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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; KGB</title>
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		<title>Centers for Islamic Studies: a Cold-War-Style Influence Operation?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/oleg-atbashian/centers-for-islamic-studies-a-cold-war-style-influence-operation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=centers-for-islamic-studies-a-cold-war-style-influence-operation</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2014 04:18:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Oleg Atbashian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[active measures]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Esposito]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242453</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new generation of Islamic supremacists employs the KGB's "active measures."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/hj.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242457" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/hj.jpg" alt="hj" width="298" height="255" /></a>The launch of a new Center for Global Islamic Studies at the extremely leftist University of Florida in Gainesville may have been planned as a purely academic affair, but the announcements in the local and national media, including <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/09/01/university-florida-to-launch-islamic-study-center/">AP and Fox News</a>, exhibited more than a purely academic interest in this event. To compare, one doesn&#8217;t often see national media announcements about, let&#8217;s say, a local center for the study of viruses &#8212; unless the virus is Ebola. And just like with any news about Ebola studies, any news about studies of Islam attracts attention from the general public, who want to know if there&#8217;s a hope for the cure, containment, and safety from danger.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, these may not be the kind of Islamic Studies that answer those hopes. The Center opened on September 18th with a <a href="http://www.bobgrahamcenter.ufl.edu/event/global-islam-and-quest-public-space-john-l-esposito">conference</a> on &#8220;Global Islam and the Quest for Public Space,&#8221; headlined by none other than Georgetown professor John Esposito, a known <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/john_esposito_takes_islam_out_of_isis.html">apologist for radical Islam</a> and founding director of the Saudi-sponsored Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in the Walsh School of Foreign Service.</p>
<p>A small group of protesters picketed the event outside the Pugh Hall on the university campus, with a dozen creative posters and a vinyl banner pointing out that John Esposito and the leader of ISIS both hold PhDs in Islamic Studies: &#8220;Same goal, different tactics.&#8221; The <a href="http://youtu.be/F9YQwTfROW0">video of the protest</a> can be seen online.</p>
<p>The protest organizer, Randy McDaniels of <a href="http://www.actforamerica.org/">ACT for America</a> and the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/CTAG.USA">Counter-Terrorism Advisory Group</a>, stated that our students certainly need to study Islam, as long as such studies are based on scientific objectivity and critical analysis. But the presence of John Esposito as the keynote speaker indicated that the new Global Islamic Studies Center was likely to <a href="http://counterjihadreport.com/tag/esposito/">go the way of many other universities</a>, opening their doors and exposing our children to political Islam under the guise of education, with programs funded by Saudi Arabia, <a href="http://www.stopqatarnow.com/">Qatar</a>, and other state sponsors of Islamic fundamentalism.</p>
<p>While many among the leftist faculty and the students were visibly upset with the protest, complete with occasional angry obscenities, a few others were interested in the message and asked for a flyer. Some of them asked, &#8220;What&#8217;s wrong with having an Islamic Studies Center, even if it&#8217;s financed by foreign money?&#8221;</p>
<p>The short answer would have been to compare such a project to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures"><em>active measures </em></a>undertaken in America by the KGB during the Cold War &#8212; except that, unfortunately, most American students aren&#8217;t familiar with this term. Their knowledge of the Cold War has been thoroughly sanitized by the leftist faculty, especially if the professors are Marxists who used to root for the other side. The resulting perceived absence of the Soviet subversion, propaganda, disinformation, and other influence operations inside the U.S. and around the world creates the impression of an ideologically neutral world, in which America&#8217;s response to protect liberty can very easily be misconstrued as imperialist aggression against the innocent.</p>
<p>Ignorance about the enemy leads to confusion about one&#8217;s own nation&#8217;s role in the world, regardless of the historical era or the current adversary. Whether we admit it or not, we are now in a new global conflict that has many parallels with the Cold War; it is often fought by similar means and sometimes even by the same actors.</p>
<p>Now, just as it was then, we&#8217;re up against a supremacist collectivist ideology whose goal is to establish a totalitarian utopian society on a global scale. The two deadly pipe dreams &#8212; global communism and the global caliphate &#8212; may have their differences, but in practical terms they both view the United States as the main obstacle in their quest of world domination. There is no reason why one can&#8217;t learn from the other&#8217;s vast experience in subverting this country.</p>
<p>Both foes have made claims that they stand for peace. The problem is that Marxists understand peace as the absence of opposition to socialism, just as the Islamist supremacists understand peace as the absence of opposition to Islam. Eventual peace will theoretically ensue once they subjugate the rest of the world to their totalitarian rule.</p>
<p>In both cases, tolerance is a one-way street: everyone must be tolerant of <em>their</em> &#8220;superior&#8221; views, while they retain the right to self-righteous intolerance of the &#8220;inferiors.&#8221; Both ideologies generate a variety of wild-eyed conspiracy theories as a means to retain loyalty, boost morale, recruit new members, and demoralize their opponents.</p>
<p>The Soviets didn&#8217;t necessarily hate Americans or wanted to kill them off; they only wanted to &#8220;convert&#8221; our economic and political system for our own good. Likewise, the Islamists feel morally justified: they don&#8217;t view terrorism as the murder of innocents, but rather as a collective punishment for being foolish in resisting Islam. This makes mass murder a moral virtue, absolving them of all sins and encouraging them to keep punishing us, &#8220;the inferior fools,&#8221; until we see the light and either convert or accept their supremacy. They&#8217;d rather convert than kill, so if we force their hand, it&#8217;s &#8220;our own fault.&#8221;</p>
<p>Now, just as it was then, the U.S. is being drawn into fighting regional proxy wars while maintaining a semblance of dialogue with the main instigator, who remains visibly uninvolved but is pulling the strings of a vast network of loosely affiliated non-governmental groups, from registered non-profits to armed gangs of cutthroats. The seeming lack of affiliations, in both cases, is usually a cover for a centralized, coordinated effort.</p>
<p>Cold War spy thrillers may show some exciting action, but the fact is that espionage wasn&#8217;t even the main focus of the KGB operations in the U.S. According to retired KGB Maj. Gen. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Kalugin">Oleg Kalugin</a>, the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence was &#8220;not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West.&#8221;</p>
<p>The KGB maintained an extensive, sophisticated network of agents in the media, academia, government, and the cultural establishment. Acting on strategies designed in Moscow, they led a relentless, coordinated attack on this country&#8217;s institutions, often quite effectively demoralizing the population, undermining people&#8217;s confidence in America&#8217;s political and economic systems, spreading rumors, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories, influencing politicians, swaying public opinion, promoting some public figures and discrediting others, creating a positive image of the USSR, and so on.</p>
<p>Fast forward to the fall of the USSR. What happened to these strategies, this system, its networks, and its methods? Did they just disappear? Not really. The KGB was never dismantled; it was renamed into FSB and one of its former lieutenant colonels, Vladimir Putin, is now running the country, using the old KGB network just as effectively to spread disinformation and to promote his imperial agenda.</p>
<p>Even more disturbingly, this system has now replicated itself, producing an even more dangerous and aggressive clone.</p>
<p>In 1960, the Soviet government had set up the so-called Patrice Lumumba People&#8217;s Friendship University in Moscow, offering free higher education to students from the Third World, many of them from Muslim countries. In addition to regular student curriculum, the goal was to train and recruit agents who would then spread the ideas of Marxism in their home countries, and if possible, conduct <em>active measures</em> designed by their Moscow handlers.</p>
<p>To be exact, the university received its African name in 1961. <a href="http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/lumumba.htm">Patrice Lumumba</a> was a pro-Soviet Congolese prime minister who earlier that year was removed from power in a coup d&#8217;état and shot by a firing squad. The international Left quickly made Lumumba into a martyr of anti-imperialist struggle; what they won&#8217;t mention is that the coup and the execution were a drastic response to Lumumba&#8217;s plans of bringing the Soviet troops to the Congo and potentially staging a major military conflict in Africa, similar to the wars that the USSR fought in Korea, Vietnam, and later in Afghanistan. In this regard, the school&#8217;s name was rather symbolic.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Was-Going-Our/dp/B0017HSXXQ">KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin</a>, who defected to the West, &#8220;The University&#8217;s first vice-rector and a number of its staff were KGB officers who used the student body as a recruiting ground for Third World agents.&#8221; The students were trained in the art of propaganda, infiltration, and influence operations. More specialized training, such as terrorist activities, was provided at locations in Baku, Odessa, Simferopol, and Tashkent.</p>
<p>Carlos the Jackal, the notorious Marxist terrorist from Venezuela, who joined Palestinian terrorists and later converted to Islam, was one of the graduates, even though the school insists that he was expelled. A BBC News article titled <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/42244.stm">Carlos the Jackal &#8212; three decades of crime</a> puts it this way:</p>
<blockquote><p>He began acting in the name of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after leaving Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, a notorious hotbed for recruiting foreign communists to the Soviet Union.</p></blockquote>
<p>Grand Ayatollah and the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, is listed among <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples'_Friendship_University_of_Russia#Notable_graduates">notable graduates</a> on the University&#8217;s Wikipedia page, although he <a href="http://www.aim.org/aim-column/cnns-iranian-propaganda-campaign/">vehemently denies it</a>. Another graduate is Timoleón Jiménez, the leader of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FARC">FARC</a> &#8212; a communist guerrilla army in Colombia, which is funded by drugs, kidnappings and extortion.</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples'_Friendship_University_of_Russia#Notable_graduates">Other notables</a> include the President of Honduras, the President of Namibia, the President of the Central African Republic, a former President of Guyana, a former Jamaican MP, a leader of the Sudanese Socialist Democratic Union, and &#8212; of all people &#8212; Anna Chapman, a Russian intelligence officer.</p>
<p>Most importantly, the list of graduates includes today&#8217;s Palestinian leader <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=29207">Mahmoud Abbas</a>, Chairman of the PLO and President of the Palestinian National Authority, who received his Ph.D. in Moscow in 1982 after completing a thesis partly based on Holocaust denial.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=13975">2004 interview with FrontPage Magazine</a>, Ion Mihai Pacepa, former acting chief of Communist Romania&#8217;s espionage service, described the KGB role in setting up terrorist networks around the world and particularly in the Middle East, as well as persuading Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi to join the terrorist war against the US, with the added benefit of using Iraq&#8217;s and Libya&#8217;s huge intelligence services that were being run by the KGB advisers and extended their tentacles to every corner of the earth.</p>
<p>Says Pacepa:</p>
<blockquote><p>The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for &#8220;liberation&#8221; organizations. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto &#8220;Che&#8221; Guevara. Then there was the National Liberation Army of Colombia, created by the KGB in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro, which was soon deeply involved in kidnappings, hijackings, bombings and guerrilla warfare. In later years the KGB also created the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out numerous bombing attacks on the &#8220;Palestinian territories&#8221; occupied by Israel.</p></blockquote>
<p>&#8220;In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter &#8212; a document that had been drafted in Moscow,&#8221; Pacepa continues.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.</p></blockquote>
<p>The entire story of the Palestinian &#8220;liberation,&#8221; which has provoked a tidal wave of global Islamic extremism, has recognizable marks of a manufactured influence operation. That includes media coverage in the Western press, which regurgitates regularly produced and coordinated disinformation. A lot of this dirty work was done initially by the Middle Eastern graduates of Patrice Lumumba People&#8217;s Friendship University in Moscow, many of whom are still active in the field.</p>
<p>The school still functions today, having dropped Lumumba from its name and calling itself <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples'_Friendship_University_of_Russia#Notable_graduates">The Peoples&#8217; Friendship University of Russia</a>. Its page claims that as of now, more than 97,000 of its graduates work in approximately 170 countries around the world.</p>
<p>Granted, not all of the graduating engineers, doctors, or agricultural experts have become KGB agents or even Marxists, but how many of them have? Even a small percentage of the total 97,000 means that thousands of agents with the knowledge of propaganda, infiltration and influence operations are currently active in the world today, particularly in the Middle East. If in the past some Muslim students may have embraced Marxism, they no longer do now. Even Carlos the Jackal has now <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/26/world/americas/carlos-the-jackal-fast-facts/index.html">converted to Islam</a>. Today&#8217;s Next Big Thing is the Muslim Brotherhood, and that&#8217;s where all the action is.</p>
<p>The astounding sophistication and effectiveness of the Muslim Brotherhood in setting up networks of various front groups, infiltrating the Western establishment, spreading disinformation, swaying public opinion, promoting some public figures and discrediting others, creating a positive image of their ideology, and other influence operations are the evidence that the thousands of trained experts in these fields didn&#8217;t just disappear. Even if they aren&#8217;t being run from Moscow today (some may still be), they are still using their knowledge and skills, as well as teaching a new generation of Islamic supremacists the intricacies of <em>active measures</em>. If the methods and techniques are effective, they don&#8217;t get abandoned.</p>
<p>Given the history, what are the chances that the new Center for Global Islamic Studies at the Florida University, &#8220;christened&#8221; by a Saudi-financed, PLO-loving Georgetown professor, won&#8217;t be turned into yet another center for the Muslim Brotherhood&#8217;s influence operations on American soil?</p>
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		<title>Who Was Yuri Andropov? Ideologue, Policeman, Apparatchik</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/who-was-yuri-andropov-ideologue-policeman-apparatchik/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-was-yuri-andropov-ideologue-policeman-apparatchik</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2014 04:35:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andropov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238843</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why a deceased Soviet butcher has an ever-growing mini-cult following.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/moscow-kremlin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238846" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/moscow-kremlin-450x337.jpg" alt="moscow-kremlin" width="277" height="207" /></a>We should not be surprised that, in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s Russia, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov –born a hundred years ago, on June 15, 1914– enjoys an ever-growing mini-cult following, shaped and upheld from the very top. For Putin and the mafia surrounding him – all characters coming from the middle-level structures of the KGB– Yuri Andropov represents the strength of a system which, they believe, was not meant to collapse. In Andropov, they admire the virility, vitality, stamina, robustness of the system that collapsed in December 1991. Worshiping Andropov, they lionize their own youth.</p>
<p>The triumphalist fantasies of the Soviet years continue to haunt the Kremlin’s imagination. Resorting to the myth of Andropov is in fact an attempt at legitimization by way of history. Obviously, what we are dealing with is a history forged, doctored, counterfeited. In short, a history rigged, distorted, and mystified.</p>
<p>According to this secret police worldview, Andropov’s reforms – carefully supervised by their initiators in the party and security apparatus – were unlikely to lead to a massive breakdown of the ideocratic party-state institutional structure. Andropov was a bureaucrat hardened during the Stalinist purges following WWII. He was a true believer in the USSR’s mission as a “bastion of world socialism.” Like so many other apparatchiks, he had adored Stalin. He had been the protégé of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, the most dogmatic of the official ideologues. Andropov’s election in November 1982 as General Secretary of the CC of the CPSU and president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, thus nominal head of the Soviet state, was a big change in the pattern of succession. This was the first time that a former chief of the secret police had made it to the helm of the totalitarian regime called the USSR. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria had come within reach of this position, but – as we well know – he was finished off before being able to fill it. Arrested in June 1953, a few months after Stalin’s death, Beria was executed as a spy in December of that same year.</p>
<p>Andropov’s career began under the auspices of Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, the supreme ideologue of Stalinism unleashed. Zhdanov was directly in charge of the Karelian-Finnish Autonomous Republic, where Andropov steeply climbed up the party hierarchy. I emphasize this because Zhdanov was the most influential exponent of the Leningrad faction, brutally purged after his death in 1948. The political mythology of Leningrad&#8217;s communists matters a great deal in this particular version of history. Vladimir Putin himself comes from that town, as do many members of his close entourage.</p>
<p>After a stage as a Central Committee bureaucrat, Andropov was sent to Hungary as an ambassador, where he was given the particularly sensitive mission to oversee political dynamics throughout the crucial year 1956. Presumably Andropov himself had suffered a shock following the disclosures in Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s “Secret Report” at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956. On the other hand, ideologically speaking, his convictions were shatterproof and unflinching, made ​​of reinforced concrete. He was not a man of doubts, he lacked the courage to question the thorniest issues in the history of the party that he had served with<em> perinde ac cadaver </em>devotion. He was a fanatic communist, a true believer.</p>
