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ALMOST HALF OF RUSSIANS CONSIDER PERESTROIKA A FAILURE

MOSCOW, March 11. (RIA Novosti)-According to the results of a public survey conducted by the Yury Levada analytical center, only a fifth of Russians believe that the reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev "were good" for Russia. At the same time, 46% agree with the statement, "It would have been better if everything had remained as it was before perestroika," Izvestia reports.

A report from the Public Opinion Foundation, Reforms in Russia - Diagnosis and Prognosis, says the main goal of reforms was to "make life better." However, the majority of Russians are convinced that perestroika did not give them the promised "decent life," and a quarter of the population does not expect any improvement in their situation even in distant future.

A large-scale public survey conducted recently by the ROMIR Monitoring agency clearly shows that 8% of Russian families currently do not have enough money to buy food, and every third Russian family "has a hard time" buying clothes.

At the height of perestroika, sociologists from the All-Russia Center for Public Opinion Studies conducted a survey to identify the difficulties that hindered the country's development. People put "corruption and theft" (two-thirds of the respondents) in first place, "the backwardness of Russian economy" in the second, and "the bureaucracy" in third place. The fourth and the fifth places were shared by increased crime and the mistakes made by the country's leadership. Instead of solving all these problems, perestroika only made them worse. The majority of experts believe the level of corruption in today's bureaucracy has significantly increased compared with the Soviet period, the economy is still based on commodity exports and the lack of bureaucrats' accountability led to mass protests against the recent benefit reform.

Therefore, it is not surprising that there is widespread nostalgia in Russian society today: 86% of Russians believe a return to the Brezhnev era is impossible,but 39% would welcome such a development, even though the main demands of the population in 1989 (filling stores with food and other goods, the chance to earn money) have been satisfied.