History’s Revenge: Why the USSR’s Collapse Is Like WWI

The world has changed enormously in the nearly 23 years since the collapse of the USSR. Can we finally breathe a sigh of relief and stop drawing scary parallels with World War I? World War I, one of the greatest geopolitical disasters of the 20th century, broke out a hundred years ago, in August of 1914. Apart from the millions killed, the war destroyed four empires – Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and German. It sparked a genocide (the Armenians in Turkey), and saw the first use of weapons of mass destruction (chemical). It led to massive relocations; many nations lost historical lands and were divided. It spawned ...