The poll was conducted in person in July with 1,600 adults, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. But what if that Jell-O wasn’t in that position at that time, who the hell knows what might have happened to us.” “But I keep saying that the Soviet Union could have been preserved.”Īddressing journalists, he said: “You criticize Gorbachev: weak, Jell-O, more or less in those terms. “Some say over and over that the Soviet Union’s collapse was inevitable,” he said at a news conference on Wednesday. Gorbachev, who had tried to reform and preserve the Soviet Union but was thwarted by the coup and then by Mr. Now, if you don’t have money you can’t do anything.”Ī recent poll by the Levada Center, a respected polling agency, found that 20 percent of Russians share her wish for a return of the Soviet Union, a number that has bobbed up and down between 16 percent and 27 percent over the past eight years.Īmong those in favor of the Soviet Union, not surprisingly, is Mr. Yes, sure, you can go overseas now, but you have to have money for that and you have to go into debt. “I felt more comfortable in the U.S.S.R.,” she said. But what she would really like, she said, is to turn back the clock. Yeltsin for what she saw as his weak leadership, and she is now part of a large majority of Russians supporting Mr. Like many Russians, she grew to despise Mr. Veretelny, saying, “If my son could have seen where the country was going, he wouldn’t have been at the barricades.” Komar, who works as a helper at a health club, still builds her life around the memory of her son. Until recently, his wife had a high-paying job as manager of a business, but she was laid off during the economic downturn. Veretelny has worked as an electrician, a police inspector and now as a small-business man on the fringes of Russia’s economy. Gorbachev stepped down, bringing an end to the Soviet Union. The armored cars and tanks pulled back soon afterward, marking the end of a coup that had tried to hold back the tide of change. I thought someone would come take the body off, but it drove back and forth until the body fell on the asphalt.” “I put out my hands to help and I was hit in the shoulder. “I saw the guy hanging off the armored car,” he said. An election that is set for early next year is unlikely to change the course of the country. Putin’s limits on political competition, civil society and the news media. Veretelny is just one voice among 140 million Russians, and while his disillusionment is widely shared, many people appear to accept Mr. Putin brought, even at the cost of some democratic freedoms. Many people welcomed the stability that Mr. In the decade that followed, chaotic social and economic changes as well as lurching attempts at reform gave democracy a bad name. We began to ask ourselves what we spilled our blood for.” But a lot of things turned out not exactly the way we expected. “We really believed the magical, beautiful word democracy. Veretelny, 54, who was at the time supporting himself as a driver. “At that time in Russia, behind the Iron Curtain, we had only heard of democracy,” said Mr. Few people said they viewed the events of 1991 as a victory for democracy. Recent opinion polls as the anniversary of the standoff approaches this Saturday come closer to the view of Mr.
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