“In 1932-1933 Ukraine experienced the Holodomor “Extermination by hunger” or “Killing by Starvation”) which was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that killed up to 7.5 million Ukrainians.”
2013:
“Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor”
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131219/185734707/Putin-Says-Stalin-No-Worse-Than-Cunning-Oliver-Cromwell.html
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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.
It is easy to be smug when you and your family weren't forced to suffer through a decade of abject poverty and sometimes near-starvation.
The point is Communism, bad. The sudden collapse of the second most powerful nation on earth, also bad in a different way, especially from the perspective of those who had to live through it.