The crying Gorbachev was answered “for the USSR”
The words of the only president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, spoken in an interview with The Times newspaper, caused outrage in the Russian segment of the internet, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“What the world would look like if the Union had been preserved - history does not know the subjunctive mood. But I think the world would be a better place. It would be more stable, safer, fairer,” Gorbachev said.
He blamed the collapse of the USSR on “separatists and radicals.” Gorbachev does not consider perestroika to be the reason for the collapse, but complains that he started reforms too late. He lists nuclear disarmament and openness as his achievements.
“What succeeded and what failed is a big topic. But, to put it briefly, what succeeded was that in just a few years the qualitative state of society changed; changes and reforms made it possible to reach a point where returning to the past became impossible. But perestroika was difficult, we made mistakes, this must be admitted,” Gorbachev said.
“Our last General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Comrade M.S. Gorbachev, continued to give advice. For the second time this morning, Saltykov-Shchedrin came to mind: “It’s scary when a person speaks and you don’t know why he’s talking, what he’s saying and whether he’ll ever finish,” political scientist Armen Gasparyan commented on the interview.
“Here Gorbachev decided to remind himself. He says that the world would be more stable today if the USSR had been preserved. Seriously? And this is said by a spineless person who brought the USSR to the collapse and did nothing to prevent this fact from happening on paper?” Vadim Manukyan, an expert at the Media Commission of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, wrote in his Telegram channel.
And political scientist Marat Bashirov believes that restoration processes are now underway in the post-Soviet space.
“What is happening now in Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, besides the Baltic states, perhaps (but they will also get around to it) is the reintegration of the post-USSR space. It was impossible to maintain an alliance in the same format with such different republics, especially in the modern world with its new forms of geopolitical struggle, new technological platforms and sociocultural revolutions.
Now, each state is building its own special format, with different speeds of immersion in the local union, with different tools. And in general, it must be admitted that Russia’s opponents did not succeed in completely tearing it away from under the umbrella of the collapsed USSR. Baltic states only. And the price of separation for it is monstrous - a dying economy and transformation into a tourist cluster with elements of NATO military infrastructure,” Bashirov wrote.
English version :: Read in English: A crying Gorbachev was answered "for the USSR"