Tag #154487 - Interview #97841 (Hertz Rogovoy )

When at the end of the 1980s perestroika 61 started in the USSR, I was delighted. We, USSR citizens, were not used to the absence of censorship in the press and literature. We were not accustomed to open honest public sources. I was happy with those events. It was marvelous that there was no iron curtain 62, severing our country from the rest of the world for many years. All it was new and delightful. But my euphoria did not last long, and my attitude to perestroika became negative. The consequences from perestroika brought to the breakup of USSR [1991], and I still regret it. Yes, I am still yearning for the Soviet Union like many of my contemporaries. Yes, it was a terrible empire, but it was a forceful foundation. And what is it now? We could easily go anywhere on the territory of the USSR, and now with a course of time it is getting more and more difficult to visit any of CIS countries. Of course, each type of society has its own disadvantages. I do not compare the independent Ukraine with such a monster as FSU used to be. I have few grounds why independent Ukraine should exist. How did the world benefit by from breakup of the USSR? There was one monster- Soviet Union, and now there are 15 instead of 1. We could forecast before, and now if the steps of one state could be forecasted, the other state would remain totally unpredictable. I would have never believed that the USSR will be deleted from the worlds map. The country that went through such a calamity as a patriotic war and was on the brink of defeat … Frankly speaking, there were moments when I did not believe that we would win that war. How could I believe when I retreated from Stalingrad, interminable retreat, starting from the Western boarders of Ukraine, when Germans reached Volga and we had way many casualties and remained stern? After that there was a huge socialistic empire, including the countries, which did not belong to the USSR: Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, half of Germany. And suddenly such a country broke up. It was hard to believe in it.