Thirty years ago, the USSR broke up, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Communist bloc. An implosion that remains with some, such as Vladimir Putin, a wound that never healed. The head of the Kremlin, who had already described the break-up of the USSR as ” greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century “, Specified in a recent documentary that he also saw the” disintegration of historic Russia “. Yet it is by wanting to modernize and democratize his country that Mikhail Gorbachev saw his reforms escape him completely. Historically, this is not the first leader to experience such a mishap, as Sabine Dullin explains in ” The Irony of Fate – A History of the Russians and their Empire (1853-1991) »Published by Éditions Payot. Sabine Dullin, specialist in the history of contemporary Russia, university professor at Sciences Po and researcher at the Sciences Po History Center, talks with Sylvie Noël.