Russia today

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sat May 13, 2023 2:06 pm

Let's take the path of nationalization of the main industries
May 13, 3:24 p.m

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The head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Bastrykin, called for the nationalization of the main sectors of the Russian economy.

Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia Alexander Bastrykin proposed to nationalize the main sectors of the Russian economy. About it writes RIA Novosti.

According to him, we are talking about "economic security in times of war."
“Let's take the path of nationalization of the main sectors of our economy ,” suggested the head of the UK.

https://russian.rt.com/business/news/11 ... -ekonomika - zinc

These are no longer the slogans of the Communist Party, this is the head of one of the most influential law enforcement agencies.
Fans of Gaidar and the Higher School of Economics will obviously not approve.

In general, it is very interesting to observe how the ruling elites, in search of means of organizing warfare, are increasingly referring specifically to Bolshevik or Stalinist practices, because there are simply no other successful examples in the 20th century. Moreover, hardly anyone can accuse the Russian ruling elites of great sympathy for the Bolsheviks. It's just that they turned out to be in the role of a cow in a bomb bay - if you want to live, you won't get so upset.

And the nationalization of strategic industries should be carried out. Here we can agree with Bastrykin.
And also, for example, return SMERSH, lift the moratorium on the death penalty, etc. and so on.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8352412.html

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Thu May 18, 2023 2:47 pm

St Petersburg Travel Notes – Part III

In my first installment of Travel Notes, I focused on supermarkets and food products on offer to see how Russian shoppers are faring 15 months into the Special Military Operation and imposition of Western sanctions. I reported on how Russian growers and food processors are constantly expanding their presence in product categories which were typically imported in the past, how imported non-seasonal produce is now coming from new suppliers like India and Iran, how prices generally appeared to me to be stable and are often many times cheaper than in the West, depending on the specific items under review.

Now that I am back in Brussels and have made a couple of trips to nearby supermarkets, I must admit that I am shocked by what I see here, not by what I saw there . BBC yesterday reported on the unprecedented rise in food prices in Britain over the past year. It is the same here in Belgium, though no one seems to be reporting it in mainstream media. Most everything in my neighborhood Delhaize is 25% to 100% more expensive than a year ago. Moreover, it is clear that consumption levels have gone down: product assortment is steadily being reduced, and I fear now for freshness.

In my second installment of Travel Notes, I directed attention to High Culture, to the performing arts in Petersburg in particular, and reported that they continue to function at a very attractive level notwithstanding the loss of some funding due to the withdrawal of Western corporate sponsors , denial of foreign tours in Europe and absence of the well-heeled business and diplomatic contingents that in the past bought the highest price tickets in Petersburg theaters.

In this final installment, I start out with remarks about another side of retailing, white goods and home electronics, where, unlike food products, domestic Russian production was always lagging and foreign imports were dominant. Then I will add for good measure some comments on a couple of other subjects which point to the evolution of the Russian economy and to the evolution of environmental consciousness in Russia.

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Electrical goods, white goods, computers and mobile phones

I freely admit that my survey is based on just a few store visits, but the stores I visited were entirely representative of two segments of the retail market in the above-mentioned products. One is a store chain selling to the mass market and offering efficiently middle range products in terms of quality and price. The other is a stand-alone store offering top of the range and very expensive products to consumers who will pay whatever it takes to get the prestige brands they want.

The store chain DNS is the largest distributor of the products under review in St Petersburg. It is the distributor which emerged from a consolidation of the branch through mergers and acquisitions about two years ago. When I visited one of their stores in a shopping center that is a fifteen minute walk from my apartment in the outlying Petersburg borough of Pushkin, it was immediately clear to me that their product offering has undergone substantial change from what it was before the start of the Special Military Operation and Western sanctions. A lot of new, till now unknown brands have appeared on their shelves. I assume that the manufacturers of these are smaller companies in China (though still quite large by global standards) that have negligible export sales to the United States or Europe and so have little to lose if secondary sanctions are imposed on them by the West. The disappearance of best known global producers is most pronounced in telephones and notebook computers. Xiaomi is in, Huawei has disappeared. There are still some Samsung models. In notebooks Hewlett Packard has disappeared. Asus and Acer (Taiwan) still have a few models as does Lenovo (PRC). But otherwise it is all brand X. Asus and Acer (Taiwan) still have a few models as does Lenovo (PRC). But otherwise it is all brand X. Asus and Acer (Taiwan) still have a few models as does Lenovo (PRC). But otherwise it is all brand X.

In washing machines, European producers are still on sale in DNS: Italian Candy and Indesit, Slovenian Gorenje. Bosch (one model only) are on display. Add to that Samsung in white goods, The new brands are unknown names. In televisions, large screens, the entire product range is dominated by South Korea's Samsung. When you look at small appliances like hair dryers, there are still some models from Phillips, but mostly brand X products fill the shelves.

For the second type of retailing in this sector, selling only premium products, I use my visit to the TekhnoPark store on the fourth floor of the Nevsky Center shopping center at the start of the city's main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt. TekhnoPark is itself a newcomer, replacing what had been a less posh retailer before Covid hit the retailing sector and it folded its tent.

As regards product assortment, in TekhnoPark it is like the good old days. All the Western and other global brands are still available. If you have the cash to buy a stove from SMEG at the price of a small automobile, then TekhnoPark is the place for you. Less pricey but still premium stoves from Hotpoint, Bosch and Electrolux are alternative options. In washing machines, you can choose from among Gorenje, Koerting, Toshiba, Samsung, Grundig and LG. For refrigerators the outstanding models are from LG and Liebher. In notebook and laptop computers you will find Acer, Asus, Samsung and Lenovo at many price points. They carry two models of Hewlett Packard laptops at knock-down prices; I imagine these are remnants of old stock.

Since I have mentioned the shopping center Nevsky Center, I am obliged to say that for more than a decade this was known by the name of its anchor tenant, the Finnish retailer Stockmann. Stockmann is still present there, occupying several floors. However, its once famous supermarket in the basement was shut down during Covid. Its place in the basement was subsequently taken by the Moscow-based food emporium Azbuka Vkusa, about which I commented most favorably in my first Notes. In general one might be surprised that Stockmann remains at all in Petersburg given the hostile policies to Russia of the Finnish government. But then the Finnish gas station chain Neste is still operating in the city and along the highways leading out of Petersburg. If Stockmann abandons the Russian market,

Finally, while on the subject of this shopping center, I add that all available rental space is taken and functioning. Yes, a number of Western companies closed shop in the month or two following the start of the Special Military Operation. One highly visible operation was Starbucks on the ground floor just near the main entrance to the complex. But their places were very quickly taken by Russian newcomers. More generally, in High Street retailing, as the British say, I saw no empty storefronts on this visit. By contrast, there are many empty storefronts of retailers that went bust on Avenue Louise, a major commercial boulevard near me in downtown Brussels.

While I was taking my notes on the product assortment in TekhnoPark, a salesman came up to me to inquire what I was doing, thinking perhaps I was engaged in commercial espionage for the competition. However, when I explained my intentions to publish my findings on product availability for readers in the West, he relaxed and explained the plot, why his firm has so many products that are not available, say, in DNS. It is all quite simple: a store like TekhnoPark is selling almost exclusively products that arrive in Russia via parallel trading, meaning via neighboring countries which re-export to Russia for a profit. Such imports, he said, are done piece by piece, not in large orders. The mass distributors like DNS cannot operate that way and fill their stores across the country,

I believe something similar is going on in the automotive industry. Direct sales from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan have collapsed because of the withdrawal of their manufacturers from the Russian market. All together these traditional suppliers now account for only 20% of the Russian market for new cars, while Lada enjoys 35%. Part of the success of Russia's Lada is improved design. Part is price: their base price per vehicle is about 13,000 euros.

That even 20% market share is held by foreign brands that have stopped direct sales in Russia is due precisely to parallel trading via many exotic channels, for example, via Dubai. This pertains particularly to the highest priced automobiles, for which the profit to be made by a middleman in Dubai on each vehicle will be several thousand dollars. My source of information for this observation is the radio station Business FM.

Meanwhile, the whole auto market is feeling the growing presence of the Chinese makers. Latest figures show them close to Lada in market share, but they will probably control more than 50% of the new car market in coming months. Their only competitor from among new entries on the market is Iran.

I asked taxi drivers what they think about the new Chinese models now on sale and the reaction was not particularly enthusiastic. One quote: “They have to improve by 35% to reach global levels of quality and attractiveness.” Be that as it may, the market trends favor the Chinese.

Banking Wars

As I mentioned in the first installment of my Travel Notes, there is a big competitive war for customers among Russia's banks that is being played out in “cashback” offers measured in discounts of 5-15% at the cash register of supermarkets when you use a credit card to pay for your purchases. This plays to a tendency in the entire economy to move away from physical cash that began when the government encouraged distribution of the domestic Mir bank cards onto which it pays pensioners their monthly allowances. Formerly, pensioners received their money in cash at the postal bank or Sberbank.

The fight to put credit cards in the hands of consumers is matched by a fight among Russia's banks to receive new deposits from the general public. For current accounts, the banks are offering roughly 5% per annum. For time deposits of one year, you can get 8% or more.

The high interest rates were introduced to compensate savers for the high inflation that accompanied the start of the Special Military Operation. But the sharp drop in inflation this year, to just 2% in the month of April, has not had an impact on the bank wars over interest paid. The prime rate is still 7.5% as the government thereby indirectly protects the exchange rate against excessive falls reflecting lower revenues from oil and gas exports.

Nevertheless, even with these measures, there has been a significant drop in the exchange rate this year. The ruble is now about 18% weaker than it was when my last visit ended in the first week of December. Meanwhile another significant development is that major banks are taking deposit accounts in Chinese Yuan. The Chinese currency has largely replaced euros and dollars as a hedge against depreciation of the national currency.

petersburg goes green

From local news, I had heard that Petersburg has ordered a large number of electric buses. Frankly, I did not yet see them on the streets. But there are newly built electric trolley buses everywhere. Their design is very contemporary and a nice change from the stodgy 1950s look of the old fleet. In principle, electric buses should make trolleys obsolete, however, manufacturing costs of the trolleys are surely far lower at present than electric buses with their expensive batteries. Meanwhile, the city fathers have also bought new fleets of latest design Russian built buses that run on diesel or propane. These are more comfortable, more aesthetically pleasing and more efficient insofar as the fares are paid using contactless bank cards rather than in cash to conductors or drivers.

Lastly, I note a change in the way household waste is handled. The change is long overdue but now seems to be taking hold very quickly. What I am talking about is the introduction of mandatory sorting of waste into separate bins for bottles, bins for plastic and metal and bins for general kitchen waste.

When I arrived in Pushkin a month ago, this new regime had obviously only just been introduced. The separate bins were there but no one paid attention and the actual sort was being done by maintenance people. However, in a matter of a week or two all the tenants got the message and the bins filled without any intervention of staff. For Russia this is a tidal wave of change in mentality.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/05/18/ ... -part-iii/

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THE WHALE OF A TALE THAT ISN’T A SECRET IF YOU ARE RUSSIAN OR CAN READ HONESTLY

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

This is a tale about whales and Russians. In the telling, it has surprised even its author. A university professor from Oregon, he belongs to that seagoing pod which, like the North Pacific right whales, is a seriously endangered species right now — that’s the American exceptionalists.

Ryan Tucker Jones’s book, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling, was published this month. It has yet to be noticed in the Russian press. One reason is that the history of Soviet whaling and Russian fishing is no secret at all in Russia. The second reason is that the secret Russians know about Greenpeace and other campaigns against whaling that are part of the long US war against Russia is not one Jones has recognised, nor does he appreciate the damage these protests have done to the ecological protection groups of Russia in their domestic battle with the Russian oligarchs. Instead, he endorses what he calls the Greenpeace plan “to hit more directly at the Soviet economy” when that organisation moved on from campaigning against US and French nuclear bomb testing to targeting not only Soviet whaling in the North Pacific, but also Soviet fishing.

The final reason is that the way Jones tells his story in a fashion that ironizes, sarcasticises, and misrepresents the whaling story, turns out to be blubber that has been cut up, boiled, and coloured into margarine for the last time to be spread on Russian toast in the mornings. That’s exceptionalism for you.

“One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century,” Jones opens his book about what he call the gencode of the whales, “whose only reckoning had been the fact that the world had forgotten about them,”. By them, Jones means the Russians of the Soviet period. Quoting a Greenpeace protester, Jones makes the equivalence he intends from start to finish. “What indeed could a nation of armless Buddhas [whales] do against the equivalent of carnivorous Nazis equipped with seagoing tanks and Krupp cannons.”

“They killed more whales than did any other country after World War II”, is Jones’s claim, and “the Soviet Union’s part in the story has remained entirely hidden”. What has been hidden from whom?

Jones isn’t speaking of the Russians, for their own histories of Russian whaling are voluminous and well-remembered. What is hidden Jones himself hides. He admits the Soviets killed “more than 500,000 whales during the twentieth century” while Japan “killed nearly 600,000 and Norway nearly 800,000. Others, mostly American whalers, had killed nearly 300,000 in the nineteenth century, at a time when Russians had killed almost none.” According to Jones’s count, the Russians killed far less than the Japanese and Norwegians after World War II, and in the 19th century far less than the Americans.

But Jones starts with his falsehood and repeats it over and over from the front cover to the blurbs at the back – “essential reading” says the American Historical Review. If not the true genocide count, what then is the truth in this whale of a tale, and is it secret at all? “If the Soviet contribution to modern whale genocide was not preeminent,” Jones concedes the qualifier, “it had special characteristics. The Soviets killed nearly half their whales secretly, in knowing contravention of the conventions they had signed.”

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Read the archive on Greenpeace’s propaganda campaigns against Russia here. Publication of the history of post-1991 Russian shipping, Sovcomplot, How the Kremlin Pirates Tried Stealing Billions but Were Caught Out, has been suspended for the duration of the war.

The Times Literary Supplement endorses this, and the Greenpeace campaign, as part of the ongoing war. Why had “the Soviets embarked on this irrational and destructive journey, and how they got away with it – until they didn’t. One answer (worth bearing in mind in view of the latest battleground over gas pipelines and wheat fields in Ukraine) is that pride, competition and a sense of historical injustice motivated Soviet whaling far more than commercial considerations.”

Indeed, the evidence of the book – and the accumulated evidence of many books and reports before it, including Russian ones – is there was Russian or Soviet cheating on the terms of the rules of the slaughter promulgated by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) between 1946 and 1986 when the IWC stopped the commercial business – except for the Japanese cheating, the killing of whales for “scientific reasons”.

Again, Jones admits arithmetic in historical evidence. The Soviet cheating, Jones has written on his third to last page, amounted to “around 170,000 more whales were killed [from 1946 to 1986, when the IWC moratorium came into effect] than they had reported… or ten times the the number of blue whales estimated to be alive anywhere in the world in 2021.” Omitted is what percentage this Russian dishonesty represented of the recorded, quota-authorized catches worldwide. This aggregate number is over 2 million – 2,014,635 according to this source. The simple arithmetic, which Jones fails to do or if he has, he is concealing it from the reader, is that Soviet cheating amounted to 8.4% of the global catch. How wicked is that?


This question of magnitude is beside the political and moral point of Jones’s (right) tale.“Altogether,” he concludes “Soviets had taken roughly one of every six whales killed in the twentieth century.” How immoral is this 17% compared to the significantly larger whale kills of Norway and Japan? Jones isn’t saying. Instead, “[in 1983] the Soviet Union stood on the brink of its own extinction”, and then “[in 1994] the Soviet Union was gone, relegated to the dustbin of history”. For an associate professor of history to speak of the “dustbin of history”, let alone relegate the Soviets to it, is nothing less than propaganda having nothing whatever to do with whales. Into what dustbin of history does Jones place the bigger whale genocidalists – Japan, with which Russia remains legally still at war, despite the capitulation of 1945; and Norway, a sworn NATO warfighter against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield and in the war to destroy Russian exports of oil and gas exports to Europe, so that Norway can profiteer from the outcome?

The failure to answer these questions, and also to understand why they must be asked in a “secret history of whaling”, is what makes Jones’s book a contender for the Pushkin House prize for best book on Russia. Pushkin House of London is a British government-funded information warfare unit against Russia whose financial reports reveal regular, intended violations of UK law – and that’s a secret; read more.

Red Leviathan is not a book about the economics, ethics and politics of slaughtering animals for food and other types of human consumption. If that was what Jones wanted to historicise, he would have pointed out that the two greatest animal slaughters in Russia occurred between 1941 and 1945, when it was German government policy to starve the Russian people to death; and between 1991 and 1996 when it was US government policy to get the Yeltsin regime to halt all forms of state support for food production and farmer support. Some estimates put the number of cattle killed during the Yeltsin period as greater than in the German occupation. For more on German starvation plans, read this.

Killing whales for margarine had been Soviet state policy for rapid replacement of animal fats in the diet of the Russian people recovering from what the Germans had tried to do – and what the US military and intelligence agencies continued planning to do. When the whale story is told as part of an anti-Russian war campaign, animal liberationsts like Princeton professor Peter Singer, or like the German Green Party under Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, are always sympathetic to the lives of animals, and in parallel quite keen on killing Russians (Chinese, Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Palestinians, Libyans, et al.). The former is camouflage for the latter.

Jones attempts his animal ethics after anthropomorphising the whales but not the other killable creatures of the field, sky, stream, and sea. According to Professor Jones, there is a distinction between the “wildness” of the whales and the domestication of other animals. “Whaling – and Soviet whaling in particular [sic] – differed in several crucial respects from the twentieth-century slaughterhouses. Unlike pigs, chickens and cows, whose life cycles and reproduction were controlled from birth and who thus lost much of their dignity and individuality, whales remained wild animals. Each whale had to be chased down and outwitted – a word that reminds us that whales remained very much conscious, intelligent and autonomous individuals.”

Jones makes plain his complete ignorance of the secret life of cows.

