ABSTRACT
All three communist federations disintegrated, but each did so in its own way. Czechoslovakia was peacefully divided in 1992 into its two constituent units (see Part VI), while Yugoslavia’s dissolution was accompanied by war and bitter inter-ethnic conflict (see below). The case of the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 falls somewhere in between, with some violence, notably in the Baltic republics and the south Caucasus, but overall the process was remarkably devoid of large-scale conflict. The secession process in the first instance took place cleanly along the lines of the already constituted sub-national sovereign legal entities, a process in which all the union republics participated with greater or lesser enthusiasm. In the long term, however, the formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 was the easy part. In the Caucasus and Moldova the disappearance of the USSR provoked a number of secessions within secessions in which what had been sub-sub-national territories (notably Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transdniestria) sought to break away from the newly-established independent states (see Part VI). While the legal framework for the independence of union republics was relatively clear, the emergence of secessionist movements provoked entrenched conflicts that assumed a ‘frozen’ character until the recognition of the independence of Kosovo in February 2008, and following the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008, that of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (see Chapter 9). As with the peculiar status of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, whose declaration of independence on 15 November 1983 was recognized only by Turkey, this second wave of post-Soviet secessions entered uncharted legal and constitutional territory (see Chapter 15 and Part VI).
