Video-conference “20th Anniversary since Disintegration of the Soviet Union”

and Alexey Semyonov, President of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, and was moderated by Dr. Rusty Butler, Associate Vice President of International Affairs and Diplomacy at UVU. These views from Russia gave some perspectives of Soviet citizens during the disintegration of the Soviet Union. There were fascinating stories of fear, uneasiness, hope, and anticipation. One of the students was at sea on a boat at the time and they didn’t have any reliable information. The captain was unsure of which flag to sail into port under—they left the Soviet Union, but that didn’t exist anymore (they made the “right choice” and raised the tricolor imperial flag that Russia adopted). Others, who were out of the country during the transformation, expressed similar views of leaving one country and the daunting journey going home to a different place without a name. For Russians, it was hard to make sense of this strange time. The whole transformation seemed so sudden and rapid when it happened, but many people had noticed increasingly ubiquitous signs of change in the years prior to 1991 as the communist government was loosening restrictions and losing their ironfisted grip on the state. Dr. Gronskaya noted that the mentality of the country was changing, fostering greater desires for liberties and human rights. Russians could feel a hint of freedom in the air. Opposition to the state was no longer aggressively quashed and communist leaders, especially Lenin, were openly criticized. Alexey Semyonov explained that there was no doubt that change was inevitable, and it was understood that the Soviet Union couldn’t sustain itself much longer. Semyonov clarified that the only question was how the dissolution would happen—peacefully or violently? What could have been catastrophic ended up being a much more “peaceful” political dissolution. Many leaders, like Andrei Sakharov, had been working on restructuring the union under more democratic structures while keeping the same territory, similar to the current European Union, but the peripheral states desired independence, and the union fragmented. For people in the