Change will come to Russia — abruptly and unexpectedly

Vladimir Bukovsky, a writer, long-term political prisoner and one of the founders of the democratic movement in the U.S.S.R., spoke words that proved prophetic. “Don’t be fooled: The dragon is not dead yet. It is mortally wounded, its spine is broken, but it still holds human souls and many countries in its claws.” Throughout the next year [after the 1991 August Revolution], Bukovsky and a few other farsighted democratic leaders, including Galina Starovoitova, a Russian legislator and adviser to Yeltsin, tried to persuade the Russian leadership to “slay the dragon”: to open the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the KGB, to publish documents about the crimes of the Soviet regime and its punitive bodies, and to condemn these crimes at the state level so that the people who committed these crimes could not decide the fate of new Russia.
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Yeltsin was not ready for a final break with the Soviet past. Western leaders, afraid of being confronted with interesting information about themselves in the Moscow archives, pressured Yeltsin to keep them closed.
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The archives, for the most part, remained closed. The KGB dodged even the mildest of reforms. It received a bit of an image makeover; that was all. And the people who took a direct part in repression ended up in leadership positions from the very first days of democratic Russia.
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We have no right to repeat this mistake when the window of opportunity opens again. All archives must be opened and published. All the crimes of both the Soviet and Putin regimes must receive a proper evaluation at the state level.
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Only in this way — having fully confronted and condemned these crimes — will Russia be able to truly free itself from the burden of the past and move forward toward the creation of a free and modern state based on law and universal values.

Truth is sorely needed for the Russian system to process the horrors and idealism of the Soviet experiment: where did it go wrong, where did it succeed, and where was it catastrophic.