Heaven welcomes you Boris Nikolayevich.
I’m reading a biography of him done by his press secretary at the time.
It’s funny, because the whole thing fell apart pretty easily and quickly. In fact, the easiest thing to dismantle was the KGB. The meeting and agreement on it took less than fifteen minutes.
As I know think I understand it, the USSR was really a union, not a monolith. Each state had a head, and the head of the Russian state was Yeltsin. He essentially had all the power anyway.
Yeltsin believed in the union, however. After the coup, however briefly the other states tasted independence, the entire idea of the ‘band getting back together’ was long history.
In fact, the book reveals the level of hatred between the Ukrainians and the Russians. Something about being starved into joining the union in the first place?
It’s hard for me now to think that the sword Putin rattles today belongs only to just the state of Russia. As much as he may like to represent the rest of those states, he only represents Russia.
Now, Russia’s still only the biggest country by land mass on the face of the earth, but . . .