Reuters: “Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said on Tuesday he supported tough measures taken by Russian President Vladimir Putin and wished he had adopted them. Gorbachev, whose political reforms led to the collapse of the communist empire, said he should have squashed the challenge from Boris Yeltsin, his arch-rival and subsequently first Russian president, by sending him into diplomatic exile. And he said separatist outbreaks that plagued his last years in power should have been crushed by taking their leaders to court…Yeltsin should have been sent away to a diplomatic post,” he added. “Separatists should have been hit — I mean confronted with criminal responsibility rather than attacked with machineguns.”

“Criminal responsibility”? Ah yes, that would be the Gulag.

He still doesn’t get it.

While we’re on the topic of those pesky “separatists”, it should be remembered that the later Gorbachev years saw quite a few “hits”, including the assault by Soviet forces on the Latvian Interior Ministry (January 1991 – six deaths), the assault by Soviet troops on the Vilnius TV Tower the same month (fourteen civilian dead), the attack on the Lithuanian border post at Medininkai (July 1991) (seven Lithuanians butchered) and on April 9th, 1989, the killing of twenty Georgians in Tbilisi by the Red Army.