Comecon

Fifteen minutes to close a bloc's economic council

On 28 June 1991, representatives of Comecon's nine remaining member states met in Budapest, Hungary, and signed a protocol terminating the organization. It was the council's 46th session and its last.

The formal proceedings lasted approximately 15 minutes. Hungary's minister of international economic relations, Béla Kádár, opened the session and said Comecon had failed to adapt to regional change.

Only ministers attended the final meeting, and Vietnam was represented by its ambassador.

Nine signatories, three of them outside Europe

The signatories were Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam were still members at the close, so this was not solely an Eastern European body when it shut down.

The members had already agreed in principle in January 1991 to wind the council up. The fall of Eastern Europe's one-party communist governments and members' moves toward market-priced, hard-currency trade had made it unworkable.

Wrong city, wrong dissolution

The listing places the signing in Moscow, Russia. It happened in Budapest. Moscow is where the Warsaw Pact's final dissolution protocol was signed, three days later on 1 July 1991.

This was also not the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which came in December 1991. The Soviet Union was one of the nine states signing Comecon away.

The protocol did not switch the organization off that morning. Comecon's legal existence was to terminate when its charter was declared invalid, specified as 90 days after 28 June, and a liquidation mechanism was created to dispose of assets and settle financial and legal obligations.