Russian President Vladimir Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago as the demise of what he called “historical Russia” and said the economic crisis that followed was so bad he had to moonlight as a taxi driver.
Putin’s comments, released by state TV on Sunday, are likely to further fuel speculation about his foreign policy intentions among critics, who accuse him of planning to recreate the Soviet Union and of contemplating an attack on Ukraine, a notion the Kremlin has dismissed as fear-mongering.
“It was the disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union,” Putin said of the 1991 breakup, in comments aired on Sunday as part of a documentary film titled Russia. New History, the RIA state news agency reported.
“We turned into a completely different country and what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost,” said Putin, saying that 25 million Russians in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called “a major humanitarian tragedy.”
Putin also described for the first time how he was affected personally by the tough economic times that followed the Soviet collapse, when Russia experienced double-digit percentage inflation.
“Sometimes [I] had to moonlight and drive a taxi. It is unpleasant to talk about this, but, unfortunately, this also took place,” he said.
Putin, who served in the Soviet-era KGB, had called the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was ruled from Moscow, was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, but his new comments show how he views it as a setback for Russian power.
Ukraine was one of 15 Soviet republics and Putin used a lengthy article published on the Kremlin Web site this year to set out why he believed Russia’s neighbor and its people were an integral part of Russian history and culture.
This view is rejected by Kiev as a politically motivated and oversimplified version of history.
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