Why Russia couldn’t give up on empire  

One hundred years ago this December, delegations from the core nations of the East Slavs, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus signed the ‘Declaration and Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’. They had with them representatives of the ‘Transcaucasian Soviet Socialist Republic’ artificially constructed by the Communists who had just won a horrifically bloody civil war. In theory it was a free association of states. In practice Stalin quickly imposed even more ruthless centralisation than before. By the end of the second world war he had recovered all the territories of Imperial Russia, and achieved domination of almost the whole of Eastern Europe.

On 8 December 1991, the Soviet Union was abolished by Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, and his colleagues from Ukraine and Belarus. This time there were only the three of them: they had intended, but forgotten, to invite the president of Kazakhstan.