Medvedev declines to back Putin on Soviet collapse

Last Updated: Saturday, November 07, 2009, 20:56

Tags: Medvedev, Soviet collapse, Putin

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

First Published: Saturday, November 07, 2009, 20:56