The opponents of perestroika had suffered a defeat, and then they organized the coup.

I will never give up politics. I've tried to give it up three times, but I never made it. Politics mobilizes me. I won't last long if I give it up.

The model of the consumer society is something that will one day end. My personal view is that too much consumption is wrong.

I certainly wouldn't say that we loved the arms race. Trillions of dollars were used to stoke it. For our economy, which was smaller in size than the American economy, it was a burden. But one cannot agree with the statement that the arms race played the key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It sometimes seems to me that some of our Western partners do not want Russia to fully recover. They would like Russia to be in a subdued state, and they want Russian resources to be used for the benefit of the U.S. economy.

Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

We could still have continued the arms race, but the arms race was pointless, and it was another reason we decided to start perestroika. It was senseless to continue to accumulate weapons. We had enough weapons to destroy life on Earth 1,000 times, and therefore it was very clear to us that the arms race could spiral out of control. A conflict could have started, as both the Americans and the Soviets realized, not out of a wrong political decision but because of a failure in the command-and-control systems.