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Left: “The Secret Life of Cows succeeds in showing that cows are thoughtful beings with individual personalities. At times Young's approach is whimsical, perhaps overly so, as when she translates what she takes to be bovine thoughts directly into human language”. Read the book by Rosamund Young, published in 2017. Right: in Germany from 1933 it was Nazi policy from to protect animal welfare, stop scientific experimentation with animals, etc. In the poster Herman Goring is exchanging Hitler salutes with laboratory rabbits he has saved. According to Goring at the time, he prohibited vivisection and said that those who "still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property" would be sent to concentration camps.” Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_we ... zi_Germany#/

There’s worse. After documenting many years of Russian scientific research on whales, Jones draws this conclusion: “the very characteristics that within three decades would convince the Western public that killing whales and dolphins was immoral appeared to Soviet scientists a key breakthrough in killing more whales.” Between the clever Russian monsters and the “Western public”, Jones’s message is that there is an ethical and moral threat so profound – existential is the NATO term — as to warrant any measure by the “Western” governments, including sanctions war, to destroy the Russians. Russian scientists’ attempts to develop conservation schemes in parallel with the whaling industry are dismissed by Jones as “technofantastical and a little totalitarian”.

Also, there are the Portland professor’s race clichés. Jones writes that between the western and eastern Russian whaling bases, he prefers “sparkling leafy” Odessa to “foggy” Vladivostok and its “vast concrete squares – the hollow heart of most Soviet cities”. In Odessa, Jones stopped at the “large beautiful synagogue [which] still constitutes one of [Odessa’s] one of the city’s main historical sites, its prominence a rarity in a country that since the 1950s had returned to its antisemitic past.” On page 157, in a chapter titled “Whales in the Home”, Jones makes this race lie.

Jones half-comprehends the military, political and commercial drivers of anti-Soviet whaling. In 1945 it had been the policy of the US government in Washington, and the Allied Council for Japan running the country under General Douglas MacArthur, to revive Japan’s whaling industry, rebuild its whaling fleets, and underwrite its commercial advantage over the Soviet fleet – just as the British government had used its colonial base in South Georgia, on the edge of the Antarctic whaling grounds, to sabotage the Soviet enterprise. Jones reports both in passing, but then glosses the evidence with this pseudo-sociology of the English ethos compared to the Russian: “Soviet class-spanning hunting culture helped inure them to the damage done by their harpooners’ killing sprees; in England aristocratic nations of ‘sportsmanship’ – a notion absent in Russia – caused some observers of whaling to condemn the industry because whales did not have a fighting chance. That concept did not register in the Soviet Union.”

In the end of his secret tale-telling, Jones concedes that the publicity generated by the Greenpeace protest campaigns against Soviet whaling had next to no impact on the policy decisions made in Moscow to stop commercial whaling. The Russian reasons included the Soviet planners’ realization that whale production had dwindled to a “minuscule” part of the domestic economy, while demand for fish was growing fast. That, plus the US Congress’s sanctions against both Soviet whaling and fishing, led to an explicit trade-off – whaling was substituted by fishing, the vessels converted, and the shore processing industry retooled. This, Jones calls, “anthropocentric Marxism”. Valuing whale lives, he adds, was “heresy.”

Note: The lead illustration is a late 18th or early 19th century illustration of whale fishing in a Chukotka village on the Bering Sea. For accounts in Russian of the whale story,interpreted unsecretly and easily accessible by machine translation into English, read the Russian Wikipedia summary. A recent interview by Fishnews.ru with the long-lived veteran of Soviet whaling, fleet captain and professor of ship management, Victor Shcherbatyuk, can be read here. In December 2021 Vladimir Putin signed into law a ban on killing whales, dolphins, and porpoises in the harbours and coastal waters of the Sea of Okhotsk. Jones displays animosity towards Putin, calling him “a later master Russian masculinist”. In Ukrainian war propaganda, repeated by the mainstream US media, Putin has been accused of killing 50,000 dolphins in the Black Sea since the start of the Special Military Operation.

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Left: Captain Victor Shcherbatyuk; right, President Putin.

https://johnhelmer.net/the-whale-of-a-t ... more-88000
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Fri May 26, 2023 2:49 pm

“Fact Finding”Journey to Russia, a Historical Perspective: Saint Petersburg, Moscow and Crimea
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 25, 2023
Daniel Kovalik and Rick Sterling

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Memorial to Children of the Donbas on Arbat Street, Moscow © Daniel Kovalik

Dan Kovalik and Rick Sterling: At this moment, Russia is more isolated from the West than it has ever been, quite possibly in history.


At the end of April of this year, the two of us ventured together to Russia. We went with the purpose of fact-finding and also to make a point that we do not believe that Russia should be isolated from the world through sanctions and travel bans.

At this moment, Russia is more isolated from the West than it has ever been, quite possibly in history. As just one example, while V.I. Lenin was able to famously travel from Finland via train to St. Petersburg, even during the height of WWI, the train from Finland to Russia ceased operating after February 24 of 2022. And indeed, it was through Finland that we decided to travel to Russia, simply because there are now very limited ways to travel there. Thus, while for years, even during the Cold War, one could easily fly directly from the US to Russia on Aeroflot and other airlines, that is no longer possible due to sanctions. Now, one can only fly there through Serbia, Turkey or the UAE, but those flights are quite expensive.

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Rick and Dan at the site where Russian journalist was killed

And so, we ended up choosing to fly to Helsinki, Finland and have a Russian friend who has a non-Russian passport (Russians with only Russian passports cannot travel to Finland) drive from St. Petersburg to pick us up. This turned out to be more easily said than done as our friend’s car broke down at the Finnish/Russian border. And so, we took a very expensive, three-hour cab ride to the border, met up with our friend and crammed ourselves into the cab of a tow truck to drive the remaining three hours to St. Petersburg – a quite inauspicious beginning to our journey.

St. Petersburg (Leningrad)

Our first several days were spent in St. Petersburg, formerly “Leningrad.” We stayed strategically at the Best Western in Uprising Square – so named by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 to commemorate the Great October Revolution of 1917. In the Square is located the Moscow train station which we used to great effect during our journey, as well as the Leningrad Hero-City Obelisk. The Obelisk commemorates Leningrad’s designation as one of 13 “hero cities” in the Soviet Union which distinguished themselves for their exceptional sacrifices in resisting the Nazis during WWII. Two other cities we visited on our trip (Moscow and Sevastopol, Crimea) are also honored with this designation, as is Kiev, Ukraine and of course Volgograd (formerly “Stalingrad”).

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Mural to old woman protecting the red flag in Donbas © Daniel KovalikMural to old woman protecting the red flag in Donbas © Daniel Kovalik

During our stay, the city of St. Petersburg sure seemed more like Leningrad, for it was beginning to be decked out in red flags with hammers and sickles and stars to commemorate both May Day and Victory Day over the Nazis on May 9. We were told by long-time residents that the ubiquitous display of such symbols of the USSR was something new (at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), and was spurred on by Russia’s Special Military Operations beginning in February of 2022. It appears that the Russian people, and the Russian government as well, are looking to the legacy of the Soviet Union as a source of strength, pride and unity during this time of war – a war that they view, we believe quite rightly, was forced on them.The newly released Russian Federation “concept” on foreign policy states quite explicitly that Russia’s current foreign policy is informed by the two main objectives and successes of the USSR – the defeat of Nazism and global decolonization. Certainly, on paper at least, this belies the claim of some Western leftists that Russia is motivated in its relations with other nations by imperialist concerns.

While in St. Petersburg, we visited the site of the terrorist attack which claimed the life of Russian journalist Vladlen Tatarsky and wounded over 30 others, at least 10 gravely. The attack involved the bombing of a cafe in the picturesque University district of St. Petersburg along the Neva – a soft target if there ever was one. The cafe remains closed, and three sets of memorials for Tatarsky are set up around it, consisting of flowers and photos. Of course, the Western press has tried to do everything it can to justify this vicious attack upon civilians, writing off Tatarsky as “pro-Kremlin” and “pro-war” (as if the Western press can’t be fairly characterized as “pro-war” and “pro-Pentagon”) and simply glossing over the numerous other civilians wounded in the assault as collateral damage.

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Saint Petersburg streets are busy from early morning til late at night. This photo taken at 11:30pm

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Dan takes his turn playing guitar on St Petersburg street at 11 pm

Moscow

As planned, we left St. Petersburg by train to Moscow after several days. We took the faster “Sapsan” (Falcon) train to Leningrad Station in Moscow (it is still called that). The train ride, reaching 120 mph, was smooth and comfortable. We sat across from two Russian women, one of whom was quite friendly. She told us of her son who lives in Boston and who, quite sadly for her, she hasn’t seen in years. She kept sliding over hard candy to share with us. And, when she saw Dan nervously biting his nails, she kindly handed him her nail filer for him to use. This type of sharing on the train is quite common in Russia as we would continue to discover on our journey.

Moscow too was being decorated for the May 9 Victory Day celebration. Red Square was sealed off from the public to prepare for the event, and the city was on high alert for possible terrorist attacks, one of which would come while we were in Russia with the drone attack upon the Kremlin itself. Despite the fears of attack, Muscovites were out on the streets day and night. Both Moscow and St. Petersburg were incredibly vibrant – much more so than our cities back home which are still feeling the effects of the lockdowns during the pandemic. Gorky Park was particularly lively with throngs of families with children enjoying the spring weather, swings and slides. Colorful tulips were in full bloom.

From appearances, Russia largely did not appear to be a country at war. However, everyone we talked to confided in us about their concerns for the war – for the loss of life on both sides, the fact that it was lasting much longer than people had expected, and the danger that the war could expand into a greater conflagration. Some Russians expressed their fear that nuclear weapons would end up being used before this was all over, though they believed that the US would be the first to launch them. At the same time, the Russians showed their usual stoicism in the face of such dangers, with one family with whom Dan had dinner stating almost matter-of-factly that “Russia has always had difficult times, and it will have them again.”

After several days in Moscow, and our hopes for visiting the Donbass falling through, we took the long, 27-hour train ride to Crimea – a region now fully in the crosshairs of the proxy war.

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Rick with train compartment companions

Arriving in Crimea

Ukrainian President Zelensky says he will “take back” Crimea. US leaders Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan say they support him. Indeed, Sullivan recently suggested Ukraine is free to use the F-16 fighter jets in attempting to “recapture” Crimea.” We traveled to Crimea to see the situation and learn details of how and why Crimea seceded from Ukraine in 2014.

A highlight of the train ride was passing over the new 12-mile long Kerch Strait bridge which connects mainland Russia to the Crimean peninsula. As our train approached the bridge, we could see that saboteurs had been active. There was a fuel tank on fire in the near distance. A couple passengers did not want us to photograph this, probably thinking it gives publicity to the enemy.

As we departed the train in Crimea at the beautiful station in the Capitol city, Simferopol, the loudspeakers on the platform greeted us with traditional Russian songs.

We then drove the roughly two hours to Yalta where we stayed while in Crimea. Along our drive, we saw the giant mosque which the Russian government is building along the highway in an area where Tatars, who generally practice the Islamic faith, protested to have land to live and worship. The Tatars had been persecuted during WWII as suspected collaborators and forcibly removed from Crimea to other Soviet Republics.

A number of Tatars have moved back to Crimea over the years and now make up about 12 percent of the population of Crimea. Meanwhile, about 65 percent of the Crimean population is ethnic Russian and about 15 percent is Ukrainian, though about 82 percent of the population overall speaks Russian on a daily basis.

As we were told while in Crimea, one of the first things President Putin did after Crimea returned to Russia in 2014 was to try to make good relations with the Tatar community by “rehabilitating” them from the claims of collaboration made by Stalin government, giving them the land they protested for, providing them with modest monetary reparations and building them the new Mosque.

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Russians remember past alliances with USA.Russians remember past alliances with USA.

Historical Background

All in all, we spent five days seeing the sights and meeting people in the capital Simferopol, Sevastopopol and Yalta. We were guided by translator and native Crimean Tanya. In the past, Tanya worked for US Aid for International Development (USAID), teaching Russian to US Peace Corps volunteers.

Crimea has a rich agricultural sector. It was severely hampered after Ukraine dammed the canal bringing fresh water from the Dnieper River. After Russian forces intervened, they removed the dam and agriculture is once again thriving. Crimean cities are busy with the streets and sidewalks full. In the parks, there are teens skate boarding and seniors playing chess.

The situation in Crimea is emblematic of the Ukraine crisis overall. In both Crimea and the Donbass (eastern Ukraine), the majority of people are ethnically Russian, their native language is Russian and they voted overwhelmingly for the elected but overthrown President Yanukovich.

From the 15th century Crimea was part of the Ottoman Empire. It became part of the Russian Empire in 1783 after the army of Catherine the Great defeated the Turks.

In 1921, Crimea became the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.

In 1954, Soviet Premier Khrushchev designated Crimea to be part of the Ukraine republic. This was done without consulting the Crimean people but it was not a major change since they were all part of one country, the Soviet Union. As we were told in Crimea, “Nobody could imagine the Soviet Union breaking up.”

As the Soviet Union was breaking up, Crimeans held a referendum in January of 1991. They voted overwhelmingly (94% in favor) to become the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea” and to separate from Ukraine. There was contention with Kiev and ultimately it was agreed that Crimea would be autonomous but within Ukraine. There was desire but not the urgency to secede from Ukraine at this point.

The desire to separate from Ukraine became more urgent in late 2013 and early 2014 as Crimeans watched with alarm as Russophobic ultra-nationalist and neo-nazi groups increasingly dominated violent protests in Kiev’s Maidan plaza. The book “To Go One’s Own Way” documents how the Crimean parliament and presidency issued statements, pleas and warnings about the threat to Ukrainian unity beginning in November 2013.

As we discuss in an upcoming article, the government of Ukraine reacted to the Crimean referendum to reunite with Russia quite punitively, and it continues to punish the Crimeans for their decision. At the same time, Russia has actively invested in the peninsula and made major improvements in the overall infrastructure there. In light of the foregoing, it is safe to say there are relatively few Crimeans who ever wish to return to Ukraine.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... nd-crimea/

************

Russia Has Lowest Inflation in Europe – PM
MAY 25, 2023

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A baby on a shopping cart. Photo: Getty Images/Caroline Purser.

Consumer price growth has slowed to 2.3% in May, Mikhail Mishustin announced

Inflation in Russia has continued to slow through May, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin told a Shanghai business forum on Tuesday, noting that the indicator is currently the lowest in Europe.

“As of early May, inflation slowed to 2.3% year-over-year. This is the lowest figure among all European countries,” Mishustin stated. The indicator continued to fall after a sharp drop to 3.51% in March from 10.99% in February. It is currently well below the government target of 5% for the year.

In comparison, Switzerland recorded 2.6% inflation in April, the second-lowest after Russia. The region’s largest economy, Germany, saw prices grow at a rate of 7.2%, France – 5.9%, Italy – 8.2%. Annual inflation for the Eurozone was recorded at 7%.

Mishustin also announced that Russia’s unemployment rate had dropped to a record low of 3.5%.

The premier stated that the Russian economy on the whole was thriving despite the pressure of Western sanctions, with credit institutions, foreign exchange and stock markets functioning normally due to the well-developed national payment and settlement infrastructure.

He also noted that the government had been implementing large-scale programs to modernize infrastructure in the regions to help local businesses.

https://orinocotribune.com/russia-has-l ... europe-pm/

***********

In the grip of hunger
May 26, 9:09 am

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In the grip of hunger

In the early nineties, the House of Military Books was still a kind bookstore, and not a cluster of cafes and restaurants. On the ground floor there was a scale model shop. I remember my shock when I saw dozens of different models of German armored vehicles in sand camouflage. And figurines in 35 scale. Many thanks to the Zvezda company, which produced a counterweight in the form of fighters and equipment of the Red Army. But the Nazi theme still seemed very cool - spotted camouflage, division emblems, personal emblems of the crews, nominal tanks ...

I almost knew the numbering of the German Wehrmacht and SS tank divisions by heart. It was a genuine fascination with the uniforms, heraldry, and technology of Nazi Germany.

In the same department it was possible to buy books on military history. Once, among the colorful books on the uniform of the SS, I saw a gray book of A4 format - “In the grip of hunger. Siege of Leningrad in NKVD Documents and German Intelligence Documents.

After reading this book, the fascination with the Wehrmacht and the SS began to fade quickly. Thanks a lot to Professor N.A. Lomagin, who published this book.

But for many, the fascination with Nazism has not gone away. Including in Russia. Hence the reaction to the recent publication of the "Hunger Plan": it cannot be that they are plotting this! These are Europeans! They are good!

NO.

For thirty years, the Russian state has diligently avoided focusing on the crimes of the European Nazis. A generation has been brought up that absolutely does not know about the burned villages and 17 million killed civilians.

The Russian state did all this in the hope that it would help reconciliation and Russia would be accepted into Europe.

NO.

(c) Bair Irincheev

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8381360.html

Google Translator

When I was a kid there were similar Nazi scale models at the hobby shop, they were by far the 'coolest'. Later, in my teens, I discovered the recently introduced Panzer Blitz board game, made by Avalon Hill, which was located in my home town of Baltimore. Again, the Nazi game counters were sharp looking and quite diverse compared to the Soviets. More importantly, the game was weighted in a variety of ways to the Nazi advantage: command control, effective weapon range, armor. Despite this, as I grew a little older and developed knowledge of real history and not the propaganda we were inundated with, I came to prefer playing the Soviets despite the disadvantage, 'being' the Nazis was just too distasteful. It has only been in the past couple of decades that I learned that Panzer Blitz was designed by a guy who was ex- US Army and a Pentagon consultant.
Other Avalon Hill WWII games were similarly distorted, imagine that, full spectrum propaganda.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Wed May 31, 2023 11:19 am

Fighting for the Russian World and All Humanity
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 30, 2023
Gennady Zyuganov

The crisis of the liberal model of running the world was inevitable. I warned of its results and alarming challenges that would fill the new century twenty years ago. My book “Globalization and the Destiny of Humankind” which was published at the time has been translated into many languages. It provided a detailed analysis of the aggressive motives of the American imperialists and their underlings, outlined the perspective of the emergence of new world power poles represented by China and India. At the time they were only poised for an economic leap forward. Not many perceived them as a future alternative to the US hegemony. Now it has become evident that it is Russia’s union with these Asian powers that overturns the thoroughly Fascist “American dream” of a unipolar world. This union can put an end to total dehumanization which Washington strategists have set about to accomplish.

