Medvedev’s predecessor and strongman Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who served in Communist East Germany, notoriously used that phrase in a national address in 2005 to describe the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine whose transcript was released by the Kremlin Saturday, Medvedev described the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a “great shock” for its people.

“It was a very serious and dramatic event as a result of which the people who had lived in one state found themselves dispersed in several states,” he said.

“But to say it was the main geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century or something like that, this is a matter for historians.”

Medvedev said that World War II was a “no less serious catastrophe” and “if we talk about the consequences a more terrible tragedy”. He described the civil war that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution as another catastrophe.

The president said in the interview that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 he was a post-graduate student in Saint Petersburg and knew that the changes “would affect the fate of Europe and in the end our country”.

He said the wall had become a symbol of the division of Europe and its fall was seen as a movement towards its reunification.

When Medvedev took over the Kremlin from Putin last year, many Russian liberals hoped he would take a softer line on foreign policy and make a clearer break with the Soviet past.

However analysts still struggle to discern clear differences between the two men and most believe that Putin remains Russia’s de-facto number one within their ruling tandem.