We have chronicled the rush to independence that in the final stage of Gorbachev's perestroika seized all the Union republics, a torrent that ultimately carried the five Central Asian republics along. The dam really burst with the collapse of the attempted coup against the reforms and their proponent, but there had been two daring trailblazers: Lithuania on 11 March 1990, and Georgia on 9 April of that year. The rest took the plunge only after the August 1991 coup: Estonia and Latvia on the 20th (thus still while the drama was being played out in Moscow), Armenia on the 23rd, Ukraine and Belarus on the 24th, Moldova on the 27th, Azerbaijan on the 30th. The Central Asians were the last to jump on the bandwagon.

Thus on 31 August the Uzbek parliament proclaimed the existence of an independent Republic of Uzbekistan; the declaration was submitted to a popular vote which confirmed it in December of the same year, and which also elected Islam Karimov as the republic's president. Similar steps were taken in the other four republics. Mean while, those former Soviet public figures who had survived the upheavals, or who had surged forward to seize the leadership from the “old guard,” succeeded in forging a special sequel to the USSR, the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States, Soyuz Nezavisimykh Gosudarstv in Russian, Mustaqil Davlatlar Hamdostligi in Uzbek). Representatives of the participating members met on 21 December 1991 in the Kazakh capital Almaty to sign a treaty establishing the commonwealth.