The Soviet Union, R.I.P.?

by Stephen F. Cohen <
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061225/cohen>

The most consequential event of the second half of the
twentieth century took place surreptitiously fifteen
years ago at a secluded hunting lodge in the Belovezh
Forest near Minsk. On December 8, 1991, heads of three
of the Soviet Union's fifteen republics, led by Boris
Yeltsin of Russia, met there to sign documents
abolishing that seventy-four-year-old state.