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I really knew the shape the country was in. I saw the mess around me. But I still entertained illusions that the system could be reformed. I had tried a mini-perestroika during the 10 years I was in charge of Stavropol, in southern Russia. But the curbs imposed from above had not let us go farther. So, I thought, it's at the top that we must start changes to let the people breathe. But even after I got there, the system fought back, resisting and biting. Nothing changed in the country at large. The party officialdom defended its power. Only in 1988 did I realize that the totalitarian communist system could not be reformed. It had to be dismantled and replaced by democracy. Yegor Ligachev, a hard-line Politburo member, said at a later point, "It was only too late that we discerned a social democrat in Gorbachev." Indeed, it was. I strove for peaceful changes; I did not want any boot stomping. They did stomp their boots in 1991 with their failed coup d'etat--and I left. Still, I dragged them to the point of no return. There could be no going back to the past and to the old system.

Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from March 1985 until its demise in 1991