Dmitri Volkov?

Dmitri Volkov was a constitutional lawyer and the chief legal architect of the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, the treaty that refounded the Soviet Union as a confederation of nine republics in March 1992. He served as lead drafter during the eighteen-month negotiation that followed the August Emergency, and remained the Union's principal constitutional adviser through two decades of federal drift and crisis.

Volkov was born in 1955 in Moscow and trained as a jurist at Moscow State University during the stagnation of the Brezhnev era. He entered the apparatus of the Supreme Soviet in 1989, where he began drafting amendments to the 1977 Constitution during the early reform period. He caught the attention of Mikhail Gorbachev's legal advisers during the drafting of the failed Union Treaty of 1991, and when the August Emergency forced a renegotiation of Soviet federalism in the autumn of 1991, Volkov was brought into the inner circle of negotiators at Novo-Ogaryovo, the government dacha complex west of Moscow where the talks took place.

The distinguishing feature of Volkov's constitutional framework was that it preserved the fiction of Union sovereignty and central authority while explicitly granting to each republic extensive powers over internal affairs, taxation, and natural resources. This ambiguity was intentional. The nine republics that remained after the departures of the Baltics, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova each required different concessions: the Kazakh Sovereign Republic demanded control over its vast oil reserves; Belarus sought protection for its industrial base; the Siberian republics wanted autonomy in resource extraction. Rather than write a constitution that forced each republic into the same mould, Volkov engineered a treaty text elastic enough to accommodate these contradictions. He later described this approach in a 1999 interview with the Kommersant, saying that "a precise constitution would have been impossible, so we made an open one."

This flexibility had consequences. The text of the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords was deliberately vague on fiscal transfers, currency authority, and the scope of central jurisdiction. Within a year of signature, these ambiguities produced the Compromise of Sochi, a separate agreement between Boris Yeltsin and the Union premier over dual-track pricing. By the early 2000s, they had enabled the Confederal Drift, the incremental transfer of authority from Moscow to the republics that Volkov had perhaps inadvertently sanctioned. He remained in office as the Union's chief constitutional officer, issuing legal opinions on each new assertion of republican autonomy, gradually watching his own framework dissolve into what he privately called "a union of documents rather than of power."

The Tyumen Compact of 2014, which granted Siberian republics direct control over energy exports, struck Volkov as a breach of the constitutional logic he had designed. His public statements that year suggest a man watching his life's work hollowed out. He gave a speech at the Nazarbayev Center for Eurasian Studies in September 2014 arguing that the Compact had "transformed the USSS from a confederation into a mere clearinghouse." Scholars disagree on whether Volkov's original constitution could have prevented this outcome, or whether the centripetal forces released by the August Emergency made federalism inevitable. Dmitri Sergeyev, the architect of the Tyumen Compact, later claimed that Volkov had written flexibility into the accords precisely to avoid a constitutional crisis—that the vagueness Volkov had embedded was his way of saying that no fixed form could hold nine republics together.

Volkov retired from the Union premiership's constitutional office in 2009, having served under five rotating premiers. He published a memoir in 2015 titled The Architecture of Compromise, drawing on his papers, which are now housed in the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library. The memoir reveals his ambivalence about the Accords: he had not expected them to preserve the Union indefinitely, but had hoped to build enough legal elasticity into the framework that the confederation could contract without collapse. Whether the USSS survives its current fiscal crisis, or fragments into independent republics, may depend in part on the constitutional groundwork Volkov laid more than thirty years ago.