Vladimir Putin has long insisted that the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, but Russian historian Mark Solonin disputes that says that in fact, it was not the end of the USSR but its beginning with the Bolshevik coup that deserves that description.
That is because, the longtime specialist on World War II says, had the Bolsheviks not come to power, Hitler would not have either; and without the Nazi leader’s rise, the second world war would not have broken out.
Asked by Alesya Batsman, the chief editor of the GORDON internet publication “how the USSR should have acted in order to avoid this bloody war?” Solonin replied that the best thing it could have done would have been never to have appeared on the map of history at all.
To be sure, the Russian historian said,
“the appearance of totalitarian regimes throughout Europe and in Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s was no accident and had deep roots. But nevertheless, all this insanity began in Russia and the Russian Empire on the ruins of which the Soviet Union was created.”
But nevertheless,
“the victory of the monstrously cruel, inhumane and mad totalitarian communist regime in a huge country” such as Russia was beyond any doubt “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
Read more:
- ‘Feudal stability’ in post-Soviet States points to collapse and chaos ahead, Portnikov says
- The Russian Federation will disintegrate but not ‘just like the Soviet Union did’
- Fascism exploited and distorted in Putin’s Russia for propaganda’s sake
- Russia’s occupation of Ukraine: a historical and centuries-old process
- Memory of the Great Patriotic war in Russia’s expansionist policy
- Who wants the USSR back in Ukraine?
