No, Putin isn’t trying to bring the Soviet Union back

On Christmas Day 1991, in his last act as president, Mikhail Gorbachev signed away the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A 74-year experiment that began with the ‘Great October Revolution’ of 1917 (although the USSR was formally constituted in 1922) was over. Or was it?

Thirty years on, Stalin regularly tops the Levada Centre’s survey of ‘the