As he does from time to time, President Vladimir Putin today made another ambiguous public statement about the fate of the Soviet Union, this time stating that its dissolution was unnecessary, were it not for the Soviet Communist Party’s policies.

“You know how I feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was entirely unnecessary to do this. It would have been possible to carry out reforms, including democratic reforms, without this [dissolution],” Putin said during a meeting at the Kremlin with the leaders of the political parties represented in the new State Duma. He then faulted the Soviet Communist Party for mismanaging the Soviet Union, blaming it for promoting “ideas of nationalism” and “other destructive ideas that are ruinous to any state.”

Earlier this year, Putin compared Soviet nationalist policies to an “atomic bomb” placed by Lenin and his allies “under a building called Russia” that only exploded later.