>>What does the author want present-day Russians to do,
>>go around whipping themselves because of past Soviet atrocities?
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“the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century” -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
“World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin’s State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’...”
“The more I see and read about Mr. Putin, in power since 1999, and his ‘managed democracy,’ the more apprehensive I become about the future of Russia and the safety of its neighbors.
If Putin believes that the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states represents the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,’ then it follows that Putin might well believe he should do something to repair the loss...”
http://web.archive.org/web/20090415000000*/http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
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“The demise of the Soviet Union was the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’,” Putin said in 2005.
“Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor”
Way too much too read there, and way too many links (I’m an old guy with a limited attention span). So please summarize.
Anyway, I’m no great admirer of Putin. But how he acting any differently from any leader - like America’s Trump or Hungary’s Orbán - who is aggressively putting his country first?
Putin regrets the fall of the Soviet Union. Okay. But many British leaders regretted the loss of British India. And many Americans regretted the loss of the Panama Canal Zone. All of these feeling are - in my mind - normal, and to be expected.
I guess my bottom line is this: Putin is a devil, but a minor one. The real danger to Western civilization comes from Islam, and from China.