In a brief, almost anticlimactic session, the Council of Republics of the Supreme Soviet issued Declaration No. 142-Н, formally dissolving the USSR and acknowledging the independence of the twelve remaining republics. It ended nearly 70 years of Soviet rule and closed the Cold War era, replacing the superpower with fifteen independent states and the loosely organized Commonwealth of Independent States.
The vote came almost as an afterthought. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as Soviet president on December 25, delivering a televised address in which he acknowledged that the union he led had ceased to function in any meaningful sense. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin that evening, replaced by the Russian tricolor.
The next day, what remained of the Supreme Soviet's upper chamber, the Council of Republics, met for a final session. Attendance was thin; many delegates had already left to serve new national governments. They passed Declaration No. 142-Н, a single-paragraph document formally acknowledging that the Soviet Union no longer existed as a state and subject of international law.
There was no ceremony, no crowds. The empire that had spanned eleven time zones, fought Hitler, launched Sputnik, and faced down the United States in a decades-long nuclear standoff, ended with a nearly unanimous show of hands in a half-empty room. Fifteen new nations emerged from its wreckage, and Boris Yeltsin's Russia inherited the Soviet seat at the United Nations.