You will recall the fawning adoration liberals lavished on Gorbachev. They would have gladly done that for Putin as well but for the fact he chose to prevent the gay agenda from dominating Russian culture.
It’s pathetic how transparent these people are.
And Putin did more than fawn on Gorbachev. Before and after him, he, as a KGB Colonel, was an integral part of the Evil Empire. He defended that system. He wasn’t a conscript. He worked for it out of dedication and devotion, the Soviet Empire, even as it suppressing freedom in satellite states and sending people off to the deadly Gulag. He has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst thing to happen in the 20th Century. Not WWI and WWII. Not the collapse of monarchies. Not the Gulag or the Holocaust. The worst thing to him was the collapse of the Evil Empire, as a real conservative, Ronald Reagan, called it.
Leftists are made at Russians for abandoning Communism.