The speech then made a number of statements about Ukrainian and Soviet history, including explaining that modern Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 as part of a communist appeasement of nationalism of ethnic minorities in the former Russian Empire, that Joseph Stalin had failed to remove "odious and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution" from the constitution of the Soviet Union, and that these mistakes, as well as the decentralisation and democratisation brought by Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the late 1980s, ultimately led to both the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the "collapse of the historical Russia."[3]