Alexander Yakovlev

Pragmatism is the most assured guiding force for good government. It is possible to run a government based on ideology or its close cousin, fanaticism, but rarely do such things end up being successful.
More often than not, the antithesis of pragmatism ends in failure.
The controversial 20th century British politician Enoch Powell once remarked,

“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs”.

In 1991 at a dacha in the middle of Belavezha Forest, three men conspired to end the Soviet Union in contravention not only of Soviet law, but against the stated wishes of the majority of Soviet citizens who just months earlier, voted in a referendum in which they expressed their desire to live together in a single state, the Soviet Union.