I continued the conversation about future challenges in the book “Russia in the Gunsights of Globalism” examining the history of our political, economic and spiritual confrontation with the West.

Then followed the books “The Russian Core of the Great Power” and “The Russian World on Two Axes” in which I described our country’s role in the 21st century. As more than once before, it is Russia that is at the center of the clash with Anglo-Saxon imperialism. The situation is highly dramatic. But the great heritage of the Soviet civilization may enable us to stand our ground and to prevail.

The time has come to continue this difficult and important conversation.

History has confronted us with grave challenges. They have turned out to be the most serious in the past three decades, since the time the traitors and turncoats made common cause with our external enemies and committed a crime of wrecking the Soviet country.


War has been declared

NATO has been tightening the noose around our borders for many years. History ordained that Russia protect the sovereignty and security of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, liberate the fraternal Ukrainian people from the Nazi-Bandera junta. In response to our desire to put a barrier in the way of the West’s aggressive plans its masters cast off the mask of “partnership” and civilized diplomacy. The globalists openly declared their readiness to deliver a lethal blow to our country by hybrid war methods. They think it is time to close “the Russian question.”

It was not yesterday that Russia’s enemies unleashed a hybrid war against us. The roots of this war go back to the centuries-old confrontation of our country with the West’s plans of conquest. Throughout history those who sought to subdue our Power and its people used the methods of a hybrid war along with the real “shooting” war. In it political and economic pressure has always been combined with information, intellectual and spiritual subversion of our society. Economic, moral and spiritual defeat of the enemy that cannot be defeated by military force – this is the main characteristic and substance of the hybrid war.

After the dismemberment of the USSR some believed that renunciation of socialism would pave Russia’s path to the West. Now, they rejoiced, we are part and parcel of this shining world. Not so. Those who promoted these ideas, wittingly or unwittingly, totally ignored the lessons of the First World War. Soviet Russia was not yet on any maps. But this did not prevent the European governments from engaging in a deadly battle for re-dividing the world. The cruelty and the number of casualties were unprecedented. Everything happened exactly in accordance with Lenin’s analysis in his great work “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”

By joining the deadly fray the Tsarist Government embarked on an anti-national adventure. The Western powers – both direct enemies and formal allies – readily tore at Russia in pursuit of their own interests. The fact that our country was not yet socialist did not matter. The reason lay elsewhere: the capitalist predator always looks for prey. Likewise, by the end of the 20th century betraying the cause of socialism did not mean ensuring a prosperous future for Russia. Things turned out the other way around. The demise of the Soviet system caused appalling losses on an immense scale.

World capital set about “developing” the divided republics of the USSR according to its neocolonialist templates. It was steadily working to turn the recently advanced power into its own back yard. We were growing weaker. But it did not occur to the globalists to extend a hand of capitalist solidarity to what was now an anti-Soviet Russia. On the contrary their hearts were filled with hopes of further dismemberment of our country. The shining world turned out to be a gaping hole.

Over the course of the past year 1500 sanctions were imposed on Russia. Such a thing never happened to any country. An unheard-of economic, political and information sabotage campaign has been launched. Its aim is to force Russia to give up its hopes for independence and attempts to uphold its legitimate interests. At stake is the existence of our statehood. By challenging Anglo-Saxon hegemony we became the main target of its adepts in Washington, London, Brussels and other centers of modern capitalism.

Such is the criminal handwriting of neocolonialists. They hope that the series of provocations would enable them to avoid a world crisis of their system – capitalism. They try to preserve their power over the planet at all costs. These circles will not stop at attempting to burn insoluble problems in the fire of the third world war.

The American military has left its bloody footprints all over the world: in Korea and Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the Washington hawks are turning Ukrainian people into cannon fodder. In the eyes of the whole world they are implementing their hideous plan of fighting Russia with the hands of our blood brothers purposely poisoned with Nazism.

Today the meaning of the coup in Kiev in February 2014 is crystal clear. For eight years Ukraine was persistently preparing for war against Russia. Zelensky has now publicly admitted it. Three wars – shooting, economic and information — are being waged against our country simultaneously. Attempts are being made to defeat us in the battlefield, strangle us economically and slander us in the eyes of the world community.

By rising to defend our Fatherland against globalist diktat and Neo-Nazism being fostered in Ukraine and all across Europe, we have acknowledged the indisputable fact: Russia has failed and cannot but fail to be an organic part of the capitalist West. The globalists do not need it as an independent, strong and successful state. For them the key condition of Russia’s “integration” into their world is its destruction. There are no other options.

In February 2007 realization of this fact translated itself into President Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. The decisions made by the Russian leadership fifteen years later marked a real turning point.

The hybrid war declared against our country entered a new phase economically, politically and militarily. Russia is on the receiving end not only of thousands of sanctions called upon to strangle our economy. Fighting against us are NATO weaponry, NATO mercenaries and instructors. Meanwhile current and former Western leaders declare without blinking an eye that their agreements with Russia were a total bluff. These documents were fobbed off for signing in order to weaken our country and bide time. In the meantime they were strengthening their Bandera nationalist puppets.

Imperialism is rapidly unfolding a new war. It threatens to develop from a regional into a global one. By tightening the noose of violence and coercion, the globalists seek to destroy our country and liquidate its sovereignty. They calculate that this will guarantee the seizure of resources badly needed to shore up the crumbling world order whose construction they never managed to complete. To this end massive efforts are being made to undermine the processes of Russia’s integration with its neighbors. Political and cultural divisions are provoked in the Eurasian space. Attempts are being made to make us quarrel with traditional allies and erase the centuries-old unity of fraternal peoples united by the great history and deep ties to the Russian World.

This was the criminal goal of the 2014 government coup in Ukraine which precipitated its all-round degradation. The Kiev administration fell under total control of the reactionary forces directed from Washington. They were hastily turning Ukraine into an ideological and military test range for a decisive attack on Russia. The process of severance of our historical ties accelerated. The flywheel of political terror, ethnic and linguistic cleansing was put into full gear. The heroic Donbass rose up to defend its right to live and speak its mother tongue.

Nazism’s guides

The Kiev junta was hastily being prepared for a terrorist attack against Russia. The results of the parliamentary investigation of the State Duma into the Pentagon’s chemical laboratories in Ukraine clearly point to this. Ukraine was stuffed with objects for dangerous research, including the development of genetic weapons against ethnic Slavs.

The Ukrainian regime was also being groomed for a cultural-spiritual attack on the Russian world. Proof of this is the row provoked around the Ukrainian Orthodox churches by the Bandera nationalists and their tempters. The Holy Dormition Kiev-Pecherskaya Lavra, described by Holy Patriarch Kirill as the cradle of our civilization and national culture, is going through its Road to Calvary. Churches and monasteries adhering to the canonical historical Church with their inmates, old icons and relics of saints are subjected to violence and desecration.

For years Ukraine was wickedly being pushed into the quagmire of Russophobia before being driven into horrible fratricide. The USA is waging this war with others’ hands. By supplying arms and providing political support the Biden team is doing everything to prolong the death throes of the Neo-Nazi regime.

The sword of the barbarians who have come to think of themselves as the masters of the planet knows no mercy. It strikes women, children, old folks – all those whose only sin is their reluctance to obey others’ will, allow their ideals and values to be desecrated, to renounce their roots and the Russian language. These people are being executed for being loyal to their ancestors, the glorious victorious warriors who saved the world from German fascism and Japanese militarism.

The West’s Russophobia is unprecedented. The wish of Washington, London and Berlin to solve “the Russian question” brings to mind the grim pages of the past: Inquisition and auto da fe, Nazi rallies and Ku-Klux-Clan actions. The globalists who have embarked on the path of terror know no “red lines” such as are characteristic of normal people. The plans to use depleted uranium shells are direct evidence of the criminal character of imperialist policies.

We must all understand: a war of annihilation has been unleashed against us. Its aim is to dismember our country, enslave its people and turn our lands into a zone of colonial plunder. This threatens us not only with massive losses. To lose in this situation means to cease to exist.

The current challenge is as fateful as the Time of Troubles in the 17th century, the Patriotic War of 1812, the foreign intervention in 1918—1920, the battle against fascism during the Great Patriotic War and the treacherous wrecking of the USSR. The USA and its NATO accomplices are set to multiply their criminal achievements of “the wild 90s.”

Hating Nazism and experiencing fraternal feelings for the Ukrainian people, the CPRF has supported the special operation to liberate Ukraine from enslavement. Donbass has become an important center of resistance to imperialist reaction.

In the struggle against Nazi and Bandera riff-raff, and in confronting their Transatlantic masters we are inspired by the same thoughts and feelings that led our fathers and grandfathers into battle against fascism. Liberal ideologues justified the need to dismantle socialism by claiming that the end of confrontation between the socialist and capitalist systems would lessen international tensions, such that a peaceful idyll would gradually settle over the planet. These promises turned out to be a monstrous lie. The world has not become a safer place after the treacherous destruction of the USSR.

The demise of the Soviet land disrupted the system of checks and balances created by the great leaders of the victorious nations: Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Transnational capital set about accomplishing its real goal in the struggle against socialism and the Soviet Union: a new division of the world in its geopolitical and financial interests. The early 1990s ushered in a new stage of imperialist expansion which today has reached its peak and has put humankind on the brink of a third world war.

The kowtowing of Gorbachev and Yeltsin to the United States under the slogans of “new thinking” and “integration into the world community” played into the hands of Russia’s enemies. Far from becoming more friendly, the foreign policy of the countries that opposed us in the Soviet era has become more hostile. The achievement of the imperialist goals of the US and its satellites is aided by the expansion of NATO and other military blocs which has been going on for more than three decades. With the turn of the millennium this has been increasingly worrying our people and the country’s new leadership. The danger of enemy forces moving closer to our borders was becoming ever more evident.

In response the West has more and more openly put its stake on force as the main instrument of ensuring its interests. It dramatically increased the use of the “enemy image” to build up a military hysteria. In the early 21st century international terrorism and the Muslim countries were ”appointed” to be such enemies. But over time the United States and the states under its control began to assign this role to China whose example of successful socialist development worries them, and Russia, which they want to see only in one capacity, as a docile raw materials appendage. The West is prepared to undermine the sovereignty of our Power as much as it needs our gigantic natural resources.

The second decade of the 21st century brought a serious and welcome change to Russia’s foreign policy. The country’s leadership finally admitted that the West had never wanted to see our might and independence grow stronger. It contributed to the USSR’s defeat in the Cold War, its renunciation of socialism, its sinking into a systemic crisis, mass poverty and the decimation of the national industry. Russia was being deprived of its economic sovereignty, without which political sovereignty was impossible.

Our country is finally departing from the harmful worshiping of the West. Pushkin’s poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” written in 1831 helps to gain a deeper insight into the historical context of these processes. Already two hundred years ago the goals of the Western powers with regard to our peoples and the Slavic brotherhood were clear.

For decades we have been ringed by unfriendly states. It was no longer possible to retreat and there was nowhere to retreat. The West had to be given to feel Russia’s determination to uphold its national interests and those of its friends.

Now the designs of the USA and its satellitesare being smashed against the willpower and heroism of the defenders of Donbass and the courage and fortitude of our military. The cardinal change of the political situation in Europe has changed the situation in the whole world. Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has highlighted the tectonic shifts in the world balance of forces.

Today, as our Armed Forces are conducting the special military operation in Ukraine to demilitarize and de-Nazify it, it is particularly important to remember the lessons of history, to hear its arguments and to understand its underlying plans. The key reminder and key benchmark is the history of our country’s Armed Forces.

Russia’s victorious pillars

Throughout the thousand-year history of the Russian state, since its foundation in the 10th century and to the present time, Russia faced attempts to destroy it by military force or at least to weaken militarily its vitality and influence in the world. Our people is peaceable, patient and kind, no one at all familiar with the Russian character needs to be convinced of that. Our past knows no mercenaries, a phenomenon that was universal in Western Europe. From the times of yore Rus had no soldiers of fortune who led mercenary troops in quest of booty, while free Cossacks quickly transformed themselves from rough-and-ready gangs into an organized force defending Russia’s borders. And yet, in spite of this Russia has had to fight throughout its history.

The famous historian S.M.Solovyov has counted 245 documented cases of invasions of Rus in the period between 1055 and 1462. General Sukhotin, a connoisseur of Russian military history, in his book “War in the History of the Russian World” published in St.Petersburg in 1894, wrote that “since the 14th century, from which one can count the revival of the Russian state, and to our day, out of the 525 years Russia was fighting wars for 329 years, almost two-thirds of its life.” And 134 times our people had to wage war against several enemies at once. On one occasion it fought against nine enemies, on two occasions against five, on 25 against three and on 37 occasions against two enemies.

The first comprehensive reform of the armed forces of Rus was the transformations carried out by Ivan the Terrible in the second half of the 16th century. These reforms saw the creation, for the first time, of a permanent army, the streltsy. In the 17th century it became the basis for the recreation of the Russian state unity after the Time of Troubles in 1605—1613, for the 1654 reunification of Great Russia and Little Russia, and for curbing the excessive appetites of Western Europe for Russian lands.

However, as Russia’s state and military might grew the streltsy army could no longer meet all the needs of the Power. Peter the Great’s decree of November 17, 1699 ushered in a fundamentally new approach to forming the Russian army, called the recruiting system. Recruitment made the army a truly people’s army, comprising all the social estates, increasing its strength and professionalism. Peter’s reform was the forerunner of the inseparable bond between the army and the people in the Soviet times which ensured our military victories and which is hated by Westernizers and liberals.

Suvorov’s ”wonder warriors” and Kutuzov’s “|eagles”, the heroes of Ismail, Chesma and Borodino gave Europe an object lesson in the effectiveness and efficiency of the Russian military machine. It was thanks to the selfless valor of the Russian soldier that by the middle of the 19th century Russia became the strongest world power.

The logic of the development of the Russian army and navy prompted another reform. It replaced recruitment with the principle of military conscription. Under the 1874 law all of Russia’s male population was liable to conscription.

The Russian Empire’s conscription policy was highly differentiated. While the standard term of service in the land forces was six years there were four categories who enjoyed exemptions depending on the education criterion. For example, those who had finished primary school served four years, those who had finished an urban school served three years and those who graduated from gymnasiums, only six months.

The Russia-Japan War and the First World War proved to be a severe test of the defense capability of Tsarist Russia. The army did not withstand that test. Not that the Russian soldier had become less staunch and brave. The reason was the overall degradation of the autocracy of the Tsars in the epoch before the revolution. A huge gap was formed between the needs of the working people, the needs of the country’s all-round development, on the one hand, and the goals of the rotten and corrupt regime, on the other.

In January 1918 the government of the young Soviet Republic signed a decree creating the Red Army. On February 23 of that same year mass recruitment of volunteers in its ranks began. The country faced a formidable historical challenge. At stake was not only the fate of socialism, for which the people had spoken out by carrying out the Great Revolution of October 1917. The very survival of the Fatherland was at stake in the struggle against foreign interventionists.

A call rang out over Russia which became a prologue to the birth of a new great army in a country devastated by the war and crisis. In a country which, or so its enemies thought, could not raise a combat-capable army within a short space of time. Yet that task was solved by the Leninist party and the people. In the mass consciousness the patriotic idea was linked with the great idea of equality, brotherhood and justice. The people for which the enemy prepared the fate of a conquered and enslaved one created the Red Army of Workers and Peasants and became victorious. Thanks to this our country survived as a single state and accomplished in the 20th century great military, social, economic, scientific and cultural feats, outstanding feats of socialism that are unequaled in world history and will forever be written in it in gold letters.

A quarter of a century after the birth of the Red Army the Great Patriotic War finally proved to the whole world the effectiveness and selflessness of the Soviet state and the people who cast in their lot with socialism and Soviet Power. It also proved the outstanding historic role of I.V.Stalin who led the country in those extremely difficult years.

It has to be borne in mind that by the end of April of 1918, two months after the Red Army started to be formed, its strength was under 200,000. However, two and a half years later, at the end of the war against the White Guards and foreign interventionists, its strength had increased 30-fold to 5.5 million. Thereafter, as a result of demobilization, its strength began to diminish. As of the beginning of 1932 it stood at a little over 600,000. But by June 22, 1941, when the Great Patriotic War began, it had increased almost ten times to 5 million. In May of 1945, the Day of the Great Victory, it predictably stood at 11 million soldiers and officers.

During the war years our army routed 507 German divisions and 100 divisions of Nazi Germany’s allies, three times more than the Anglo-American troops. Three quarters of German planes, tanks, artillery and assault weapons were destroyed on the Soviet-German front without any participation of the Western countries.

If the West had been committed to historical truth and not to Russophobia and anti-Communism much in our world would have looked differently. Following the world-famous American writer and Nobel Prize laureate Ernest Hemingway the gentlemen from Biden’s team would do well to repeat his impassioned words uttered in 1942. He said that 24 years of discipline and work for victory had created the glorious Red Army. “Every human being who loves freedom owes to the Red Army more than he will be able to pay in a lifetime.”

No other country in history has paid such a huge and gruesome price for victory over the enemy. No other country has achieved a victory that had such colossal significance not only for itself, but for the whole world, bringing salvation from death not only to the victorious people but to the whole planet. The Great Patriotic War in which the Soviet power, at the cost of colossal sacrifice, overcame Fascism is our abiding sense of pain. Victory in this war is our great pride. It was unconditional proof of the grandeur of the socialist system and moral rightness of the socialist idea which was inscribed on the banners and lived in the hearts of those who saved the world from the “brown plague.”

