25 years ago Gorbatchov’s supporters made a last effort to save the Soviet Union - they organizied the Referendum where the participants should answer the main question if they would like to live in one country or it would be better to dissolve the USSR.
Allthough the 78% of the people who took part in this referendum answered ‘yes, they would like to keep the country’, the USSR was dissolved 8 months later after this referendum.
I remember these days, the reasons for the dissolution of the great country.
There are two possibilities to listen to my article: in English and in Russian.
Here is the link to the English version which was made by Richard Protorich from England:
I can not understand why the Soviet Union disappeared. Some countries like Baltic republics wanted the independence. But in the republics where the referendum was made the most people wanted to keep the union. Maybe the problem was the political class. The Communist Party did not use democratic liberty. Communist leaders weren’t be able to solve the problem by open discussion, and the old system of government was not useful, it was broken.
Today, the problems are not yet solved. Russia at this moment is losing the last influence in the world and fighting at the doors of its own house. Syria and Ukraine are consequences of this crises, and, unfortunately, they are not the last crises provoked with this failed referendum.
Syria and Ukraine crises are a part of the cold war that never died.
The democracy system is the best, I believe, but many time people do not understand the questions. And the politics are not the capacity of explaining its. The capitalist system is not the solution for all problem, that it was not a solution the communist revolution. The reality is more complex. The capitalist system is not wealth is only a system like any other.
The real issue with the policy lies on the ethos of politicians and the societies. Every system has its positive and negative sides, but the most important is the faithful application of the principles of each system. Until now we have been seeing the cruel face of the capitalism with an enormous inequality leaving the weakest parts of population more or less in their luck and on the other hand we saw the slippage of the socialism to regimes with fascist attributes.
Somehow the people start becoming familiar with the sight of the “monster” and at the end acquire the same characteristics. The corruption is a universal phenomenon nowadays, because of the elasticity of the human consciousness and the lack of an educational system capable to produce citizens with a clear opinion.
We usually say that all the matters are matters of policy and indeed they are, but on the other hand, the policy needs one basic substructure of the society, which can be found only via the education.
And from this point of view, we have a long way in front of us. In the meanwhile we have to stay alive.
I ask myself if Russian society is learning about liberal democracy. I think in the future Russia has the possibility to be a new big power, with a social stratum like Finland or Germany that like China. For me, the first models could make of Russia a stable and attractive power. But it is necessary a social change. And this change is very hard.
Changes are always difficult, partly because of the power of the habit and mainly because the well-ensconced parts of the population usually oppose to the reforms. But the best solution can never be the solution for some parts of population ignoring the whole and this has been being proved during the history of human civilization. We have seen some countries to have been evolved better from the rest, because their politicians respect the citizens and this has as a result the creation of a developed social behavior on the part of the population. By this way the societies can be entered to a “virtuous circle” leaving behind them the (opposite) “vicious circle” of a long recession, which can lead only to the collapse. History is full of fallen civilizations and let’s hope that we’ll find the way to escape from this deadlock.