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#1 On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered his last speech as president of the Soviet Union. He signed the papers that would formally dissolve the Soviet Union, and began to speak. His voice was soft and forced at first, but it became more controlled as he went on.

#2 The country that had come into existence after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 had ceased to exist minutes later, when Gorbachev passed the nuclear briefcase to Yeltsin. The role played by Alexander Yakovlev in the dismantling of the Soviet Union was second only to Gorbachev’s.

#3 The Soviet system rested on violence and ideology. The death of Stalin in 1953 put an end to mass terror and repression. Violence, administered by the security services on behalf of the Communist Party, became more sporadic and was now used mainly against dissidents.

#4 The collapse of the Soviet Union was not caused by economic problems or a revolutionary uprising in Moscow, but by the dismantling of lies. Without lies, the Soviet Union had no legitimacy.

Summary of Arkady Ostrovsky's The Invention of Russia

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