It’s not just Putin who misses the Soviet empire. President Bush did, too

Vladimir Putin calls it ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century’, a viewpoint which explains much of his recent behaviour. Few others anywhere in the world, particularly people who live around Russia’s borders, would agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything to lament. From Riga to Tbilisi and from Kiev to Tashkent, Christmas Day 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR and the Red Flag was lowered from the Kremlin, remains a day to celebrate.

With nearly a quarter of a century’s hindsight it still seems astonishing that a great superpower and, with it, an entirely different way of looking at the world — Soviet-style communism — disappeared almost overnight and with practically no bloodshed. Two years earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviets abandoned their colonies in Eastern Europe, and the 40-year-long ideological and military rivalry between East and West — the Cold War — seemed over.