Over the course of its history the task of saving Russia was more than once shouldered by our heroic soldiers and outstanding commanders. In the battles for the Motherland they forged their victories and covered themselves in unfading glory. The names of Alexander Nevsky, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov and other brilliant military leaders have lived in the people’s memory for centuries.

Throughout its entire history our Power has been a constant target of external enemies. The country’s difficult and heroic destiny prompted Emperor Alexander III his famous words: “Russia has no friends, our vastness is feared. Russia has only two reliable allies, its army and navy.”

A country with such a destiny is obliged to have a strong army. Russia’s history has always been inseparable from is Armed Forces. That is why all the great leaders of our country – from Peter I to Lenin and Stalin – did not only create a powerful state, but built an invincible army.

One of the most outstanding commanders of the Great Patriotic War, Marshal Zhukov, said: “Time has no power over the grandeur of all that we have lived through in this war. The people which once experienced such great trials, will always draw strength from this Victory.”

And today, as we continue to stand up to the pack of Russophobes and anti-Sovieteers who seek to slander our history and our army, we can confidently repeat these words of Zhukov: “We know: neither time nor the wickedness of our enemies have power over historical truth. They cannot cancel the outstanding feat of the Soviet country and the Soviet people.” The results of the past remind us today that Russia will secure itself against external threats only if its internal policy is based on the ideas of justice and the interests of the majority of the people.

The “reformers” who undertook to dismantle the gains of socialism were undermining our country’s defense capability and its military-industrial complex. Many enterprises had to switch to producing pots and pans instead of tanks and guns. A purposive and well-planned campaign was launched to demoralize army servicemen.

A logical consequence of such policy was the dismantling of major overseas bases of the Russian Armed Forces in Lourdes (Cuba) and Kamran (Vietnam). To this one should add the wave of army and navy downsizing that took place at the same time, humiliating doing of Washington’s bidding and fawning to NATO, capitulation to the West conducted under the slogan of “fighting international terrorism.” In spite of everything, the Russian soldier has all this time honestly fulfilled his military duty. The Russian leadership’s military policy made a long-awaited fundamental turn. But the dire consequences of criminal deeds are felt to this day. Without them the aims of the special military operation to liberate Ukraine from Nazism, the Bandera legacy and NATO expansion would have been reached much sooner and more confidently.

What we have been warning about for many years has become starkly confirmed: the re-division of the gigantic geopolitical heritage of the USSR has not been completed. Hence Russia needs to be ready to act in the world in conditions of strategic instability for a long time to come. This means first and foremost that the military shield of our national security is of paramount and vial importance.

In the early 20th century, when many thought Russia was doomed, the communists, led by Lenin, managed to preserve the great Power thanks to the Red Army. They rallied and invigorated the country. Our Fatherland rose from the ruins of a bankrupt monarchy and the pro-Western adventurers who replaced it. The builders of socialism rose to the colossal historical challenge.

We are the heirs of great victors! We know that Russia has more than once crushed the most fearsome enemies. The memory of this fills as with confidence that we will stand our ground this time around as well.

Strategic turn

Our adversaries counted on political and economic isolation of Russia. But they failed. Our political and economic interaction with partners in the CIS space, the Eurasian region, Latin America and Africa has, if anything, grown stronger recently. Our diplomatic and trade contacts have increased. Successful negotiations have been held at the venues of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Samarkand and the Eurasian Economic Union in Bishkek. The influence of the USA and the collective West has visibly diminished in a number of regions. It is not by chance that there was an obvious split at last year’s summit of ASEAN in Cambodia, and at the G20 summit in Indonesia. Half of the participating countries refused to vote for the Russophobic resolutions cooked up in Washington. As a result, the ASEAN summit failed to pass a collective resolution for the first time in its history. The final document of the G20 was fundamentally adjusted in line with Russia’s demands and with the support of friendly countries. The conclusion is obvious: the US State Department’s international policy is categorically at odds with the aspirations of the world community and is sustaining a defeat more and more obviously.

Western pressure, the attempts of the US and is allies to install “a new world order” meet with protest all over the world. Humanity does not want to live under the dominance of American globalists. This is evidenced by the opposition to the American course in a number of Asian and Latin American countries. The African Union formed in the early 21st century aims to strengthen the unity and solidarity of African states and peoples and developing a common defense policy. The majority of Asian, Latin American and African states categorically refuse to take a Russophobic stand toward which Washington and its European “helpmates” are pushing the world.

A hundred and fifty countries have refused to impose sanctions against Russia. Their population accounts for 60% of the world population. Even authoritative US and EU experts say that it is rather the Western world that finds itself in isolation. The scale of these developments is such that they can be compared to the collapse of the colonial system in the 1960s and 1970s.

Our opponents are clearly scared that the Russian civilization is adding its potential to the potentials of other civilizational centers: China, India and Persia. Our great civilizations are ready to offer peace in which order and not diktat will prevail. In it justice and not exploitation will reign. High culture and spirituality and not plunder and violence will prevail.

It has to be stressed that the states that follow the path of socialism are the staunchest supporters of Russia on the international arena. It is China which is demonstrating spectacular achievements under the leadership of the Communist party. Its 20th Congress which proclaimed the end of the era of the unipolar globalist world was a key event of the modern time on the national and planetary scale. It is Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, and the DPRK. Finally, it is the Asian and African states whose managerial, scientific and medical cadres were formed at Soviet universities and institutes.

This is one of the key elements of the Soviet legacy which continues to serve us at this troubled time. It provides a lesson for us today. Addressingthe World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in Brazil in early 2023 I said that the new multipolar world would facilitate the struggle for social progress.The weakening of the US hegemony paves the way for a more just system of international relations. But multipolarity by itself does not lead to conflict-free development, social justice and socialism. Yet billions of disadvantaged people dream of a worthy life, free of oppression in which honest work and friendship of the peoples triumph. Only the struggle of working people for socialism will make it possible to build a new world!

The planet is beginning to see the dead-end character of the path toward which our country was pushed at the end of the last century. Two major powers – China and Russia – are called upon to play the key role in confronting American hegemony, strengthening the community of states seeking sovereign development and many-faceted peaceful cooperation.A milestone on the way toward forming a new concept of our interaction with the world was the 22nd Meeting of the Leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization held in Samarkand in September of 2022.

Between them the SCO countries occupy an area of 34 million square kilometers, that is, 60% of the territory of Eurasia. The total population of SCO countries is 3.4 billion, almost half of the Earth’s population. SCO participants stress that the SCO is not a military bloc. Unlike the key organizations of the collective West, it does not seek to bring military or political pressure to bear on anyone.

The constructive principles were reaffirmed at the Samarkand summit. Attention was focused on the speeches of President Putin of Russia and PRC Chairman Xi Jinping. The Russian head of state stressed signs of a fundamental transformation in world politics and economics. It is irreversible. We see a growing role of the new power centers interacting among themselves not on the basis of rules imposed from outside, but on the basis of common principles and the UN Charter, respect of the sovereignty, national values and the interests of one another.

In the West the idea of disintegration of the Soviet Union has been cultivated for decades. Now the idea of destroying the historical Russia has triumphed. The West is harboring plans to use our country in its confrontation with China. But this will not happen. Simultaneously the West has been creating a Neo-Nazi enclave in Ukraine to threaten and rock the situation inside Russia. The special military operation was launched to prevent this.

During his meeting with Xi Jinping the Russian President said: “The world is changing rapidly, but one thing remains immutable: the friendship between China and Russia, our good relations of strategic comprehensive partnership. We continue to strengthen these relations.”

One cannot but welcome this position. I am convinced that the strengthening of allied relations with the People’s Republic of China must be the bedrock principle of Russia’s foreign policy. In our internal policy we need to take into account the unique experience of China’s development which the whole world admires.

Addressing the participants in the International Forum of Marxist Parties organized by the Communist Party of China in July 2022, I said: time has shown convincingly that socialist China has become the locomotive of progress and the lode star for the whole humankind. The experience of the PRC has in fact acquired universal significance. It needs to be thoroughly studied and disseminated with due account of the national conditions in each country. The strategic partnership between Russia and China is deepening. The friendship between our peoples is growing stronger. The leaders of our states have repeatedly reaffirmed the readiness to expand close cooperation.

In 2022 the Communist Party of China marked its centenary. It was a great milestone in the history of the Chinese people which had huge resonance in many countries. The Russian communists held major events in Moscow to mark this momentous date.

From the moment of the creation of the PRC, within several decades, China traversed a path that took the developed states hundreds of years to traverse. Within a historically brief space of time the country overcame its semi-feudal and semi-colonial legacy to become a world power. In 2021 China put a final end to poverty. Continuous progress of the huge country is ensured. The strategic tasks of national development, the goals of “two centuries” and a great resurgence of the Chinese nation, are being realized successfully. The rapid growth of the economy and social stability in China confirm the strength of socialism and demonstrate its creative character.

The tragic experience of the USSR has shown that renunciation by the Communist Party of its leading role inevitably plunges society into chaos and leads to the restoration of capitalism. This lends especial value to the CPC’s efforts to strengthen and improve the system of party leadership at all levels.

Socialism in China is an impressive result of the creative efforts of the whole people. The CPC skillfully combines the principles of Marxism and the conditions in China. All the achievements of the PRC have become possible because the people and the party have preserved and constantly improve the ideas of socialism – in theory as well as in practice.

Apologists for the bourgeoisie have often claimed that capitalism is the only possible path for moving forward, “the end point of development.” But we communists have proved the opposite: a better alternative to capitalism exists. The construction of socialism in the USSR proved it in the 20th century. China’s achievements are proving it now in the eyes of the amazed world.

Today the European Union, at the bidding of its Transatlantic overseer, is sealing the “window to Europe” cut by Peter the Great. Instead we are to open wider the gates to Asia, to our friends and reliable allies. This work must become one of the key tasks for our country.

The great lessons of Victory

The special military operation of the Russian army in Ukraine can be seen as essentially the continuation of the events of the Great Patriotic War. Then our country had to fight against the united forces of Europe where Bandera’s people were on the side of the Fascists. Today their descendants have reared their heads seeking revenge.

Their open terrorist war against the Russian World and the brotherhood of peoples began on May 2, 2014. On that day the pro-fascist supporters of an anti-constitutional coup carried out that same year in Kiev, burned alive inside the Odessa Trade Union House almost 50 champions of the legitimate rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking people. This beastly act was rightly called a new Khatyn by analogy with the tragic events in a Byelorussian village burned to the ground by Hitler’s punitive troops in March of 1943.

Today the terrorist attacks of neo-Nazi pro-Bandera thugs nurtured by their Western mentors have added to their “record” terrorist attacks on industrial enterprises and civilians in several regions of the European part of Russia. On the eve of Victory Day they used military drones to attack our national holy place, the Moscow Kremlin. Such things did not even happen during the Great Patriotic War when the German army was within 30 kilometers of Moscow.

It is incumbent on the Russian state to administer a fitting rebuff to this wanton act of terror. We have unique experience of effective struggle against terrorism of every stripe. Today we must use it to take adequate measures against the bandits who have dug in on Ukrainian land and threaten our security arms in hand.

We have to be aware of the seriousness of the historical challenge we face. We must honestly assess our vulnerabilities and realize that if we are to move forward the main thing is to mobilize internal resources. Soviet history sets a great example of effective military and economic mobilization, which is precisely what we need today.

As Arseny Zverev, a talented Soviet economist who was the Soviet Finance Minister in 1938—1960, wrote in his book “Stalin and Money,” by the late 1930s the state budget was already geared to the needs of the defense complex. Its allocations for the People’s Commissariat of Defense accounted for 21% of the budget in 1938, 26% in 1939, 32% in 1940 and 34% in 1941, when it was already a wartime budget.

Expansion of the capacity of artillery and tank plants proceeded apace. In December of 1939 the legendary T-34 tank was put into service. In February 1941 serial production began of the Katyusha rocket launcher which would strike fear into the Germans. In March production was started of IL-2 assault plane dubbed flying fortress. In April-May on the directions of the Soviet leadership, a secret reinforcement of the Soviet forces was carried out, mainly in the military districts in the west of the country, as a result of which 850,000 reservists were called up to the army and navy.

At a meeting of the Politbureau of the CC AUCP(B) in May 1941 G.K.Zhukov, appointed Chief of the Red Army General Staff several months earlier, reported: during the course of the industrial modernization launched in the USSR since the early 1930s production of tanks increased by more than three times. The Red Army received almost 10,000 pieces of ordnance and mortars. The Soviet industry provided the army with about 18,000 combat aircraft. The numerical strength of the Armed Forces almost trebled, the air power increased sevenfold, the number of tanks put into service rose 43 times. 312 new warships were put into operation.

Such was the great patriotic, organizational and economic prerequisite of our Great Victory which shook the world four years later.

The results of economic mobilization aimed at liquidating the consequences of the devastation caused by the Hitlerites were also impressive. By 1940, a year before the Great Patriotic War, the USSR’s gross domestic product was 4.5 greater than twelve years earlier. The national revenue was five times that of 1928. The same 12 years saw the basic production assets grow by 2.6 times, capital investments by 6.7 times, production volume by 6.5 times. The number of workers trebled during the same period.

During the three five-year-plan periods the USSR put into operation 9,000 industrial facilities. On average 600 giant machine-building, metallurgical and power generating facilities were built every year. Owing to this in the ten pre-war years industrial output grew by 30 times, power generation by 24 times and oil and chemical industry output by 17.5 times. By the beginning of the war our country was the biggest producer of the main types of commodities in Europe, and on many counts was leading the world. Raw materials were not sold abroad on the cheap, but were used primarily to put out high-quality Soviet goods.

After Germany’s attack in June 1941 production started to decline. It dropped by almost half by November. But toward the end of the first war year decline gave way to sustained industrial growth. It never stopped until the early 1990s, the time of treacherous break-up of the USSR. As early as 1942 we were producing four times as many tanks as Germany, twice as many warplanes and three times as many pieces of ordnance of all types. It was then that the Chelyabinsk and Kirovo-Chepetsk thermal power plants and Karaganda Hydro–Electric Power Station went on line. Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsky plants launched production of all types of steel needed for the military hardware within days. All in all, 3,500 new big enterprises were built and 7,500 destroyed industrial facilities were restored during the war years. Between July 1941 and January 1945 the total floor area of residential housing built and restored amounted to 103 million square meters.

Such were the heroic exploits performed by the Soviet industry and economy which withstood the Fascist onslaught. But with the onset of savage capitalism it became the object of free-for-all plunder by Russian oligarchs and their foreign accomplices who turned the majority of Soviet enterprises into ruins. Those that survived were made to work not for the people and for our country, but for the enrichment of their owners and of their Western principals. What Hitler failed to accomplish became a reality in Yeltsin’s bourgeois Russia.

Soviet agriculture also withstood the cruel blows of the war. During the war years areas under crops in the eastern regions increased by 5 million hectares. Agrarian science was working successfully to breed new cold-resistant crop varieties. Areas under winter crops increased by 64% in Siberia and by 44% in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. These regions provided 67 million wagons of cargoes to the front and to other regions.

Invaders totally or partially destroyed and burned down 1710 cities and urban-type settlements, more than 70,000 villages. They destroyed 6 million buildings and left 25 million people without a roof over their heads. They put out of operation almost 32,000 industrial facilities, 65,000 kilometers of railways and 4,100 railway stations. They slaughtered or transported to Germany 7 million horses, 17 million cattle and 30 million sheep and goats. They razed to the ground 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools, technicums and higher education establishments, and 43,000 libraries. No state in history had suffered such gigantic damage at the enemy hands. The world had not seen such a brutal and devastating war, economic and ideological aggression as that unleashed against the Soviet Union.

All the more impressive was the feat of the Soviet power which stood its ground against the most formidable enemy, and the feat of its rapid post-war rehabilitation.

A third of the basic assets destroyed by the Hitlerites were restored even before the war ended. The pre-war level of industrial production was reached as early as 1948 and in agriculture in 1950. Real per capita incomes in 1950 were 40% higher than in 1940. In 1946—1955, 201 million square meters of housing space was built, almost as much as in all the pre-war five-year-plan periods combined.

Already before the war Joseph Davis, US ambassador to the USSR in 1936—1939, wrote in his book “Mission to Moscow” that the most striking thing about the Soviet planning was boldness in making decisions and perseverance in implementing them.

Soviet science, which is today being strangled in the noose of thievish capitalism, made a colossal contribution to the victory over the enemy. The role of our medicine in the years when death stalked everyone in the battlefield is impossible to overestimate. Thanks to the selfless effort of medics three out of every four soldiers and officers hospitalized with heavy injuries were put back on their feet. What would have happened to them if they were put in the hands of the present-day health service run over by the steamroller of “optimization” and mass staff cuts?

The Soviet Gosplan started developing the Fourth Five-Year Plan as early as August of 1945 when the USSR was still fighting Japan. The main target was to restore the pre-war production level. Particularly tight control was imposed on gold mining and the production of precious metals, a key industry which today is in private hands and outside state and public control. As a result, the plan targets were exceeded many times over. By the end of the first post-war five-year-plan period national income was 64% higher than in 1940. At the gala Kremlin meeting on November 6, 1944 Stalin had every reason to say the following: “The economic foundation of the Soviet State turned out to be incomparably more viable than the economy of the hostile sates. The socialist system born of the October Revolution gave our people and our army great and invincible strength.”

In peacetime, the strength of socialism Stalin spoke about from the Kremlin rostrum in 1944, made the USSR the leading science and space power on the planet, a leader of progress which accounted for one fifth of the world’s industrial output.

(Continued on following post.)
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Wed May 31, 2023 11:30 am

(Continued from previous post.)

Revival program needed

In the early 1990s an absolutely untenable socio-economic system was foisted on Russia. Three decades after renouncing socialism we still have not reached 1990 performance indicators. The country has not restored what has been destroyed not by war, but by irresponsibility and treachery, the greed of oligarchs and the crimes of corrupt officials.

