A top Moscow official and his colleagues were directly involved in forcibly deporting Ukrainian children, who were then placed in Russian military training programs, it has been reported.
A top Moscow official and his colleagues were directly involved in forcibly deporting Ukrainian children, who were then placed in Russian military training programs, it has been reported.
Was Russia actually torn down and rebuilt as the USSR? By some accounts the USSR was a grand experiment in building a better world (with seriously flawed execution), and by others it was just a continuation of the Russian empire with a new set of despots at the top. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, but it’s damned hard to draw any conclusions when almost everyone who talks about the USSR seems to either have too limited a perspective to see the big picture, or to have a vested interest in pushing a certain narrative.
The collapse I was talking about was actually the dissolution of the USSR and the turmoil which resulted from that in the 90s. This is a pretty clear crisis in which the old paradigm was eliminated totally and was replaced chaos and economic depression. This crisis seeded the desire for a strongman to set everything right, which was a position filled by Putin.
Ah, that makes more sense. Putin seems to have done a bang-up job of rebuilding Russia as the version of the USSR its harshest critics portray, just missing some territories he’s desperately trying to reconquer.