Union of Soviet Sovereign States
From The Long Union, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
The Union of Soviet Sovereign States (USSS), often called simply the Union, is a confederation of nine republics occupying most of the territory of the former Soviet Union. It was created by the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords of March 1992, following the August Emergency of the previous year, and it survives into the present as a rotating-premiership federation with a weak central budget, wide disparities between its energy-exporting Siberian members and its impoverished Slavic core, and an economy tied closely to Chinese credit.
In August 1991 the State Committee on the State of Emergency, a group of senior officials and security figures opposed to the draft treaty then being prepared with the republics, placed Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest at his residence in Foros. Unlike the brief and disorganized action later remembered by some Western observers as doomed from its first hours, the committee held Gorbachev for four additional days, long enough that the popular resistance organized around Boris Yeltsin in Moscow could not force an immediate collapse of the plotters' position. By the time Gorbachev was released, the balance of power among Moscow, the republics, and the security establishment had shifted enough that a full-scale drive toward independent republics lost its momentum.
What followed was not a restoration of the old centre but eighteen months of negotiation among republican leaderships, culminating in the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, signed at the same suburban retreat where earlier draft treaties had been discussed. Nine republics — Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Karakalpakstan as an autonomous signatory under the Uzbek delegation — remained within the reconstituted union. The Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova departed outright, taking with them no share of the Union's institutions and, crucially, no claim on its military arsenal.
The Accords established a Union Premiership rotating every two years among the constituent republics' delegated candidates, a body called the Congress of Republican Delegates serving as the nearest thing to a Union legislature, and a Union Central Bank whose authority over the rouble would prove far weaker than its Soviet predecessor's. No republic inherited the whole of the Soviet nuclear arsenal; instead, a Joint Strategic Command was created under a supervisory arrangement among Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, an arrangement that outside observers at the Vienna Monitoring Office have called durable but legally ambiguous to this day.
The first Union premier was Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose 1992–1994 term set the pattern of republics using the rotating premiership to advance their own economic priorities rather than a shared Union program. Mikhail Gorbachev, retained in an advisory capacity as chairman of the Congress's standing committee, clashed repeatedly with Boris Yeltsin, then serving as President of the Russian Sovereign Republic, over the pace of price liberalization. Their dispute was settled, imperfectly, by the 1994 Compromise of Sochi, which rationed a dual-track pricing system that persisted in modified form for much of the decade.
References
- 1.The Confederal Drift]], Yevgenia Solovyova, 2011, Novosibirsk University Press
- 2.Fundamentals of Union Economic Planning]], A. R. Dzhaksybekov, 1999, Almaty State Publishing House
- 3.Tyumen Compact Retrospective]], Congress of Republican Delegates Research Staff, 2016, Congress Printing Office
- 4.Novosibirsk Household Survey]], Institute of Union Statistics, various years, Novosibirsk
- 5.Planovoye Khozyaistvo Segodnya]], vol. 34, no. 2, 2019, Moscow