<p>In the Soviet Embassy in Budapest, in 1956, one of Andropov’s subordinates was KGB officer under diplomatic cover, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who later became himself head of the State Security Committee. Astutely friendly and seemingly benevolent, Andropov played the openness card and thus managed to put the suspicions of Imre Nagy and the other reformist group members to sleep. When the revolution broke out on October 23, 1956, Andropov simulated a conciliatory stance and accepted the claims issued by the new government. He was calm and affable, a world-class impersonator. The friendly act was in fact hiding the huge anxiety of Moscow’s envoy.</p>
<p>In truth, Andropov was one of the most adamant activists; he strongly supported the idea of ​ Soviet military intervention. He then gave the legal government members assurances that, if they were to come out of the Yugoslav embassy’s building where they had taken refuge after the second Soviet military intervention, on November 3, 1956, they would be granted freedom and would be able to go home with their families. Right after Nagy and his friends left the embassy premises, giving credence to Andropov’s promises, they were captured, thrown into Soviet trucks, and shipped to Romania. The official story was that they had requested political asylum. In reality, the whole thing was a gangster-like operation, namely the kidnapping of still legitimate officials of a state which had dared to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Andropov was also the one who convinced János Kádár to break with Nagy and form the so-called “Workers’-Peasants’” Quisling government.</p>
<p>As a reward for his contribution to destroying what the communist propaganda called “the Hungarian counter-revolution,” Andropov was put in charge of the CPSU’s international relations department, a position from which he struggled to maintain Soviet hegemony within the world communist movement. As secretary of the CC, he collaborated with Suslov for the consolidation of a hardline ideology. He was one of the most active critics of the Chinese Communist Party, accused of political adventurism, as well as Yugoslav “revisionism.” He loathed any deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The 1968 Prague Spring gave him nightmares, he fervently supported military intervention to suppress what has gone down in history as the attempt to pursue with a human face. He tried unsuccessfully to organize a world communist conference to excommunicate Mao&#8217;s party. He had become the Kremlin&#8217;s most sophisticated expert in world communist affairs.</p>
<p>Precisely because he was a most reliable, disciplined, and faithful apparatchik, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin – the tandem who ended up at the pinnacle of the Soviet dictatorship after Khrushchev’s departure (in October 1964) – appointed Andropov succeed Vladimir Semichastny’s as chairman of the KGB in 1967. Maximum efficiency was needed and Andropov had proven that he was a highly effective defender of the nomenclature.</p>
<p>The one who suggested his appointment as chief-policeman of the USSR was red cardinal Mikhail Suslov, the ideological pontiff who had sensed the risk of the official monolithic doctrine’s disintegration. Andropov’s main mission was to suppress the human rights movement, to nip in the bud any dissident initiative. He was a champion of the most abject misinformation and recklessly cultivated criminal “special methods.”</p>
<p>As shown by <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/">dissident intellectual Yuri Glazov</a> in his illuminating writings, Andropov was a paradigmatic<em> Homo Sovieticus</em>. His main opponents were the great dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. He personally conducted disinformation campaigns against them. He also handled the terrorist actions against Pope John Paul II. In the history of the Cold War, the methodically stubborn bureaucrat Andropov endures as one of the most sinister characters.</p>
<p>When he became secretary general, the KGB started a disinformation campaign in the Western media which sought to advertise him as a secret reformist, “a closet liberal”, a man who, in his heart of hearts, admired Western cultural values, loved jazz, and was by no means the tenacious, obtuse, and dogmatic monster described in previous accounts. In fact, the inflexible Yuri Andropov came to power an exhausted and seriously ill individual– as exhausted and seriously ill as the system that he so badly wished to save. His reforms were modest, half-hearted, lacking vigor and vision, and mainly targeted at strengthening discipline in factories. They did not transcend some trivial doctrinal touch-ups. His formula was “acceleration” (<em>uskorenie</em>).</p>
<p>Andropov was definitely not tempted to encourage the transparency which, under Gorbachev, would become known as glasnost. As secretary general – we learn from Kryuchkov’s memoirs – he opposed the return of the anti-Stalinist party intellectual Aleksandr Yakovlev from the Canadian diplomatic exile. As far as party intellectuals go, he was close to Yevgeny Primakov and Georgy Arbatov, whom he deemed trustworthy not only for party leadership, but also for the KGB. Primakov, the future prime minister of Russia between 1998 and 1999, was probably even an undercover KGB officer.</p>
<p>Andropov personally conducted the frenzied reactions of the official propaganda after the downing of the South Korean airliner in 1983. He died in 1984, mourned by no one except his former KGB underlings, including, most likely, the up-and-coming Vladimir Putin. Perhaps his only merit was promoting Gorbachev, thus speeding up – involuntarily, of course – the ruin of a despotic regime, a totalitarian experiment responsible for the death of over twenty million human beings.</p>
<p>In a rare moment of honesty, Andropov said that there can be no greater error than reopening the public debate on the “accursed question.” He was referring to the Stalin question. Forced by the logic of the struggle for power, Gorbachev reopened this Pandora box and expedited the USSR’s downfall. This denouement was something the KGB abhorred. Years later, Andropov’s fan Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant-colonel, spoke about the end of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the history of the twentieth century.”</p>
<p><em>This essay was broadcast by the Moldovan service of Radio Free Europe. It was translated from Romanian into English by Monica Got.</em></p>
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		<title>From Andropov to Putin: The Last Spasm of a Decrepit Dictatorship</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/from-andropov-to-putin-the-last-spasm-of-a-decrepit-dictatorship/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=from-andropov-to-putin-the-last-spasm-of-a-decrepit-dictatorship</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2014 04:15:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Andropov]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237332</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The last gasp of the secret police's squalid rule?  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pa.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237393" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pa-450x281.jpg" alt="pa" width="309" height="193" /></a>Kremlinology is back on the daily agenda. This can hardly be considered good news. I distinctly remember: the year was 1983 and Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov – former Chairman of the Committee for State Security, an institution known under the horrifying acronym of KGB – reigned as absolute leader of the CPSU and the USSR. Today, the Russian Federation is commanded by none other than Andropov’s former subordinate, one-time KGB lieutenant-colonel and deputy chief of the residency in Dresden (in what was called – then and for four more decades after that – the GDR), Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.</p>
<p>On September 1, 1983, a Soviet fighter shot down a South Korean Air Lines commercial aircraft (Flight 007), which had taken off from Kennedy Airport in New York City and was heading for Seoul after a stopover in Anchorage, Alaska. The current tragedy, directly linked to Russia’s intervention against the democratic revolution in Ukraine, shows that the Putin regime is applying and developing the strategy of Bolshevik-inspired international terrorism. The West must acknowledge this state of affairs before it is too late.</p>
<p>Years ago, the <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/remembering-a-dissident-3-1-1/">Soviet dissident Yuri Glazov</a>, one of the most lucid interpreters of the Soviet experience, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/">diagnosed Andropov&#8217;s neo-Stalinism</a>, more sophisticated but no less repressive than Leonid Brezhnev&#8217;s, as the last gasp of the nomenklatura&#8217;s squalid rule. The same can be said about Putinism, this latter-day incarnation of the Andropov model. I will write soon about the Andropov legacies and Putin&#8217;s efforts to revive it.</p>
<p>Andropov’s propaganda claimed that the Soviet leader had not been aware of the decision to attack. Born one hundred years ago in 1914, Andropov died in 1984. He was followed in office by the inept Konstantin Chernenko and then – with his strengths and weaknesses, his well-known consistencies and inconsistencies – by Mikhail Gorbachev.</p>
<p>September 1983 is considered to be among the top moments of the last period of the Cold War, a moment of all-out, explosive tension. The USSR collapsed in December 1991. What followed was the Boris Yeltsin chapter, and then – under various avatars, either as president or Prime Minister – that of Putin. For the latter, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Putinism meant imposing a disguised dictatorship of the KGB’s successor, the new/old secret police known as the FSB. The FSB&#8217;s “ethos” is deeply rooted in the tradition which began with the Cheka and the entranced Polish-Russian Bolshevik, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky.</p>
<p>On July 17, 2014, a missile launched by the separatists in Eastern Ukraine – armed by Putin’s Russia and with military leadership provided by Russian citizens, Putin’s direct emissaries – downed a Malaysian airliner, flight MH 17, with 298 passengers on board. No one survived. The disaster was complete. Only apparently was this an anomalous and absurd action. In fact, as so many of the actions prompted by Russian (then Soviet, then yet again Russian) imperialism, it’s all about the infamous paranoid style being consistently exercised, without any reluctance or scruples. It replicates Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic&#8217;s mendacious tricks in his relationship with mass murders such as General Ratko Mladic and the psychopathic nationalist Radovan Karadzic.</p>
<p>In fact, Putin – either explicitly or surreptitiously – has encouraged the separatist rebels. Putin’s propaganda has gone once more into a state of hysteria, bearing a shocking resemblance to that of Slobodan Milosevic, especially that of the delirious Serbian television, during the wars of secession in former Yugoslavia. The lies are coming down in heavy waves, frantically and shamelessly. Brought up in the KGB’s climate of fabrications, legends, and mystifications, Putin idolizes Andropov. What is currently happening in Russia is linked to perhaps the last great spasm of the totalitarian secret police. Stale and stifling, Putin’s world belongs to bygone times. Predicting its end can be read by those who <em>can</em> read – the facts, not the stars.</p>
<p>Andrew Nagorski, one of the finest experts on the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet world, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-nagorski/the-downed-airliner-putin_b_5599912.html">writes the following</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>When the façade of an authoritarian regime begins to be exposed to the harsh glare of truth, it usually crumbles at some point. That doesn’t necessarily happen immediately or even fast. But both the world at large and the Russians themselves will soon realize that the emperor in the Kremlin has no clothes. Future historians are likely to look at the downing of Malaysian Flight 17 as a pivotal moment in that process.</p></blockquote>
<p>I find it unnecessary to emphasize British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash’s competence. In “The New York Times,” Garton Ash – the author of the classic book “The Uses of Adversity,” a profound connoisseur of Europe’s political meanderings of the last five decades and more, an expert on German-Russian relations and the recent history of what was the Soviet Bloc – deals with the ominous Putin doctrine. It is a doctrine which encodes, in an aggressive manner, Russia’s right to intervene whenever the Kremlin decides that the rights of populations of Russian origin from other countries are being threatened.</p>
<p>The Russianness criterion would be similar to that used by Nazi Germany in the &#8217;30s in order to define what was known as &#8220;Deutschtum,&#8221; meaning the common origin as a people, as “volk.” Garton Ash is right, this is an ideology of resentment, a conglomeration of authoritarian-imperial and intensely nationalist fantasies, with catastrophic consequences for the international situation. Putinism, as a mental formula, was not born yesterday. It suffices to read or re-read the writings of admirable individuals such as Andrei Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, Yuri Glazov, Sergey Kovalev, Yuri Orlov to grasp the barbaric, totalitarian roots of what we may call the Putin Doctrine.</p>
<p><em>This article came out on the Romanian online platform www.contributors.ro and was translated into English by Monica Got.</em></p>
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		<title>Czar Putka&#8217;s Imperial Delusions</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/czar-putkas-imperial-delusions/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=czar-putkas-imperial-delusions</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jul 2014 04:49:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A new book unveils the dark world of a brutal tyrant driven by messianic delusions.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/putin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236568" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/putin-383x350.jpg" alt="putin" width="311" height="284" /></a>Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has a past and an ideology. He is the head of a mafia-like association of thugs, mountebanks, and experts in manipulation, often described as &#8220;political technologists.&#8221; In other words, in spite of the masterfully crafted image of &#8220;The Man Without a Face,&#8221; to use the title of Masha Gessen&#8217;s gripping biography, Putin is not the elusively enigmatic individual propelled by anonymous forces to the rudder of the Russian boat in one of the most turbulent periods of the country&#8217;s history. Putin is the offspring of the political culture of the Soviet secret police and inherits from that constellation of passions, emotions, and phobias his political techniques and the deep contempt for individual rights.</p>
<p>In his book &#8220;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fragile-Empire-Russia-Vladimir-Putin/dp/0300181213"><em>Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin</em></a>&#8221; (Yale University Press, 2013), journalist Ben Judah succeeds admirably in deconstructing the origins, dynamics, and ramifications of the Putin regime, from the early days in Sankt Petersburg, when the teenager &#8220;Putka&#8221; was a street bully, through the KGB career, to the transmogrification into a supporter of Anatoly Sobchak, the flamboyant advocate of glasnost in the morose city on the river Neva. Not that Sobchak was a choir boy: he rose to prominence in association with the visible and invisible authoritarians in that city and engaged in reckless populism and shady economic deals. He relied on the former KGB lieutenant-colonel Putin and Putin found in Sobchak a man intimately associated with Boris Yeltsin&#8217;s bid for power, a consistently supportive patron. Judah mentions several times that Putin is fiercely loyal to those who are faithful to him. In fact, he showed this psychological feature in his relation with Sobchak.</p>
<p>In addition to the Sobchak group. Putin benefited from the enthusiastic trust bestowed upon him by the Machiavellian, power-thirsty tycoon Boris Berezovsky, the driving force in the Kremlin during Yeltsin&#8217;s second, agonizingly inept presidency. What Berezovsky needed, and Putin seemed to offer, was a disciplined, self-effacing, ascetic leader, able to restore a certain sense of hope among the increasingly disillusioned Russians, sick and tired with corruption, cynicism, and rampant plundering of the state. Nothing in Putin&#8217;s past suggested his cupitdy, greed, even rapaciousness. His KGB past indicated admiration for such paragons of austerity as the Cheka founder, Feliks Dzerhinsky, and the orgaization&#8217;s head during the persecution of the dissidents in the 1970s, Yuri Andropov. He seemed malleable and, most important, controllable. Berezovsky was terribly wrong, he misread Putin&#8217;s mind and paid for this huge mistake. Putka was interested in both power and money. He saw the oligarchs as a means to achieve these two objectives. Those who accepted his iron fist continued to thrive. Those who, like Brezovsky, did not understand that Yeltsin&#8217;s times of senile debauchery were over, were forced into exile. Putin&#8217;s nemesis, billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, paid with years of labor camp for the reckless ambtion to challenge the new czar. Power for Putin is indivisble and unsharable.</p>
<p>The best chapters in the book deal with Putin&#8217;s circle and his views on state, history, and Russia&#8217;s role in the world. Obviously, he is not a sophisticated doctrinaire. His main ideas come from dubious sources such as the maniac of Eurasian imperialism, Aleksandr Dugin. Judah mentions Dugin, but only passingly. In fact, it has been Dugin who articulated, in most virulent terms, the doctrine of imperial conservatism that Putin adopted wholeheartedly. Add to this the bizarre fascination with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s vision of a resurrected Russian empire that would necessarily incorporate the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan. Ironically, the same Solzhenitsyn, a main voice of Soviet dissent in the 1970s, the author of &#8220;The Gulag Archipelago,&#8221; chose to endorse Vladimir Putin as a genuine Russian patriot. He accepted honors from Putin that he had rejected when offered by Boris Yeltsin. The former dissident was thrilled to see the former KGB officer espouse his nationalist ideas and anti-liberal ideals.</p>
<p>Understanding Putin&#8217;s behavior in recent years, including his repudiation of the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014 and the invasion of Crimea, means to grasp his authoritarian mindset, including his conviction that might creates right. His values are macho-like, vertically-authoritarian, militaristic, opposed to tolerance and diversity. He despises the democratic opposition (people like Boris Nemtsov, Gary Kasparov, and Aleksey Navalny) and deeply distrusts intitiatives from below, civil society, and Western liberalism. Helped by immensely cynical operators like Sergey Markov and Vladislav Surkov, a cult of Putin&#8217;s personality has emerged as a pillar of this authoritarian-kleptocratic system. Judah documents impressively how the promise of a &#8220;dictatorship of law&#8221; evaporated into a cronyist system with an ideological camouflage reminiscent of Fascism.</p>
<p>Is there any light of this somber tunnel? Can one hope that democratic parties and movements will one day, sooner or later, prevail and create a state based on rule of law? Putin&#8217;s panic-ridden and fiercely aggressive reaction to the Ukrainian Revolution shows that he is aware of the deep trends within the Russian society. He knows that his quasi-dictatorial regime, based on lies, intimidation, and scorn for civic values, can be overthrown by a popular revolution. Judah concludes his brilliant book with these foreboding words: &#8220;There is paranoia everywhere and a presence in Putin&#8217;s office, one whose shadow is so huge that encompasses everything to the point it cannot be seen. The ghost of Boris Yeltsin. All Putin&#8217;s career has been about not being Yeltsin.&#8221; (p. 329).</p>