The growth of left sentiments in the world meets with furious resistance of transnational capital. Influential forces here in Russia take its side. They seek to keep intact the destructive socio-economic model. These liberal revenge-seekers do all they can to prevent a revision of the system that has taken shape. They do not want to reject the course imposed on us in the vicious 1990s.

We communists know that from the perspective of large world processes the behavior of the Russian comprador bourgeoisie represents resistance of a historically doomed side. But today it is exacting a heavy price from our country and its citizens. An attempt is being made to wreck Russia through aggravating the economic crisis and actions of “the fifth column.”

Western strategists are inspired by the glaring flaws in the Russian bourgeois system. Our opponents know well what happened after the collapse of the Soviet model. They were at one with Yeltsin, Gaidar, Chubais and Kozyrev who were cutting up what they scoffingly called “the new Russia.” We were plunged in the most backward, absolutely primitive gangster capitalism. Those who planted multiple mines under the foundation of Russian statehood are still rubbing their dirty hands.

Those who run the Russian economy still do not have a firm commitment to break with the ideology foisted on us by the globalists, nor do they have a coherent program of transformations in our national interests. We hoped that under the circumstances power will at long last come up with a new socio-economic course and renounce the ideology of socialism-haters. Instead, we are stuck with a budget of addiction to commodity trade and technological backwardness. On practically all counts it envisages symbolic increase of financing, which in practice means decline in real terms, adjusted for inflation, or a reduction even in nominal terms. We see that the government’s financial and economic unit continues to ignore the need to break with the neocolonial structures of global capital, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. These people still cling to the ideology of a raw materials appendage which rejects the prospect of full-fledged development and forward-looking economic growth. The negative consequences are there for all to see.

Over the past 10 years our economy has registered an average annual growth rate of under 1%. In 2022 it shrank by 2%. Experts from Moscow University’s Chair of Political Economy point out that Russia’s GDP today is a mere 20—25% above that of 1990. Meanwhile the world economy has on average grown by three times on 1990. Тhus, the world economy over the past 30-odd years has been growing at least 12 times faster than the Russian economy. The same can be said of the USA and the leading European states whose economies have also grown by 2-3 times since 1990.

China has seen its economy increase by 8 times since the mid-1990s. The difference between the performance of oligarchic capitalism and socialism renewed under the leadership of the Communist Party is evident to all. This is what we should proceed from if we want to preserve our country and set it on the path of victories and successful independent development.

Over the same ten years real incomes of citizens dropped by 12% putting us in the sixth ten in terms of minimum wage. With its current budget policy Russia, according to UNESCO data, has dropped to 121st place in the world in terms of spending on healthcare, to 84th place in terms of spending on education and 37th place in terms of financing science.

Even the top moneybags have the same flat tax rate as citizens with medium and low incomes. Billionaires contribute to the treasury the same percentage of their assets as paupers. Yet the government is still reluctant to revise that rule which has been scrapped practically all over the world.

In the Soviet era one in every four scientists in the world was a Soviet citizen. In the last 30 years the number of highly qualified scientists in our country dropped by at least one third. Their number continued to decline in 2022. It was down 2.5% on 2021 and 9% on 2010. Without exaggeration, this poses a strategic threat because technological sovereignty is indispensable for survival and development.

In last year’s report “The Broken Vector of the Russian Economic Development” the same experts from Moscow University come to this conclusion: the economic model Russia took on board after the collapse of the USSR is categorically ineffective and contrary to the tasks of development. Equally ineffective and irresponsible is the management of the economy in its present form which is a direct result of adventurous and plunderous privatization.

As a result of de facto illegal privatization deals the majority of Russian enterprises ended up in the hands of owners who are incapable of running them effectively. They do not want to invest in development, are concerned only about their personal profit and syphon off huge financial resources out of the country. Only 15% of strategic resources are in the hands of the state. The lamentable results of privatization haunt the Russian economy determining its character and prospects.

The scientists see the only way out of the situation in transferring strategically important sectors to the state. On the immediate agenda is nationalization of the key enterprises and removing the oligarchy from management of the economy. The experts also come out for a revival of the Soviet practice of five-year plans. These should first and foremost envisage the restoration of existing and creation of new spearhead technology development projects.

These conclusions fully coincide with the demands of the CPRF. Our policy documents insist on the need for a new socio-economic course. The country faces massive social-economic tasks. Their solution demands a fundamental revision of the policy of the last 30 years. Without it we will go under.

The bandit Western sanctions have destroyed the former format of Russia’s interaction with the external world. A patch-up approach will not work in this situation. A change of economic and financial policy is required. A switch toward the path of a new industrialization – this is what guarantees our sovereignty.

Russia needs a massive industrialization, a rapid growth of the national industry and quick eastward reorientation of export and import.

It is high time to admit that the private sector should not hold sway in system-forming sectors. Today, when the question of economic growth is the question of national salvation, the state must play the key role. It alone can address such priorities as boosting of production, support of the poor, and expansion of foreign economic ties in new directions. The authorities should revise the untenable course which has brought colossal losses.

At the tail end of the previous year President Putin, conducting a meeting of the Council for Development and National Projects, set six key socio-economic targets for 2023:

— reorientation of trade;

— strengthening technological sovereignty;

— priority growth of the manufacturing industry;

— financial sovereignty;

— raising the incomes of citizens;

— protection of motherhood and childhood.

Commitment to these goals was reaffirmed in March of this year in the government’s report to the State Duma. This cannot but be welcomed. But such key socio-economic tasks can only be solved if there is a new and sound policy and a coherent program of actions.

Russia has all the resources needed to reverse the dangerous trends, and protect its present and future. The best way to combat the crisis of capitalism is to get rid of capitalism itself! This has been proved in our program of immediate measures to revive Russia approved by the Oryol International Economic Forum. We have ample grounds for demanding de-oligarchization of the economy, nationalization of strategic sectors, commitment of the financial system to the goals of accelerated development and revival of state planning. Our program has the backing of scientists, doctors, teachers and the heads of key enterprises. It offers a concrete and detailed plan of actions to tackle the strategic tasks facing the country.

It provides clear answers how to put an end to the policy of decimating the national industry and wrest its key sectors from the hands of foreign capital; liberate ourselves from the financial and legal diktat of transnational structures such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the WTO; clear our strategic enterprises of the presence of foreign agents; implement a robust state program of the development of electronics, aircraft building, machine-building, woodworking; restore the single power grid; give the Central Bank the role of a truly state bank; put an end to the flawed practice of parking capital abroad, due to which we lost 600 billion dollars of our gold and currency reserves in 2022. Of that sum 350 billion have been unlawfully “frozen” in Western banks. A further 250 billion have been hastily spirited out of Russia by the oligarchs.

Our program is a program of a new industrialization which would involve research centers in reviving sectoral science and treble the spending on research and development.

Our program is a new development budget which can be brought up to 40 trillion roubles within a comparatively short space of time. It means comprehensive social transformations the most important of which would give back to our citizens free and high-class education and health service. It means reducing the retirement age to the former level: 55 for women and 60 for men.

In our Victory Program we summed up our key proposals and demands and complemented them with new ones which reflect the most important recent changes. We have submitted to the State Duma a range of exceedingly important draft laws envisaging all-round support of the social sphere and key sectors of the economy.

The sound character of our program has been convincingly confirmed by numerous parliamentary hearings and round tables devoted to the problems of the national industry, agriculture, healthcare, education and science. We have brought together top scientists, leading industry specialists whose knowledge and ideas should be the basis of a new policy serving our national interests.

To win the battle against those who declared an all-out war against Russia we need mobilization of the economy and ideology, science and culture. This calls for a new industrialization, a plan economy, information support based not on empty and noisy declarations, but on real policies in the interests of the country and its citizens. History vindicates our cause. Socialism has repeatedly confirmed its creative power and its role in saving the Motherland. The Great October pulled the planet out of the First World War, and our Great Victory put an end to the Second World War in May of 1945. Thereafter we have owed our salvation to the nuclear-missile parity which still ensures our security.

The West has more than once lowered “an iron curtain” on the Soviet Union. But the USSR’s leading positions continued to grow stronger. How was this achieved? Through economic independence! The independence we can only regain if we rely on socialism as the foundation.

To save lives, to save souls

The main security issue is preserving the population. To survive in our wide space we need a population of 200 million. To defend a territory of 16 million square kilometers we need a 1.5 million-strong army. But the demographic situation categorically runs counter to the strategic needs of our Power.

By the early 1970s the USSR was, in terms of life expectancy, ahead not only of the United States, but of the majority of European countries. And this despite the fact that in the early 20th century the average life span in Russia was 17 years less than in America.

In 1900 Russia had a population of 70 million. Fifty years later there were already 102 million of us. And this despite the two world wars. The next 40 years added 50 million. In 1990 there were 148 million of us, but now there are two million fewer of us. That is, in the last 30 years the country’s population did not increase but decreased.

We witness the continued effect of factors which lead to a demographic catastrophe and which stem directly from the current socio-economic policy. Russia has been dying out for the fifth year in a row.

Since 2018 the population shrank by 2.5 million, that is, by 1,500 people every day. Last year alone the population dropped by 600,000. Birth rate dropped by 6% on 2021. The birth rate was 9 per 100,000, the worst indicator since 2001. According to the Health Ministry, more than half of Russian men die before they are 65.

These colossal problems are closely connected with the high divorce rate. According to official statistics, out of a hundred new marriages between 60 and 65 end in divorce. It is one of the worst indicators in the world. In other words, three quarters of family unions fall apart. Half of divorced couples have no children.

The roots of all these phenomena are social problems which breed a sense of insecurity, of not being able to ensure a decent life for the children, housing, normal diet, medical help and good education. The demographic crisis leads to the crisis of manpower which also poses a threat to our national security. According to the results of a Central Bank study published in April 2023 Russia is experiencing the most acute shortage of manpower, especially in the young age bracket.

Along with the physical preservation of the people spiritual preservation is very important. Russia haters make it the aim of the information war to corrupt the souls and destroy the truth. In the fierce battle against the collective West it is not enough to strengthen the military potential. To move forward the Russian World needs inspiring values, a worldview based on the ideas of social justice. Education and culture should be the foundation of these ideas.

The destruction of the USSR and the liberal reforms were accompanied by a fierce ideological war aimed at destroying the unique system of educating the new generation. Thousands of children were left at the mercy of the street. They were fed “Western values,” including drug addiction, child prostitution, disdain for the acts of heroes, nihilism toward society. Everything connected with the achievements of the Soviet land and its youth, victories at the front and in the rear, the conquest of outer space and All-Union Construction Projects was expunged from the school programs.

In the middle of the 20th century we would not have won the war with Fascism, which was armed to the teeth, but for the Leninist-Stalinist modernization of the 1920s and 1930s. Its solid foundation was the brilliant development of the education system. The whole country went to school, hundreds of thousands of young people, children of workers, peasants and intellectuals, entered higher and secondary technical education institutions. As Stalin said at the 18th party congress, “a new Soviet intelligentsia has been created which has close ties with the people and is ready in its mass, to serve it faithfully.”

Satlin’s words are borne out by the biographies of the best Soviet writers, poets, film directors, composers who have left us a poignant chronicle of the Great Patriotic War. That chronicle includes “The Young Guard” by Alexander Fadeyev, “They Fought for Their Motherland” by Mikhail Sholokhov, wartime poetry of Konstantin Simonov. These outstanding authors created works that are the pride of Soviet literature. In those grim years they were war correspondents, working on the frontline and risking their lives. Yuri Bondarev went to the front in 1942 straight from school. The future author of the story “Battalions Ask for Fire Support” and the novel “Hot Snow” took part in the Battle of Stalingrad, the crossing of the Dnieper and the liberation of Kiev from the Nazis.

In Russia before the Revolution about 80 percent of the population were illiterate. This is one of the reasons why Russia quickly lost its wind in the First World War: people were not prepared to fight. It was not until 1916 when it became clear how vulnerable a semi-literate soldier was that universal primary education was introduced. But the casualties could not be brought back.

Soviet power was very mindful of this sad lesson. Making education and culture generally accessible, it elevated them to an unheard of level of quality. In this way cadres were forged for a gigantic industrial breakthrough of the USSR and for the future Victory.

The course foisted on the country in the 1990s has been decimating our education for decades. It undermined fundamental and applied science. It took us several years to solve the obvious question: Russia must have a Russian Language Day.

On November 22, 1994 the World Bank published a report “Russia. Education in the Transition Period.” It set forth what amounted to a plan of destroying our education system. Part of the report was devoted to primary education, which it proposed to dump as unnecessary. The whole system of civic disciplines was also canceled. Basic subjects were emasculated. We are talking about mathematics, the Russian language and literature – all that shapes a person, citizen and a full-fledged specialist. Engineers also turned out to be redundant. Instead BA and MA degrees were introduced.

Sadly, one has to admit that this destructive plan was to a large extent implemented. We need urgently to rectify the situation. We cannot achieve an industrial and economic breakthrough without a massive increase of support for education and science on the part of the state. But the country which in the Soviet era, even in the grimmest war years, spent up to 17% of the budget on education, today spends no more than 4% of the budget, that is, less than one percent of the GDP.

Yes, it is heartening that in his address in February 2023, the President at long last declared that Russia is giving up the faulty Bologna system and is reverting to the traditional education system. But this is so far practically the only step away from the former dead-end course. Other steps are necessary. In an address to the Federal Assembly and the Government adopted at the CPRF-organized round table “Science and Education Under Sanctions” in April 2023 we called for the following measures:

— to ensure equal educational opportunities for Russian citizens irrespective of their material and social status;

— within five years increase the share of financing of education in the country by not less than 7% of the GDP, that is, to double it;

— urgently consider and support a body of legislation aimed at enhancing the status of education workers and increasing student stipends;

— raise the base salaries of education workers to not less than 70% of the average wage in the region and in the Russian Federation as a whole;

— in forming the federal and regional budgets proceed from the recognition of education as one of the main priorities of state policy.

The foundation for all this has been laid. It is in our draft law “Education for All” which we have developed. The CPRF considers it to be a key task to make our culture and education system truly of the people. The time has come to again cherish the achievements of all the peoples of the Soviet Union embodied in the unique Soviet civilization. Our ancestors created one of the most brilliant cultures in the modern world. Everyone in our country should be deeply aware that this is not only something to be proud of but also to be responsible for.

The Soviet pinnacle of the Russian World

It has to be stressed that the Communist Party has made a key contribution to the sacred cause of defending the USSR and the whole world against the Fascist invasion. This contribution is intellectual, managerial and military. Members of the CPSU and its youth wing, the Komsomol, made up more than half of the Red Army personnel.

Communists and Komsomol members were fighting in the front ranks and were the first to give their lives for Motherland and the socialist cause. Soviet soldiers who had not yet joined the Party, before going into a deadly battle, put a note in the breast pocket with the words: ”If I get killed please consider me to be a Communist.” Such was the last will of these selfless people. There cannot be a more convincing proof of the people’s selfless faith in the Soviet power and the Communist Party. There is no more convincing proof of the fact that Soviet power and the Party have fully deserved such popular faith. Thereby they deserved the Great Victory.

It is impossible to erase from the consciousness of our people faith in the social system which gave people a chance to live according to the laws of equality and justice. Our people have rejected capitalist exploitation and the power of a handful of fatcats over millions of poor people which so unnaturally installed itself here by the beginning of the 21st century. The Communists created a country whose victorious sons tossed the banners of vanquished invaders at the foot of the Lenin Mausoleum. Thereby they proved that the strongest army in the world is the army of socialism. It unites in its ranks all those who build society on the basis of equality and justice.

The Soviet civilization is the historical pinnacle of the Russian World militarily, economically, socially and spiritually. Today’s “party of power” lacks the reason, conscience, and will to inherit this outstanding experience. We see around the President many adherents of White Guard patriotism, an ideology that is muddled and sly, faulty and false. I would like to remind you that it was this ideology that led its adherents to national treachery and a historical defeat in the Civil War. Russia avoided collapse thanks to the victory of the Bolsheviks over the interventionists and their accomplices, the leaders of the White movement who had stooped to collaborationism.

Time demands that we protect our common home from Fascist scum, from latter-day “dog-knights,” from insane followers of Hitler. Particular historic responsibility has fallen on the shoulders of the present generation: to stop the slide toward an abyss. To achieve a fateful victory, our Motherland needs an effective economy, high-class science and education, a robust military potential and support of allies across the world.

The key condition of victory is the staunchness of our people and its ideological strong-mindedness in any confrontation. We have the experience of our forebears who knew how to rally in the face of dreadful peril. Russia needs consolidation of healthy patriotic forces for the sake of protection, development and prosperity of the beloved Motherland. Our country needs “a social contract” of a new type based on respectful attitude to the people, solidarity of working people and profound respect for the position of the citizens.

A patriotic front of struggle against the imperial West cannot grow out of the right of some to oppress and rob others. To create such a front, it is necessary to cast aside all delusions imposed on our country in the late 20th century. Neo-liberal dogma has cost our people dearly. Any attempt to continue nursing hatred of the Soviet era should be declared to be harmful and criminal practice.

To achieve victory and solve ambitious historical tasks Russia needs to rally around creative ideas and shining symbols. On the days in May our people pay attribute to the great feat of their ancestors with tears in their eyes and pride in their hearts. At such special moments it is not right to hide the key symbol, the Lenin Mausoleum. Draping it on national holidays is a cynical and absolutely inadmissible act. I declared it in my open letter to President Putin in April 2023 shortly before the birthday anniversary of V.I.Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state.

The celebration of Victory Day should be seen as an important act of people’s unity. The meaning and content of this event are sacred. So are all its symbols. The disgraceful practice of draping the Lenin Mausoleum is corrupting and intolerable.It is beneath the dignity of the country which today courageously challenges the heirs of Hitler, whom our ancestors defeated under Lenin’s banners.

