Video: 'ABC Nightly News December 21 1991 w/Commercials WHAS 11 Louisville KY'

(Saturday, December 21, 1991; during the Dissolution of the Soviet Union; part of the Cold War and the Revolutions of 1989) — Eleven of the 12 former republics of the Soviet Union formally constituted themselves today as the Commonwealth of Independent States, proclaiming the death of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Video: 'BBC1 Continuity & News 21st December 1991 - USSR Disolved'

Putting aside seven decades of central dictatorship, the republic leaders meeting in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, near the Chinese border, negotiated and signed a broad commonwealth agreement that guarantees their separate sovereignties but leaves unsettled such important issues as how to create an acceptable system of command to administer common military policy and nuclear weapons control.