Lenin and the October Revolution were meant to remain publicly hallowed. Gorbachёv failed to understand that his actions were destabilising communism. Glasnost and perestroika were undermining the political and economic foundations of the Soviet order. Localism, nationalism, corruption, illegal private profiteering and distrust of official authority: all these phenomena, which had grown unchecked under the rule of Brezhnev, had been reinforced by the dismantlement of central controls undertaken by Gorbachёv.

—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 466.