With the support of St. Petersburg State University and the Russian Museum of Political History, the first seminar on "Winds of Reform" will be held in St. Petersburg from October 28 to 30.
On the 27th, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech while welcoming scholars attending the "Winds of Reform" seminar in St. Petersburg, recalling the reforms he implemented in the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev pointed out that a mainstream view in Russian academic circles today is that the reforms he introduced in the 1980s led directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is a fundamental mistake.
Convinced of the historical correctness of his reforms, the former Soviet leader said that despite the mistakes and mistakes of the reforms, he and other promoters have been trying to maintain the correct pace of reforms.
The main result of this process was the formulation of a policy of change, which was the end of the system of constraints on national development and the end of the Cold War and the arms race.
Gorbachev stressed that there are two historical events that have dealt a fatal blow to his reforms, one is the 8.19 incident planned by the State Emergency Committee (some senior officials tried to save the Soviet Union) and the signing of the Belovezh Agreement (Yeltsin, Kravchuk and others decided to establish the CIS and terminate the existence of the Soviet Union). These two events deprived the Soviet Union of an environment for further transformation and made the country worse.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was not the result of reforms, a great mistake that Gorbachev believed "distorted the Russians' understanding of the country's history."
Not long ago, Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian Federation Communist Party, said that Gorbachev should take responsibility for the collapse of the Soviet Union and that Gorbachev needed to be tried and imprisoned. (October 28, 2021, by Liu Peng)