“In early 1988, the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh was aggravated. The roots of the conflict – an old, simple decision he did not have then and does not have now, although I tried to convince me that it could be achieved by border crossing. In the country’s leadership there was a single opinion : This is unacceptable. I believed that the achievement of the agreement on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh is the case of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and the role of the Union Center is to help them in normalizing the situation, in particular in solving economic problems. I am sure that it was the right line, “writes in President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev for the magazine “Russia in Global Policy”.
Gorbachev accuses to aggravate the problem of the party leadership and intelligentsia of the two republics: “They failed to find a way to consent or at least to the dialogue. And they were pushed to the background extremists. Events raised as a snowball.”
The last owner of the Kremlin writes that he tried to work out a new national policy, which was doomed: “During this period, in 1987-1988, I sought to develop a single democratic approach to interethnic disputes. Its essence was that national problems May be truly solved only in the overall context of political and economic reform. And I must say that initially national movements in the Baltic Republics, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine performed under the slogans of support support. The question of the exit from the Union in 1987 did not put almost Nobody. “
However, Gorbachev is still confident that the leadership of the USSR could not protect the empire from the inevitable collapse. And first of all, because of the countries inherited from the day the country’s foundation are acute interethnic problems: “A heavy heritage got a restructuring in the field of national politics and federal relations. And I can not say that I and my colleagues starting the restructuring seen the whole problem in her full volume.
Now, of course, it is quite obvious that the conservation and renewal of the country, which was the “world of the worlds”, the conglomerate of peoples, in which the will of historical courts were together such different republics, as, say, Estonia and Turkmenistan, objectively represented the task Cossal complexity. During the years of perestroika, everything was broken out that was copied in this area over the centuries and decades. I do not think that anyone was ready for this.
Historically, the Soviet Union inherited the Russian Empire. Was she “prison of peoples”? If you agree with this, the first among prisoners should be called the Russian people. And during the years of Stalin’s regime, he made no smaller deprivation and suffering than other nations of the Soviet Union.