How the collapse of the USSR felt from the inside

How the collapse of the USSR felt from the inside:

A reflection by a witness 25 years later

By Oleg Atbashian | First published in FrontPage Mag 12/30/2016

25 years ago George Bush Sr. was still in office, and so was Saddam Hussein. The European Union didn't exist and neither did China's economic powerhouse. The Berlin wall had just come down and Germany had finally reunited. Hillary Clinton was a little-known mouthy First Lady of Arkansas and the media gleefully predicted that Donald Trump would never climb back to the top after his Atlantic City fiasco.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Eastern bloc was in shambles, but the USSR was still standing with Mikhail Gorbachev at the helm. Vladimir Putin dabbled in minor corruption working for the Mayor of Saint Petersburg, which had just been renamed from Leningrad. The KGB meddled in other countries' affairs as usual, spreading "fake news" and helping leftist politicians to win elections with no objections from the Western mainstream media.

Then, all of a sudden, the USSR disappeared from the map. How did that happen? Political scientists have and will continue to write, with varying degree of accuracy, about the details of it. What I'm attempting to do here is describe how it looked and felt from the inside - as seen by me, who at the time happened to be a voiceless, powerless Soviet citizen trying to make sense of the universe..."

Read on!