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BELOVEZHYE ACCORDS
 
The Belovezhye Accords clinched the dissolution of the USSR and started the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). They were signed on 8 December 1991 at Viskuli (Belovezhskaya Pushcha, Belarus) by the heads of state and government of three Soviet republics, the Russian Federation, Belarus and Ukraine.

The document registered the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a legal international entity and proclaimed the formation of the CIS. The Agreement on the Establishment of the CIS declared the signatories' will to develop cooperation among its members in the political, economic, humanitarian, cultural and other spheres. The RSFSR Supreme Soviet ratified the Belovezhye Accords on 12 December 1991, simultaneously declaring the Union Treaty of 1922 null and void.

On 21 December 1991 the Agreement was joined by Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. These countries, together with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, signed a Declaration on the Aims and Principles of the CIS in Alma-ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan. In December 1993 the CIS agreement was joined by Georgia.

Russia was named in the Agreement the legal successor to the Soviet Union. It assumed all Soviet property and financial obligations in exchange for Soviet property abroad and other assets. Ukraine refused to accept this manner of settling Soviet commitments, laying claim to part of the Soviet assets abroad and of gold reserves, and insisting that Russia repay the debts to the Ukrainian Sberbank' depositors.

Controversy is still raging over the Belovezhye Accords and the events that followed. It is alleged that in terms of their content and the way of adoption the Belovezhye Accords were illegal; that they directly contravened the USSR and RSFSR Constitutions then in effect and the result of the All-Union Referendum on the Preservation of the USSR held in March 1991. In fact they were the product of the struggle for power waged by the nomenklatura of the Soviet republics against that of the Center as represented by the Gorbachev government. The Union government was preparing an alternative project for transforming the Soviet Union into the confederative Union of Sovereign States (USS), a project that was never put into effect.

The heads of the three republics who secretly got together in Belovezhskaya Pushcha declared that the USS was an impossibility. Besides, according to the leaders of the ex-Soviet republics, by December 1991 only the RSFSR and Kazakhstan still retained formal membership of the USSR, as they had not declared themselves independent, so that the Belovezhye Accords merely confirmed de jure the de facto disintegration of the Union.

However, the legality of declarations of independence by Belarus, Kirghizia and Tajikistan, which had not held referenda on the issue, was questionable. Besides, at the time the Accords were signed, the establishment of the USS had been approved by representatives of seven of the Union's republics, Russia and Belorussia included, on 14 November 1991. The treaty on the establishment of the Union of Sovereign States was scheduled to be signed on 9 December 1991; the Belovezhye Accords torpedoed the project at the eleventh hour for no valid, legal reason.

The fight for a revision or annulment of the Belovezhye Accords continued even after the complete disintegration of the Soviet Union. In March 1996 the Russian State Duma denounced the Belovezhye Accords, yet the move had no serious political or legal consequences.

Numerous opinion polls suggest that most Russians (over 70 percent, according to some estimates) regret the collapse of the Soviet Union and believe that it was avoidable.
Whether it was avoidable or not, the fact remains that the only individuals who gained by the collapse of the Soviet Union were the extremely narrow strata of the Union republics' ethnic elites, while the absolute majority of the people in these republics suffered incalculable hardships, financial and economic ruin, loss of employment and, in a great many cases, loss of life in pogroms and internecine wars.

For 25 million Russians, and even more Russian speakers, who overnight found themselves "abroad" in the newly independent states without moving an inch, the tragedy included loss of their Motherland.

For some of the republics, especially in Central Asia, Azerbaijan etc., the dissolution of the Soviet Union signified, on a historical scale, a backward step into sheer Oriental despotism, with certain "democratic" trappings like parliaments, parties, referenda, and so on, which do not fool even the least observant.
 
 
 
 
 
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