Theresa May’s Brexit chief defended the Soviet Union and expressed regret that it collapsed, it was claimed last night.
Oliver Robbins penned an article reeling off the totalitarian country’s ‘achievements’ and said it became a state ‘its people could be proud of’, according to reports.
He bemoaned its demise following the fall of the Berlin Wall as it left a world in which there ‘appears to be no alternative to the mad excesses of capitalism’.
And he said the Communist experiment collapsed because of the ‘unfair conditions’ of its Tsarist Russian past – rather than the murderous regime’s fundamental flaws.
His sympathies for the totalitarian state were laid bare in an article he wrote while a student at Oxford University in the 1990s.
Theresa May’s top Brexit adviser Oliver Robbins – pictured picking up an honour form the Queen in Buckingham palace in 2015 – defended the Soviet Union in an article while he was at Oxford University, it was claimed last night
Theresa May, pictured yesterday at the UN in New York, has recently appointed Oliver Robbins to be her chief EU adviser
The comments surfaced just a day after it was announced that Mr Robbins is leaving his job as the top civil servant at the Brexit department to directly advise the PM on the negotiations.
Millions were killed in the forced collectivization of farms and the political purges and ‘red terror’ imposed on the Soviet Union by Stalin and later dictators.
Many others who fell foul of the tyrannical regime and the notorious secret police were sent away to preform hard labour in the country’s gulags.
After decades of terror the regime eventually crumbled after mass protests led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In the article for the Oxford Reform Group, which is posted on the Guido Fawkes website, Mr Robbins heaped praise on the Soviet Union for its ‘achievements’ in health and education.
He wrote: ‘The Russian state has endured more than any other major nation in the twentieth century, and has achieved more too.
As Soviet dictator Stalin oversaw the forced collectivisation of the farms and the purges which saw millions die
‘I would never disagree that some of the deeds done in the name of communism were evil, but it is as well to look at the era’s aims and achievements.’
He said Russia had introduced free education, housing and healthcare and had done more than the UK to tackle homelessness.
He added: ‘Another achievement was the making of a state, a world power indeed, and one that its people could be proud of.
‘The Soviet leaders changed Russia from a backward peasant autocracy, despised by the West, into a technological giant at whom the world cowered in fear for half a century.’
He expressed regret at the collapse of the demise of the Soviet experiment as nit ‘means that for those growing up in the world today, especially western Europe, there appears to be no alternative to the mad excesses of modern capitalism.
‘To the thinking man and woman, Soviet Russia may not have been ideal, but it was food for thought in the “greed is good” climate of the 1980’s.’