New Union Treaty

   Also called the All-Union Treaty or the Union Treaty, the New Union Treaty was the proposed replacement for the original Treaty on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. During 1991, independence movements in the Baltic States, Georgia, and elsewhere prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to allow devolution of power to the union republics in an effort to hold the country together. While the majority of Soviet citizens supported preserving the union, the republican leadership, including Boris Yeltsin as the leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), backed a loosening of the ties between the Soviet Socialist Republics. The new entity, tentatively titled the Union of Sovereign States (originally the Union of Soviet Sovereign States to preserve the Russian language acronym of the USSR), was to be created on 20 August 1991 but was preempted by the August Coup one day before the treaty-signing ceremony (Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Armenia were not signatories to the agreement). In the wake of the failed putsch, the leaders of Belarus, Ukraine, and the RSFSR (now the Russian Republic) established the Commonwealth of Independent States, effectively bringing about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

   See also All-Union Referendum.