Nostalgia for USSR and dreams about possible Euro-Russia union

No former member of the USSR managed to achieve much after proclaiming independence. Nobody can boast that everything happened as they planned. Related opinions were stated in a multimedia conference themed “20 Years of the Putsch. View on Today”, Info-Prim Neo reports. ”Nobody wants the Stalinist repression to repeat. A lot of people were affected. We did not enjoy freedom. Owing to the deficit, we lived staying in queues. Even if today we do not live as we want, I think we will manage to achieve what we hoped for 20 years ago. The Soviet Union wouldn’t have fallen apart if the relations between the member states had been based on partnership, not created artificially,” said the first President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk. Former President of Kyrgyzstan Askar Akaev expressed his conviction that in 10-15 years, the countries will concentrate around Russia and there will be created a Euro-Russia union. “We will have a President, as in the EU. Russia must become a country that will attract the rest of the states,” he said. Ghenadi Burbulis, head of the International Forum of Modernizers “Moia Rossia”, said that Russia is not yet a country around which all the other states would concentrate, not even 20 years after the Soviet Union fell apart. “A possible post-Soviet or Euro-Russia union should be based on relations of partnership, communication, trust and common responsibility,” said Ghenadi Burbulis. Nicolae Chirtoaca, director of the Independent Institute of Strategic Studies, said he hoped that Moldova will democratize and develop after the Putsch of 1991, but nothing happened. The press is not fully free, there is no market and the power was taken by a group of very rich persons. Moldova’s population has Soviet-type thinking and a radical reformation of the country is not possible. There is too much corruption and oligarchy makes is stronger,” he stated. Communist MP Eduard Musuc, chairman of the parliamentary commission on public administration and regional development, said the Moldovans are nostalgic for the past. He stressed that a switch to a new development level was possible without destroying what was already created in the Soviet Union. Now we have democracy, but do not have workplaces and high pensions. The economic relations with Russia and other Soviet states were destroyed, he said, voicing hope that a post-Soviet union between the former member states of the USSR will be established. The 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt (19–21 August 1991), also known as the August Putsch or August Coup, was an attempt by a group of members of the Soviet Union's government to take control of the country from Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup leaders were hard-line members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) who were opposed to Gorbachev's reform program and the new union treaty that he had negotiated which decentralized much of the central government's power to the republics. They were opposed, mainly in Moscow, by a short but effective campaign of civil resistance. Although the coup collapsed in only two days and Gorbachev returned to government, the event destabilized the Soviet Union and is widely considered to have led to both the demise of the CPSU and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Moldova proclaimed its independence on August 27, 1991.