<p>Revolutions happen suddenly, swiftly, and unpredictably. One day, Putin may wake up and realize that all his impersonation of imperial grandeur has turned out to be another Russian mirage, a fatally bankrupt effort to derail his country&#8217;s advance toward democratic normality. As I write this review, analogies with Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini abound. From Zbigniew Brzezinski to Hillary Clinton, a consensus seems to coalesce regarding Putin as a new totalitarian dictator. Ben Judah&#8217;s book is a perfect companion in any endeavor meant to explain Putin&#8217;s seemingly absurd actions. He does not live in a non-real world, as Angela Merkel put it, but rather in his own reality, haunted by conspiratorial obsessions and driven by messianic delusions. He sees himself as Russia&#8217;s redeemer and indulges therefore in fervid fantasies of salvation.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Death of a Communist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-kengor/death-of-a-communist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=death-of-a-communist</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:49:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Paul Robeson Jr. gets a pass from the press.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/lkr.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235240" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/lkr.jpg" alt="lkr" width="313" height="207" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://spectator.org/">Spectator.org</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Paul Robeson Jr. has died at age 86. He was the son of the famous African-American performer and activist Paul Robeson, who died in 1976 at age 77. Regardless of what the adoring left says, both men were hardcore communists, with the senior Robeson being a dedicated Stalinist.</p>
<p>The headline for Paul Jr.’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/arts/activist-and-author-paul-robeson-jr-dies-at-86.html?hpw&amp;rref=obituaries&amp;_r=2">obituary in the <em>New York Times</em></a> was predictable, stating simply, “Paul Robeson Jr., Activist and Author, Dies at 86.” The <em>Times</em> is always reliable for a flatteringly misleading headline at the death of any old communist, hailing the deceased as a celebrated “progressive” or “civil rights activist” or whatever—really, anything but an American Bolshevik.</p>
<p>To its credit, the <em>Times</em> could not avoid conceding that Paul Jr. had been a communist. It cited Paul Jr. himself acknowledging that he had been a member of the Communist Party. But to its discredit, the <em>Times</em> quoted Paul Jr. insisting that his father was not a communist—a predictable falsehood from Paul Jr. and predictable bad information from the <em>Times</em>. “While they had much in common,” the <em>Times</em> said of father and son, “he [Paul Jr.] said one difference was that he was a member of the Communist Party from 1948 to 1962 while his father never joined the party.” The <em>Times</em> was sure to add: “During the McCarthy era, his father faced F.B.I. surveillance after he criticized the government.”</p>
<p>Yes, of course. That one and only Red Terror, better known to liberals as The McCarthy Era. Once again, the bad guy is not Joe Stalin but Joe McCarthy. And yet again, the handy narrative is sheer nonsense. The <em>Times</em> and its readers repeatedly <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dupes-Americas-Adversaries-Manipulated-Progressives/dp/1935191756/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=1X80278XXJWYP0H7WD2S">dupe themselves</a> into such self-imposed ignorance.</p>
<p>To that end, let me put this bluntly, and without the slightest whiff of exaggeration: Paul Robeson Sr. was an unflagging admirer of Joseph Stalin, one of the most prolific killers in history. It was this that brought Robeson under congressional scrutiny in the 1930s when the Democrats ran Congress, the White House, and the attorney general’s office—long before Joe McCarthy emerged on the scene. Even the <em>New York Times</em> once called Robeson “an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union.” He was dedicated to the Communist Party USA goal of fundamentally transforming America into a “Soviet American Republic.”</p>
<p>The senior Robeson’s Soviet romance began in 1934, the year he made a pilgrimage to the Motherland. When he returned, he spoke at length to the Moscow-funded <em>Daily Worker</em>. In a breathless piece than ran in the January 15, 1935 issue, under the headline, &#8220;&#8216;I Am at Home,’ Says Robeson At Reception in Soviet Union,” Robeson gloried in the “feeling of safety and abundance and freedom” he found “wherever” he turned under Stalin. When asked about Stalin’s purges, Robeson responded with a stunning statement that probably surprised even the Kremlin: “From what I have already seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot!”</p>
<p>The KGB tortured people pretty damned hard to get those kinds of statements. But Paul Robeson Sr. needed no such compulsion; just some careful wining and dining and duping. Indeed, Robeson was deadly serious. He was enamored with what he found in Stalin’s state, so much so that he moved his family there—his son included. They lived there, where they were given excessively special treatment. The Soviets rolled out the red carpet, literally.</p>
<p>In 1952, shortly before Stalin’s death, Paul Robeson was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize, which he unhesitatingly accepted. And when his beloved Stalin perished in March 1953, Robeson was moved to tears and to verse. He responded with a poetic eulogy titled, “To You Beloved Comrade.” He tearfully recalled the unforgettable moment when he elevated his son, Paul Jr., at the site of Stalin, as if lifting the boy in the air to present him with some sort of supernatural commission. Robeson waxed reverently of this “kindly,” “good” man of “wisdom,” “deep humanity,” and “understanding.” Stalin’s “noble example” and “daily guidance” had left Russians a “rich and monumental heritage.” The death of the “great Stalin,” reported a heartbroken Robeson, left “tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief.”</p>
<p>Of course, in reality, Stalin left tens of millions dead, and their families bowed in heart-aching grief.</p>
<p>It would take almost a half-century after Robeson’s death for Communist Party USA to publicly concede the obvious: Paul Robeson Sr. had been a longtime secret member. In May 1998, the centennial of Robeson’s birth, longtime CPUSA head Gus Hall finally, proudly revealed the truth. Hall made that announcement in a speech reprinted in the leading Marxist journal <em>Political Affairs</em>.</p>
<p>Only progressives were surprised by Hall’s revelation. They are still today; that is, they would be if they bothered to learn or care about the facts. The <em>New York Times</em> is still clueless.</p>
<p>That brings us back to Paul Robeson Jr. The younger Robeson perpetuated the lie that his father was not a communist. And the left embraced him.</p>
<p>Paul Jr. had long been loved by the communist and “progressive” left merely for being the son of Paul Sr. Historian Ron Radosh, a former communist, ran in some of the same political circles as Paul Jr. Radosh remembers being in high school in the 1950s and attending the national conference of the Labor Youth League, one of the incarnations of the Young Communist League. After a plenary statement, various attendees raised their hands to comment. One of them was Paul Jr. The speaker eagerly recognized him and said, “I call on Paul from Harlem.”</p>
<p>Radosh recalls:</p>
<blockquote><p>Robeson Jr. stood up, and the entire audience gave him a standing ovation and cheers that lasted at least five minutes. Then everyone sang &#8220;The World Youth Song,&#8221; before he could say one word. I don’t remember his comment, but it was trivial at best and was only a few sentences. I believe that’s when he saw that he didn’t have to make a living, but could manage to make a career out of being Robeson’s son.</p></blockquote>
<p>Radosh called Paul Jr. “a total sycophant and enabler of his father’s legacy.”</p>
<p>Charlie Wiley, a longtime anti-communist who was Paul Jr.’s age, vividly recalls his run-ins with the young Robeson. He encountered him a number of times, most memorably at one of the notorious Soviet-orchestrated World Youth Festivals, specifically the Vienna World Youth Festival in August 1959. These festivals were serious ideological battlegrounds, with the international communist movement using them to indoctrinate as many youth as possible. Young American communists like Robeson went to these events to agitate against America and for communist Russia. They were countered by pro-American anti-communists such as Charlie Wiley, the late Herb Romerstein, and others.</p>
<p>These debates were intense, vicious. In Vienna, they turned physical. One of the British anti-communists was beaten unconscious and carried to the nearest hospital. Wiley was assaulted, as were women in the American delegation. The communists had yet again resorted to force to advance their cause. It was what they knew best.</p>
<p>Wiley says that Paul Jr. basically ran the American delegation, or at least sought to. The communists were not a numerical majority in the delegation, but they were seasoned manipulators who easily dominated the group. As the leader of the communist cell, Paul Jr. tried to speak for the full delegation. At the welcoming ceremony, Robeson stepped forward on behalf of the entire American contingent, speaking in what one participant called “very beautiful Russian.” In fact, he knew Russian so well that he listed his occupation at the time as “translator.”</p>
<p>Wiley describes Paul Jr. as “really hardcore,” “a hard, committed, austere communist.” He was “mean, tough, no nonsense, not one to mess around with.” Wiley says that whereas he (Wiley) could personally trick other American communists into trusting him as possibly one of them, and thus goading them in a less destructive direction, Paul Jr. “didn’t trust me at all.” The younger Robeson constantly gave him a cold, hard stare. He knew his way around. Unlike the wide-eyed liberals, Robeson was a committed radical leftist who was no sucker.</p>
<p>Wiley added this comment on Paul Jr.’s personality:</p>
<blockquote><p>As an interesting side-note, there was one funny thing I remember about Paul Robeson Jr. It’s funny what sticks with you, but I remember the <em>language</em> he used. He was the first male I ever encountered who swore in front of women with really foul language—rude, crude. I mean the &#8220;F-word&#8221; and everything. You have to understand that men just didn’t talk like that in those days. Later on they would all the time, but not back then. Robeson was the first time where I saw that. It really struck me. It was very unusual.</p></blockquote>
<p>Charlie Wiley told me these things two years ago, and I wrote them down. When I emailed him immediately upon receiving news of Paul Jr.’s death, he emphatically added that the younger Robeson “was a worse America hater than his father,” and concluded by calling him a “son-of-a-bitch.”</p>
<p>Clearly, the animosity is still palpable. And for good reason.</p>
<p>Back in Washington after the Vienna festival, there was a dramatic follow-up showdown between Paul Jr., Charlie Wiley, Herb Romerstein, and other delegates. The fireworks started on February 4, 1960 before the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Pennsylvania Democrat Francis Walter, a staunch Cold Warrior (back when such Democrats existed).</p>
<p>Wiley and Romerstein were fully candid in their testimonies. Romerstein, a former communist, deeply impressed the committee. Paul Robeson Jr., on the other hand, was characteristically evasive, snide, unintimidated, and disrespectful. He refused to answer basic questions, including repeatedly refusing to affirm that he was a member of the Communist Party. He wouldn&#8217;t discuss his pro-Soviet work at the Vienna festival; to the contrary, he maligned the anti-communist Americans who were there. Amazingly, Paul Jr. accused <em>them</em> (the anti-communists) of agitating and turning the festival into a “cold-war battlefield.” He said that they had come to “disrupt,” “discredit,” and “subvert” the festival. They were a “disgrace,” he snarled at the committee.</p>
<p>It was a grossly mendacious performance. It was also a blatantly pro-Soviet stunt. Moscow surely reveled in every minute of it.</p>
<p>Robeson then turned his guns on the House Committee itself, which he accused of “harass[ing] those who fight for Negro equality,” of giving “aid and comfort to segregationists,” of undermining “the enforcement of civil rights of Negroes,” of “never doing anything about civil rights,” and of being sympathetic to “self-confessed Nazis and Fascist collaborators.”</p>
<p>This was the typical smear tactic used by the communist left. And, of course, Paul Jr. accused the committee of “attempting to poison the minds of young people with the ideology of McCarthyism.”</p>
<p>Again, quite a performance.</p>
<p>Alas, when it came to poisoning the minds of young people—and also accusing the House committee of being racist, fascist, and pro-Nazi—one such communist who excelled at the art was <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Communist-Paul-Kengor/dp/B00C01DYBY/ref=pd_sim_b_1">Frank Marshall Davis</a>, who joined Communist Party USA during World War II (after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact). Davis, who I profiled at length in an October 2012 cover feature for <em>The American Spectator</em>, deserves mention here. He knew the senior Paul Robeson extremely well, admired him greatly, and likely knew Paul Jr.</p>
<p>Davis mentioned Robeson more than any other figure in his weekly columns for the communist-line <em>Chicago Star</em> and <em>Honolulu Record</em>. He was his biggest cheerleader. Davis, who otherwise lied about his party membership and work, candidly acknowledged in his memoirs that Robeson was a major factor, if not <em>the</em> factor, in Davis suddenly uprooting from Chicago in 1949 to move to Hawaii to do Communist Party work there.</p>
<p>There, in Honolulu, Davis would eventually meet and mentor a young person named Barack Obama. There’s no doubt that Davis would have regaled young Obama with stories of glory about the great Paul Robeson. Does Obama today have an opinion of either Robeson? He absolutely does, and I would pay good money to hear it. What was his reaction to the younger Robeson’s death? How about the old man, Frank’s pal? Unfortunately, we can expect no one in our press corps will bother to ask the president.</p>
<p>As for both the senior and junior Paul Robeson, they will be eternally remembered by our press and “progressives” as stoic civil rights crusaders, lionized as fearless freedom fighters who battled the nefarious forces of McCarthyism. Their work on behalf of a truly pernicious regime and ideology will get a wink and a pass.</p>
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		<title>&#8216;Dialoguing&#8217; with the Muslim Brotherhood and the KGB</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/dialoguing-with-the-muslim-brotherhood-and-the-kgb/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dialoguing-with-the-muslim-brotherhood-and-the-kgb</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:35:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Thorbjørn Jagland]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[European politicians embrace the enemies of democracy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/jagland.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235185" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/jagland.jpg" alt="jagland" width="275" height="206" /></a>You can tell a lot about a society by watching what kind of people it puts into positions of power</span><span class="zw-portion"> and influence</span><span class="zw-portion">.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Thorbjørn Jagland is a former Prime Minister of Norway from the Norwegian Labour Party. </span><span class="zw-portion">Since 2009, he has been the Secretary General of the Council of Europe</span><span class="zw-portion"> (CoE). He was reelected </span><span class="zw-portion">to</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">this position for a second term, with the support of parliamentarians from across </span><span class="zw-portion">Europe</span><span class="zw-portion">, on </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/Thorbjorn-Jagland-ble-gjenvalgt-7616203.html" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">June 24</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">2014.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The </span><span class="zw-portion">CoE was established in 1949. It</span><span class="zw-portion"> is distinct from and less powerful than </span><span class="zw-portion">the European Union. However, it</span><span class="zw-portion"> has a formalized cooperation with the EU on a range of</span><span class="zw-portion"> issues, for instance </span><span class="zw-portion">those </span><span class="zw-portion">related to</span><span class="zw-portion"> immigration. This cooperation </span><span class="zw-portion">has been strengthened </span><span class="zw-portion">under Jagland’s lead. </span><span class="zw-portion">The CoE</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">further enjoys</span><span class="zw-portion"> frien</span><span class="zw-portion">dly relations with many</span><span class="zw-portion"> Islamic organizations and has made </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3460" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">combating</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> so-called </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://hub.coe.int/combating-islamophobia" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">“Islamophobia”</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> in </span><span class="zw-portion">Europe</span><span class="zw-portion"> one of its </span><span class="zw-portion">stated priorities.</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">In addition to heading the Council of Europe, </span><span class="zw-portion">for years </span><span class="zw-portion">Mr. Jagland has also been the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the annual Nobel Peace Prize. </span><span class="zw-portion">Under his leadership, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded </span><span class="zw-portion">in 2009 </span><span class="zw-portion">to Barack Hussein Obama, </span><span class="zw-portion">when he</span><span class="zw-portion"> had only been US President for a few months. In 2012, Jagland and the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the European Union (EU).</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">The Socialist </span><span class="zw-portion">Jagland has for decades been a passionate supporter of supranational organizations such as the EU.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">One of the three women who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, Tawakkol Karman from </span><span class="zw-portion">Yemen</span><span class="zw-portion">, has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Norwegian Nobel Committee knew about this and thought it was fine. </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Nobel-Peace-panel-stands-behind-Muslim-Brotherhood-winner" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">Jagland</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> told reporters in </span><span class="zw-portion">Oslo</span><span class="zw-portion"> that he disagrees with the </span><span class="zw-portion">widespread </span><span class="zw-portion">“perception” in the West that the Brotherhood is a threat to democracy. The very same man has </span><span class="zw-portion">warned </span><span class="zw-portion">repeatedly </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/Islamofobi-vart-nye-spokelse-6393337.html" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">for years</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> against the allegedly great dangers presented by “Islamophobia” and people who </span><span class="zw-portion">peacefully </span><span class="zw-portion">voice </span><span class="zw-portion">anti-Islamic</span><span class="zw-portion"> view</span><span class="zw-portion">point</span><span class="zw-portion">s.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">In Jagland’s view, being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood makes you a potential part</span><span class="zw-portion">n</span><span class="zw-portion">er worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. If, on the other hand, you peacefully oppose Islamic inroads into the Western world then that makes you virtually a threat to world peace.