Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 12 – Boris Slavin, an
aide to former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, says that in his “personal”
view, “sooner or later the restoration of a state like the USSR will be
achieved,” although he said that “of course, this will not be a unification in
the style of the Soviet Union.”
He says that in 1991 “Gorbachev said
that three men [the presidents of the RSFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the
Belarusian SSR] could not decide the fate of the country,” especially since
there had been a referendum earlier that year in which 76 percent of the
participants supported the preservation of the USSR (nr2.ru/moskow/493492.html).
Slavin’s remarks came in response
to suggestions by some Duma members that a case should be opened against
Gorbachev for his role in the disintegration of the USSR. According to his aide, Gorbachev is treating
such suggestions “with humor” and as an effort by some to attract attention to
themselves.
Gorbachev wasn’t to blame for the
USSR’s collapse, Slavin says, suggesting that people like Boris Yeltsin were
far more responsible and implied that the Russian leader would not be able to preserve his image as “a
democratically inclined” person forever.
In addition, the Gorbachev aide says, charges are impossible given the 15-year
statute of limitations.
Slavin said that people need to
realize that Gorbachev had no interest in destroying the country “which he
headed.” Instead, his aide said, the Soviet president was prepared “to fight as
is said to the last bullet.”
He added that Gorbachev was pleased
that Crimea had been absorbed by Russia especially since it was done by a
referendum which showed that is what the people of the peninsula wanted. In Slavin’s words, what has happened in
Crimea is part of a more general “striving of the people to unity.”
Consequently, Slavin concluded, a
country encompassing what had been the Soviet Union will “sooner or later”
re-emerge.
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