Medvedev declines to back Putin on Soviet collapse

The USSR's collapse caused suffering for its people but whether it was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century is a matter for historians, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said.

Medvedev's predecessor and strongman Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who served in Communist East Germany, notoriously used that phrase in a national address in 2005 to describe the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine whose transcript was released by the Kremlin yesterday, Medvedev described the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a "great shock" for its people.

"It was a very serious and dramatic event as a result of which the people who had lived in one state found themselves dispersed in several states," he said.

"But to say it was the main geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century or something like that, this is a matter for historians."

Medvedev said that World War II was a "no less serious catastrophe" and "if we talk about the consequences a more terrible tragedy". He described the civil war that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution as another catastrophe.

The president said in the interview that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 he was a post-graduate student in St Petersburg and knew that the changes "would affect the fate of Europe and in the end our country".

But Medvedev held back from praising the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose cautious liberalisation is hailed in the West for opening the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union.

He said perceptions of Gorbachev were different in Russia as it was during his rule "that it came to the collapse of our state".