Republics, the upper chamber of the Supreme Soviet, adopted Declaration No. 142-N and voted the country out of existence. The night before, Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as president and the red flag was lowered over the Moscow Kremlin. The world’s largest country, 22,402,200 km² stretching more than 10,000 km across 11 time zones, split along the borders of its 15 union republics into 15 independent states: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the three South Caucasus states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the five Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Russia was recognised as the USSR’s successor state and kept its seat on the UN Security Council.
1922–1985: From Lenin’s Union Treaty to Gorbachev’s Kremlin
The map that broke apart in 1991 had been drawn in stages. The Soviet Union was created in 1922 by a treaty between four Soviet republics: the Russian SFSR, Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation, which later split into Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Central Asia was carved into national republics in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were annexed in 1940 under the secret protocols of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Baltic governments have always held that this annexation was illegal and that their states survived under occupation, a position backed by the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights and the United States; the Russian government maintains that the annexation was legitimate.
On paper the USSR was a federation of sovereign republics. The constitutions of 1924, 1936 and 1977 each gave every union republic the right to secede, and Article 78 of the 1977 constitution said a republic’s territory could not be altered without its consent. In practice power sat in Moscow with the Communist Party. The number of union republics settled at 15 after 1956, when the Karelo-Finnish SSR, a product of the Winter War with Finland, was merged into Russia as an autonomous republic, the only time in Soviet history that one union republic was absorbed into another. Those 15 internal borders are exactly the lines along which the country later divided.
Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo on 11 March 1985, a few hours after Konstantin Chernenko died. His glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) let national grievances in the republics be voiced openly.
1986–1988: Alma-Ata, Riga, Yerevan and Tallinn Break Ranks
The first serious unrest came not from the Baltic but from Kazakhstan. In December 1986 Gorbachev replaced Dinmukhamed Kunaev, the ethnic Kazakh head of the republic’s Communist Party, with Gennady Kolbin, an outsider from the Russian SFSR. Students gathered on Brezhnev Square in Alma-Ata on 17 December, and the protests, known as Jeltoqsan (“December”), turned into clashes with police and troops that lasted until 19 December. In Riga, about 5,000 people gathered at the Freedom Monument in June 1987 to mark Stalin’s 1941 deportations.
In 1988 Moscow began to lose control of two whole regions. In the Caucasus, the regional soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-majority autonomous oblast inside the Azerbaijan SSR, voted on 20 February 1988 to transfer to Armenia, and crowds swelled daily in Yerevan’s Theatre Square. Gorbachev refused to change the border, and the dispute grew into an armed conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis that outlived the Soviet Union.
On the Baltic coast the challenge was legal rather than violent. The Popular Front of Estonia was founded in April 1988, and both Lithuania’s Sąjūdis and the Popular Front of Latvia in June. On 16 November 1988 the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR declared sovereignty, ruling that Estonian law would take precedence over Soviet law and claiming the republic’s land, forests, mineral deposits and industry. Estonia was the first union republic to make such a declaration, and over the next two years almost every other republic, Russia included, followed its example.
1989–1990: The Baltic Way and Landsbergis in Vilnius
Violence in Georgia hardened opinion there. On 9 April 1989 Soviet troops broke up a crowd of demonstrators in front of the Communist Party headquarters in Tbilisi who had called for Georgia to leave the union; about 20 people were killed and more than 200 wounded. Four months later, on 23 August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, an estimated 2 million people joined hands in the Baltic Way, a human chain some 675 km long running from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. In December 1989 the Congress of People’s Deputies accepted a commission report condemning the pact’s secret protocols, the legal basis of the 1940 annexations.
Lithuania moved first. Gorbachev’s visit to Vilnius on 11–13 January 1990 drew a pro-independence rally of about 250,000 people. On 11 March 1990 the newly elected Supreme Council chose Vytautas Landsbergis, the leader of Sąjūdis, as its chairman and adopted the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania, making it the first Soviet republic to declare independence.
