How did the Soviet Union’s permanent seat end up in the hands of the Russian Federation?
A founding member of the United Nations, the Soviet Union held three seats in the new international organization. Article 23 of the United Nations Charter listed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, alongside the Republic of China, France, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America. In addition to this seat, the Soviet Union also managed to secure a place in the General Assembly for two of its constituent republics: the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. (An earlier Soviet attempt to secure general assembly membership for each of the Union’s constituent republics collapsed after the United States responded with a request that each state in the United States be seated as a member of the general assembly.)
That three-seat arrangement governed Soviet participation for decades to come, until the centralized authority of the Soviet Union eroded in the early 1990s. After a group of hardliners attempted a coup d’état to overthrow Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, three of the republics – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – declared independence from the Soviet Union. International recognition of the Baltic states soon followed, including by the Soviet Union. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania ended up admitted to the United Nations General Assembly in September. The remaining twelve republics seemed poised to follow suit quickly, ultimately unleashing a political process that would dissolve the Union before the year was through. In Ukraine, for instance, a referendum on independence turned out an overwhelming majority: over 92 percent of Ukrainians backed independence in the December 1 vote.
The Soviet Union’s fate was clear on December 8, when representatives from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met in Minsk. Together, the three republics, each initial founders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics first formed in 1922, agreed to dissolve the Union. “The U.S.S.R. is ceasing its existence as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality,” the agreement’s preamble affirmed.
Despite the Russian endorsement of this principle, Russian President Boris Yeltsin did not intend to let all aspects of the Soviet Union cease to exist, whether as a subject of international law or a geopolitical reality. Yeltsin continued to cling selectively to some aspects of the old Soviet Union, including its permanent seat on the Security Council. On December 16, he publicly indicated Russia’s intention to “continue” to hold the Soviet seat.
Russia’s position contained clear contradictions. It endorsed the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union, its legal existence, and international presence, yet it staked a claim to a seat at the United Nations that was a direct outgrowth of the Union’s existence as a subject of international law. These contradictions ended up enshrined in the Alma-Ata Protocol to formally establish the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), signed on December 21, 1991. In doing so, the eleven signatories–each of the remaining republics, apart from Georgia (which signed two years later)–affirmed the position adopted at Minsk earlier that month: the creation of the Commonwealth meant that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would no longer exist.
On December 24, Yeltsin dispatched a letter to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the secretary general of the United Nations, containing formal notification that the Russian Federation would take over the Soviet Union’s permanent seat, along with its rights and obligations in the organization. Yuli Vorontsov, the Soviet-turned-Russian representative to the United Nations, made clear that the Russians assumed it was a done deal and would require no further deliberation or decisions.
Vorontsov assumed correctly. The United Nations accepted the hand-off to the Russian Federation without meaningful debate. The Western members of the Security Council greeted the Alma-Ata Protocol with a sense of relief. It offered an easy solution that would spare them from facing undesirable questions about the body’s make-up and how it might be changed to better reflect the geopolitical realities of the 1990s. A simple transfer of the Soviet seat to the Russian Federation would avert a situation in which the Charter ended up an open question, emboldening various proposals for reform gaining steam. Britain and France, for instance, resisted calls to transfer the Soviet seat to any commonwealth or federation of post-Soviet states lest it set a precedent that would pressure them to establish a single “Euro-seat” representing all members of the European Community (EC). “The less said the better,” one U.S. official quietly admitted in late December 1991.
The lack of debate did depart from past precedent on similar questions of seating and representation. In 1971, the United Nations General Assembly voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China as “the only lawful representatives of China to the United Nations.” That decision, enshrined in Resolution 2758, also made explicit that the People’s Republic of China seat included a permanent place on the Security Council. Despite this formal transfer, the original language in the Charter remained unchanged; Article 23 still makes mention of the Republic of China, not the People’s Republic of China. The same, it should be noted, is true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
No such debate occurred on the fate of the Soviet seat. Instead, other members of the Security Council accepted Russia as the obvious heir to the international benefits of the old Soviet Union, even as the Russian Federation played an active role in dissolving that union and ensuring it was declared null and void.
In other cases of state dissolution in the 1990s, different procedures carried the day. Representatives of Czechoslovakia, for instance, notified the United Nations that their federation would cease to exist on December 31, 1992, and indicated that both successor states would apply for membership in the organization. Both the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic were formally admitted to the United Nations as member states on January 19, 1993. As a result, neither inherited Czechoslovakia’s position as a founding member of the body.
The Russian Federation operated under the assumption that it would not be considered a successor state, but a continuing one. Those assumptions stood in stark contrast to the actual mechanics of how the Soviet Union came to an end. Politicians like Boris Yeltsin moved against the central authority of the Soviet Union, consolidating power in a distinct Russian Federation. And yet, even as they worked to nullify the union, they laid exclusive claim to the benefits of the same Soviet structures deemed defunct.
The United Nations permitted the Russian Federation to act as a continuing state to the Soviet Union, conveniently ignoring the terms on which the Soviet Union had dissolved, in the hopes of continuing relative peace and stability in the region.
As Russia systematically violates Ukraine’s sovereignty, in a campaign marked by war crimes and mass atrocities, the price is all too clear. An organization purportedly dedicated to maintaining peace boasts a flagrant aggressor in its top ranks. And Russia occupies a seat at the United Nations’ most powerful table–a seat earmarked for the old empire its leaders now aim to recapture parts of–with virtual impunity. It is little wonder, then, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on the United Nations to either evict Russia or “dissolve yourself altogether.”
