Vladimir Putin has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century. Western leaders have been quick to brand this as old-fashioned thinking.  Their condescension sounds eerily like Neville Chamberlain’s remark that Hitler “missed the bus” in the Czech crisis. The “bus” the Russians have missed is not failure to accept the breakup of the Soviet Empire. Rather, the great “catastrophe” of the 20th Century was its very existence. Behind this difference lies the amnesia that enables President Putin’s adventurism in the Ukraine and his determination to put the wheels back on a malevolent and lethal machine. In 1989, the entire world witnessed the defeat of the Soviet Union across every front: ideology, economics, technology, and moral philosophy. This purported “catastrophe” freed enslaved satellite states from the terror and autocracy exported by the Bolsheviks across...(Read Full Article)