428. Echoes of ’91: The Fall of the USSR and Putin’s Future

2026-08-19

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In this episode of Battleground: The Big Picture, host Roger Moorhouse sits down with renowned historian and author Robert Service to dissect the historical threads connecting the fall of the Soviet Union to Vladimir Putin’s present-day Russia. Drawing from his recent work on the August 1991 coup, Bob reflects on his first-hand experiences in Moscow, the sudden collapse of Soviet institutions, and the complex legacies left behind by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Together, they explore how the p...

In this episode of Battleground: The Big Picture, host Roger Moorhouse sits down with renowned historian and author Robert Service to dissect the historical threads connecting the fall of the Soviet Union to Vladimir Putin’s present-day Russia.

Drawing from his recent work on the August 1991 coup, Bob reflects on his first-hand experiences in Moscow, the sudden collapse of Soviet institutions, and the complex legacies left behind by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

Together, they explore how the political and economic missteps of the 1990s shaped today’s authoritarian landscape, the mounting internal pressures on Putin’s regime amid the war in Ukraine, Russia's shifting geopolitical reliance on China, and whether historical parallels suggest a breaking point is near.

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Producer: James Hodgson

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