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">On</span><span class="zw-portion"> August 1 2013, </span><span class="zw-portion">Thorbjørn Jagland</span><span class="zw-portion"> “</span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.thelocal.no/20130801/nobel-committee-chair-warns-of-giving-voice-to-fjordman" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">att</span><span class="zw-portion">a</span><span class="zw-portion">cked</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> the Norwegian press for allowing the extremist blogger Peder ‘Fjordman’ Jensen to air his anti-Islamic views.</span><span class="zw-portion">” </span><span class="zw-portion">He</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">warned against letting the ideology allegedly held by the mass murderer </span><span class="zw-portion">Anders Behring </span><span class="zw-portion">Breivik to enter the mainstream:</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">“If you read what Fjordman has published online, you can easily see that he is coming from the same mindset. The only difference is that while Fjordman writes, Breivik acted. But there is not much difference between giving Fjordman the support to publish his opinions and giving the killer himself a public microphone.”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">In July 2013, he stated that he fears violence in </span><span class="zw-portion">Europe</span><span class="zw-portion"> due to increasing xenophobia and </span><span class="zw-portion">the </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/norge/1.11142913" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">criminal</span></a><span class="zw-portion">” views </span><span class="zw-portion">held by </span><span class="zw-portion">some </span><span class="zw-portion">people </span><span class="zw-portion">regarding mass immigration. </span><span class="zw-portion">In an essay in the daily </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1003/subcat1018/thread280064/" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link" style="font-style: italic;">Dags</span><span class="zw-portion" style="font-style: italic;">a</span><span class="zw-portion" style="font-style: italic;">visen</span></a><span class="zw-portion">,</span><span class="zw-portion"> Jagland expressed concern that if people like me were able to express their views, convicted murderers might be next. “Someone has to say stop before we find ourselves on a slippery slope where Fjordman’s voice becomes more and more normal.”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/08/will-anyone-stop-fjordman/" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">Jagland</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">singled out a couple of</span><span class="zw-portion"> people by name in addition to me. </span><span class="zw-portion">One was</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">Anders Behring Breivik</span><span class="zw-portion">, who</span><span class="zw-portion"> killed 77 people with his </span><span class="zw-portion">attacks in </span><span class="zw-portion">Norway</span><span class="zw-portion"> on July 22 2011</span><span class="zw-portion">. The other was Arnfinn Nesset. Nesset is a former nurse and one of the worst serial killers in </span><span class="zw-portion">Scandinavian history</span><span class="zw-portion">. In 1983 he was convicted of poisoning 22 patients, but he was strongly suspected of having killed many more than that. For murdering dozens of human beings, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison. This was and remains the maximum prison sentence </span><span class="zw-portion">one</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">can </span><span class="zw-portion">receive</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">in </span><span class="zw-portion">Norway</span><span class="zw-portion">, regardless of</span><span class="zw-portion"> the nature of your crime. B</span><span class="zw-portion">ecause of good behavior in jail, Arnfinn Nesset</span><span class="zw-portion"> served only</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.nrk.no/programmer/radio/norgesglasset_40/40/2944962.html" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">12 years</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">behind bars, </span><span class="zw-portion">or a few </span><span class="zw-portion">months </span><span class="zw-portion">for each</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">murder.</span><span class="zw-portion"> Breivik </span><span class="zw-portion">himself </span><span class="zw-portion">was sentenced to just over 3 months in jail per murder.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Thorbjørn Jagland, a former Prime Minister and President of the Storting (Parliament) from the country’s largest political party</span><span class="zw-portion"> and the Secretary General of the Council of Europe</span><span class="zw-portion">, thus</span><span class="zw-portion"> directly </span><span class="zw-portion">compared me to </span><span class="zw-portion">two </span><span class="zw-portion">of the </span><span class="zw-portion">worst murderers in </span><span class="zw-portion">Scandinavia</span><span class="zw-portion">, both convicted of murdering dozens of people. He didn’t think there was much difference </span><span class="zw-portion">among</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">the three of us. </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1003/subcat1018/thread280064/" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">Jagland’s</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> claim was that if we allow evil people like me to broadcast their opinions in the public debate, the next logical step would be giving an open microphone to serial killers.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">I am sure some of my most dishonest critics will accuse me of “whining” for bringing this up</span><span class="zw-portion"> again</span><span class="zw-portion">, but I don’</span><span class="zw-portion">t </span><span class="zw-portion">have any criminal record whatsoever, not even a speeding ticket. </span><span class="zw-portion">I would just like to point that out. I would further </span><span class="zw-portion">assert</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">that the main issue here is not actually me, but rather how certain people in positions of power choose to exercise the influence that they possess. Is it wise of a man who is the leader of the Nobel Committee and claims to promote tolerance of other people’s viewpoints</span><span class="zw-portion"> to say this</span><span class="zw-portion">? </span><span class="zw-portion">Is it appropriate behavior </span><span class="zw-portion">for</span><span class="zw-portion"> a former Prime Minister and current leader of the Council of Europe to compare peaceful, non-criminal citizens whose views he disagrees with to convicted serial killers? I </span><span class="zw-portion">maintain</span><span class="zw-portion"> that this is unwise and inappropriate.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Ironically, Thorbjørn Jagland has previously shown few scruples in having a dialogue with representatives of a totalitarian regime, guilty of the mass murder of millions and probably tens of millions of people. Apparently, the only ones you cannot have a “dialogue” with are native Europeans who oppose Islamization or </span><span class="zw-portion">object to </span><span class="zw-portion">being turned into a minority in their own countries by rampant mass immigration from every corner of the planet.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">There are quite a few examples where not just the same groups, but in some cases the same individuals, appeased Communism a few decades ago and appease the forces of Islam today. From </span><span class="zw-portion">Scandinavia</span><span class="zw-portion">, one prominent such case would be Mr. Jagland. It is </span><span class="zw-portion">well-</span><span class="zw-portion">documented that he was one of many figures on the political Left who had a file in the </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.dn.no/arkiv/article3455.ece" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">KGB</span></a><span class="zw-portion">, the secret police of the Soviet Union, because he was seen as a useful contact.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Unlike his fellow Labour Party member and convicted spy Arne Treholt, there is no evidence that Jagland did anything overtly criminal in his talks with KGB agents. Yet it is arguably foolish behavior to believe you can have any form of “dialogue” with people representing totalitarian belief systems</span><span class="zw-portion">,</span><span class="zw-portion"> who are only here to infiltrate our societies and subvert our freedoms. These days he is displaying the very same foolishness when dealing with dangerous Islamic movements and countries.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Unfortunately,</span><span class="zw-portion"> I am not a member of the KGB or the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">Thorbjørn </span><span class="zw-portion">Jagland would have been more willing to listen to my viewpoints </span><span class="zw-portion">if I had been</span><span class="zw-portion">.</span></p>
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		<title>Obama and Putin: Two Totalitarians, One Game</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-and-putin-two-totalitarians-one-game/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-and-putin-two-totalitarians-one-game</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:56:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Obama is a national community organizer, but Putin is a global community organizer.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-and-putin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221862" alt="obama-and-putin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-and-putin.jpg" width="385" height="217" /></a>War is what Obama does best. The War on Women. War on Poverty. Class War. Race War.</p>
<p>Walk up to a union member snoozing on a bus, a Latino man crossing the street, a gay cowboy poet earning minimum wage, and community organize him along with a few hundred thousand others into the latest battle in the social justice war that never ends.</p>
<p>&#8220;Fight for card check, for birth control, for gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty.&#8221;</p>
<p>Every time a battle is won and an election ends, a new source of social conflict is dug up and deployed for war.</p>
<p>As a domestic radical, divisiveness is his natural weapon. Obama plays on fragmented identities, assembling coalitions to wage war against some phantom white heteronormative patriarchy consisting of a middle class barely able to pay its bills.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s governing by terrorism. The bombs are ideological. The objective is a constant state of war.</p>
<p>The war that never ends has been good to Obama. Its various clashes have given him two terms and very little media scrutiny. They have given him a post-American army of identity groups with few mutual interests except radical politics and government dependency.</p>
<p>While Obama profits from stirring up conflicts at home, making it easy for him to light some fuses and walk away, he loses from conflicts abroad.</p>
<p>A Reaganesque president could have turned the Syrian Civil War or Russia&#8217;s invasion of Ukraine into an approval rating bonanza. Foreign conflicts pay off politically for presidents even when they aren&#8217;t involved. But that&#8217;s not true of Obama who is congenitally incapable of showing strength and reacts to a foreign crisis by playing for time while struggling to resolve the ideological betrayal of using American power abroad.</p>
<p>Internationally, it&#8217;s the KGB agent, not the community organizer, who profits from conflict. Putin plays Obama&#8217;s role in the world community, dividing and conquering, doing to America internationally what Obama does to it domestically.</p>
<p>Obama uses a phantom patriarchy, a phantom white privilege, a phantom 1 percent, to mobilize a coalition for his own agenda. Putin uses the United States as a phantom enemy to organize a coalition of &#8220;oppressed&#8221; tyrants from Belarus to Venezuela to North Korea.</p>
<p>Administration officials scratch their heads wondering why Putin&#8217;s won&#8217;t cooperate with them. It&#8217;s the same reason they don&#8217;t cooperate with Republicans. Their coalition of black nationalists, gay rights activists, abortion-loving professors of feminism and fist-pumping La Raza nationalists, Muslim Brotherhood front men with trimmed beards and aging Stalinists urging single payer shares little in common internally except a furious resentment and a consuming sense of unfairness.</p>
<p>It needs an enemy to give it meaning. Without a common enemy it will tear itself apart and die.</p>
<p>The same is true of the anti-American coalition that Putin has cobbled together out of Marxist dictators in Latin America, Shiite fanatics in Iran, a North Korean prep school grad who starves his people to build nukes and radical American leftists convinced that every war is a CIA conspiracy. Like allying the NAACP, AFL-CIO and GLAAD; it&#8217;s an odd conclave, but as long as everyone focuses on a common foe, they can all be herded in the right direction.</p>
<p>Obama is an adequate national community organizer, but Putin is a global community organizer.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not just that Obama is weak and inept, but he&#8217;s using a rulebook that Moscow is entirely familiar with because its men helped write it. The KGB vets running the show understand Obama intimately because they understood his mentors. The tactics that Obama and his people imagine are clever and innovative are minor examples of the tactics that the USSR was using abroad before he was even born.</p>
<p>Obama isn&#8217;t isolating Putin. Putin is isolating Obama. He&#8217;s doing it in the same way that Obama did it to Republicans.</p>
<p>Anti-Americanism has nothing to with America. Anti-Americanism creates a phantom enemy.</p>
<p>Osama bin Laden flew planes into the World Trade Center to increase the importance of Al Qaeda. Khrushchev&#8217;s bellicose posturing was intended to ensure that the USSR would be taken seriously as a world power by framing its presence on the world stage alone with America. For Putin, conflict with America wasn&#8217;t a reason not to invade Crimea, but an incentive to do it.</p>
<p>Putin is weakened, his popularity is shaky, the energy economy that he built up may collapse and the domestic opposition shows no fear of him despite all the beatings, arrests and suspicious suicides. Crimea polarizes his domestic debate on favorable terms, between nationalists and &#8216;traitors&#8217;, while increasing his stature as a world leader.</p>
<p>This should be familiar territory for Obama who has reacted to bad economic news by finding targets to attack. The War on Women had a lot in common with the invasion of Crimea. Both were sham wars stirred up by corrupt political figures to distract everyone from their own misdeeds.</p>
<p>Obama needs a Republican enemy to keep his people in line. Putin needs an American enemy to keep his people in line. If Obama understood this, he would also understand that Putin is as likely to work with him to defuse the conflict, as Obama would with John Boehner.</p>
<p>Putin and Obama are both deeply corrupt men whose former popularity has waned and are badly in need of distractions. The soft distractions of photo ops with celebrities, impromptu musical performances and hunting expeditions, won&#8217;t work. So they turn to the hard distractions of war.</p>
<p>The threat that both men face is the same. Their people are suffering and that suffering has been caused in no small part by the culture of corruption surrounding them. Obama and Putin&#8217;s friends have robbed both countries blind and the American and Russian peoples are waking up to their crimes.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why Putin isn’t going to play nice. Unlike Obama, his domestic political opposition isn’t in a position where it can be blamed for anything involving his regime. He can&#8217;t declare that his domestic political opposition is waging a War on Women.</p>
<p>Instead he has to seek his wars abroad.</p>
<p>Obama would like Putin to go away so that he can focus on demonizing the domestic political opposition. Putin would like his domestic political opposition to go away so that he can focus on demonizing America. It&#8217;s the same old game by two reds with law degrees on different political battlegrounds.</p>
<p>Obama thinks globally and acts locally. Putin thinks locally and acts globally.</p>
<p>Putin is determined to score points from the post-American transition. Reducing American power and influence worldwide was a move that the foreign policy left believed would defuse tensions. Instead it has turned into a gold rush for every petty tyrant and terrorist eager to count coup by humiliating the United States.</p>
<p>Obama wanted a peaceful post-American transition. Instead he&#8217;s getting worldwide chaos and war.</p>
<p>Putin seeks out a conflict with the United States for the same reason that Obama seeks one out with Republicans; he wants an easy target to beat up on to distract from the economy and political corruption. United Russia, like the Democratic Party, is a party of crooks and thieves, which survives by fighting phantom enemies for phantom causes while robbing everyone blind.</p>
<p>For Obama and Putin, it&#8217;s not really about Crimea or birth control; it&#8217;s about power.</p>
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		<title>Junius Irving Scales,  An American Communist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arch-t-allen/junius-irving-scales-an-american-communist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=junius-irving-scales-an-american-communist</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Dec 2013 05:06:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arch T. Allen]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[American]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communist-party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Junius Irving Scales]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A case study in how an individual was drawn to the Communist Party in the United States. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Junius_Scales.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-212872" alt="Junius_Scales" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Junius_Scales.jpg" width="350" height="509" /></a>Yale historian Glenda Gilmore, in her award-winning book about radical roots of the civil rights movement,<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> recalled a childhood event in her native Greensboro:  “When I was about eight, I visited an abandoned mansion in our neighborhood.  Here, everyone whispered, was where the Communist had lived.  No one really understood what a Communist was; rather, the lesson lay in what became of them.  They left their homes, they lost their families, and they went to prison.  That’s what happened to . . . the rich golden-haired boy who had grown up in that house.”</p>
<p>The rich golden-haired boy was Junius Irving Scales.  Born in 1920 to a prominent North Carolina family, Scales was named for his grandfather, a Confederate colonel, and Scales’ father was named for the colonel’s brother, governor of North Carolina after Democratic “redemption” of the state from Republican Reconstruction.  As a boy, Scales lived in a 34-room mansion built by his father in a new development of his, just west of the then-city limits of Greensboro.  According to Scales, his father, a lawyer and real estate developer, was then a millionaire several times over.  Among the family’s servants was a black woman born into slavery; she wore a servant’s uniform and attended to young Scales.</p>
<p>The family fortune faltered in the late 20s, however, and they left the mansion and rented a home in Chapel Hill.  Scales was an avid reader, and at age 15 he became a fixture at Chapel Hill’s Intimate Bookshop.  There, as expressed by Gilmore, Scales “breathed in the radical politics that mingled in the bookstore’s dust.”<a title="" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a>  In the 30s, according to Gilmore “varying shades of liberals, Socialists, anti-Fascists, and new Communists came together to create a hotbed of agitation among students and professors at the University [of North Carolina] . . . .”<a title="" href="#_edn3">[iii]</a>  Scales enrolled at the University, where he soon became disenchanted with his classmates; disenchantment led to depression, and he attempted suicide.  Later he found some like-minded friends interested in radical politics, and as Gilmore concluded, “Radical politics held out a lifeline to Scales.”<a title="" href="#_edn4">[iv]</a></p>
