We have perhaps come to the final chapter of the Soviet Union. What’s next for Belarus?

President Lukashenko appears to have been wrongfooted by his quick-thinking opponents, who want to restore the first democratic constitution of the country from 1994

President Alexander Lukashenko is standing for a sixth five-year term, but he is facing an opposition that is suddenly stronger and more united than ever before (Reuters)

Are we watching the last piece of the Soviet Union’s jigsaw finally breaking away? History tells us that the Soviet Union ceased to exist on 25 December 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, Boris Yeltsin became master of the Kremlin as president of Russia, and the other 14 Soviet republics went their own way. That is history for the textbooks, but it is not the whole truth.

For a start, there were stages in the Soviet collapse. There was the democracy movement that had eaten away at the dominance of the Communist Party over the previous three years. There was the coup by Soviet hardliners in the August of 1991 whose aftermath included the haemorrhaging of power from the institutions of the Soviet Union to Russia. There was the restored independence of the three Baltic states that was recognised by most western countries soon afterwards. There was the gathering at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha hunting lodge on 8 December, when the leaders of the countries that had founded the Soviet Union renounced that treaty, supplying the “de jure” underpinning for the dissolution.

Less tangible and harder to chart is the real, de facto, disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Russian tricolour might have replaced the hammer and sickle over the Kremlin overnight, but the ties that bound could not be severed so simply. Arguably, it has taken the best part of 30 years for the political, economic, and, yes, psychological, ties to fall away, with those former republics closest to Russia naturally the last in line.