A student in Japan once asked me, “President, democracy is all very well. You were elected; you introduced free elections and everything, but at the next election you might not be elected and you will lose.” I told her, “But you see, even then I will not lose, because there will have been free elections and that is the result of what I have been trying to achieve.” I said, “If I win a free election then I will have a double victory. If I lose then there will only be one victory, but democracy will exist and that is the main thing.” For this reason, when they ask me nowadays how I feel, after all that has happened, I say, “Of course it did turn out that the very moment we were supposed to go further in reforming the Soviet Union, the Party and the economy, perestroika was interrupted, but what it accomplished, and what processes and tendencies it laid down — that is an enormous victory.”