This interview is so good – and so worth 37 minutes of your time.
Summary from the YouTube page of the Hoover Institute:
Yuri Yarim-Agaev was already a distinguished physicist when, in the 1970s, he joined the Moscow Helsinki Group, the dissident organization set up to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords. Fellow members of the organization included physicist Yuri Orlov and Yelena Bonner, wife of Andrei Sakharov. Yarim-Agaev, now a financial analyst in New York, devotes much of his time to ensuring that the evils of Soviet communism are never forgotten.
Yarim-Agaev stresses communism’s inherently evil nature and hostility to the West, asserting that “the cold war was inevitable.” He also rejects the notion that the Soviet Union crumbled under its own weight and gives little credit to Gorbachev: “Those reforms made by Gorbachev were not caused by his love of freedom or any human right but by sheer necessity to save the communist system.” The Soviet Union fell, he avers, because it was pushed by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.
