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Quote by Masha Gessen

“Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively...”

Quote by Masha Gessen

Book:The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
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The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist known for her in-depth reporting on Russian political and social issues. Born on January 13, 1967, she has been living in the United States since the early 1990s. more

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“Perestroika is an urgent necessity arising from the profound processes of development in our socialist society. This society is ripe for change. It has long been yearning for it. Any delay in beginning perestroika could have led to an exacerbated internal situation in the near future, which, to put it bluntly, would have been fraught with serious social, economic, and political crises.”

Perestroika
Book:Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World
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“An essential prerequisite for the reforms to which I gave the name of perestroika was glasnost or transparency, which gave people the possibility but also the right to speak the truth. How could reforms be put in train if one did not tell the truth about the actual situation, if people could not hear the truth about the past?”

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“There are different interpretations of perestroika in the West, including the United States. There is the view that it has been necessitated by the disastrous state of the Soviet economy and that it signifies disenchantment with socialism and a crisis for its ideals and ultimate goals. Nothing could be further from the truth than such interpretations, whatever the motives behind them. Of course, perestroika has been largely stimulated by our dissatisfaction with the way things have been going in our country in recent years. But it has to a far greater extent been prompted by an awareness that the potential of socialism had been underutilized. We realize this particularly clearly now in the days of the seventieth anniversary of our Revolution. We have a sound material foundation, a wealth of experience and a broad world outlook with which to perfect our society purposefully and continuously, seeking to gain ever greater returns—in terms of quantity and quality—from all our activities.”

Perestroika
Book:Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World
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“[...] All colonial powers have wrestled with decolonization after World War II, but while England and France in particular were driven step by step from their global positions, the Netherlands lost everything at once.” This fact, to lose “everything at once,” played a role also in Russia. The decolonization was sudden, unexpected, and total. The Russian frontiers were completely redrawn, and after centuries of almost uninterrupted expansion, the map of the country resembled that of sixteenth-century Russia [50].”

RussiaDecolonizationUssrPerestroika
Book:Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism
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