Mikhail Gorbachev
The first President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev believes that the borders of the former Soviet Union may be a new Union state. He stated this in an interview with TASS, dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“I believe that the new Union can be. In the former borders and with the same composition, voluntarily”, — said the politician. However, he stressed that does not assume “responsibility” for the collapse of the Soviet Union, and defended the Soviet Union “until the end”.
In his opinion, the incident was influenced by a number of factors, including the putsch of the State emergency Committee (GKCHP) in August 1991 and the character of the first President of Russia Boris Yeltsin. In his opinion, Yeltsin simply “did not understand that his role is important, but it’s not what he started to do, and he just started to struggle with the Federal centre”.
While Gorbachev has categorically rejected the hypothesis that the collapse of the Soviet Union led restructuring. “So I think it would be a major historical mistake. As a result of restructuring, the country embarked on the path of freedom and democracy. It has been difficult. Harder than we thought in the beginning. But he, I was and still am sure, irreversible,” he said in an interview to “Interfax”.
8 December 1991 the leaders of the republics-founders of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin (Russia), Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine) and Stanislav Shushkevich (Belarus) in the Bialowieza forest signed an agreement (known as Belovezhskaya agreement), which announced the termination of activities of the Union and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). 25 December of the same year Mikhail Gorbachev announced the resignation of the USSR President.