January–August 1991: Vilnius TV Tower, the March Referendum and Foros
Moscow’s last attempt to hold the Baltic by force came on 13 January 1991, when Soviet troops and KGB special forces stormed the Vilnius TV Tower; 14 unarmed civilians were killed. Lithuania answered with a poll on 9 February in which 93.2% voted for independence, and on 3 March 77.8% of those voting in Estonia’s referendum backed restoring independence. Gorbachev’s counter-move was the union-wide referendum of 17 March 1991, in which 77.85% of voters endorsed keeping a reformed Soviet Union. Six republics boycotted it: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. Georgia held its own vote on 31 March, when 99.5% chose independence, and its parliament declared it on 9 April 1991.
A new union treaty was due to be signed in August. To stop it, Vice President Gennady Yanayev, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and others formed an emergency committee on 19 August 1991 and placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his holiday home in Foros, in Crimea. Thousands of Muscovites gathered to defend the White House, the seat of the Russian parliament, and Boris Yeltsin, elected Russian president that June, rallied opposition from the top of a tank. The coup collapsed on 21 August.
The failed putsch destroyed what authority the centre had left. On 24 August Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and on the same day the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR declared independence, subject to a referendum. Between August and December ten republics seceded. The Soviet Union recognised the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on 6 September 1991, and the three were admitted to the United Nations on 17 September.
December 1991: Kyiv’s Referendum, Belovezha Forest and Alma-Ata
The decisive vote came in Ukraine, the second most powerful republic after Russia. On 1 December 1991 about 92% of Ukrainian voters confirmed the August declaration of independence, ending any realistic chance of keeping even a smaller union together. A week later, on 8 December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met secretly at the Viskuli hunting estate in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, the forest straddling the border between western Belarus and Poland, and signed the Belavezha Accords. These declared that the USSR had ceased to exist “as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality” and created the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. Gorbachev called it an unconstitutional coup. The Ukrainian and Belarusian parliaments ratified the accords on 10 December, and the Russian parliament on 12 December, when it also denounced the 1922 union treaty.
Kazakhstan became the last republic to declare independence, on 16 December. On 21 December leaders of 11 of the 12 remaining republics, every one except Georgia, met in the Kazakh capital and signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the dissolution, enlarged the CIS and agreed that Russia would take over the Soviet Union’s UN membership, including its permanent Security Council seat.
On the evening of 25 December 1991 Gorbachev announced his resignation on national television and handed control of the nuclear arsenal to Yeltsin. At 7:35 pm Moscow time the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin, and at 7:45 pm the Russian tricolour went up in its place. The upper chamber of the Supreme Soviet voted the union out of existence the next day, and Russia took the Soviet seat at a Security Council meeting on 31 December 1991 without objection.
After 26 December 1991: Fifteen Capitals and the Disputed Edges
The successor states inherited very unequal shares of the map. Russia kept roughly 76% of the old territory, from Kaliningrad on the Baltic to Chukotka on the Bering Strait, and remains the largest country in the world. Kazakhstan, at about 2,724,900 km², became the ninth-largest country and the largest landlocked one, while Ukraine became the largest country lying entirely within Europe. Five Central Asian states were independent for the first time in their modern history, and capitals that had been republican administrative centres, among them Tashkent, Bishkek, Ashgabat, Dushanbe and Chișinău, became national capitals overnight. You can see how the 15 republics fitted together on this map of the Soviet Union and its countries.
The new states also took different paths. The Baltic states never joined the CIS, turned towards the West and became members of both NATO and the European Union in 2004, a story told in more detail in our guide to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Georgia joined the CIS in December 1993 and left after its 2008 war with Russia, Turkmenistan became an associate member in August 2005, and Moldova denounced the CIS treaty in April 2026.
Because the old internal borders became international ones, regions that rejected their new states were left in limbo. Transnistria, in eastern Moldova, is an unrecognised Russian-backed state. Abkhazia and South Ossetia broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s and are recognised as independent by Russia and a handful of other UN members, while Georgia and most of the world regard them as Georgian territory. Nagorno-Karabakh was fought over by Armenians and Azerbaijanis from 1988, through a 1994 ceasefire and a second war in 2020, until an Azerbaijani offensive in September 2023 led to the announced dissolution of the breakaway republic. In Ukraine, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and on 30 September 2022, during its full-scale invasion, it declared the annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions; Ukraine and most UN members regard all of them as Ukrainian territory.
Most of the new Soviet frontiers held without a fight. Yugoslavia’s did not, as the breakup of Yugoslavia shows town by town.