Collapse Of Soviet Union Quotes

“That is why, reflecting on that nauseating possible future, I am so grateful to Gorbachev for having done away with it. Not that meant to. He goofed, and that is precisely what I have to thank him for...He overlooked the fact that inviting everyone into the garden would not lead to deferential discussion with an elite, full of allusive hints and skirting around contentious matters. On the contrary, realizing that they now could speak out without getting beaten up, the denizens of the basement would climb up to the roof en masse and state bluntly that they had no water to drink and nothing to eat. The weight of their words, the reverberation of their stamping boots, and the indignation in their hearts would make everything come tumbling down.

I didn't regret that in the slightest. After all, what had I lost? Russia, my country, was still there. I still had my language, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moscow and Kazan and Rostov. The army was still there, and the state. Even the bureaucrats were still where they had been. Kiev, Tallinn, and Riga did not vanish into thin air. Everything was as it had been. You could go to those cities if you wanted to. What had changed was that now you had a choice, you had freedom. What remains of that freedom in Putin's Russia today, which is trying to pretend it is the U.S.S.R., is in fact much more than there was then. You can now choose your profession, where you want to live, and your lifestyle. You no longer have to tie yourself in knots in a competition to see who can be the more two-faced in order to be allowed a trip abroad. You can just buy a ticket and go.

At this point someone almost always says, "Only nowadays you have to have enough money," and then reminisces about the social guarantees and equality in the U.S.S.R. In reality there was nothing of the sort. The social gulf between a collective farm worker and a member of the regional Communist Party committee was no less than the gulf we have now between an oligarch and one of today's many average workers. Housing and cars were, by an order of magnitude, less accessible than they are today. Sure, many people received accommodation for free, but to get it they had to wait twenty years. Of course, there is a huge difference in the ceilings for luxury and wealth then and now. In the U.S.S.R. the ceiling was on the first floor of a dacha in the "writers' village" outside Moscow. Now there is no ceiling; it has disappeared unimaginably far away, bursting through the roofs of French chalets and skyscrapers on the edge of Central Park in New York.

That, of course, is annoying But it does not alter the indisputable fact that although the mass of the population might indeed have been moved by grim tectonics, as Tolstoy would have it, it was nevertheless Gorbachev who started patching something up, but in the end hammered a nail in the wrong way and everything fell down. On its ruins, everyone was given the chance to live a decent life without the perpetual lying and hypocrisy. If, of course, they wanted it.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“More often than not the "successful entrepreneurs" of the time were officials of the Communist Party or members of the Young Communist League, and this seemed to confirm the popular suspicion that there was corruption and that the source of their wealth was not so much enterprise and initiative as power and access to resources. On top of that, for the seventy years of its existence the Soviet Union had been inculcating contempt for wheeler-dealers and anyone else in pursuit of private profit. Someone working in commerce in those times could live reasonably well, but it was more prestigious to be a cosmonaut, in the military, or a professor. Then, suddenly cosmonauts were nobodies, just ordinary mortals who got rewarded for their pains with a three-room apartment and a black Volga car, and professors could barely make ends meet. At the same time, some obscure cooperative owner, and just about anyone selling something in the market-was a lord of the universe and had more money than any Hero of Labor ever received.

It turned out that being poor was much more bearable when everybody else was, but it was intolerable once you could see your neighbor was far richer. We often hear talk about the envy Russian or Soviet people felt toward the first entrepreneurs, and that is what made the late 1980s such a hateful time. I believe, however, it was all caused by the inequality of opportunities. If Gorbachev could have made it easy for everyone to become an entrepreneur, if millions of people had taken that up, rather than just tens of thousands of the smartest, or wiliest, or those who found themselves well positioned, then everything could have been different. Instead, the setting up of cooperatives, and later of the first businesses, was made monstrously complicated and was totally under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy. If you wanted to start a business, you had to pay bribes or have contacts, or at least have the kind of charisma that could bring walls tumbling down. For long years this established the image of businesspeople as shifty, devious individuals who had got in on the act by less than legal means.

