“I consider it vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements which have been attained in the last few years. We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the pretexts. Otherwise, all our hopes for the best will be buried.”

—  Mikhail Gorbachev

1990s, Resignation Address (1991)

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Mikhail Gorbachev 65
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1931

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