ABSTRACT
Some 35 miles north of the Poland-Belarus border town of Brest, an ancient forest spreads across a small area of both countries. It is the Belavezhskaya Puscha, (Bialowiezha Forest) or "Forest of the White Tower", named after a 13th century structure. Yeltsin and his counterparts from the Ukraine and Belarus met on the December 8th, 1991, in a government residence in Viskuli in the forest, and proclaimed absolute and unqualified independence for their countries, thereby putting an end to the USSR. The leaders' deliberations were assisted by considerable consumption of alcohol, which accounts perhaps for certain of their pronouncements. The Soviet constitution still retained from Stalin's times the amazing provision: "Each Union republic shall retain its right to secede from the USSR". In 1936 it was intended to be yet another demonstration of Soviet superiority to the bourgeois states in democratic virtue. Beginning in 1989 most of the fifteen Union republics were impelled to declare themselves sovereign states.
