Tag #143868 - Interview #78254 (Pyotr Bograd)

At first I was enthusiastic about perestroika [40]. I built up great expectations about perestroika. This seemed to be something fresh. I watched TV, Duma meetings [State Duma, Russian Parliament's lower house], speeches made by various politicians. There was hope for improvement. However, we must have made a big mistake at some stage because we started admitting students, who had been poor students at school, to military educational institutions. There were higher educational colleges, engineering or command schools of high level. They required well-educated students. Besides, another negative impact was that after the breakup of the USSR in 1991 the attitude towards the army changed.