<p>That lifeline led Scales into advocacy and activities for union organization and racial equality.  His new affiliations developed during the Communist Party’s Popular Front strategy of aligning with liberal advocacy groups and portraying communists as merely “liberals in a hurry.”<a title="" href="#_edn5">[v]</a> Scales soon considered himself a communist, and he joined the Communist Party USA in 1939, on his 19<sup>th</sup> birthday.<a title="" href="#_edn6">[vi]</a></p>
<p>Despite some early doubts about the Party, Scales became committed to it after the Party district organizer took him to Greensboro.  Gilmore concluded that “No ideological lesson could have been more effective for Scales than visiting [the Party organizer’s] ‘run down little house’ across town from the thirty-six-room mansion that had sheltered Scales during his unhappy early childhood.”<a title="" href="#_edn7">[vii]</a>  With his new ideological commitment, Scales engaged in organizing black and white college students to promote union organization and racial equality, thinking, according to Gilmore, that the Communist Party “furnished the only platform from which he might work to overthrow white supremacy.”<a title="" href="#_edn8">[viii]</a></p>
<p>Scales recalled later that he had explained to University history professor R. D. W. Connor his motivation in joining the Party:  “I told him that there were four main things:  fear of war and Fascism; the plight of Negroes, especially in the South; the helpless, unorganized condition of most workers; and the belief that socialist redistribution of the wealth would be the basis of the brotherhood of man.”<a title="" href="#_edn9">[ix]</a></p>
<p>With his new commitment, Scales attended a Communist Party school at a secret location north of New York City.  The curriculum included study of what Scales called “the Negro question” but focused on the study of Soviet Communism.  Attending the school, Scales said, gave him “an undreamed-of grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory . . .” and aroused “a sort of exultation and decisively chang[ed] my plans for the future:  henceforth the socialist revolution would be the determining force in my life. . . .  I was going to become a professional revolutionary. . . . I had taken sides!  I had chosen to be with the wretched of the earth on their march to a better world.”<a title="" href="#_edn10">[x]</a></p>
<p>The revolutionary march would have to wait, however, for after Pearl Harbor Scales enlisted in the Army. During his service he complained about his limited assignments and lack of promotion, attributing them to his Communist affiliation.  Upon his discharge he returned to Chapel Hill in 1946, resumed his education at the University, and returned to his Communist activities.  He later reported that the Party in Chapel Hill had grown in the late 40s from one to four, and soon six, “clubs,” its term preferred over “cells.”  The clubs catered to different constituencies:  students, faculty and their wives, white townspeople, and blacks.<a title="" href="#_edn11">[xi]</a>  Scales recalled later that there were approximately 200 Communists, including 30 blacks, in Chapel Hill then and that the University was the main center of Communist activity in the Southeast.<a title="" href="#_edn12">[xii]</a>  Most Communists kept their membership secret, even though membership was legal, but during the war some became open members, perhaps because of our alliance with the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>In 1947, pressured by the Party, Scales announced publicly that he was a Communist.  He professed his motivation as hoping “that I may in a small way dispel some of the dangerous illusions and falsehoods about Communists . . . .  As a Southerner, I am especially glad to belong to the only organization which fights for the full and complete equality of the Negro.”<a title="" href="#_edn13">[xiii]</a>   Scales became the Party’s district chairman for the Carolinas in 1948, a district chairmanship soon expanded to four states.</p>
<p>After the convictions of some national Party leaders for conspiring to overthrow the government by force or violence, the Party in 1951 ordered Scales to go underground.  He left Chapel Hill, his wife, and their three-month old daughter for New York.  For three years he led a secret life, using assumed names, pretending to be a traveling salesman, and holding clandestine meetings with other Communists in his four-state district.  Scales’ underground activities ended abruptly in 1954, when FBI agents, pistols drawn, confronted him and commanded, “We’ve got you Scales!  Don’t move.”<a title="" href="#_edn14">[xiv]</a>   They charged him with violating the so-called membership clause of the Smith Act of 1940.</p>
<p>Other events paralleled Scales’ Communist activities and arrest, of course, and some add context to his indictment:</p>
<p>&#8211;A major event occurred in 1939, when Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist and courier for a Soviet spy ring, attempted to warn President Roosevelt personally of Soviet infiltration of his administration.  Chambers was allowed to meet only with a Roosevelt assistant, whose notes taken at the meeting, later made available to investigators, recited that Chambers reported that several high administration officials were Soviet agents.  Included on the list were White House assistant to the president Lauchlin Currie, assistant secretary of the treasury Harry Dexter White, and state department official Alger Hiss. Nothing came of Chambers’ allegations until investigations began in 1945.<a title="" href="#_edn15">[xv]</a></p>
<p>&#8211;That year, the <i>Amerasia </i>spy case became the first of the postwar spy cases.  At the offices of <i>Amerasia</i>, a pro-Communist publication about American-Asian relations, American intelligence agents discovered two briefcases filled with numerous classified documents from the State Department and American intelligence agencies.  Six people were charged initially with espionage for the Communists, but after a grand jury proceeding only two, the editor of the publication and a State Department employee, were indicted and convicted, and only for the lesser crime of unauthorized possession of government documents.  A cover-up, orchestrated by Lauchlin Currie and other high-ranking officials, had kept the grand jury from delving too deeply into the case.  But the case provoked charges of Communist infiltration of the government and countercharges of a witch-hunt.<a title="" href="#_edn16">[xvi]</a></p>
<p>&#8211;Also in 1945, just two weeks after the end of the war and our alliance with the Soviets, Elizabeth Bentley, a former Communist and courier for her Soviet-spy lover, walked into an FBI office and began to tell her story.<a title="" href="#_edn17">[xvii]</a>  Whittaker Chambers soon joined her as an FBI informer and corroborated much of her story.  A grand jury investigated her charges and heard her testimony, but Chambers was not called before it for corroboration; no indictments were issued based on her testimony.</p>
<p>&#8211;Separately, however, Chambers’ allegation to investigators that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, an allegation denied by Hiss under oath, led to Hiss’ conviction for perjury.<a title="" href="#_edn18">[xviii]</a>  Just weeks after Hiss’ conviction, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his 1950 speech alleging that the State Department was infiltrated by a number of Communists.  A national sensation and much controversy followed.<a title="" href="#_edn19">[xix]</a></p>
<p>&#8211;Of major significance for Scales, Eugene Dennis, the leader of the Communist Party USA since 1945, and other national Party leaders were prosecuted under the Smith Act for conspiring to advocate and organize for the overthrow of the government by force or violence.  Some scholars suggest that these prosecutions were prompted by the earlier failure to obtain any indictments after Elizabeth Bentley’s grand jury testimony and by the grand-jury cover-up in the <i>Amerasia </i>spy case.<a title="" href="#_edn20">[xx]</a>  Whatever the motives for the prosecutions, Dennis and the others were convicted, and most received maximum five-year prison sentences.  The Supreme Court affirmed the convictions in 1951, the year the Party ordered Scales to go underground.<a title="" href="#_edn21">[xxi]</a></p>
<p>&#8211;Also in 1951, a year after physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to espionage concerning the Manhattan Project and was convicted in Britain, the Rosenbergs were tried and convicted in New York of espionage related to the project; they were executed in 1953, the year before Scales’ arrest.<a title="" href="#_edn22">[xxii]</a></p>
<p>Although arrested during that controversial era of conspiracy and espionage, Scales was charged with neither.  He was charged under the Smith Act’s clause making it unlawful to be a member in an organization <i>knowing</i> that it advocated the overthrow of the government by force or violence.<a title="" href="#_edn23">[xxiii]</a>  He was one of only a few people so charged, and his case became the leading one and resulted in a Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of that clause.<a title="" href="#_edn24">[xxiv]</a></p>
<p>The indictment charged that from 1946 to 1954 the Communist Party USA was such an organization and that Scales was a member of it with knowledge of the Party’s illegal purpose.<a title="" href="#_edn25">[xxv]</a>  Scales was tried in Greensboro in 1955, convicted, and sentenced to six years imprisonment, but a retrial was ordered because of a new Supreme Court ruling regarding defendants’ access to FBI files on witnesses testifying against them.</p>
<p>Scales left the Party in 1957, the year after Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged Stalin’s terror.  Scales later summarized the effect on him:  “[M]ost of what the capitalist press and the professional anti-Soviet experts had been saying about the Soviet Union for years was <i>true</i>. . . .  Stalin—my revered symbol of the infallibility of Communism  . . . had been a murderous, power-hungry monster! . . .   My idol had crumbled to dust forever.”<a title="" href="#_edn26">[xxvi]</a></p>
<p>By that time, the CPUSA had fewer than 20,000 members, less than a fourth of its peak soon after Scales had become a member.<a title="" href="#_edn27">[xxvii]</a>  The FBI reported the membership in North Carolina in 1957 was a mere thirty.<a title="" href="#_edn28">[xxviii]</a></p>
<p>Scales was retried in 1958, again in Greensboro. The government proposed and the trial judge gave instructions to the jury requiring that Scales’ membership had been “active” as opposed to “nominal” or “passive” and that he had the specific intent to bring about the violent overthrow of the government “as speedily as circumstances would permit.”<a title="" href="#_edn29">[xxix]</a>  The government presented testimony about the character of the Party from five ex-Communists, two of whom had been bona fide members and three of whom had become members as FBI informers.  Along with two others who had dealt with Scales, Ralph C. Clontz Jr. testified regarding Scales’ activities. Clontz was a graduate of Davidson and Duke Law School and had served as an Army intelligence officer during the war.  After his discharge, while a student at Duke, he had become concerned about Communist activities and offered to the FBI to try to penetrate the Communist Party.  Clontz testified extensively.  Scales called ten witnesses.  His mother and aunt testified to his good character and conduct, and others testified that Scales’ statements to them were inconsistent with any advocacy of violent overthrow.  Scales did not testify.  The jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to six years imprisonment.<a title="" href="#_edn30">[xxx]</a></p>
<p>The federal court of appeals and the Supreme Court rejected Scales’ constitutional and other arguments and affirmed his conviction; the Supreme Court was divided, 5-4.  The Court summarized the evidence it held sufficient to support Scales’ conviction, further summarized as follows:</p>
<p>Regarding the CPUSA and its reconstitution in 1945, a former bona fide Communist had testified that during the pre-1945 leadership of Earl Browder the Party claimed that change to a communist society could be achieved through peaceful, democratic means.  But in 1945 the Party replaced Browder with Dennis and returned to the principles of Marxism-Leninism, including Lenin’s teaching that communism could only be achieved by violent revolution.  Another bona fide former Communist had testified that after the 1945 reconstitution she attended a Party training school where various Party officers and functionaries were “reeducated” in the principles of Marxism-Leninism, including that Party members were to prepare workers to be ready to take power when a revolutionary situation arose.  Specifically, she said “the class was told that the coalition of workers and peasants which had proved so successful in Russia should have as its counterpart in America a coalition of workers and Negroes, especially in the South.”  She attended and taught other, similar classes, where the teachings were that “the means would be forcible” and that the Party should win the confidence of “the working class, . . . the Negro people, the poor farmers, other national groups, and in this way, in the course of struggle, constant struggle taking the forms of strikes and demonstrations and picket lines and marches and various kinds of activities to train the working class and the people for revolutionary battle.”<a title="" href="#_edn31">[xxxi]</a>  Other witnesses described similar Party training-school instruction, including that the only way to change the capitalist system was that it “had to be taken away by force and violence . . . .”<a title="" href="#_edn32">[xxxii]</a></p>
<p>Regarding the testimony of Clontz and two other witnesses about Scales’ activities, the Court found it of “special importance in two ways:  it supplies some of the strongest and most unequivocal evidence against the Party” based on the statements and activities of Scales and “his high Party position” . . . ; and it appears clearly dispositive as to the quality of [Scales’] Party membership, and his knowledge and intent . . . .”<a title="" href="#_edn33">[xxxiii]</a>  Clontz had sent Scales a postcard expressing interest in Communism, and Scales responded by sending him a box of Communist literature.  They began to meet.  At an early meeting, Scales said that for the Communists to succeed a forceful revolution would be necessary, and in a subsequent meeting Scales explained the basic strategy for bringing about the revolution—the Party as the vanguard of the working class would “bring the working class . . . and what [Scales] termed the Negro nation, together to bring about a forceful overthrow of the Government.”<a title="" href="#_edn34">[xxxiv]</a>   After Clontz joined the Party at Scales’ invitation, Scales engaged him in a course of instruction, where Scales “repeatedly told Clontz of the necessity for revolution to bring about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”<a title="" href="#_edn35">[xxxv]</a>  Scales arranged for Clontz to study in New York at a Party school, where he had private instruction from a teacher who, like Scales, told Clontz “that the only . . . means . . . would be forceful means . . . ,” and, again like Scales, “that ‘the revolution basically would come about by combining the forces of  . . . the Negro nation and the working class as the vanguard.’”<a title="" href="#_edn36">[xxxvi]</a>  Another witness who had attended the same Party school testified that in a course on Negro history he and other students, mostly from the South, were taught that the Negro people were the only revolutionary group within the United States that Communists could align with “‘and hope to reach . . . gains through the avenue of force and violence, by overthrow of the Government . . . .’”<a title="" href="#_edn37">[xxxvii]</a></p>
<p>After the Supreme Court affirmed his conviction in 1961, Scales began to serve his six year sentence.  He served only 15 months, however, as President Kennedy commuted his sentence on Christmas Eve 1962.</p>
<p>While the Supreme Court decision and the commutation attracted much commentary, Scales and his wife tried to avoid attention.  They secluded themselves in New York, where he worked as a proofreader at The New York Times. Attention returned to Scales in 1977, when a UNC-Chapel Hill professor wrote a play about Scales’ conviction. A production of the play toured North Carolina, playing in courthouses with audiences acting as juries.  Of 29 performances, it is reported that 28 resulted in acquittals and one in a hung jury.  According to Scales’ daughter, he came to Raleigh and saw the play, and as a result he decided to come out of seclusion and write his memoir</p>
<p>His memoir, <i>Cause at Heart:  A Former Communist Remembers</i>, was published in 1987 and reissued in 2005.  An oral history, <i>A Red Family:  Junius, Gladys &amp; Barbara Scales</i>, based on interviews in 1971, was published in 2009<i>. </i> In both books, Scales projects himself as a kind and gentle man, motivated to join the Party only by his concerns for working people and blacks.  Historian Gilmore, who came to know Scales and found him to be a “sweet, gentle man,” accepts his explanation that he joined the Party “because it was only among Communists that he found nonracist people who cared about the poor.”<a title="" href="#_edn38">[xxxviii]</a></p>
<p>Scales’ apologia may explain his early attraction to the Party during its Popular Front pretensions, but it is difficult to reconcile it with his continued activities in the Party after 1945 when it abandoned those pretensions and returned to Marxist-Leninist principles.  The Party, and indeed Scales himself according to the testimony against him, taught the doctrine that revolution could occur only by force and violence.  In his memoir and in the oral history, Scales denies that he personally advocated force or violence, and he belittles the witnesses against him, especially Clontz, who testified that he did.</p>
<p>Whatever his true thoughts about Communist revolution, Scales’ expressed recollections about his Communist past lack the anguish and critical self-examination expressed by other ex-Communists, such as Arthur Koestler and others in <i>The God that Failed</i> and Whittaker Chambers in <i>Witness, </i>or more recently David Horowitz in <i>Radical Son</i> and Ronald Radosh in <i>Commies</i>.  But, after <i>Cause at Heart </i>was published and Scales toured the state and spoke on some campuses, he issued a formal statement, prompted by “thirty years of struggling with the demons of his allegiance with the Communist Party.”<a title="" href="#_edn39">[xxxix]</a>  Scales began the statement consistently with his earlier explanations of why he had become a Communist, but he added something new:</p>
<p>“Along the way I became a closed-minded ideologue.</p>
<p>“I became a total apologist for the Soviet Union—a country devoid of basic freedoms.</p>
<p>“My tortured ideology became partly destructive of the very things that were constructive.</p>
<p>“I became arrogant, narrow, and sectarian in my outlook . . . .</p>
<p>“But still, with all the wrong turns and missteps I made, those ideals of human brotherhood that led me into the Communist Party and out of the Communist Party are the same ones that I will advocate as long as I live.”<a title="" href="#_edn40">[xl]</a></p>
<p>Scales died in 2002, predeceased by his wife, also once a Communist.  Although both had broken with the Party, they remained socialists.<a title="" href="#_edn41">[xli]</a></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><em>Arch T. Allen is a retired lawyer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and contributing writer for Raleigh Metro Magazine (<a href="http://www.metronc.com" target="_blank">www.metronc.com</a>).  He presented this paper to a history club of which he is a member.</em><br />
</span></p>
