The flag came down. The ideology stayed

Whoever does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart and whoever wants to rebuild it has no head

By Ayesha Arshad

“Whoever does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart, and whoever wants to rebuild it has no head.”

In 2005, Vladimir Putin offered the world a tidy little paradox, the kind that sounds wise until you actually think about it. It is a line engineered for quotation, mournful enough to flatter the nostalgic, cautious enough to flatter the pragmatist, vague enough to mean whatever the listener needs it to mean. It also happens to be the perfect epitaph for a state that died on paper in 1991 and never quite finished dying anywhere else.

On 25 December 1991, a flag came down over the Kremlin for the last time. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on live television, fifteen republics were suddenly, awkwardly independent, and the twentieth century’s great ideological experiment ended not with a revolution but with a signature. It was, by the standards of empires, a remarkably tidy death. No siege, no firing squad, no dramatic final battle, just paperwork, and then silence.

Which makes it all the stranger that the silence never actually arrived.

To understand why, you have to go back further than 1991, back to 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power and began building a state that didn’t just want to govern territory, it wanted to govern belief. By 1922 the USSR was official. By the 1930s, Stalin had turned it into a machine for rapid industrialisation, forced collectivisation, and the kind of political terror that makes ordinary repression look restrained. By 1945 it was a superpower. For the next forty-four years, the Cold War turned the entire planet into a proxy chessboard, Sputnik in 1957, Gagarin in orbit by 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 bringing the world within a decision or two of nuclear war, Soviet tanks in Afghanistan by 1979. Gorbachev’s reforms, perestroika, glasnost, were meant to save the system. Instead they cracked it open. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Two years later, so did everything else.

That is the official story, and it is entirely true. It is also, on its own, useless for explaining the present, because the present keeps behaving as though the Cold War never actually finished, just changed venues.

Start with the obvious one. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was justified, in part, using language lifted almost verbatim from Soviet-era grievance: betrayal by the West, the unnatural separation of “one people,” the humiliation of imperial contraction. This is not incidental rhetoric. It is a government reaching for a Soviet emotional vocabulary because the population still understands it fluently. You cannot mobilise a country around the loss of an empire unless a large number of its citizens still feel, somewhere, that the empire was theirs to lose.

Then there are the frozen conflicts nobody outside the region thinks about until they reignite, Transnistria wedged inside Moldova, South Ossetia and Abkhazia carved out of Georgia, each one a Soviet-drawn border dispute that the USSR never resolved and simply left armed on its way out the door. Belarus operates under a “Union State” arrangement with Russia that is, in practice, a slow-motion re-absorption dressed up in diplomatic language. In January 2022, when unrest broke out in Kazakhstan, it was a Russian-led, explicitly post-Soviet security bloc, the CSTO, that sent troops in to restore order, a reflex so old it barely needed to be improvised.

The Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, spend a disproportionate amount of their defence budgets and political energy on a single question: whether Moscow still considers their independence permanent or merely paused. That is not paranoia. It is a rational response to living next to a state that has, within living memory, treated borders as provisional. Meanwhile, Europe spent the better part of three decades wiring its energy supply directly into Russian pipelines, discovering only after 2022 how much political leverage it had quietly handed away in the name of cheap gas, a dependency that was built, in its infrastructure and its habits of trust, in the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet years.

None of this means the USSR secretly survived. It didn’t. Fifteen states went in fifteen different directions, and the gap between, say, Estonia’s institutions and Belarus’s is not cosmetic, it’s the difference between a functioning democracy and a personalist dictatorship that still jails people for the wrong Telegram post. The collapse was real. What survived was not the state but its reflexes: a tolerance for centralised power in some successor states, a live fear of it in others, and a shared, unresolved argument over who gets to narrate what actually happened between 1917 and 1991.

Governments fall constantly. Most have the decency to stay fallen. The Soviet Union is the rare case where the funeral was real, the body was buried, and the argument over the inheritance never closed the file. Ukraine is fighting a war partly rooted in it. The Baltics are arming against it. Kazakhstan called in troops because of it. And Europe is still untangling its energy grid from it.

The flag came down in 1991. Whatever the flag was actually holding together did not go with it.