For many years our two nations were the two powers, the two opposites. They wanted to make us implacable enemies, that effected the destinies of the … - Boris Yeltsin

I should not interfere with this natural march of history. To hold onto power for another half-year, when the country has a strong man who is worthy of being president and with whom practically every Russian today ties his hopes for the future? Why should I interfere with him? Why wait still another half-year? No, that's not for me! It's simply not in my character!

Quite recently I spoke to very different audiences in Yaroslavl, Kaliningrad, and Novgorod provinces. And although I met with workers, intellectuals, peasants, military men, party employees, and managerial employees, people with diverse political views, sympathies, and passions, it will be a long time before I will be able to recall such unanimity on the most important point, that is, the understanding that the country has reached the very final stage of collapse and that there is no longer anywhere to fall back to. The people who led one of the wealthiest and most talented countries on the planet to a state of destitution and degradation must always have a face of the “enemy” to fall back on, someone they can blame for everything that is going on. We have always had an “enemy” in the seventy-three years of Soviet power: at first we had the bourgeoisie, the gentry, and the capitalists; then we had the counterrevolutionaries, the Trotskyites, and the left- and right-wing deviationists, and also the kulaks; then came the CIA, imperialism, and the Zionist conspiracy. And now we need a new “enemy,” because no one believes in the CIA, the Trotskyites, or the capitalists anymore. The new “enemy” is the so-called democrats, who are destabilizing, tormenting, subverting, disorienting, and committing all other kinds of vile acts in their lust for power. On the basis of this logic, all we would have to do to make everything good in the country would be to remove the democrats and get rid of them somehow, and then there would ensue a glorious time known as the “Communist future,” “the socialist choice,” or the “radiant future.”

Using the traditional demagoguery, which has been tried and tested over the years, the putschists blame all our current difficulties on the democrats and promise economic recovery and a better life, security and prosperity for the citizens of the USSR. What a hypocritical lie! Surely Pavlov is responsible for rocketing inflation and unprecedented price rises this year? Surely Yazov as leader of the most corrupt highest placed generals, is responsible for the poverty and lawlessness of our servicemen? Surely Pugo bears personal responsibility for the blood shed in the Baltic republics? Surely Starodubtsev, leader of the organization of Soviet land-owners is to blame, owing to the stance he assumed, for the abortive collection of last year’s bumper crops? And these are the people who promise to “restore order in the country!”