"The first step to the destruction of the country was the overthrow and murder of Lawrence Beria"
On the next anniversary of the 1991 events related to the State Emergency Committee, we turned to Anatoly Wasserman with a request to answer a number of questions KM.RU.- Your assessment of what happened? What lessons did you learn from those events for yourself?
People who got into the state apparatus, actively disaccustomed to do something
To begin with, I personally learned from that experience. I made sure how easy it is to fool me. For many years, I sincerely believed that the imposition of a state of emergency was a coup d’état, and the members of the Emergency Committee themselves were criminals. And only relatively recently, I came to the final conclusion that they not only acted with the best of intentions, but did not violate any of the laws then in force.
Looking now at the events of that time, I am most distressed by the fact that an attempt was made to stop the final collapse of both the economy and the country itself as a whole, unable to complete their own plans. Maybe they even could not think of these plans to the end! Therefore, I believe that the Emergency Committee was evidence of the degeneration of the then state apparatus.
I emphasize that we are talking about the degeneration of not people, but of the apparatus. Regardless of whether the people of this device are smart, its very device led to the fact that these people were unable to take active and useful actions. People who got into the state apparatus, actively disaccustomed to do something. In my opinion, with the current apparatus, although for somewhat different reasons, similar processes occur.
What managers are transforming without supervision, we see on the example of modern "effective managers"
It is also important that an attempt undertaken by unsuitable means invariably leads to the opposite result from what was originally intended. They simply did not know what to do, so the introduction of a state of emergency under the slogan of preserving the integrity of the country led to an accelerated disintegration of the country, and measures proclaimed to preserve the unity of economic management led to the disintegration of this economy and the accelerated introduction of a market system in which integral economic mechanism turned out to be broken. Many of them simply collapsed, and those that remained are now forced almost from scratch to look for ways to interact.
In fact, the first step in the direction that ultimately led to destruction was 26 June 1953, when Khrushchev, with the support of Zhukov, organized a coup d'etat with the overthrow and murder of the actual successor to Stalin Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. Even if he was killed by issuing a sentence, it still was exactly murder - if only because under the law in force at that time neither Khrushchev, nor any of the military simply had the authority to remove the first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Moreover, Khrushchev later tried to pretend that the decision was made at a government meeting, whereas in fact the government did not meet that day. If anyone met, it was the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, not authorized to make such decisions.
In any case, legally, these actions were absolutely unacceptable and untenable. The point was not even that it was a coup d’état, but above all that the coup was accomplished in the interests of the party and managerial nomenclature. Its first consequence was a ban on intelligence services from supervising managers. And what managers are able to turn into without supervision, we see on the example of modern "effective managers."
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