24.06.2025, Moscow.
The outcome of Gaidar’s reforms turned out to be absolutely different for the Russian people than the initiators expected, the leader of the Essence of Time movement, philosopher and political scientist Sergey Kurginyan said on May 30 on the program Conversation with a Sage on radio Zvezda.
The political scientist stressed that “the Soviet Union was illegitimately destroyed within the integrationist model,” and the GKChP (State Committee for the State of Emergency, a group of top-ranking Soviet officials who opposed the disintegration of the USSR and the perestroika. It existed between August 18-21, 1991 – Rossa Primavera News Agency) was not a consolidated force, and its members disagreed in their vision of the future of the country.
“The ideologists of the GKChP wanted different things: Shenin wanted to put both Gorbachev and Yeltsin in prison to continue the communist development, Lukyanov wanted to destroy Yeltsin to give way to Gorbachev. Pavlov and his team, including his deputy and other persons, wanted to make Yeltsin the president of the USSR,” Sergey Kurginyan reminded.
The analyst told about his conversation with former KGB director Vladimir Kryuchkov who shared a story from the period when he served under Yuri Andropov.
“I visited Andropov for the first time, he had a heart attack, it was long ago, it was not Andropov’s diseases that everyone knew about later, but it was much earlier, in 1970s. He said he had written a poem for the first time in his life. And that was a period when Ilyenkov’s book The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital was very popular. I said, ‘What kind of a poem?’ He gave me a sheet of paper, ‘You quickly come to concrete understanding when get a hedgehog under your bare ass,’” Sergey Kurginyan told.
The political scientist added that Kryuchkov later told him, “Everything became so much brainwashed towards capitalism that we should let the Russian people get this hedgehog of Gaidar’s reforms under their bare ass.”
The philosopher noted that later the outcome of these reforms turned out to be different than their initiators expected.
“So, the people got it there. But in fact they were so demotivated that the result was absolutely different than what the campaigners for this policy expected. How could this be overcome?” Sergey Kurginyan said.
Kurginyan indicated that the international relations today are entering a new phase of instability due to the escalation between India and Pakistan along with a new arms race and a heating of conflict threat worldwide, which makes an absolutely new reality as compared to 1990s.
“It is already a new reality, already a new arms race, already a new level of conflict threat in the world, everywhere! Everywhere, between India and Pakistan as now the Indians have found out that it came from the Chinese who controlled the Pakistani military to hit down their aircraft. Where are we moving?” the leader of the Essence of Time movement concluded.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
