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“Neither Yeltsin nor the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus were to blame for its collapse. The Soviet Union was destroyed by the Communist Party and the KGB. The former, through the lies, hypocrisy, and incompetent management of its senile leaders, reduced the country to a state of economic crisis. The latter, in the person of its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, attempted a coup that was bungled as badly as everything else they had done in earlier years. Most researchers of the August putsch believe Chairman Kryuchkov was the main actor among the conspirators. At that time, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin, working in the Leningrad department of the KGB, was by no means making a fuss about geopolitical disasters but, in pursuit of money and new opportunities, cheerfully leaving the ranks of his organization in order to throw in his lot with the mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, one of Yeltsin's main supporters. In other words, Putin was unquestionably one of those with a direct interest in the collapse of the U.S.S.R., helping it along and extracting maximum benefit from it. I don't want to exaggerate Putin's personal role or assert that he particularly betrayed his organization. He simply acted in his own interests. One day he was out catching dissidents on the streets of Leningrad who would be sent to prison for "anti-Soviet propaganda," and the next he was the bag carrier of one of the new regime's most radical supporters.” — Alexei Navalny