| Summary/Abstract |
ON DECEMBER 8, 1991, the heads of three Union republics - Boris Yeltsin (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), Leonid Kravchuk (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), and Stanislav Shushkevich (Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic) - signed the Belavezha Accords, dissolving the Soviet Union.1 That document was unprecedented in terms of international practice and its socioeconomic consequences for the once union state. It was followed two weeks later by the Alma-Ata Declaration, which eight other republics joined, and then by the resignation of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Many experts consider that truly epochal event the final act of the drama that Russian President Vladimir Putin described as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century"2 - i.e., the collapse of the Soviet Union and a new reference point in the history of modern Russia, which, despite its turbulent centuries-old history, found itself overnight in a drastically altered political and economic reality. This December, many will recall those seemingly distant events in order to consider the main results of the three decades of Russia's foreign policy development as an independent state, which, like any person, goes through stages of development: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and maturity.
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