Memoranda on the Treaty Negotiations?

The Memoranda on the Treaty Negotiations are the working records of the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords negotiations, produced between September 1991 and March 1992 by the delegations of the nine republics that chose to remain in the Union, along with papers from the office of Mikhail Gorbachev. They consist of position papers, drafts, minutes, and correspondence exchanged among negotiators, and are preserved across three archival holdings: the Archive of the Russian Presidential Library, the Archive of the Russian Sovereign Republic Council of Ministers, and the institutional files of the Union Negotiations Secretariat, now held by the Nazarbayev Center for Eurasian Studies.

The memoranda begin in the immediate aftermath of the August Emergency. The earliest dated document, from 5 September 1991, is a two-page memo from the Russian delegation to Gorbachev's office proposing the structure of what would become the Novo-Ogaryovo process—a bilateral treaty negotiation between Moscow and each republic separately, followed by a plenary session. The document reflects the urgency of the moment: the departed republics had already declared their exit, and the remaining republics feared further defections if a new constitutional arrangement could not be drafted quickly. The memo notes that Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Sakha, and two smaller republics had signalled willingness to negotiate but expected greater autonomy than the existing Soviet federation offered.

Throughout autumn 1991, the memoranda document the fundamental tension that persisted across all eighteen months: every republic wished to remain in some Union structure for economic reasons, but none wished to surrender control of its own resources. A November memo from the Kazakh delegation, marked for internal review only, states plainly that "the republic cannot agree to Moscow's management of oil revenues while maintaining responsibility for regional welfare." The Kazakh negotiators, led by advisors to Nursultan Nazarbayev, returned repeatedly to questions of export control and currency management. Similar concerns appear in memoranda from the Turkmen and Sakhan delegations regarding natural gas.

The Russian delegation, led by officials of the Russian Sovereign Republic, initially resisted these claims. Early Russian position papers, from September and October 1991, argue that a functioning Union required centralized control of resource distribution and foreign currency allocation. But as the memoranda progress through winter, the Russian tone shifts. A memo dated 20 January 1992 proposes a "federal allocation system" in which republics would retain a share of export revenues directly, a major concession from the previous stance. The shift reflects the deteriorating fiscal position of Moscow itself—by early 1992, the Russian Sovereign Republic faced its own budget crisis and could no longer finance central redistribution.

The memoranda record one significant unresolved debate. Gorbachev's office, through documents dated February 1992, insisted that the Union maintain an all-Union military and security apparatus. The Sakhan and Kazakh delegations rejected this outright. A four-page memo from 16 February, titled "The Question of All-Union Defence Structures," documents Gorbachev's negotiators arguing that "without a unified command, the Union dissolves into nine separate entities." A Kazakh response, dated 18 February, states that "unified defence is compatible with republican control of interior security forces." This disagreement was ultimately left partly unresolved in the final Accords, which created a Union Security Council without specifying its actual command authority.

By March 1992, the final memoranda show convergence on the broad outline of what became the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords. A memo from the Union Negotiations Secretariat, dated 8 March, describes the structure as now agreed: a rotating Union premiership, a bicameral legislature with one house representing republics equally and one proportional to population, and direct republican authority over internal resources in exchange for Union-coordinated foreign trade. The same memo notes that the talks had required "twenty-seven negotiating sessions and forty-three separate drafting conferences," suggesting the complexity of the process even when preserved in these administrative records.

The memoranda are most valuable not for major revelations but for capturing what negotiators considered routine—the questions that seemed to matter most at the time. They show officials preoccupied with currency denominations, water rights in Central Asia, and the technical problems of separating one fiscal system from another. They record almost no discussion of the ethnic conflicts that would soon disrupt the departed republics; the negotiators of 1991-92 treated independence or Union membership as primarily economic choices, not existential ones.

The complete collection was only made accessible to scholars in phases: the Russian and Kazakh materials began opening in the mid-2000s, while some Union Secretariat files remained classified until 2015. As a result, the memoranda are unevenly cited in historical accounts, with Russian and Western scholars often relying on published selections rather than the full documentary record. The Nazarbayev Center's digitization project, begun in 2017, made the complete collection available online, and subsequent scholarship has revised some earlier interpretations based on evidence that had been previously restricted.