On Saturday, however, Putin was struggling to stop history from repeating itself– not the glories of 1945 but the fratricidal horror of Russia’s civil war from 1917-23. Instead of garlanding the current crisis with references to World War II– which Russia calls the Great Patriotic War, a favorite Putin topic– Putin spoke instead of 1917. Throughout the 1990s, when Russia’s president was Boris Yeltsin, he and his political enemies regularly accused one another of tipping the country toward civil war. Putin vowed to put an end to all that disarray after he took over from Yeltsin at the end of 1999. “Putin always wanted to repeat the Great Patriotic War,” said Volodymyr Viatrovych, a Ukrainian historian and lawmaker, “but he instead repeated the civil war.”Credit: nytimes.comENND

Source: New York Times June 24, 2023 20:41 UTC