Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that the Soviet Union's decision to send tanks into Hungary and Czechoslovakia to crush mass protests during the Cold War was a mistake. "It was a mistake," Putin said when asked about perceptions of Russia as a colonial power due to Moscow's decision to send tanks into Budapest in 1956 and into Prague in 1968. "It is not right to do anything in foreign policy that harms the interests of other peoples," said Putin, who in 2022 sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two.
I mean, silly on its face. What did he think the "Union" part of the USSR meant? It wasn't just Russians For Russia. You had the entire Warsaw Pact working towards a common goal.
I can see arguments that the Hungarian Revolution was the first in a long line of phony propaganda-inspired color revolutions. I can also see it as a real weakness in the early Soviet social model. The act of sending in tanks to suppress the revolt was a consequence of that failure, not the cause of it. One could say the same of Tienanmen. By the time the tanks arrived, the state had already failed.