…You have to begin with Gorbachev. Without him, we’d still be living in the USSR. Yeltsin would have been the first secretary of the regional Party committee in Sverdlovsk, and Yegor Gaidar would be editing economics articles in Pravda and believing in socialism. Sobchak would still be lecturing at the University of Leningrad…[A pause.] The USSR would have lasted a long time yet. A colossus with feet of clay? Total nonsense! We were an Almighty Superpower that called the shots in many countries. Even America was afraid of us. There weren’t enough pantyhose and blue jeans?
