Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Vladimir Putin's Big, Soviet Dream

Vladimir Putin's dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union is falling apart, thanks to Ukraine.

September 24, 2013 at 12:43 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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(Corrects size of Ukrainian economy in third paragraph.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin's success in defusing the Syria conflict contrasts sharply with a fiasco developing closer to home: the disintegration of his grand plan to build a Eurasian economic union on the ruins of the former USSR.

Putin sees a free-trade agreement uniting former Soviet states as a big part of his political legacy. He has mentioned the project in every major speech for almost two years. "Tight integration with our neighbors is our absolute priority," Putin toldinternational Russia experts last week at a conference in Novgorod. "The Eurasian union is a project meant to preserve the identities of nations and the historic Eurasian community in the new century, in a new world."