In the conditions of struggle against Fascism which has reared its head the attitude to Soviet history has become a test of the maturity and responsibility of any political force in Russia. You may say what you like about socialism. But the past cannot be undone. Putting into question the feats of the Soviet people and its state means rolling out a carpet to Fascism. And Fascism, whatever its shades, brings evil, degradation and colossal losses.

For an anti-Fascist front and a better future for the planet.

Condemning evil is not enough. Evil should be fought. It needs to be overcome. That is why a very special event was held in the Hero City of Minsk on Lenin’s birthday on April 22, 2023. It was initiated by the Communist Parties of Russia and Byelorussia with the support of the UCP-CPSU. Representatives of a score of countries from Asia, America and Europe gathered in a symbolic place, the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War.

We met in order to hold our first International Anti-Fascist Forum and say a firm “No!” to war and reaction, neo-Fascism and oppression. We did it in Byelorussia where the number of victims and the amount of destruction during the war against Hitlerism were especially high. Every inch of that sacred land was awash with the blood of millions of Nazism’s victims. One in every citizens of the Byelorussian SSR was destroyed by the German Fascist aggressors.

The participants in the anti-Fascist Forum declared that Nazism is engendered by the crisis of capitalism. It grew out of Big Capital’s lust for preserving its power over the working people at all costs. To this end the imperialists have embarked on the path of supporting the darkest forces. They brought to power Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and other rascals. The Nazis turned from a political fringe into a huge force which threatened to subdue the whole world.

The peoples of the Earth have no right to forget the experience of those great battles. In 1936, with the support of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy the Spanish Civil War broke out. The people’s power, in spite of the support from the USSR and other progressive forces, could not stand its ground. This paved the way for the most horrible war in human history. Decisive steps were taken toward the furnaces and gas chambers of Buchenwald and Mauthausen, Dahau and Sobibor, Majdanek and Oswiecim.

The world paid a heavy price for getting rid of Nazism. The heroes of that struggle – the soldiers and officers of the Red Army, the warriors of the Allied countries, the fighters of the People’s Liberation Army of China, representatives of the French and Italian Resistance, participants in the German anti-Fascist underground, Yugoslav and Korean partisans, Polish and Czechoslovak patriots — covered themselves with unfading glory.

The Red Flag over Reichstag in May 1945 is not only a heroic fact of the past. The meaning and significance of the Great Victory over Fascism reach out to the future. They sound like a tocsin appealing to the hearts of the new generations.

Today the situation is getting more and more alarming. Neocolonialism is rearing its head in Africa and America. Imperialists are stoking up tensions in Asia. To the roar of cannon in Europe and other corners of the planet the black smoke of war fires is spreading. Human misery and suffering are multiplied. The moaning of the wounded and dying is heard. Mothers shed tears of grief. The sinister outlines of the spider-like swastika are emerging ever more visibly from the gaping abyss. The deadly threat of a Fascist revenge is growing. The emboldened Nazi beast has crept out of the wolf’s den in search of new victims.

People of good will need unity and courage in the battle against absolute evil. This means struggle against the prime cause. Capitalism in its neo-liberal guise has created a global system of plundering entire countries and peoples. It has stained itself with aggression against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Byelorussia. An unprecedented sanctions pressure has been unloosed against the peoples of Russia and China, Cuba and the DPRK. Military threats and political blackmail are increasingly used.

On the eve of the Second World War Hitler’s storm troops were orchestrated by financial capital. In the 21st century it again directs later-day Nazis. Seemingly vanquished Fascism has not disappeared from the face of the Earth. The world oligarchy needs its services. As a result, Nazi riff-raff stages marches in Vilnius and Tallinn. Books are being burned in Kiev. Monuments to Soviet liberator warriors are being dismantled in Warsaw. Euro MPs initiate wicked resolutions trying to equate Hitler’s Nazism and Soviet Socialism.

In Ukraine, US and NATO support has elevated Nazi ideology to the rank of official ideology. The Bandera lot ensconced in Kiev has turned Ukraine into a concentration camp for dissenters. They have banned undesirable media outlets, strangled the opposition, and launched reprisals against communists. The Nazis burned people alive in Odessa, blew up and killed people from behind the corner. The Azov* thugs with a wolf hook on their chevrons have for years terrorized Donbass. Everyone who has preserved the ideals of the brotherhood of peoples and loyalty to the Great Victory over Fascism has become a victim of reprisals.

The Western governments are pumping weapons into Bandera Ukraine. Zelensky already says he wants to have a nuclear arsenal. But the gentlemen from NATO did not sound the alarm even then. Moreover, London contemplates providing Neo-Nazis with depleted uranium ammunition.

NATO countries have not just stuffed the world with military bases. Four hundred US bio-laboratories in various parts of the planet are conducting experiments with dangerous viruses and bacteria. The consequences of such activity threaten humankind as a biological species.

The communists have always claimed that “Fascism is war.” We see clear proof of it today.The bacilliof “the brown plague” are too dangerous. They should be rendered harmless confidently and quickly.The horrors condemned by the Nuremberg International Tribunalmust not be repeated. The world reaction must not be allowed to plunge the world into a new catastrophe. Individual heroes cannot solve tasks of such magnitude. It takes mass activity of working peoples and nations.

Analyzing the situation from all sides the participants in the Minsk anti-Fascist forum pointed to the ever deepening crisis of the bourgeois ideology. Indeed, the globalists cover up their dangerous actions with pseudo-intellectual research. They like to pluck from the theories of Nietzsche, Chamberlain and Gobinau the most reactionary ideas about the “superman” and “race superiority.” A grim cocktail of neo-Malthusianism and post-humanism is being cooked. Man-hating nonsense is put forward about the “priority of technological progress over social development.” Klaus Schwab and his ilk put the old ideas that inspired Hitler and his accomplices in pseudo-scientific wrapping. Vices and perversions are extoled as humanistic values.

Such false “innovations” are promoted by those afflicted with ethnic and racial prejudices who want to take revenge on the fighters against Fascism and colonialism. These circles are possessed by the idea of total control over humanity. Declaring cancelation of the great Russian culture and “redundancy’ of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chaikovsky, they target humanistic culture of the whole world seeking to throw it into times of unheard-of savagery and an electronic concentration camp.

Progressive-minded people know that neo-liberalism is a vicious enemy of independent development and democratic norms. Western political systems have degenerated into absolute autocracies. Bourgeois elites have lost touch with the values of freedom and humanism. Writhing in agony, capitalism has proved that it is ready to accept reincarnation of Fascism. World reaction actively encourages the followers of Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and Salazar, Antonescu and Mannerheim, Pilsudski and Quisling. They cynically falsify historical facts hoping to erase the memory of the Second World War.

For all the peace-loving forces on the planet the key to success is unity in struggle, cohesion and assertiveness. Resistance to world reaction can only be successful if it is worldwide.Only international solidarity can protect humankind from the Fascist threat and from sliding into the abyss of a world war.

The final document of the Minsk Anti-Fascist Forum stresses: “The plans of a ‘new world order’ lead to aggression and conflicts, neo-Fascism and neo-colonialism and the threat of a new world war. The whole world is becoming a battlefield. We must win this battle – in the name of all the best that has been created by world culture, in the name of a worthy future for humankind!” These are words from the Manifesto for Uniting the Peoples of the World unanimously supported by the participants in our meeting. “Protect Humanity from Fascism!” has become the title of the Manifesto.

The Manifesto recalls that the great militant alliance of opponents of Fascist barbarism – communists, patriots, fighters against tyranny and democrats – took shape in the flames of the Second World War. It was created in spite of the social and ideological divergences, differences of political and religious views. Such was the bidding of the time. The present day again calls for united actions of all the people of good will in the struggle against neo-Nazism, reaction and militarism.

The Manifesto “Protect Humanity from Fascism!” is a document that carries a great political message. It provides a convincing ideological platform for uniting all the left, truly popular forces in the world. Only such a union can overcome the main threats to humanity in the first half of the 21st century.

We Fight for Justice!

Do we have a chance to win? Undoubtedly! The systemic crisis of capitalism is growing, which impedes the globalists in their bid to keep the world within set limits. The prosperity of the “golden billion” — the West’s show window – has long been based on colonial plunder of the rest of the world. But even these powers face a catastrophe. That is why even in the heart of capitalism public consciousness tends to grow more left.

Only the destruction of the USSR and the socialist community has enabled capitalism to delay the aggravation of the systemic crisis in the late 20th century. Imperialism’s doping at the time was capture of new markets and temporary absence of the competition between capitalism and socialism. But the effect of the doping wore off. The crisis spiral continues.

The data of the international research organization Oxfam speak of a catastrophic rate of mass impoverishment. Amid the corona virus pandemic the number of billionaires in the world has increased by 573. Their total wealth accounts for 14% of the world GDP. The ten richest people on the planet have more wealth than 40% of the Earth’s population. The wealth of eighty chief billionaires on the planet exceeds half of the total world wealth. One percent of the richest people own more than 45% of the world wealth. The poorest half of the world owns just three quarters of a percentage point of that wealth!

Extreme polarization continues. In 2022 the number of poor people increased by 263 million. The number of people who found themselves below the poverty line for the first time equals the populations of Germany, France, Great Britain and Spain combined. The reality is such that the total wealth of the billionaires would not only pay for corona virus vaccines for the whole humankind. These resources could prevent the impoverishment of those who lost their livelihood because of the pandemic. But the interests of the peoples are alien to the capitalists.

The mind-boggling enrichment of a handful of “the select” eats up the incomes of all the rest. Half a billion Earth inhabitants live in absolute poverty, One in every ten goes to bed hungry. By the beginning of 2023 a billion people lived on two dollars a day. Another 3 billion live on 5 dollars a day. Half of the planet’s population has sunk into poverty! The authors of the Oxfam report titled “Survival of the Richest” come to this conclusion: we witness the biggest growth of global inequality and poverty since the time of the Second World War.

Decline of living standards is fast spreading to the middle class. According to the IMF, the purchasing power of the dollar dropped by a third within a decade and a half. The quality of consumption is falling in the USA and Western Europe. For the first time new generations live worse than their parents and grandparents.

All this is reflected in social statistics, with 56% of the people in 30 major countries saying that capitalism brings more harm than benefit. This is the opinion of between half and three quarters of the population even in Germany, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Singapore. Half of respondents in the USA, too, are unhappy about capitalism. Mass disenchantment is growing even among those who are considered to be socially well-off.

A new aggravation of the systemic crisis of capitalism is evident. Assessing this situation, the authoritative economists Joseph Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini and Thomas Picketty have shown that the pandemic is not the cause of the problem but a litmus test of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system.

The apologists for capitalism have no plan of counteracting the crisis. Behind their hackneyed phrases the Western elites hide the desire to preserve a unipolar world. Their policy is totally bereft of a creative element. Their militancy targets socialist China and our country. Latter-day “crusaders” of capital are ready to make humankind pay any price for preserving the globalists’ control over the world and even, for this purpose, push the planet into a maelstrom of a world war.

The inadequacy of the capitalist system and its danger for humanity is more and more openly recognized by our country’s leadership. Addressing the Valdai Forum, V.V.Putin said that capitalism is in a dead end. He stressed that the civilizational breakthrough achieved by the Soviet people had created a powerful basis for the Great Victory. He noted the successes the USSR had achieved contrary to sanctions and blockades on the part of the capitalist world. A natural consequence of these statements would be recognition that a renewed socialism for Russia is inevitable.

The start of the special operation in Ukraine caused a justified upsurge of patriotic hopes among our fellow-citizens for long-awaited change. Yet today we say in a forthright manner: no cardinal badly needed renewal of the country’s internal policy is taking place. While supporting the efforts to uphold the political sovereignty of the Russian State in the struggle against Nazism and Bandera ideology, society demands ever more persistently that the country’s socio-economic course be adjusted to match the magnitude of historical tasks.

Recent sociological surveys show that three quarters of our citizens are convinced that the Soviet era was the best in our history. Among its achievements which should be our beacons today the absolute majority name social justice, the state’s concern about people, guaranteed right to work, free and high-class education and medical service. The centenary of the USSR which we marked in the late 2022 increased society’s interest in the Soviet legacy and the wish to see it revived.

Today we maintain: socialism is ever more assertively knocking on humanity’s door. We see its powerful sprouts in Russia as well. They are in the enduring socialist ideals. They are in the souls of young men and women who know that their grandfather was a communist and are proud of it. They are in the rejection of anti-Sovietism by those who march in the ranks of the multi-million Immoral Regiment. They are in the unique example of our “people’s enterprises” whose experience is confidently demonstrated as proof of the advantage of the socialist way of running the economy.

The CPRF recently marked its 30th birthday. All these years we have adhered to the principle: our main weapon that never gets rusty is an honest and upfront position, persistence in upholding our cause, and firmness in protecting the interests of the popular masses.

We see the Russian World as a vibrant and original civilization. Russia connects North and South, West and East by land, air and water. It is a center of diverse experience of human economic and creative activity, an heir to great humanistic values and a great spiritual culture. Today, as more than once before, it is at the focus of a struggle that determines the future of the planet’s peoples.

The challenge time presents us with is extremely important. And the stakes are extremely high: will the rapacious appetites of the global oligarchy destroy the world, will the imperialist aggressors burn humankind in the conflagration of a world war or will it be able to avoid the worst, take on board as a model the outstanding practices of social progress and open up new historical horizons?

The saving victory will only come if we understand that it is necessary to follow the unique experience of social justice and solidarity accumulated over the last hundred years. It makes perfect sense that it has delivered the most impressive results.

We shall do everything to safeguard our long-suffering and heroic people against a catastrophe and follow the path toward new victories in the battle for the Russian World – a battle on which depends not only our destiny, but the future of the whole humankind!

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... -humanity/


CPRF talks a good game, pity it often behaves as a social democratic party. Given it's current condition it is correct in backing the bonapartist regime, both for the sake of the people of Donbass and in opposition to rampant US imperialism which threatens the existence of the Russian state. But Russian culture, yes, and if you want to call it the Russian World, fine. But a separate civilization, naw, Peter saw to that.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 03, 2023 2:36 pm

Medvedev about those who left
June 3, 15:15

Image

Once again about those who left

The representatives of the “honest elite” who have left “there” indulge in sweet dreams about how well our country will live after the fall of the “regime” and return to the non-binary European bosom.
How quickly all the ideologemes of an unnecessary patriotic war will be curtailed and a universal holiday of freedom will reign.
I don't know which of them sincerely believe this. There are different people with different mental abilities. Although, of course, neither Bunin, nor Berdyaev, nor Ilyin, nor Chaliapin are among them at all. So-so. Average. But I can say one thing for sure: there will be no return to the “bright” European past for them. And not only because they don’t like us there and don’t wait for us. Home-grown analysts "from the former", who have bred like lice and scattered all over the greasy European body in all directions, cannot and do not want to understand one simple truth.

Russia today is a completely different country compared to the pre-war period. Leaders, parties and governments come and go. But the memory and values ​​\u200b\u200bbonded with blood remain for a very long time. For decades. Sometimes for centuries. No new leaders will be able to change them, let alone destroy them, no matter what political force they embody (I'm not talking about outright traitors). Today, only those renegades who have forgotten about the death of our citizens can dream of returning to a friendly European family. Civilians and soldiers of Russia. Unfortunately, there are deaths.

Imagine the unimaginable that the USSR collapsed in the late 1940s. And the new, “democratically elected” leadership of Russia would announce that the war with the Germans was unjust, and the Nazi regime suffered innocently and that we urgently need to make peace with it. It is clear what would happen to such freaks. In every family, the memory of the terrible war of the Soviet people and the dead relatives was fresh. And now the situation is very similar, despite the different scale of the involvement of the population in the war.

Therefore, any political leader who tries to change the discourse of the country's development that emerged after February 24, 2022 will be anathematized as a traitor. As a person who betrayed the memory of our citizens who laid down their lives in this war.

So there is no hope for a triumphant return for these figures. Relocants are lonely and useless. Let them live, expiring bile accumulated from anger. Or, under a glass of red, sadly recalling the lost Fatherland and former glory.


(c) Medvedev

There will be no return to 2007.
We continue to say goodbye to the 30-year experiment on the country and people with a trip to the golden billion.
The inertia of this "great march to the West" left as a legacy the need to deal with "frightened patriots", relocators, collaborators and traitors who were and are derivatives of the "march to the West", which began back in Perestroika.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8400888.html

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 10, 2023 2:18 pm

After Pardoning Regime Changer Roman Protasevich His Girlfriend Gets Released Too
On May 26 I commented the pardoning of Roman Protasevich in Belarus:

Closing The Case Of Regime Changer Roman Protasevich And His Ryanair Flight To Minsk

Moon of Alabama has followed the case throughout. Those interested in the details of the original incident can find them in our June 2 2021 post. For a wider political view of the 'color revolution' business in east Europe see this piece by Kit Klarenberg. Links to all MoA posts about the case are listed at the end of this piece.

A week after the incident, during a long TV interview, Protasevich spilled the beans about the whole regime operation. He also says that he has come to believe that one of his regime changer colleagues had sent the bomb threat email to get him arrested.

A few weeks later Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega were released and put under house arrest. A trial followed and, in early May of this year, he was sentenced to eight years in prison.

I though that the sentence, in light of his public turnabout, was quite harsh but others accused of the same regime change operations against Belarus had received up to 20 years prison time. Still, eight years is a long time for a young man who had clearly changed his mind. Sofia Sapega, who is a Russian citizen, had earlier received a 6 year sentence.

On May 22 Protasevich was unexpectedly pardoned:

...

All was fine with Protasevich but the fate of his (former?) partner, Sofia Sapega, was still up in air. I expressed hope that she would soon be released too:

Reporting on Protasevich's pardon the Washington Post notes:

Sapega, a Russian national, was accused of running another Telegram channel called “Belarus’s Black Book,” which published personal information about the country’s security forces. She was sentenced in 2022 to six years in prison. Last month, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Belarus granted its Russian counterparts’ request to transfer Sapega to Russia following her family’s pleas.
I have found no other new information about Sapega but, if she is still with Protasevich, it is likely that she will now receive similar leniency.


