Tag #147213 - Interview #77954 (Miron Manilov)

The financial position of many people worsened considerably. Many necessary products weren't found in the stores, and prices escalated. All those things, in the end, caused the breakup of the USSR [in 1991]. I disapproved of those things before, and I don't approve of them now. Our country was a great and powerful state, respected, valued and feared by everybody in the world. And who are we now? From the standpoint of the economy, Russia has become a semi-colonial country and our power and strength aren't determined by our machine-building plants, or prosperity of military and mining industries. We were the main source of raw materials supply to the capitalist world. There is hardly anything good in our independence. It would have been better to preserve the good things that were in the USSR, and not bring everything to the naught and build nothing in the shambles.