Revolutions are messy affairs that may go on for years with climax after climax before a stable new regime is finally established. But along the way they pass distinct turning points at which it becomes clear that the old order is gone beyond any hope of resurrection, and the future's possible shape, however vague and tentative, comes into view. So it was last week in the Soviet Union, late superpower and communist totalitarian state ruled from Moscow.
Since the failed coup in August, the country has been writhing in a last agony that, in the words of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, seemed to drag on "through some sort of sick eternity." Finally Yeltsin and the Presidents of Ukraine and Belorussia -- founding republics of the old union in 1922 and still its Slavic core -- decided to sign a death certificate: "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence."
That announcement, along with the formation of a new, inelegantly named Commonwealth of Independent States, came as a stunning surprise but hardly a shock. The power had long been leaching out of the central authority in the Kremlin, and it was the leaders of the key republics that everyone looked to for salvation. The fear was that they would prove too determinedly nationalistic to come together in any kind of practical alliance. Yet Yeltsin and company came up with a proposal that all the independent republics could embrace -- if they wanted.
Through it all, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev fought to hold off the burial of the state he officially ruled. "I'll use all my political and legal authority" to keep playing a major role, he said in an interview with TIME. But his position now seemed largely irrelevant. Whether he resigns in short order, as is widely expected, or continues to sit in his Moscow office a while longer, his political and legal authority is virtually gone, and there is nothing much left for him to preside over.
At the same time, the first blurry outlines of what might replace the old union began to take shape. The new commonwealth formed by the three Slavic republics would supposedly coordinate -- but not dictate -- the economic, military and foreign policies of its sovereign members. To dramatize the break from the communist -- and before that, Russian imperial -- past, the Presidents decided that the commonwealth's coordinating bodies, yet to be formed, would be based not in Moscow, the Soviet capital, nor in the czarist capital of St. Petersburg, but in the plain-Jane, utilitarian Belorussian city of Minsk.