By accusing Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Western governments of being behind the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Tsipko says, the Putin regime seeks to conceal what for it is a most unwelcome truth: at the end of Soviet times, it was Russians and no one else who wanted a sovereign Russia and were ready to give up the empire to get it.

According to the senior Russian commentator who was deeply involved in Russian political life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the USSR’s disintegration, which Putin calls the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century, was “the sovereign choice of the Russian people” (mk.ru/social/2024/06/10/raskryta-trudovaya-pravda-o-raspade-sssr-elcin-ne-byl-predatelem.html).

Tsipko points out that the idea of a sovereign Russia was formulated and promoted by Russian ruralist writers, a group especially close to the thinking and feeling of the Russian people and distant from many democrats and certainly the West, at the RSFSR Writers’ Congress in 1988.

Aleksandr Yakovlov, then a close advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and someone often presented by the Putinists as “a CIA agent” who supposedly undermined the Soviet Union, advised Tsipko, then one of his aides, at the time that “you should read it and you will understand how the disintegration of the USSR began.”

“I........

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