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The new commonwealth has managed to stave off, at least for the moment, the threat of an outright economic war between the sundering union's republics. That prospect played no small part in pushing the commonwealth's founders together. When Yeltsin, Kravchuk, Belorussian leader Stanislav Shushkevich and some aides gathered at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha dacha, a forest retreat outside the city of Brest, on Saturday, Dec. 7, they appeared to have no intention of declaring the old union dead and founding a new association. But they quickly found they could not come to any other agreement -- and agreement was imperative.
Yeltsin had been trying to introduce radical free-market reforms in Russia, but was balked partly because the remnants of the central Soviet ministries kept getting in the way. To remove them, some new form of union had to be invented, but negotiations were stymied by Gorbachev's desire to preserve at least a pared-down central government and the insistence of several republics on complete independence. The overwhelming vote for independence in Ukraine on Dec. 1 brought the tug-of-war close to a crisis; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin had said there could be no union at all without Ukraine.
Nor was that the only cause for high anxiety. The imminence of free-market pricing in Russia frightened neighboring republics, which protested that they could not or would not move so fast. If Russia went ahead alone, prices would soar so high that neighbors could not afford to buy the republic's products, including the oil on which they depend. Farms and factories in neighboring republics would sell their products in Russia rather than at home, while masses of Russian shoppers would cross over into other republics to buy at prices lower than in their own stores. Further, Ukraine was planning to introduce its own currency in mid-1992, a move that could have touched off a stampede to all kinds of separate currencies that would have made hash out of any future efforts to revive economic cooperation.
Meeting in Moscow two weeks ago, Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed that one last effort had to be made to keep Ukraine in some sort of union. To that end, Yeltsin took advantage of an already scheduled trip to Belorussia to sign a trade agreement and invited Kravchuk to join the discussions at the forest dacha. According to their aides, the three initially tried to revive a Gorbachev idea to form a fairly loose Union of Sovereign States that would still have a central government of sorts. But all day Saturday, says Russian Deputy Prime Minister Gennadi Burbulis, they kept hitting "a dead end." Finally the leaders instructed their foreign ministers to start over from scratch and draft something new. Working separately through the night, the ministers produced three texts that proved to be so similar that the leaders had no trouble next morning melding them into one document.