<div><strong>Notes:</strong><br clear="all" /></p>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> Glenda E. Gilmore, <i>Defying Dixie:  The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950</i> (2008).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> <i>Id</i>. at 206, citing Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson, <i>Cause at Heart:  A Former Communist Remembers</i> 46-46, 63 (1987, 2005).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref3">[iii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie</i> 201-02.  <i>See also </i>Gregory S. Taylor, <i>The History of the North Carolina Communist Party</i> 146-85 (2009).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref4">[iv]</a> <i>Defying Dixie  </i>at 222.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref5">[v]</a> Stephen Koch, <i>Double Lives:  Stalin, Willi Muzenberg, and the Seduction of the Intellectuals </i>(2004 ed.)</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref6">[vi]</a> <i>Cause at Heart</i> 64-67.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref7">[vii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie </i>293-94, citing <i>Cause at Heart</i> 71.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref8">[viii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie</i> 304.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref9">[ix]</a> <i>Cause at Heart </i>191.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref10">[x]</a><i> Id. at 99-101.</i></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref11">[xi]</a> <i>Id.</i> at 161-62.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref12">[xii]</a> Mickey Friedman, <i>A Red Family:  Junius, Gladys &amp; Barbara Scales</i> 48, 50 (2009).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref13">[xiii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie</i> 427; <i>Cause at Heart</i> 188-89.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref14">[xiv]</a> <i>A Red Family</i> 74.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref15">[xv]</a>M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, <i>Stalin’s Secret Agents:  The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government</i> 78-80 (2012).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref16">[xvi]</a> Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, <i>The Amerasia Spy Case:  A Prelude to McCarthyism </i>(1996).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref17">[xvii]</a> Kathryn S. Olmsted, <i>Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley</i> (2002).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref18">[xviii]</a> Allen Weinstein, <i>Perjury:  The Hiss-Chambers Case</i> (1978, 1997).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref19">[xix]</a> M. Stanton Evans, <i>Blacklisted by History:  The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies </i>(2007).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref20">[xx]</a> <i>Stalin’s Secret Agents</i>, 211-21.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref21">[xxi]</a> <i>Dennis v. United States,</i> 341 U.S. 494 (1951).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref22">[xxii]</a> Ronald  Radosh and Joyce Milton, <i>The Rosenberg File:  A Search for the Truth</i> (1984, 1997).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref23">[xxiii]</a> 18 U.S.C. 2385.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref24">[xxiv]</a> <i>Cause at Heart</i> xxvii-xxviii.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref25">[xxv]</a> <i>Scales v. United States</i>, 367 U.S. 203, 205-06 (1961).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref26">[xxvi]</a> <i>Cause at Heart </i>301-02.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref27">[xxvii]</a> Larry Schweikart and  Michael Allen, <i>A Patriot’s History of the United States </i>646 (2004).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref28">[xxviii]</a> <i>History of the North Carolina Communist Party</i> 205.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref29">[xxix]</a> <i>Cause at Heart </i>xxxvi.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref30">[xxx]</a> <i>Scales v. United States,</i> 260 F.2d 21, 28-36 (4<sup>th</sup> Cir. 1958).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref31">[xxxi]</a> <i>Scales v. United States</i>, 367 U.S. at 237-38.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref32">[xxxii]</a> <i>Id</i>. at 239.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref33">[xxxiii]</a> <i>Id</i>. at 243.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref34">[xxxiv]</a><i>Id</i>. at 245.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref35">[xxxv]</a> <i>Id</i>.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref36">[xxxvi]</a> <i>Id.</i> at 247.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref37">[xxxvii]</a> <i>Id.</i> at 251.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref38">[xxxviii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie </i>5, citing <i>Cause at Heart</i> 66-67.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref39">[xxxix]</a> <i>A Red Family</i> 151.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref40">[xl]</a> <i>Id.</i></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref41">[xli]</a> <i>Id.</i><i> </i>at 130.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Indomitable Natalia Gorbanevskaya</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-indomitable-natalia-gorbanevskaya/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-indomitable-natalia-gorbanevskaya</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-indomitable-natalia-gorbanevskaya/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2013 05:49:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Monica Lovinescu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Natalia Gorbanevskaya]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vladimir Putin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212228</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A noble voice of the Soviet dissident movement passes from the stage. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nat.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-212233" alt="CZECH-RUSSIA-HISTORY-GORBANEVSKAYA-FILES" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nat.jpg" width="400" height="303" /></a>The ongoing revolutionary upheaval in the Ukraine shows that the spirit of freedom prevails over infamy and fear.</p>
<p>This is the great lesson of Natalia Gorbanevskaya&#8217;s admirable life. A main voice of the Soviet dissident movement, Gorbanevskaya passed away in Paris at the age of 77. She was one of the few demonstrators in the Red Square, in August 1968, who dared to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Their courageous action, dashed by the KGB, marked the birth of the human rights movement in the USSR. Their heroic defiance of the despotic Leviathan remains a most inspiring example of civic disobedience, under the most unpropitious circumstances. The secret police obtained a temporary victory, but, in the long run, Gorbanevskaya and her fellow dissidents were the victors.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union fell apart in December 1991. In recent years, Vladimir Putin&#8217;s regime has tried to impose the image of Yuri Andropov as a great statesman. In fact, he was an ideological hack and a brutal persecutor of all those who dared to challenge the regime. No wonder he is Putin&#8217;s idol. In August 2013, Gorbanevskaya went to Moscow to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the protest. Together with her friends, she was arrested again on charges of holding an unauthorized rally. Putin and his servants do not fear the ridicule. All they care about is power.</p>
<p>Trained as a psychologist, Natalia was a poet and a fighter. She was a main contributor to the &#8220;Chronicle of Current Events,&#8221; a samizdat publication documenting human rights abuses. Arrested in 1969, she was interned into the Soviet mental hospitals, charged with &#8220;schizophrenia.&#8221; The political use of psychiatry remains one of the most scurrilous pages in the sordid history of Soviet repression.</p>
<p>For the totalitarian system, any criticism amounted to a mental disease. Her case became an international <em>cause célèbre</em>. Joan Baez wrote a famous song praising Natalia&#8217;s courage. Forced into exile, Gorbanevskaya continued her struggle in Paris where she worked for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Her colleague, the Romanian writer and political thinker, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/truth-memory-dignity-why-does-monica-lovinescu-matter/">Monica Lovinescu</a>, praised Natalia&#8217;s unshakeable commitment to freedom. Her writings belong to the best of the dissident tradition. As a poet, she expressed the longing for dignity and happiness in times of suffering and despondency.</p>
<p>Let me quote these moving lines, an unperishable testimony of a noble spirit:</p>
<p><em>&#8220;In my own twentieth century</em><br />
<em> where there are more dead than graves</em><br />
<em> to put them in, my miserable</em><br />
<em> forever unshared love</em><br />
<em> among those Goya images</em><br />
<em> is nervous, faint, absurd,</em><br />
<em> as, after the screaming of jets,</em><br />
<em> the trump of Jericho.&#8221;</em></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bashe.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-212235 aligncenter" alt="bashe" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bashe-450x253.jpg" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>How Soviet Intelligence Promoted Christian Marxism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/how-soviet-intelligence-promoted-christian-marxism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-soviet-intelligence-promoted-christian-marxism</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Oct 2013 04:20:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan Mauro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christianity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Disinformation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marxism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pacepa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pope pius xii]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206137</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And how the strategies are still in play today. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/dis.jpeg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-206156" alt="dis" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/dis-232x350.jpeg" width="232" height="350" /></a>When you can’t beat them, join them. That’s what the Soviet Union did to curtail Christianity’s anti-communist influence. In a new book titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Disinformation-Strategies-Undermining-Attacking-Promoting/dp/1936488604/"><i>Disinformation</i></a>, a covert campaign to discredit Pope Piux XII is revealed. In addition, the Soviets tried to influence the church with a Marxist-friendly version of Christianity.</p>
<p>The communists’ strategy against the church had three pillars: A propaganda offensive; the implanting of agents of influence and the promotion of Liberation Theology, an anti-Western spin on scripture.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Disinformation-Strategies-Undermining-Attacking-Promoting/dp/1936488604/"><i>Disinformation</i></a> is written by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc defector and Ronald Rychlak, Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi. A related documentary has also been released, titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Disinformation-Secret-Strategy-Destroy-West/dp/B00DD5R8F4"><i>Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the West</i></a><i>.</i> They disclose how a primary target of Soviet “active measures” was Pope Pius XII.</p>
<p>“The Soviets understood that Pius XII was a mortal threat to their ideology, despising communism as much as he did Nazism. They thus embarked on a crusade to destroy the pope and his reputation, to scandalize his flock, and to foment division among faiths,” Rychlak told me in an interview.</p>
<p>The claim that Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” originates in a 1945 broadcast from Radio Moscow or, in other words, the Soviet propaganda apparatus. Later, the Soviets reacted to his death in 1958 with a new disinformation campaign. It’s a lot easier to lie about someone when they can’t respond.</p>
<p>Pacepa, who was serving in Romanian intelligence at the time, says Soviet Premier Khrushchev approved the KGB-drawn plan in February 1960. It was code-named “Seat-12” and Pacepa says he was the Romanian representative for it. He is now <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219739/moscows-assault-vatican/ion-mihai-pacepa">publicly detailing his involvement.</a></p>
<p>Revealing this operation against Pope Pius XII isn’t only important for historical analysis. It teaches us a sober lesson about the effectiveness of enemy influence operations that are undoubtedly ongoing.</p>
<p>“It tells us that disinformation experts can convince us of anything. They took a person widely regarded as a champion of the Jews and other victims—someone who was despised by Adolf Hitler—and convinced the world that he was a virtual collaborator,” Rychlak said.</p>
<p>The second leg of the KGB’s anti-church strategy was to influence those it could not destroy using East Bloc churches, particularly the Russian Orthodox Church.</p>
<p>KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin provided a secret 1961 directive to infiltrate the Russian Orthodox Church. The objective was to implant agents of influence that could then push out “reactionary” and “sectarian” church figures that were seen as threats to communism.</p>
<p>Mitrokhin disclosed a secret meeting of senior East Bloc intelligence officers in Budapest in July 1967. Two KGB officers gave instructions regarding “work against the Vatican; measures to discredit the Vatican and its backers; and measures to exacerbate differences within the Vatican and between the Vatican and capitalist countries.”</p>
<p>Pacepa <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219739/moscows-assault-vatican/ion-mihai-pacepa">illustrates</a> the success of this operation with multiple examples. For example, in January 2007, the newly-appointed archbishop of Warsaw had to resign amidst revelations that he had been a secret collaborator with the Polish secret service during the Cold War.</p>
<p>Rychlak said that Soviet efforts to influence Protestants were also targeted. In 1944, the Soviets established the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian Baptists, now named the Union of Evangelical Christian Baptists of Russia.</p>
<p>The president of the <a href="http://www.theird.org">Institute on Religion and Democracy</a>, Mark Tooley, has <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/mark-d-tooley/world-council-of-churches-the-kgb-connection/">written about the communist use of the World Council of Churches</a>.  He notes that hundreds of Protest and Orthodox churches belonged to it as it towed the Soviet line and even went so far as to finance Marxist guerillas.</p>
<p>The third leg was promoting an anti-capitalist, anti-Western brand of Christianity. If the KGB could not eliminate Christianity, it reasoned it might as well manipulate it. Liberation Theology was born.</p>
<p>Pacepa <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35388">recalls</a> hearing Khrushchev say in 1959, “Religion is the opiate of the people, so let’s give them opium.” He flatly says that Liberation Theology is “KGB-invented.” He has first-hand knowledge of secret Romanian agents being dispatched to Latin America to spread it among the religious masses.</p>
<p>Pope John Paul II had a Vatican committee study Liberation Theology in 1984, Pacepa documents in a <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35388">2009 article for <i>FrontPage</i>.</a> It concluded that it was a mixture of “class struggle” and “violent Marxism.”</p>
<p>Robert. D. Chapman <a href="http://www.aei-ideas.org/2010/02/liberation-theology-and-the-kgb/">writes</a> in the <i>International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence</i>:</p>
<p>“Without doubt, the Theology of Liberation doctrine is one of the most enduring and powerful to emerge from the KGB’s headquarters. The doctrine asks the poor and downtrodden to revolt and form a Communist government, not in the name of Marx or Lenin, but in continuing the work of Jesus Christ, a revolutionary who opposed economic and social discrimination.”</p>
<p>In my interview with Rychlak, Pacepa’s co-author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Disinformation-Strategies-Undermining-Attacking-Promoting/dp/1936488604/"><i>Disinformation</i></a>, he remarked that the book was written today for a reason. These strategies are still in play.</p>
<p>“When Nazism was removed from Germany, we had de-Nazification panels…That never happened when the Soviet Union fell. The same people were left in charge,” Rychlak said.</p>
<p>He continued, “In fact, today Russia is run by a former KGB officer who has surrounded himself with his old associates. We are looking at the first superpower that is being run by intelligence officers.”</p>
<p>Pacepa is trying to wake the West up about how its enemies, including him in his past life, exploited its weaknesses. It isn’t easy to admit that one has been manipulated or beaten in some way but the West must, or it will happen again.</p>
<p><em>This article was sponsored by the </em><a href="http://www.theird.org"><em>Institute on Religion and Democracy.</em></a><b><a href="http://www.theird.org"><br />
</a></b></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong><b></b></p>
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		<title>Snowden to Join KGB Veterans Group</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/snowden-to-join-kgb-veterans-group/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=snowden-to-join-kgb-veterans-group</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Jul 2013 17:15:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Edward Snowden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198253</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Because he's an American patriot.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ex-kgb-climate-hack.jpg.492x0_q85_crop-smart.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-198255" alt="ex-kgb-climate-hack.jpg.492x0_q85_crop-smart" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ex-kgb-climate-hack.jpg.492x0_q85_crop-smart-450x340.jpg" width="450" height="340" /></a></p>
<p>Because he&#8217;s an American patriot. Just like Justin Amash. And <a href="http://freebeacon.com/edward-snowden-seeking-to-join-kgb-veterans-group/">nothing says patriotism like trying</a> to join the KGB. Even after it&#8217;s been dismantled.</p>
<p>True patriots who defect to an enemy country that has less human rights than the worst state in America don&#8217;t let little facts like that get in the way of their patriotism.</p>
<p>And who are we to question the patriotism of a Hanoi John Kerry or an Edward &#8220;Kremlin&#8221; Snowden?</p>
<blockquote><p>Edward Snowden has applied to join a group of former Russian intelligence and security officials, according to the group’s director.</p>
<p>Participation in a union of former KGB security, intelligence, and police officials, would likely change Snowden’s status from that of a whistleblower seeking to expose wrongdoing, to an intelligence defector who has changed sides.</p>
<p>Alexei Lobarev, chairman of the group called “Veterans of the Siloviki”—literally “men of power”—told a Russian news outlet on Monday that Snowden, who has been staying in a Moscow airport transit lounge for a month, applied for membership in the group.</p>
<p>Kenneth deGraffenreid, former National Security Council staff intelligence director, said Snowden’s embrace by former KGB officials is a sign the former contractor is being used as a pawn in an international program of “active measures,” political operations aimed at harming the United States.</p>
<p>DeGraffenreid said Snowden, along with Army Pfc. Bradley Manning who was charged with leaking secrets to WikiLeaks, are part of a global anti-American network “that runs from Russia, to China to Iran to Venezuela to WikiLeaks and the European Union – all of whom want to do ill toward the United States.”</p>
<p>Lobarev, head of the former intelligence officers’ group, told Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, a member of the Russian government’s President’s Human Rights Council, in a July 18 letter that Snowden formally sought membership in the group, according to the Russian business publication RBK Daily.</p>
<p>According to the report “veteran siloviki” want to recognize Snowden as a “colleague” who formerly worked in intelligence.</p></blockquote>
<p>As discussed previously, Anatoly Kucherena<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/freedom-fighter-edward-snowden-hires-kgb-lawyer-who-urged-ban-on-internet-anonymity/"> is an FSB stooge who supports every type of censorship</a> Putin can think of. The FSB is the successor to the KGB.</p>
<p>Snowden is deep in bed with an enemy intelligence agency. The technical term for that is spy. Or traitor. Or in Paulland, patriot.</p>
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		<title>KGB Distributed Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Muslim World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/kgb-distributed-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-to-the-muslim-world/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kgb-distributed-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-to-the-muslim-world</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Jun 2013 15:57:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim anti-semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USSR]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194680</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Andropov commissioned the first Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian-forged 1905 propaganda book]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/1297817095putin.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-194688" alt="Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (C" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/1297817095putin.jpg" width="380" height="255" /></a></p>