Today the New York Times reports that my hope has been fulfilled:

A Russian woman imprisoned in Belarus after being arrested with her dissident boyfriend has been pardoned.

The Belarusian president has pardoned a Russian woman who was arrested along with her boyfriend, an exiled blogger and antigovernment activist, after the dramatic forced landing of a flight in Minsk.
The president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, on Wednesday released the woman, Sofia Sapega, 25, only two weeks after he pardoned the blogger, Roman Protasevich.


On May 31 the Ukrainian news outlet Strana, prohibited from publishing in Ukraine as well as in Russia, defended Protasevich from smears by the foreign directed, expatriate opposition (machine translation):

The former editor-in-chief of Nexta, Roman Protasevich, did not trample on the white-red-white flag of the Belarusian opposition, which was spread on Belarusian TV in front of the entrance to the studio.

The flag was placed at the threshold instead of a doormat. Protasevich came to the studio together with the famous Belarusian TV presenter Grigory Azarenok.

Azarenok entered the room in front of the former oppositionist and walked on the white-red-white flag, while Protasevich stepped over the symbol of the Belarusian opposition several times.[/i]

Congratulations to Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega and a respectful bow to President Lukashenko for the sensible handling of their cases.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/06/a ... .html#more

*******

Sons and daughters of Russia’s ‘White Emigration’ are coming back into the fold

In this brief note, I wish to share some observations from taking part yesterday evening in a reception at the Russian Embassy in Brussels to mark the country’s National Day,

The event was well attended but the composition of guests was noticeably different from past years: fewer foreigners, more Russians. Among the foreigners were, as is traditional, military attaches from foreign embassies in Brussels. Chinese, other Asians, blacks from Africa in smart uniforms all stood out, of course, as they always did. But this was all the more evident given the absence of the British and other Western European officers and diplomats. As for the Belgians, there appeared to be very few recognizable business people.

But, as for Belgian Russians, there nonetheless was something to report and that ‘something’ is indicated in the title given to this essay.

As you might expect, there were some socially prominent Russian Belgians at the event. They are the sons and daughters of White Russian émigrés who fled Soviet Russia following the Revolution. Indeed some of the best known families from the Empire ended their days in Brussels and are commemorated on the walls of the main Russian Orthodox church in the city which is just a few hundred meters down the very same Avenue De fré along which the Russian Embassy to the Kingdom of Belgium is situated.

This group of Russian Belgians is bound by additional family ties that were forged after they came to Belgium, namely that many spent years, even decades living and working in the Belgian Congo as from the 1930s. The Belgian domestic economy was hit by the Europe-wide Depression but the colony had need of skilled engineers for infrastructure work. Many White Russian noblemen were engineers or had other relevant education and so found jobs in Africa. Of course, it was not only Russian Belgians but also middle class Belgians de souche who also found their Eldorado in the Congo and came home with more than the African masks that you see on the walls of their living rooms today.

One couple at the reception fit the description of White Russians’ offspring in Belgium perfectly. We happen to have in-law relations with them through our daughter’s marriage. They remarked as we clinked glasses that they are now celebrating the 100 years since their parents first arrived and settled in Belgium. They went on to tell us that they have just received Russian passports, having applied not long ago to acquire citizenship on the basis of their ancestry. And as we were chatting another friend from my social club, a pediatrician who is approaching retirement age, told us that he has just now filed with the embassy for naturalization, also with reference to his White Russian parents.

Three such “converts” in one night was not a bad harvest. It was unexpected but not entirely so. The first couple had been taking baby steps in that direction going back several years. They had applied for and received from the government an apartment at the back of a magnificent villa situated opposite the Catherine Palace park in Pushkin that once belonged to their family. The main rooms of the building are now used by the municipality for the celebration of weddings. And a year ago their daughter purchased a house in the nearby town of Pavlovsk, which, before the Revolution, was the preferred location for summer residences of the court nobility.

But why would these people choose to go “all the way” and take Russian passports precisely now, when Belgium, like the rest of the EU, is in a deeply anti-Russian mood? I think their decision is an expression of their outrage at the insanity of the ongoing state censorship and military-financial support for Ukraine while denigrating everything Russian.

And so Russian Belgians whom I know fairly well, people who are not Putin fans, people who have their wits about them and cannot abide the mad world around us, are making their choice ….for Russia and to be counted as Russian citizens.

As I wrote several months ago, “wars make nations,” and this war in and about Ukraine is defining a new patriotism expressed in deeds and not just words among the sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of refugees from the Revolution.

Before closing, I am obliged to add one small note on what distinguished last night’s reception from the last such National Day celebration I attended, several years ago, before COVID: no vodka!

No, I don’t think that official Russia is going ‘dry.’ After all, they served glasses of very decent French white and red wines. But the vodka was missing, making it really hard to think of sampling the little herring appetizers that call for the white stuff. I have little doubt about the reason: importing Russian vodka into Belgium is prohibited. And it is really hard to imagine the Russian embassy buying and serving its guests Polish vodka or vodkas with Russian sounding names distilled in Germany.

And so, in considering all the ‘sanctions from hell’ imposed on Russia since the start of the Special Military operation, this is the most cruel sanction that our EU bureaucrats could dream up.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/06/09/ ... -the-fold/

Yeah, well, will they run like rats as their ancestors did when the Reds return to power?

Because they will.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 15, 2023 3:21 pm

What makes them so...
June 14, 20:49

Image

What makes them so...

“What is it that bugs them so much?” - I thought after watching the film "For us with you", which had just been released. It was created by 82-year-old director Andrei Smirnov, the author of the immortal "Belarusian Station".

Smirnov himself admitted that this was his last film. He, as it were, sums up their life outcome, says his parting word.
And this is not only the result. This is the verdict. The verdict of the USSR-Russia, which, in the form in which we get to know it in the film, has no right to exist on the world map.

Why?
Because this is a country of slaves, serfs, hopeless darkness, shortages and queues, poverty, untruth, anger, rudeness and violence. Because the people who mourn the terrible villain Stalin in March 1953 are themselves complicit in his crimes. That is why they live so badly.
The film is very talented. You should pay tribute to the director. Smirnov himself wrote the script, he himself placed the necessary accents, he himself selected the actors who played believable.

It is a masterpiece. The swan song of a man who does not love his country with every fiber of his soul and does not want her to save herself. Let it be anything. But it's better to let the Europeans come here (not the Chinese!). And they will build a real life on the ruins of this torn country.
Here is such a movie.
By the way, it was filmed with sponsorship money. Roman Abῥamovich gave the most.

And what is the plot?
Autumn 1952. Large communal apartment. Nearby live former nobles and lumpen workers, lonely widows, alcoholics, scammers. And everyone secretly or openly hates each other. Life is extremely miserable, hunting for food occupies almost all thoughts and feelings, lumpens look disgusting. Their mental abilities are lower than those of Neanderthals.

The only rays of light in this dark kingdom are two families. This is the Petkevich and Dorfman family.
Petkevichi from exiled Poles, the head of the family, Pavel Kazimirovich, is a professor of philosophy (played by Andrey Smolyakov), his wife is a noblewoman, a graduate of an elite pre-revolutionary educational institution (Irina Rozanova).

Dina's daughter, an editor at a publishing house (Yulia Snigir), her husband, a party member, a front-line soldier and a metro builder, their teenage son and a housekeeper from a remote Ryazan village huddle with them in a wretched little room.

And now they (truly intelligent people) are forced to endure humiliation from the lumpen.
Pavel Kazimirovich at home openly scolds the Soviet government, his son-in-law argues with him. Petkevich sees everything vicious in the people who surround him. Considering that this people wants equalization, so that everyone has the same soup, that this people equally cannot stand the superiority of someone else's mind, beauty and talent.

Later, Pavel Kazimirovich is arrested on New Year's Eve, and his son-in-law leaves the family, and his wife Dina is expelled from work.
The Dorfmans are doctors, but they live quieter. The head of the family is played by Leonid Yarmolnik, his wife is Galina Tyunina, a pediatrician. In the rampage of the company on the "doctors' case" they are most afraid of arrest. As a result, this arrest occurs.

Who needs such power? Such a country?
None of the normal people. They only suffer, wince, trying to survive. This country is needed only by this dull people who walk the streets. And this people looks especially repulsive. Illiterate, narrow-minded, untidy, they don’t even know how to eat at the table.
When Stalin dies, and people go to work in tears, the captain of the MGB tells Dina that they are crying for the owner, whom they did not respect, but were afraid of.
In the kitchen, those same proletarians are reading aloud the newspaper Pravda, which contains information about exposed foreign agents. And Dorfman stands up for these agents, saying that all these people are doctors, they went through the Great Patriotic War, he knows them. But in response, they just laugh in his face. And rudely remember his nationality.

Well, the fact that there are scammers and terrible employees of the state security organs all around - I generally keep quiet.
Only one of them is human. His name is Ivan, he falls in love with Dina (the heroine of Yulia Snigir), who comes to prison in order to find out about the fate of her arrested father. Ivan comes from a dispossessed family, his father saved him by buying him a passport for a bribe, and Ivan's entire family died of starvation during the war.

In general, a lot is said about the war, but most of all about the fact that it was the Stalinist regime that was to blame for such colossal losses. Even figures are given - four dead Soviet soldiers in front of one German. There were 14 boys in Dina's class, only two returned from the front, one without a leg. It is this legless invalid (whom his state does not help at all) at the meeting that promises to make a receiver for Dina to listen to the forbidden "Voice of America".

Why is this movie out now?
Yes, because, according to gentlemen who are ideologically close to Andrei Smirnov, we are now going through the same time. Then there was the agony of Stalinism, and now who among us must die? What is this agony?
Yes, and the analogy with the Great Patriotic War is the same. Like, why again give their children to death for this country, when you can just ... And then it's clear. Well, newspapers about spies and foreign agents of 1953 are also read for a reason in the film. Yes, and the "funnel" at night take away the "best".
So they can't wait for the "best people in the country" when all this is over.

The Time of Truth
It seems to me that the only advantage of this movie is that it shows the reality in which all this liberal creative crowd lives. Previously, they did not allow themselves to speak. And now they are playing in the open.
And the same Anatoly Chubays, Andrei Smirnov's son-in-law, probably considers himself a great person, because with the help of privatization he was able to transfer the assets of the former USSR to Western oligarchs. And now he has safely left for the land of his wife's ancestors. And there will be dust particles blown off it.
But this film is not made for you and me.
It was filmed for them. For those who voluntarily renounce their homeland, country, people, its culture. And he wants them to die.
And at all times they were called by only one word. And you, my dear readers, know this word...

http://vott.ru/entry/629124 - zinc

After the start of the SVO, many were surprised to learn that the characters who had been pissing on Stalin and the USSR for decades and modern collaborators are the same people. I hope now there will be more understanding that the defamation of Stalin and the USSR served the cause of betrayal and destruction of our country and people.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8422290.html

Google Translator

********

“Cancel Russian Culture” is cancelled

News from the music world on Russian compositions and performers being featured in the main venues of Western Europe in the 2023-2024 season

Well, dear friends, the attempt by the Russia-hating ideologues in power in Washington, London and Berlin to stamp out all traces of Russia from the performing arts in the Collective West is doing as poorly as the Ukrainian counter-offensive seems to be doing these past five days. That is the ineluctable conclusion one draws from reading an excellent overview of the musical season 2023-2024 in major European houses written by Marina Ivanova and just published online by Izvestiya.

https://iz.ru/1526284/marina-ivanova/ot ... um=desktop
It is not normally my practice to translate entire articles for republication on my site, and I will not do that here. But I will extract some information from Ivanova’s 9 page piece and reorganize it slightly differently to address a Western audience whereas she compiled much more extensive material to satisfy the interests of her readers in Russia for the career progress of many individual performers whom you are not likely to have heard of.

In her material there are discoveries to be made on several levels. First there are Russian operas and other compositions that will be performed in Europe.

We learn that Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov will be shown at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs Elysées and it will open the season at the Hamburg Opera. Meanwhile a new production of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina is announced for the Berlin Opera.

Other Russian operas that will be presented by the Hamburg company in the new season include Tchaikowsky’s Eugene Onegin and Lady Macbeth of Mtensk by Shostakovich. The latter will be a new staging by the Petersburg cinema director Angelina Nikonova.

Meanwhile in the realm of ballet Zurich will be presenting Stravinsky’s Svadebka to mark the 100th anniversary of its creation and presentation in the West by the Diaghilev troupe. They will reproduce the original staging, decoration and costumes.

Perhaps the most emblematic news in the article concerns opera diva Anna Netrebko, who was thrown out of La Scala productions a year ago in one of the more vicious examples of “cancel Russia” politics at work. At the same time, she was canceled at New York’s Met.

Well, the Met never says sorry. But La Scala evidently does. She will be appearing in the first show of the new season, Verdi’s Don Carlos, in which she sings the role of Elizabeth opposite the Russian bass, Ildar Abdazakov ,who plays King Philip.

As a side note, I see that Abdazakov will also be singing at the Opera Bastille (Paris) in the lead role of Massenet’s Don Quichotte. The orchestra will be conducted by Mikhail Tatarnikov, who for many years was the main conductor of the Mikhailovsky Opera Theater in Petersburg. And as for Netrebko, she will be on stage in Bastille together with her husband Iosif Aivazov in Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.

However, Netrebko’s biggest success in validating her preeminent position in European opera and role of standard bearer for Russian culture will surely be her solo recital at the Vienna Opera. The opera management gave her a free hand to select a program that will feature Russian vocal works little known in the West. There will be romances by Rimsky-Korsakov and the evening will end with the scene of the meltdown from the Snow Maiden. Netrebko will be accompanied at the piano by her regular collaborator, Pavel Nebolsin.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/06/12/ ... cancelled/

Well, it's all but canceled on US public radio. I enjoy classical music, but it's getting hard. Never heard so many Ukrainian artists in my life, some of whom ain't nothin' to write home about. But Ruskies hardly ever mentioned. About sick of 'Finlandia' too....

It's been going on for a while now, even before things heated up in Ukraine they couldn't mention Prokofiev or Shostakovich without getting riled about how shabbily they were treated by 'Stalin'. No context, just 'evil commies'.

Propaganda in the USA is as pervasive as the air we breath.

************

Image

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert faces backlash over book with plot in Russia
Originally published: Al Mayadeen on June 14, 2023 by Agencies (more by Al Mayadeen) | (Posted Jun 15, 2023)

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the renowned book “Eat, Pray, Love”, announced on Monday that she will postpone the release of her new novel, “The Snow Forest”, because she received heavy backlash given that the book’s events are set in Siberia, Russia.

Ukrainians took issue with the book’s setting which drove Gilbert to announce in a video that she will be “making a course correction” and “removing the book from its publication schedule. It is not the time for this book to be published.”


According to Gilbert, the book tells the story of a “group of individuals who made a decision to remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and to try to defend nature against industrialization.”

Ukrainian readers, according to Gilbert voiced “anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain” over the book’s setting given that it will also be released while the war in Ukraine remained ongoing.

In contrast, literary non-profit PEN America criticized Gilbert’s decision to push back the publication’s release date as the book is expected to undergo certain changes.

PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said “Ukrainians have suffered immeasurably, and Gilbert’s decision in the face of online outcry from her Ukrainian readers is well-intended,” adding “But the idea that, in wartime, creativity and artistic expression should be preemptively shut down to avoid somehow compounding harms caused by military aggression is wrongheaded.”

In turn, Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Makkai also criticized Gilbert’s decision saying:

“So apparently: Wherever you set your novel, you’d better hope to hell that by publication date (usually about a year after you turned it in) that place isn’t up to bad things, or you are personally complicit in them,” she wrote on Twitter.

https://mronline.org/2023/06/15/writer- ... in-russia/

Propaganda, it works. Jfc, criticism of the USSR ain't good enough....

**********

Checking "Yeltsin Center" has begun
June 15, 12:03

Image

Something has died in the forest.
The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation has begun an official check of the Yeltsin Center.
"Yeltsin Center" is suspected of activities that are compatible with the status of a foreign agent. Can't be. Noticed in 2023.

It was once believed that it was impossible in Russia to do something about Memorial, Ekho Moskvy, Moscow Helsinki Group and Novaya Gazeta. But times change and the impossible happens. I hope that the Yeltsin Center will add to this list. Without paying off the "Yeltsin Center" it is impossible to break with the 90s.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8423917.html

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 17, 2023 2:53 pm

High point of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum: Putin on stage

The St Petersburg International Economic Forum got underway on the 14th and today was the culmination point for the broad public in Russia and worldwide: the time on stage of Vladimir Putin in the traditional format of questions presented to him and to a featured visiting head of state by a moderator.

The visiting head of state was President of Algeria Tebboune. His presence at the Forum was all by itself newsworthy, and surely must have shocked France and other Europeans. But then again they might be beside themselves that another top foreign dignitary with whom Putin met privately on the sidelines of the Forum was the President of the United Arab Emirates.

The moderator was for the first time in many years not some pretty woman from MSNBC prepped to ask aggressive and unfriendly questions again and again or some smart Alec from another Western television channel but Russia’s “own” Dmitry Simes. This was the first time in many years that the moderator was not just reading questions but had written them himself.

This is Simes, the former Russian-Jewish emigrant to the United States, former adviser and traveling companion of Richard Nixon on his visits to Russia after leaving the presidency, former decades-long head of the Nixon Center, later renamed the Center for the National Interest.

I have recently written about Simes, describing this born-again Russian patriot. He left Washington to resettle in Moscow and has returned to Russian state television as host of The Great Game and interviewer of some of the country’s leading politicians with whom he clearly has very good personal relations. From his exchanges with the Boss on stage this afternoon, it is also obvious that he is ‘close to Putin,’ as our Western experts so often say without justification about others.

What I propose to offer here is some of the questions and answers that I heard on the fly. I will set them out by relative importance, not necessarily by their sequence in the on stage discussion.

