To Russia's once and possibly future president, Vladimir Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union-two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall-was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. It set off shocks that were felt across the globe. Russians who lived through the ruinous inflation and currency woes of the early post-Soviet years paid a heavy price. Yet few ouside Russia lamented the passing of the century's last failed empire.

Even Russians had seen worse. For them, the 20th century had already brought the first world war, with the Bolshevik grab for power, followed by Stalin's self-induced famine, which killed millions. By contrast, the end of the cold war was hardly devastating. The post-1945 nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the West had brought a perilous stability, but had generated proxy wars from Korea and Vietnam to Angola, Central America and Afghanistan —a continuation of cold war by more traditional bloody means. Indeed the collapse of Soviet influence around the world went unmourned outside Russia, except by those who had relied on it to seize and hold power. Yet how had the end come so fast? And how would it refashion a world forged over four decades of superpower domination and rivalry?

Some credit Ronald Reagan's "star wars" dream of a missile-defence shield with engineering the Soviet demise: superior technology had threatened the Kremlin with a new, unaffordable arms race. Yet the Soviet Union could still have overwhelmed such defences simply by turning out ever more rockets — one reason the defences were never built. In many ways it was the Soviet Union that lost the cold war, rather than America that won it.

... contd.