<p>While this is an interesting story, the idea of the KGB teaching the Muslim world to hate Jews is a little like the Muslim world teaching the Soviet Union to spy on its own people. There&#8217;s a long pre-existing tradition of that sort of thing.</p>
<p>But the <a href="http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=191086">USSR clearly attempted to exploit existing</a> Muslim <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2348191/EXCLUSIVE-KGB-operation-seeded-Muslim-countries-anti-American-anti-Jewish-propaganda-1970s-laying-groundwork-Islamist-terrorism-U-S-Israeli-targets.html">antisemitism for its own purposes</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>The highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West claims in a new book that anti-American Islamic terrorism had its roots in a secret 1970s-era KGB plot to harm but the United States and Israel by seeding Muslim countries with carefully targeted propaganda.</p>
<p>Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief for 15 years before he became the Soviet premier, sent hundreds of agents and thousands of copies of propaganda literature to Muslim countries.</p>
<p>Andropov began his leadership of the KGB just months before the 1967 Six-Day War between Arabs and Israelis, in which Israel humiliated the key Soviet allies Syria and Egypt. And he decided to settle the score by training Palestinian militants to hijack El Al airplanes and bomb sites in Jerusalem.</p>
<p>But more shocking, Andropov commissioned the first Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian-forged 1905 propaganda book that alleged Jews were plotting to take over Europe &#8211; and were being aided by the United States.</p>
<p>The Protocols book, Pacepa claims, became &#8216;the basis for much of Hitler&#8217;s anti-Semitic philosophy.&#8217; And the KGB, he writes, disseminated &#8216;thousands of copies&#8217; in Muslim countries during the 1970s.</p></blockquote>
<p>The KGB was just following in the footsteps of the Nazis which had also sent out copies of the Protocols to the Muslim world. But considering the origin of the Protocols in the Russian Secret Police in the Czarist era, there is something ironically appropriate about their Soviet successors passing it out.</p>
<blockquote><p>In 1972, Pacepa writes, his DIE agency &#8216;received from the KGB an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion along with &#8220;documentary&#8221; material, also in Arabic, &#8220;proving&#8221; that the United States was a Zionist country.&#8221;He was &#8216;ordered,&#8217; he adds, &#8216;to &#8220;discreetly&#8221; disseminate both &#8220;documents&#8221; within its targeted Islamic countries.&#8217;</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Stalin’s Secret Agents</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/stalins-secret-agents/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stalins-secret-agents</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 04:50:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[M. Stanton Evans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Roosevelt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin’s Secret Agents]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189385</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Communist subversion of Roosevelt’s administration.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/st.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-189387" alt="st" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/st.jpg" width="260" height="393" /></a>Try a word association quiz with the phrase “Cold War,” and the first two responses that are almost certain to come to the mind of the general public are “paranoia” and “McCarthyism,” which is practically a synonym for paranoia. The common assumption, thanks to decades of public school indoctrination and the influence of leftist intellectuals, is that the Cold War, at least in its early decades, was all about suspicious Republicans fearing a Red under every bed and blacklisting innocents in Hollywood. But a recent book (the paperback edition hits bookshelves next month), lays out the historical evidence for massive Communist penetration of our government beginning in the New Deal era, increasingly rapidly during World War II, and afterward leading to gaping breaches of national security and the betrayal of free-world interests.</p>
<p>Contrary to the notion that domestic Communists were simply harmless, misguided idealists, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Secret-Agents-Subversion-Roosevelts/dp/143914768X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1363213982&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Stalin%E2%80%99s+Secret+Agents"><i>Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government</i></a> by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein shows that widespread government infiltration by Soviet spies sabotaged our foreign policy and molded the post-WWII world in favor of the Soviet Union. Evans, the author of eight previous books including the controversial revised look at Joseph McCarthy called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blacklisted-History-Senator-McCarthy-Americas/dp/1400081068/ref=pd_cp_b_0"><i>Blacklisted by History</i></a>, is a former editor of the <i>Indianapolis News</i>, a <i>Los Angeles Times</i> columnist, and a commentator for the Voice of America. Romerstein is a leading Cold War expert, formerly head of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the U.S. Information Agency from 1983 until 1989, who has served on the staff of several congressional committees including the House Intelligence Committee.</p>
<p>The early Cold War spying which resulted in the theft of our atomic secrets, radar, jet propulsion, and other military systems was serious enough, but that wasn’t the major issue. “The spying,” as the authors put it, “was handmaiden to the policy interest,” which was by far the leading problem. As President Franklin Roosevelt’s health and mental ability waned, covert Communist aides exerted pro-Soviet influence on U.S. policy, which was reflected in postwar discussions by the Big Three powers about the new shape of the world. The policy impact of such deceptive influence on the part of Soviet agents</p>
<blockquote><p>was to turn Western influence and support against the anti-Communist forces and in favor of their Red opponents, as U.S. and other Allied leaders based decisions on false intelligence from pro-Soviet agents. The effects were calamitous for the cause of freedom, as numerous countries were thus delivered into the hands of Stalin and his minions.</p></blockquote>
<p>The three leaders – FDR, Churchill, and Stalin – “would ultimately decide what political forces would prevail where and the forms of government to be installed in formerly captive nations, including those in alignment with the victors.” Unfortunately, at that time “seeking Soviet ‘friendship’ and giving Moscow ‘every assistance’ summed up American policy [in meetings] at Teheran and Yalta, and for some while before those meetings.”</p>
<p>Three notable examples of countries “pulled into the vortex of Communist power” were Yugoslavia, Poland and China. Other nations in central Europe were absorbed into the Soviet empire as well, as prelude to the Cold War struggle. Similar results occurred in Asia, where millions were slaughtered in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos where Communists came to power. “Red police states would in due course extend from the Baltic to the Pacific, and later to Africa and Latin America… The supposedly progressive twentieth century thus became a saturnalia of tyranny and violence, surpassing in this respect also all previous records of such horrors.”</p>
<p>The most powerful pro-Red influence was actually the President himself. He distanced himself from Churchill’s warier stance about Russian imperialism, and instead made common cause with Stalin. “His main object was to get Stalin to agree with the Rooseveltian vision of a peaceable kingdom to come via the United Nations.” FDR seemed to be “guided very heavily by his advisers and took no step independently,” as one observer noted. Harry Hopkins, FDR’s longtime and most powerful adviser, “held pro-Soviet views of the most fervent nature.” Indeed, the authors claim, “Throughout the war years, Moscow had no better official U.S. friend than Hopkins.” FDR’s wife too advocated in a pro-Red direction, and Vice President Henry Wallace was “arguably the most prominent pro-Soviet political figure of his time.”</p>
<p>But entities outside the government affected American foreign policy in these years too. The press corps, academics, lobbyists, and think tanks all helped mold a climate of opinion that paved the way for pro-Red policymakers in federal office. Media spokesmen then helped promote pro-Soviet policy “while attacking the views and reputations of people who wanted to move in other directions.” A complicit media helping to advance the Communist agenda while shutting down opposition voices – sound familiar?</p>
<p>The most famous example of infiltration was, of course, the spy Alger Hiss, whose “skill in positioning himself at the vectors of diplomatic information indicates the degree to which Soviet undercover agents were able to penetrate the U.S. government in crucial places, up to the highest policy-making levels.” Hiss rose from obscurity to become the custodian of all memoranda for the President on topics to be considered at the crucial Yalta summit. However, “he wasn’t an isolated instance, but only one such agent out of many.”</p>
<p>The authors’ conclusions are threefold: 1) Communist penetration in the American government in the WWII-era and early Cold War was deep and extensive, involving many hundreds of suspects; 2) the infiltrators wielded important leverage on U.S. foreign policy in that period; and 3) pro-Soviet penetration and the resulting policy damage occurred because Soviet agents preyed on the credulity of officials who were willfully ignorant of Communist methods. “The net effect of these converging factors was a series of free-world retreats” in the face of Marxist conquests across Europe, Indochina, Latin American states, and African nations.</p>
<p>The lessons of this highly readable and concise history are well worth taking to heart today, not merely as an historical study, but as a reflection of the subversive infiltration and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on our current administration.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>New Cable Series Wants to Make Audiences Cheer for the KGB</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/new-cable-series-wants-to-make-audiences-cheer-for-the-kgb/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=new-cable-series-wants-to-make-audiences-cheer-for-the-kgb</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:49:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173603</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[  “It might be a little different to believe and get used to, but we want you to root for the KGB,” said Joel Fields.  “If you tried to tell a story like this about al-Qaeda now, it would be impossible; no one would want to hear it,” ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/new-cable-series-wants-to-make-audiences-cheer-for-the-kgb/0811b_4/" rel="attachment wp-att-173604"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-173604" title="0811b_4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/0811b_4.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="223" /></a></p>
<p>Oddly we never do seem to get around to that cable series which will make us cheer for the SS. But getting audiences to cheer for the KGB is fine. Because an organization that killed countless numbers of people, terrorized entire countries and engaged in every atrocity you can think of are the good guys&#8230; <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/337785/root-kgb-jonah-goldberg">so long as they&#8217;re fellow progressives</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>  Briefly sidelined by Sandy, FX’s The Americans started production in New York in December and gets a speedy launch on the network later this month.</p>
<p>The thriller, which stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as embedded Soviet spies in 1981 Washington, DC, made an appearance during Wednesday’s Television Critics Association winter press tour — and producers were quick to emphasize who viewers should be rooting for.</p>
<p>“It might be a little different to believe and get used to, but we want you to root for the KGB,” said EP Joel Fields. “They’re going to try to get the Soviets to win the Cold War.”</p>
<p>History knows they’re fighting a losing battle, but the creative team behind the high-profile launch expressed a confidence that more than enough time has passed for American audiences to not hold a grudge.</p>
<p>“If you tried to tell a story like this about al-Qaeda now, it would be impossible; no one would want to hear it,” Fields continued. “I feel even the same could have been said up to 10 years after the cold war ended.”</p></blockquote>
<p>A grudge? Really. This isn&#8217;t like the Yankees and the Red Sox.</p>
<p>There are plenty of Americans still living today whose family members were murdered by the KGB. Others spent decades in prison camps. And if the USSR had won the Cold War, all this would have come here.</p>
<p>Then again considering the existence of this series and this administration, sometimes it&#8217;s not clear who really won the Cold War.</p>
<p>And Joel Fields implies that he would like to tell a story in which you&#8217;re supposed to root for Al Qaeda, but not even the most liberal cable network will air that&#8230; until ten years from now.</p>
<p>Now you may never tune in to this series, but if you watch Rizzoli &amp; Isles, another show that Fields works on, you&#8217;re still putting money in his pocket. And even if you don&#8217;t, the current structure of cable is such that you&#8217;re paying for the KGB Hour and Al Jazeera in America.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/intels-new-iptv-might-kill-cable-2013-1">why cord cutting </a>is the answer. One of the most promising such proposals c<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/12/30/why-intels-new-iptv-service-will-do-what-google-apple-and-microsoft-cant/">omes from Intel which plans to </a>offer per channel and per series subscriptions. If it wins big, then Al Jazeera will have wasted 500 million dollars and the nature of the entertainment industry will change because your cable subscription will no longer be funding the leftist rantings of this country&#8217;s enemies.</p>
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		<title>Russia Celebrates the 95th Anniversary of the KGB</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/russia-celebrates-the-95th-anniversary-of-the-kgb/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=russia-celebrates-the-95th-anniversary-of-the-kgb</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:42:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=170352</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["On this day, exactly 95 years ago, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR was established All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Somewhere, deep underground, fireworks are being shot off in the faces of blindfolded prisoners. Somewhere muffled cheers are rising from behind iron bars. Somewhere a codes message of congratulations is passed through three routers, reflected off a mirror and sent deep into the frozen north from a government building in Washington D.C.</p>
<p>Yes boys and girls, it&#8217;s the Day of the KGB Agent, a special day every year to celebrate the founding of the KGB, under its various names, currently known as the FSB, and today is a very special KGB anniversary because it&#8217;s the 95th anniversary of the KGB.</p>
<p>For Putin, only the second KGB member to run the country, December 20th is an especially special day, and he marked it by holding a press conference blasting the United States.</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Qb63vKtCvRo?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" width="540" height="360"></iframe></p>
<p>&#8220;I am probably a bad Christian,&#8221; Putin said, referring to the Magntisky Act, &#8220;but when the United States slaps us in the face, I must answer.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Abu Ghraib is known to the whole world. In Guantanamo where they keep people for years without charging them and they walk in chains like in the Middle Ages. They carry out torture in the middle of the country. Can you imagine if we did that?&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Today we celebrate not only the 95th anniversary of our control, but also a national holiday, a special day for those who have chosen a difficult way of serving the Fatherland &#8220;, said the head of FSB in the Nizhny Novgorod region, Valery Nazarov.</p>
<p>&#8220;On this day, exactly 95 years ago, the Council of People&#8217;s Commissars of the RSFSR was established All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, recognized in the young Soviet Republic to provide internal and external security. Years passed by the changing international situation and polity of the country, but the defense of the state has always been in the forefront,&#8221; said Alexander Kalashnikov, head of the FSB in the Komi Region.</p>
<p>Happy KGB day to one and all.</p>
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		<title>The Norwegian Left&#8217;s KGB Romance</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/the-norwegian-lefts-kgb-romance/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-norwegian-lefts-kgb-romance</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Nov 2012 04:40:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jens stoltenberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[labour party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soviet]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=165641</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And its collaboration with Islamic totalitarians of today. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/the-norwegian-lefts-kgb-romance/1277628210-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-165674"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-165674" title="1277628210" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/12776282101-450x327.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="229" /></a>After Barack Hussein Obama was reelected as President of the United States in November 2012, the regular columnist Frithjof Jacobsen wrote in the Norwegian <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/norsk-politikk/artikkel.php?artid=10055523">newspaper VG</a> that the problem for Obama is that as a human being, he is so great that it becomes hard to live up to these expectations as a political leader. He claimed that the same was the case with another left-wing politician, Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.</p>
<p>Frithjof Jacobsen suggested that Stoltenberg is in a totally different league from all the other politicians in his country and has displayed exceptional “moral fiber.” If you believe this leading columnist in Norway’s largest national newspaper, “The public person Jens Stoltenberg has given the Übermensch a human face.”</p>
<p>Yes, he used the same term (<em>overmenneske</em> in Norwegian, <em>Übermensch</em> in the original German) as was employed by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche about exceptional human beings above normal morality, which was also used or misused by the Nazis for their own purposes. This is an embarrassing reminder of the tradition for personality cults surrounding various left-wing leaders throughout history, most of them deeply flawed.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2001/12/08/299904.html">In October 2001</a>, a few days after stepping down as Prime Minister for the first time, Stoltenberg damaged another car in a parking lot in Oslo after he reversed a car owned by the Labor Party. He then tried to run away from the bill, putting a meaningless parking ticket at the windscreen of the other car in case somebody was watching him, but without leaving his name, telephone number, registration plate number or an explanation. The only reason why the owners of the damaged car got paid was because a witness had watched what happened and decided to check to see if the former Prime Minister had truly left his personal information. He did not.</p>
