Medvedev declines to back Putin on Soviet collapse
Moscow: The USSR's collapse caused suffering for its people but whether it was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century is a matter for historians, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said.
Medvedev's predecessor and strongman Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who served in Communist
East Germany, notoriously used that phrase in a national
address in 2005 to describe the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine
whose transcript was released by the Kremlin today, Medvedev
described the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a "great
shock" for its people.
"It was a very serious and dramatic event as a result
of which the people who had lived in one state found
themselves dispersed in several states," he said.
"But to say it was the main geopolitical catastrophe
of the 20th century or something like that, this is a matter
for historians."
Medvedev said that World War II was a "no less
serious catastrophe" and "if we talk about the consequences a
more terrible tragedy". He described the civil war that
followed the 1917 Russian Revolution as another catastrophe.
The President said in the interview that when the
Berlin Wall fell in 1989 he was a post-graduate student in
Saint Petersburg and knew that the changes "would affect the
fate of Europe and in the end our country".
Bureau Report