Slava Paperno: So, was the Soviet Union doomed, or was [its collapse] due to a mistake? Or many mistakes?
S. Popov: The question you're asking is a pretty tough one, to which... to which there is no answer, but frankly, what I saw around me back when I was a student and when I was growing up, I loved the society I lived in. I enjoyed living in the Soviet Union, and what happened with the economy seemed, on the whole, like something utterly absurd, that could have been avoided.
Take the Kosygin reforms, take any other tendencies or, you know, trends in the economy that were shaking up the whole society and it seemed that we could feed the country, increase labor productivity and also manage to avoid capitalist exploitation. But in fact what happened was that there was even greater oppression of humans by other humans, to use Marxist-Leninist language.