The claim in the speech that Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks following the 1917 Russian Revolution was in particular met with widespread skepticism.[15][16][17][18][19][20] Serhii Plokhy of Harvard University has said that it was "a bizarre reading of history" and that "even a cursory acquaintance with the history of the Russian Revolution and fall of the Russian Empire that accompanied it indicates that the modern Ukrainian state came into existence not thanks to Lenin but against his wishes and in direct reaction to the Bolshevik putsch in Petrograd in October of 1917."[21] Cihan Tugal of the University of California, Berkeley described it as "history rewritten by Putin, a history where Ukraine and the other nations of the USSR are communist artefacts, and only Russia is real and natural," and a "historically significant denial of the right to self-determination."[22] Mario Kessler of the Centre for Contemporary History wrote that "a modern Ukrainian national consciousness striving for independence already existed in the nineteenth century" and that Putin was "taking up the imperial desires of tsarist Russia, which Joseph Stalin resumed after the break with the Bolshevik internationalism of 1917."[23]