Fiona Hill

It was basically that there were so many debates that Gorbachev had sparked off about how to reform the country, how to put it on a different path, that no one was in agreement.

And it was basically all these fights and debates and disputes among the elites at the center, as well as basically a loss of faith in the system in the periphery and among the general population that in fact pulled it apart.

And of course,

In 1991, you get Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Russian Federation, then a constituent part of the Soviet Union, together with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, all of these being individual parts of the Soviet Union, getting together and agreeing and essentially ending it.

And Gorbachev, you know, so basically I'm there at the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation and thinking about the future.

And within a couple of years, it's all kind of gone and it's on a different track entirely.

Yeah, I wonder about that too.

And I also wonder about what would have happened if it didn't collapse and Gorbachev had found a different direction.

Until, though, that they don't keep together.

I mean, I've had colleagues who have described what's happening in the West right now as a kind of soft secession with states, you know, going off in their own direction.

In which states?

Well, these kinds of conceptions that we have now of divisions between red and blue states because of the fracturing of our politics.

And I'd always thought that that wouldn't be possible in somewhere like the United States or, you know, many other countries as well, because there wasn't that ethnic dimension.

But in fact, many of the way that people talk about politics has given it that kind of appearance in many respects.

Because, look, I mean, we know from the Soviet Union and the Soviet period and from where you're from, you know, originally in Ukraine, that language is not the main signifier of identity and that identity can take all kinds of other forms.

I also feel that when I go around.

I mean, I've spent a lot of time since I wrote my book in last October.

And this last year going around, I find the same feeling.

But, you know, when I traveled around the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, I didn't get any kind of sense that people wanted to see the end of the Soviet Union either.

It was an elite project.