Juliane Fürst teaches modern European history at Bristol University.
People here don’t like Ukrainian politics, she said. Who would? Who could like somebody who had had a gold toilet installed? Yet Crimea had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovich several times. What she was really saying that people don’t like post-Soviet life.
The Soviet Union claimed leadership of the world revolution in the 1920s and 1930s – not surprisingly, since of all the European upheavals at the end of the First World War, theirs was the...
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