Among the most memorable was the following, which answers directly the panic and confusion in the heads of our Western foreign policy community following the publication a few days ago in the bilingual Russian-English magazine Russia in Global Affairs of an article entitled “A Difficult but Necessary Decision” by Sergei Karaganov, professor and honorary chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Russia.

I had planned to publish today an essay critiquing Karaganov’s piece and dealing with commentary by several prominent personalities in the West, including Seymour Hersh and Rose Gottemoeller. I will now defer completion and publication of that essay till tomorrow, because the answer to all the controversy was given this afternoon by Vladimir Putin in response to a question pitched to him by Simes: “Some people are talking about Russia perhaps using tactical nuclear weapons now to re-instill in the minds of people in the West what nuclear deterrence is all about. Will Russia use these weapons?”

Putin : “The answer is No. We do not plan to use nuclear weapons in this conflict. As I have said, their use is theoretically possible only when the existence of our statehood is threatened. As for tactical weapons, I do not want to lower the threshold for use of any nuclear arms. For purposes of deterrence, there is no need to remind the West that we have a significantly bigger stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons than they do. This is, so to speak, our competitive advantage. We have made our statement by positioning nuclear weapons in Belarus. That is a clear message. We have no need to frighten the whole world.”

Probably the single most important question and answer in the entire session was the following, for which Putin and his assistants were very well prepared:

Question: Russia has spoken about the Ukraine as controlled by neo-Nazis. This is a position which confuses many in the West. How can this be so when the country’s elected president, Zelensky, is himself a Jew?

Answer: And what kind of a Jew is Zelensky? He has made the most vicious leader of the pro-Hitler Ukrainian collaborationists, Bandera, and his military units into the great heroes of the Ukrainian nation. They killed 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during the war, as well as Russians, Poles and other civilians.

[at this point Putin calls for the screening of a 10-minute documentary showing the mass murders committed by these units, showing their declaring allegiance to Hitler in the annihilation of Jews and purification of the Ukrainian nation

To this, Simes makes his own contribution, saying that in the Soviet Union the head of the domestic security services Kaganovich was also a Jew, and he carried out a program of systematic anti-Semitic repressions. The origins of a given state authority tell us little about the policies he will enforce.]

Question: According to Purchasing Power Equivalence calculations, the Russian economy is now the 6th biggest in the world, coming just after Germany. In present conditions do you think Russia will continue to hold this position?

Answer: “Developing countries are moving ahead very quickly, as for example, Indonesia. At the same time a country like Germany is slipping into recession. Perhaps in a year we will take their place as 5th largest economy in the world.”

Question: As regards the need for skilled workers in Russia, we note that many people, especially in the IT field left Russia after the start of the Special Military Operation. Are they returning?

Answer: “People can live wherever they wish. There are many Russians who left for the United Arab Emirates, for neighboring Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and so forth. However, it is not easy to leave behind Moscow, which is one of the top cities in the world. It is not easy to leave behind your language and your family and friends. The latest information is that 50% have already returned. And those who do stay abroad provide Russia with liaison for our developing relations with these countries.”

Question: Some in the West say that Russia is promoting de-dollarization. What is the future of this movement?

Answer: “De-dollarization is part of the changing economic relations and was accelerated by the United States itself when it abused its privileged position and weaponized the dollar for political objectives. Now we see many countries starting to trade in their national currencies. Some sale of oil to China is now being conducted in yuan. If oil exchanges are set up quoting barrels in yuan or in currencies of the Middle East, then the beginning of the end of the dollar will arrive. And we have nothing to do with that.”

Question: Do you consider NATO to be a party in the war in Ukraine? Is there still room for diplomacy if that is so?

Answer: “NATO is getting drawn into the war with Ukraine. They have supplied a lot of heavy equipment. Now there is talk of providing F-16s. As you see in the past week during the Ukrainian counter-offensive, we have destroyed many tanks, including the German Leopards, and also NATO-supplied armored personnel carriers. If F-16s are sent, they will also be destroyed.”

Question: We think back in the past of Western leaders and some outstanding people come to mind, like Gerhard Schroder, Jacques Chirac, Silvio Berlusconi. What can you say about the quality of the present-day European leadership?

Answer: “I never express my thoughts about the merits of leaders today. What I will say is that Jacques Chirac was a man of encyclopedic knowledge. I remember asking him why the Americans were doing something unpleasant and he said, in Russian: ‘because they are uncultured’ [потому, что они некультурные] Today many people in power have had poor educations. As for Silvio Berlusconi, he was a world class leader who tried very hard to bring Russia into rapprochement with the countries of the European Union. He died this past week, and I ask you all to honor his memory in a minute of silence.” [the audience rises as one]

Question: How will Russia respond to the terror attacks from Ukraine, as for example the incursions in Belgorod,, the murder of Dugina and other provocations?

Answer: “They would like for us also to attack civilians, but we will not do so. However, by our missile attack which destroyed the American Patriot air defense system in Kiev we demonstrated that we have the ability to destroy any building in Kiev at our choosing. We have not done this yet, though we reserve the possibility. We have not done so, because we have no need to do so. We have used air and sea launched missiles to destroy Ukrainian military targets very effectively.”

Question: There are those in the West who say that the sanctions have forced Russia to become very dependent on Chinese markets, Are you afraid of falling under Chinese influence?

Answer: “And those same countries in the West who say this have themselves become very dependent on China. And are they any the worse for that?”

Question to Tebboune: Algeria is surely under very strong pressure from the West to join the sanctions against Russia. So far you have resisted that. What do you tell them?

Answer: “I say that we Algerians were born free and will remain free!”

Question: What final words do you have for the world?

Answer: (Putin) – “Be healthy and wealthy”

(Tebboune) “Live in peace, prosperity, security”

Final question to Putin: If this gathering took place in the United States, one would necessarily ask Biden as the closing question what message he wanted to give to President Putin. And so I ask, what is your message to Joe Biden?

Answer: “Mr. Biden has long experience in government and I would not propose to offer him any advice. I would only say to him that all actions you may take have consequences.”

*****

In past years, I reported on the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in broader terms of the business being done there, the big names from international corporations who were on panels, and so forth. This year I received an official invitation to attend and gave it some thought…until I read through the list of 150 or more panels and understood that a lot has changed in the nature of the event. The panels themselves were mainly directed at issues of great importance to Russia as it reorganizes to face the new challenges of reindustrialization and reorientation of its export-import channels away from Europe and towards Asia, Africa and Latin America. I saw virtually no Western firms mentioned in the program. And even the contingents of Chinese and Indian firms and government officials which were very large in the past were not reflected in the composition of panelists. One obvious reason is that in the past couple of months there have been very big visits of Russian business delegations to both countries and little was left for discussion in the Petersburg Forum.

And yet, the presence of large delegations from Algeria and the United Arab Emirates was noteworthy and points to where Russia’s future is developing. It also underlines the West’s loss of the Global South and self-marginalization.

This very reorientation of Russia and its growing popularity in what used to be called the developing countries brings to mind a comment from the leading Russian film director Karen Shakhnazarov on last night’s Vladimir Solovyov talk show. Shakhnazarov said that Russia is now reassuming the role of global champion of a new world order that the Soviet Union assumed at the start of the 1920s. In this context, the enmity of the Collective West today is an expression of its frustration that it has “lost” Russia, which it would rather have kept on its side.

That comment was allowed to stand unchallenged, although Solovyov himself is a believer that the West is out to destroy and break up Russia, rather than to bring it back under its control.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/06/16/ ... -on-stage/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sun Jun 18, 2023 1:54 pm

Sergei Karaganov’s latest controversial article in ‘Russia in Global Affairs’

Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov’s latest article entitled “A Difficult but Necessary Decision” in the bilingual Russian-English publication Russia in Global Affairs touched off a wave of commentary and panic in the American foreign policy community.

See https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/a ... -decision/

As we say in the vernacular, “everyone and his uncle” has a word to say about Karaganov now, including people who never heard his name before and will likely forget it tomorrow. I received e-mails a couple of days ago from American colleagues who were at wits end, fearing on the basis of what Karaganov wrote that Russia is in the midst of ‘war fever’ and will unleash nuclear weapons in the days ahead. Then someone else sent me the latest blog by Seymour Hersh on substack.com which was clearly dictated by Hersh’s alarm over the Karaganov piece and sent him rambling into a discussion of Russia-related issues including why Putin is to blame “for his decision to tumble Europe into its most violent and destructive war since the Balkan wars of the 1980s” and Hersh’s speculation on Russian responsibility for the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, about which he knows no more and no better than Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, yesterday’s Financial Times featured an essay by Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary general of NATO and former US chief negotiator on the New Start strategic weapons treaty. The title of her piece is “The West must act now to break Russia’s nuclear fever.” The prompt for this essay was again what Karaganov has just written, as we see from mention of him in the text.

What I propose to do now is to first briefly summarize what Karaganov says in the article in question and why that touched off alarm bells on the other side of the Atlantic. Then I will relate what I know about Karaganov and his place in the firmament of Russian elites from personal experience and not just from my reading him and his fans or detractors. This tells you why he is writing what he is writing now.

But before I get into all that, allow me to make one thing perfectly clear, at the risk of offending my pen pals: without reference to the merits or demerits of Dr. Karaganov, his political role as influencer of Russian government policy, like that of all academics and armchair analysts everywhere, myself included, is close to nil. He may have some value as a wind vane telling us which way the wind is blowing among the chattering classes, but not at the decision-making level of the Kremlin. He is one voice in a flock that preens itself before its peers.

*****

Allow me to open this brief examination of Karaganov’s latest essay with a bouquet. He is a peerless showman with a sense of drama and a good command of the pen. In his essay, Karaganov is as unflinching in taking his argument to its logical if horrible conclusion as, say, the American academic Herman Kahn was in the 1980s with his classic work Thinking About the Unthinkable.

Karaganov tells us that the war in Ukraine can truly end only if the West is forced to capitulate, to abandon its hegemonic ambitions in Europe. And that victory over the West can be achieved by putting aside all restraint in the use of nuclear weapons and to strike now in a decisive way

Allow me to quote from the middle of his essay where Karaganov applies his literary talents to the task at hand:

For many years I have studied the history of nuclear strategy and come to an unambiguous, albeit seemingly not quite scientific, conclusion. The creation of nuclear weapons was the result of divine intervention. Horrified to see that people, Europeans and the Japanese who had joined them, had unleashed two world wars within the life-span of one generation, sacrificing tens of millions of lives, God handed a weapon of Armageddon to humanity to remind those who had lost the fear of hell that it existed. It was this fear that ensured relative peace for the last three quarters of a century. That fear is gone now. What is happening now is unthinkable in accordance with previous ideas about nuclear deterrence: in a fit of desperate rage, the ruling circles of a group of countries have unleashed a full-scale war in the underbelly of a nuclear superpower.

That fear needs to be revived. Otherwise, humanity is doomed.

By breaking the West’s will to continue the aggression, we will not only save ourselves and finally free the world from the five-century-long Western yoke, but we will also save humanity. By pushing the West towards a catharsis and thus its elites towards abandoning their striving for hegemony, we will force them to back down before a global catastrophe occurs, thus avoiding it. Humanity will get a new chance for development.

To cut to the quick, Karaganov is recommending that the threshold for using nuclear weapons be lowered, that Russia give clearer signals of its readiness to use nuclear arms preemptively. And what if the West nonetheless does not back down?

In this case we will have to hit a bunch of targets in a number of countries in order to bring those who have lost their mind to reason.

This was the punch line that has set off alarm bells in the American foreign policy community.

En passant, Karaganov has not missed the opportunity to share with readers his utter contempt for Western elites which he sees as wallowing in moral degradation. And he gives us his vision of the new Russia that is emerging from three hundred years of intellectual servitude before Europe.

We will carefully preserve our European heritage, of course. But it is time to go home and to our true self, start using the accumulated experience, and chart our own course.

It is in this section of his paper that Karaganov shows himself to be a true son of the Russian intelligentsia, which is not what most readers in the West may imagine.

I, and many others, have written many times that without a big idea great states lose their greatness or simply disappear. History is strewn with the shadows and graves of the powers that lost it. It must be generated from above, without expecting it to come from below, as stupid or lazy people do. It must match the fundamental values and aspirations of the people and, most importantly, lead us all forward. But it is the responsibility of the elite and the country’s leadership to articulate it.

With these eloquent but incautious words, Karaganov puts the seal of death on his proposals. The pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia considered itself to be precisely the avant-garde of progressive humanity. In that regard it was by definition anti-democratic. And it is today the only stratum of Russian society that is anti-Putin. Anyone who believes that Karaganov, with his dramatic recommendations, is close to the Kremlin decision-makers knows nothing about Russian history or about Russia today.

*****

I saw and heard Karaganov in the flesh and blood eight years ago when I was invited to participate in the 18th annual gathering of the Schlangenbad Gespräche [Dialogue], an event organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think tank of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). The meetings brought together outstanding Russians from government and civil society as well as their German counterparts. For reasons of travel expense, the German participants were always two or three times more numerous than the Russians, meaning that each Russian underwent that much more scrutiny.

I have described what I saw in general in the chapter entitled “2015 Schlangenbad Dialogue: The East-West Confrontation in Microcosm” pp 341-349 in Does Russia Have a Future? (2015).

For reasons of Chatham House rules, I did not name the speakers then, but will disclose now that the most prominent speaker, second only to a Russian deputy foreign minister in attendance who spoke blah-blah, was precisely Sergei Karaganov, who was highly entertaining and was highly appreciated by the audience.

Let us remember that this event took place a year after the coup d’état in Kiev, after the “reunification” of Crimea with the Russian Federation and the start of a civil war in the Ukrainian regions of the Donbas. The concept of a common European home which had guided Russian-German relations for more than a decade was now discredited. The roof was leaking, the windows were blown out. Everyone was looking for a new concept of European security and Karaganov presented an intriguing answer, which was to recreate a new Holy Alliance such as came out of the 1815 Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic wars.

The hosts were leaning heavily towards demonstrating their dislike for the Russian government and its policies. When some sharp criticism was made by one speaker or another, there was typical rhythmic foot stamping of approval by the whole German contingent. I overheard a German host warmly confiding to one of the two openly anti-Putin politicians on the Russian side: “Ah, I was hoping by now you would already be President.”

This was the setting in which I had the opportunity to hear Karaganov in person. And it bears mention that most likely this was not Karaganov’s maiden visit to Schlangenbad: the vast majority of invitees had been coming year after year

I mention all of this because it shows that in the new period of patriotic upsurge in Russia today during the war in and about Ukraine, people like Karaganov who were “soft on the West” in the past find themselves compromised and are often positioning themselves not just as patriots, as Dmitry Trenin, (the “front man” giving respectability to the Carnegie Center Moscow for more than a decade) has done, but as super-patriots, like Dmitry Medvedev who was, let us be frank, a perfect patsy for the West during his presidency.

In short, nothing that Karaganov says now should be taken at face value. He is trying to improve his image at home.

*****

Those who speak of Karaganov as “known to be close to Putin” as Seymour Hersh does are disseminating disinformation. If we counted all the circus performers like the Eurasianist Dugin and now the oracle Karaganov who are said to be close to Putin, we would be counting in the hundreds. And when Hersh says that Karaganov has to be taken seriously because Serge Schmemann says so, and Schmemann is “a longtime Moscow correspondent for The New York Times,” then I wonder what added value Hersh brings to the public today, Pulitzer prize winner that he may be. I wrote several weeks ago about my classmate Schmemann, Harvard ’67, that he is anti-Russian down to his socks and always has been. And why does Hersh rail against The Washington Post for not publishing his exposé on the bombing of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and from the other side of his mouth cite another mainstream publisher’s thinking on who is who among influencers of Kremlin policy or on why Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam.

The moral of the story as regards Hersh is that no man is a universal genius, and only those who have been flattered by their admirers in the reading public and lost all self-control allow themselves to talk in public about subjects beyond their own expert knowledge.

This same rule applies to Rose Gottemoeller, who is, without question a highly intelligent and highly experienced person in matters of nuclear weapons and arms control. However, her article in The Financial Times, which today lists it among the most popular feature articles of the week, demonstrates willful ignorance and a remarkable inability to see two sides to an issue.

I say willful ignorance because she advances an utterly groundless interpretation of who is who and what messages to the world are coming out of Russia. I quote: “the notion that the Russian ruling class, including its top man, are unhinged about these devastating [nuclear] weapons is unnerving.” Had she taken the time to view Putin in his public appearances, most recently in the widely publicized two hour discussion with Russia’s war correspondents, she might understand that Putin is probably the most sane and reasonable statesman on the global scene. And when she goes on to praise Joe Biden and other western leaders for having been “wise to face these wild threats with messages of calm deterrence” then you have to ask when she lost the script and began living in some virtual reality.

I say inability to see two sides to an issue, because her calling out extravagant and threatening statements about razing London to the ground and the like, which indeed have been made by some Russian commentators and even by some legislators, ignores the wild and irresponsible statements made with respect to what awaits Russia that appear nightly on American television. The likes of Lindsey Graham and his call for Russians to be killed in the greatest numbers possible during his recent visit to Kiev or for Russia to be divided up: these hate speeches from American politicians are shown on Russian television and naturally prompt extreme statements in return. However, Lindsey Graham does not speak for the Biden Administration and Dmitry Medvedev does not speak for the Kremlin. The role of negotiator, which Gottemoeller once filled, requires an ability to understand your opponent which she patently lacks today, and maybe lacked in the past as well.

What are we to make of Gottemoeller’s suggestion that Russia and the USA should come back to the New Start treaty in the midst of the undeclared war of NATO on Russia following several years of determined cancellation of arms control treaties initiated by the USA? Gottemoeller would do well to enjoy her retirement and just shut up. Her experience from the past provides no new light on the present or on the future, only disinformation about the prospects for global security after Russia loses its war in Ukraine, as she hopes and expects.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/06/17/ ... l-affairs/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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