In the army, the police, and the KGB, resentment at this decline in the status of officers was particularly acute. Something was going to have to change.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“On August 21, the Soviet defense minister, Dmitry Yazov, gave the order for troops to be withdrawn from Moscow. The State Committee for the State of Emergency had lost, and along with it, the U.S.S.R. had, too. On returning from his dacha in Crimea, Gorbachev evidently expected to be greeted by rejoicing crowds as a liberated hero. People were happy to see him back, but only as further evidence that the putsch committee had been defeated. Gorbachev's expectation of consolidating his authority on a surge of support came to nothing. All the admiration and support was for Yeltsin and a new government, the people who had taken risks and acted resolutely. This was strengthened when testimony was produced suggesting that Gorbachev might have had a part in preparing the conspiracy, or at least knew of it in advance and, in his usual way, decided not to take sides either with the Soviet conservatives or with the Russian reformers but to wait and see who came out on top. Indecision is a cardinal sin in an era of change. In an instant, Gorbachev lost everything. Once again, as happens during revolutions, something mind-blowing had occurred. On Monday he was, if not the most popular of leaders, the universally acknowledged president of a vast nation, with power over the world's largest army and over the industry and agricultural enterprises of a territory covering one-sixth of the world's land area-and the power to start a nuclear war. Come Thursday, he was nobody. He still retained a personal limousine, his secretaries, and a special telephone, only now no one was calling him.

Whatever might be documented in seemingly unchallengeable statutes protected by a constitution and an army of lawyers, the center of power had shifted to Yeltsin, transferred in some intangible manner. Nobody really understands exactly how it happened, but neither was anyone in any doubt that the transfer of power had taken place.

On December 8, 1991, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republics, and Ukraine pulled of a spectacular ruse. Their leaders, Stanislav Shushkevich, Boris Yeltsin, and Leonid Kravchuk, met in a forest in Belarus, where they declared that, since their three republics had been the founders of the U.S.S.R., they had the right to dissolve it, which they would proceed to do. In its place they established the Union of Independent States. From their point of view, the trick made good sense: the presidents of the republics wanted to put Gorbachev and all his officials out of contention and to seize unfettered power for themselves. That is what was behind their action, and to implement it they needed formally to put an end to the indestructible U.S.S.R.

Nowadays, people go on about what a mistake that action-the Belovezha Accords-was. One of those publicly lamenting it is Vladimir Putin. With great intensity and passion, he claims the accords was "a major geopolitical disaster." Well, it didn't seem like that to me at the time (and I'm not claiming to be a repository of objective truth, just relaying what my feelings were). It was just one more item on the television news-well, perhaps an item that rated a bit more discussion that usual, but there was no sense of portentousness. If those who gathered in the woods executed a crafty and, to be honest, rather deceitful and devious legalistic maneuver, they were only confirming something that was already obvious, namely that the U.S.S.R. no longer existed as a real country.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“Neither Yeltsin nor the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus were to blame for its collapse. The Soviet Union was destroyed by the Communist Party and the KGB. The former, through the lies, hypocrisy, and incompetent management of its senile leaders, reduced the country to a state of economic crisis. The latter, in the person of its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, attempted a coup that was bungled as badly as everything else they had done in earlier years. Most researchers of the August putsch believe Chairman Kryuchkov was the main actor among the conspirators. At that time, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin, working in the Leningrad department of the KGB, was by no means making a fuss about geopolitical disasters but, in pursuit of money and new opportunities, cheerfully leaving the ranks of his organization in order to throw in his lot with the mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, one of Yeltsin's main supporters. In other words, Putin was unquestionably one of those with a direct interest in the collapse of the U.S.S.R., helping it along and extracting maximum benefit from it. I don't want to exaggerate Putin's personal role or assert that he particularly betrayed his organization. He simply acted in his own interests. One day he was out catching dissidents on the streets of Leningrad who would be sent to prison for "anti-Soviet propaganda," and the next he was the bag carrier of one of the new regime's most radical supporters.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir