In trying to regain his balance amid a host of problems, Gorbachev was thinking out loud in the presence of Chernyaev, as if arguing with some conservatives: „Stabilization will be the end of perestroika. Stability is stagnation. Revolution equals instability!“
Chernyaev believed his boss was now out of touch.
—Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, (Yale University Press, 2022), 82.
This last line strikes me as incredibly funny. Zubok is writing about August 1989, so this is tragic, of course, but the utter failure of many Soviets – and many Americans for that matter – to at all understand what was going on in the USSR during these years led to some people taking very laboriously thought out and well written up positions which in retrospect appear quite ludicrous.