<p>The damage to the other car amounted to 8000 Norwegian kroner. Not an enormous sum, but the main point is that Jens Stoltenberg’s first reaction was an attempt to cheat other people as long as he thought he could get away with it. The Labor Party later paid his bill, but only after they had been contacted about the case and it became too embarrassing for them to deny it.</p>
<p>This story may not be a major issue in itself, but it does tell us something about the man’s character which does <em>not</em> reveal “exceptional moral fiber.”</p>
<p>Far more serious are the allegations that in the 1980s Stoltenberg, as a political talent with good family connections, had more friendly relations with KGB contacts than was advisable. This was the case with many left-wing Western politicians in the Nordic countries and elsewhere. I must stress here that no evidence is available indicating that he did anything outright criminal in this context, but there are things in life that may not be illegal but are nevertheless unwise.</p>
<p>According to the author Alf R. Jacobsen, one of the great taboos of Norwegian politics is the way in which central members of the political Left, including the Labor Party, had contact with the KGB and other intelligence organizations from Communist dictatorships. After the arrest in 1984 of the spy Arne Treholt, a Labor Party politician, it became more difficult for Soviet authorities. One of the last important persons in Norway cultivated as a useful contact by the KGB before the collapse of the Soviet Union itself was the young and promising Jens Stoltenberg. He was, however, warned by his own security services and broke off all contact shortly after this.</p>
<p>As Jacobsen writes, “<a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/07/06/kultur/debatt/kronikk/spionasje/arbeiderpartiet/17206163/">When</a> I as editor of NRK <em>Brennpunkt</em> uncovered this case in December 2000, the reaction was powerful. I was condemned – not just by Jens Stoltenberg, who a few months earlier had become Prime Minister, but by virtually all of the leading press commentators.”</p>
<p>His boss Einar Førde, the director-general of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and a prominent Labor Party ideologue who himself had a shady relationship with the KGB, gave him the cold shoulder. The Labor-friendly members of NRK <em>Dagsrevyen</em>, the country’s leading TV news program, tried to undermine the case as either irrelevant or made up with <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=2936193">malicious</a> intent, as did the veteran reporter and foreign correspondent Jahn Otto Johansen.</p>
<p>Soviet authorities knew a great deal about the internal intrigues of local politics and had extensive files on many notable politicians, intellectuals and journalists. Alf R. Jacobsen is careful to note that none of these people were involved in criminal activities, but he questions whether they were wise. The KGB had many highly trained, cunning and calculating officers who were only there to infiltrate society. What could be gained from engaging in “dialogue” with organizations representing hostile powers in foreign countries with repressive rule?</p>
<p>Besides the KGB, the security services from many Soviet satellite nations under the rule of Communist dictators, for instance Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia and other countries, were sometimes active abroad, but perhaps the most active ones apart from the KGB were Stasi from East Germany (DDR).</p>
<p>Another prominent Labor Party member whom the KGB tried to cultivate as a contact was Sigbjørn <a href="http://m.nrk.no/m/artikkel.jsp?art_id=1908112">Johnsen</a>, Minister of Finance from 1990 to 1996 in PM Gro Harlem Brundtland’s Third Cabinet, and since 2009 in PM Jens Stoltenberg’s Second Cabinet, but he, too, broke off contact after having been warned. Quite a few others from the political Left, also from the Socialist Left Party, had a dialogue with representatives of the KGB.</p>
<p>The historian <a href="http://www.document.no/2011/07/hvem-av-ap-toppene-samarbeidet-ikke-med-kgb/">Roy Vega</a> has asked the provocative question:  which senior Labor Party members in Norway <em>didn’t</em> have close contacts with the KGB? Much of this was swept under the rug in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The public was told that Communists and people on the political Left had been put under unfair surveillance and that the security services were the bad guys. In this way, the Left avoided the uncomfortable prospect that someone might ask too many critical questions about their conduct and their many Stasi and KGB connections. They later pretended that this was all innocent, and simply part of a regular diplomatic exchange, but the KGB cultivated these contacts precisely because they were useful to them.</p>
<p>Some would claim that the nature of politics – and of foreign policy in particular – is that one sometimes has to deal with unpleasant people with whose opinions one disagrees. This is true up to a point, but some of these meetings with senior members of a foreign military power with obviously hostile intentions are still questionable.</p>
<p>It is also striking to notice that far fewer attempts were made to groom conservative politicians in this manner. The Communist regimes perceived the Left to be the West’s soft spot. They presumably had their reasons for that.</p>
<p>It is disturbing to notice that the very same groups and individuals who once appeased or collaborated with totalitarian outside forces during the Cold War are now doing the same thing with Islamic organizations.</p>
<p>Vebjørn Selbekk, the editor of a small Christian newspaper in Norway, on January 10 2006 reprinted the Danish Mohammed cartoons. The former Oslo bishop Gunnar Stålsett reacted by claiming that he did this because he took pleasure in harassing Muslims. Selbekk merely wanted show what the international news story was about.</p>
<p>Selbekk had expected some reactions, but not on the scale of what happened. He soon received 50 explicit death threats from Muslims, and at that point he stopped counting. Some of these were very graphic, with details about cutting his throat in his bedroom. Prior to this, he had lived a quiet family life. Suddenly everything was turned upside down, with bodyguards instructing his children to check for bombs under their car.</p>
<p>In addition to the death threats against him, massive pressure for Selbekk to back down came from leading Norwegian politicians such as Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of the Labor Party. After this event, the FM repeatedly had direct contact with leader <a href="http://www.tv2.no/nyheter/utenriks/midtosten/stoere-har-hatt-hemmelige-samtaler-med-hamas-3400055.html">Khaled Mashal</a> of the Palestinian Islamic terror organization Hamas, contacts which Støre tried to hide and deny. In 2007, the Stoltenberg government made Norway the first country in the Western world to attempt to “normalize” its relationship with the terrorists of Hamas, since its youth organization AUF, the labor unions (LO) and coalition partner the Socialist Left Party had all pushed for this.</p>
<p>In 2006 Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, at a point when Selbekk’s family were living with constant death threats, pointed to him as personally responsible for the burning of the Norwegian embassy in Damascus, Syria, perhaps the most serious attack on Norwegian territory since WW2. He thereby abandoned one of his countrymen and indirectly gave legitimacy to Islamic death threats against him. Selbekk has later described (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQD7JcORv-s">video</a>) that he felt as if the Stoltenberg government told militant Muslims “Just take him, he has hurt Norwegian interests.”</p>
<p>The conservative Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, showed some spine during the Cartoon Jihad and refused to apologize to Muslims for the actions of one newspaper in his country. The Socialist Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, displayed the spine of a badly baked soufflé and quickly caved in to Islamic pressure. If he has the exceptional “moral fiber” of an <em>Übermensch</em>, he certainly didn’t show it then.</p>
<p>As Vebjørn Selbekk warns, what is valuable is not free, including freedom of speech. Unfortunately, that lesson doesn’t seem to have sunk in with everybody, including the leaders of what was once called “the free world.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Russia Sinking</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/yulia-latynina/russia-sinking/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=russia-sinking</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 May 2012 04:11:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Yulia Latynina]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Corruption]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=132403</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The pathologies dragging a great nation down.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/russia-protests.png"><img class="size-full wp-image-132456 alignleft" title="russia-protests" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/russia-protests.png" alt="" width="460" height="307" /></a><em>Editor&#8217;s note: The article below, translated by <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/18/remembering-alexander-ginzburg/">George Gerich</a>, was written by Yulia Latynina in the &#8220;Novaya Gazeta&#8221; in 2010. Titled &#8220;Either the Swarm or the Anti-Bread Maker,&#8221; it triggered a threat from the Russian administration to bring the paper down. Latynina is a modern dissident in Russia.  The magazine “URA.Ru” re-published the article at its own risk.  </em></p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Swarm or the Anti-Bread Maker<br />
</span></strong>By Yulia Latynina<strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br />
</span></strong></p>
<p>The Reality of how Russia functions today:</p>
<p><strong>Adam Smith</strong></p>
<p>1.1. According to Adam Smith, when an individual acts in his own self-interest in a free market, the result is an increase in the benefit of all. When a baker bakes bread he’s not thinking of the general social good, he’s thinking about personal profit. But as a result of his actions there is an increase in the general welfare.</p>
<p>It is easy to see that this correlation between personal and general welfare is not always present in society. The marauders that pillage a city, reaping personal benefit, do nothing to increase the social welfare. A bureaucrat who exploits the benefits of his position in order to buy himself a higher one does not increase the general welfare. Throughout history there were many societies where it was more beneficial to be a pillager than a bread maker.</p>
<p>1.2. A society where it is profitable to be a bread maker is a free society.</p>
<p>A society where it is more profitable to be a marauder becomes an un-free society.</p>
<p>1.3. In Putin’s Russia it is disadvantageous to be a bread maker. It is more profitable to be a fire or medical inspector or a tax auditor who monitor the bread maker. The Russia of Putin is a serious case of a closed and un-free society.</p>
<p><strong>Economic  Degradation</strong></p>
<p>2.1. All un-free societies suffer from economic degradation. Rather than producing, everyone wants to control the producer. The baker who is trying to bake his bread or an entrepreneur attempting to organize the production of cell phones are demonstrating irrationality in their economic enterprises. Instead of maximizing their profits, they are maximizing their vulnerability. The bureaucrat best demonstrates rational behavior when he extorts a bribe from the businessman.</p>
<p>The simplest economic endeavor is no longer practical. It has been replaced by importing because the transactional expenses of any imported product are less than the transactional expenses of its production. The merchandise that is produced in the country is only that which cannot be produced abroad. For instance, stores or airports will still be maintained because a Muscovite will not buy milk in a shop in Warsaw.</p>
<p>2.2. One of the specifics of an economy during a period of degradation is its inability to develop high technology. Sophisticated technology is the most volatile part on an economy. You cannot have development in nanotechnology in a Byzantium-like country.</p>
<p><strong>Motivational Degradation</strong></p>
<p>3.1. An equally important consequence is “Africanization,” that is, a degradation of social motivation and expectations. The motivation to “build a career in a company” is replaced by “finding a more profitable position.”</p>
<p>Levels of education begin falling and that which simulates one to move forward disintegrates. If a federal judge makes $5,000 per month, there is no rational reason to get an education if, in this country, you are paid $500. As such, integrity and a good education becomes an economically absurd activity.</p>
<p>3.2. The fallout of this motivational disincentive results in a degradation of the educational system. One illustration of this degradation is reflected at the “International Branch of Moscow University Law School in Geneva.” The existence of this educational facility became known only after four of its students organized a sport car race in Geneva of Ferraris and Lamborghinis. The head of the “international branch” was a certain Mr. Gasanov, who just several years prior, was arrested in Moscow University for stealing ten million dollars from the government of Azerbaijan. According to the Moscow University website, the courses at the Geneva branch were taught in the Russian language.</p>
<p>One can only guess about the quality of the diplomas given out by this institution. Most amazing is not that these rich, young ignoramuses couldn’t get into Oxford or Harvard, but that their parents did not even think it necessary.</p>
<p>Here’s another example: upon completion of work at the “Seliger Camp” (for exceptional children) in 2006, top graduates were given an opportunity to receive practical education at “Gasprom” (Russia’s energy monopoly) or with the administrative staff of the President. In comparison, the government of Georgia pays for a university education of any high school student who graduated in the top ten percent of the class.</p>
<p>This cancer of low motivation destroys not only today’s society, but future societies as well.</p>
<p><strong>Degradation of the Ruling System</strong></p>
<p>4.1. In a closed society every level of every part of the ruling system, whether it’s a Department or an Agency evolve into governmental corporations, whose purpose is to expand the territory from which they can then extort bribes.</p>
<p>The strategic damage that these tactics influence society, as a whole, is not taken into account. Let’s take, for example, the Ministry of Finance. How is the Russian budget structured?</p>
<p>It is structured in a way that maximizes power for each bureaucrat of a department and for the Ministry of Finance over the entire country. The fact that regional governors, who receive funds from the central government, are not interested in developing a local tax base and do what they can to alienate and self-appropriate local businesses is of little concern to the Ministry of Finance. As a group their only motivation is that the more the governors depend on them in the center, the more windfall there will be for the center and each of them personally. In this controlled society every ruling level attempts to maximize, to the fullest, its potential to steal.</p>
<p>4.2. In addition, the individuals in ruling system stop carrying out even the orders that come from the top. As an example, consider the building of the sports facilities in Sochi (a future Olympics site) &#8211; Putin’s personal project. The work there is moving very slowly. Two groups of bureaucrats (who are in constant conflict) are demanding large kickbacks from each contractor. If only one group gets the kickbacks, the other could stop the entire project. But, if both get paid, the money they are demanding will preclude any possibility of making a profit on the Games.</p>
<p>In February 2008, Vladimir Putin visited Botlih and demanded that a military road be built there which he characterized as “one more access corridor to Georgia.” He stressed that this road should be able to handle “heavy military equipment.” However, in August 2008 the road, which would give access Georgia from a third direction, from Southern Ossetia and Abhazia, as well as from Dagestan, was not being built for a very simple reason – thievery.</p>
<p>4.3. This system behaves as if every bureaucrat, and not only Putin, is himself the center of this so-called ruling system. Everyone wants to decide everything.</p>
<p><strong>Degradation of Law Enforcement</strong></p>
<p><em> </em>5.1. The American economist, Arthur Laffer, once noted that when taxes reach a certain threshold the ability of the government to collect them begins to decline. This is known as the “Laffer Curve.” It appears that such a threshold also exists when it come to criminal behavior. Dimitry Kamenschik, co-owner of the Domodevo airport, calls this barrier the “penitentiary threshold.”</p>
<p>5.2. In a country where criminal violations exceed the penitentiary threshold, crime investigation becomes meaningless. Law enforcement groups not only stops preventing crime, but also become part of the problem by committing crimes themselves.</p>
<p>5.3. A system is not defined by mistakes. A system is defined by its reaction to mistakes. At present, when a police officer or bureaucrat commits a crime, the system tries to come to his defense.</p>
<p>5.4. As a result, the crime is no longer seen as a crime, but, rather, as a privilege afforded to a bureaucrat.</p>
<p>5.5.  Secondly, law enforcement officials stop doing that which they are supposed to do, i.e. conduct criminal investigations. It is believed that the MVD and prosecutors don’t do their job in not punishing the higher-ups. That is not so. It is system itself, which does not work.</p>
<p>Here is a simple example: on the 20<sup>th</sup> of March, 2009, a courier was robbed in 24 seconds on the tarmac of Vnukova Airport by a group of unknown armed men. He was carrying 43 million rubles ($1,075,000) in cash from Mahachkaly. Airport police routinely robbed such couriers, but this time when it became known that an investigation had begun, the robbers became “unknown persons,” though airport security knew them very well. Let me remind you that Vnukova is a government airport. It could well have happened that instead of well-armed robbers, the airport could, just as easily, been breached by terrorists, intent on capturing the airplane of Vladimir Putin.</p>
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		<title>Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/alger-hiss-why-he-chose-treason/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=alger-hiss-why-he-chose-treason</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 May 2012 04:37:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Christina Shelton's new book nails Hiss against the communist ideology that determined his actions and behavior.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/algerhiss.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-130890" title="algerhiss" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/algerhiss.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="571" /></a>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Christina Shelton, a retired US intelligence analyst; she spent the major part of her thirty-two year career (twenty two years) working as a Soviet analyst and a Counterintelligence Branch Chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She is the author of the new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Alger-Hiss-Why-Chose-Treason/dp/1451655428/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top"><em>Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason</em></a>.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Christina Shelton, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p><strong>Shelton: </strong>Thank you, Mr. Glazov.<strong><br />
</strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Let’s begin with you telling us what inspired you to write this book.</p>
<p><strong>Shelton: </strong>I have always had an abiding interest in both the Soviet Union and the intriguing world of espionage.  For the first major paper I wrote in high school a very long time ago, I chose the subject: “Stalin’s Forced Labor Camps.”  My interest continued at George Washington University where I studied at the Sino-Soviet Institute.  This led to a career in the Intelligence Community that covered counterintelligence in general and Soviet military and intelligence services in particular.  For a couple of years before I retired from the government in 2009, I thought about writing a book, despite the fact that I had spent thirty-two years writing intelligence assessments.  And the subject of Hiss “came to me” in a very natural way.  Except for the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss is probably the most famous American spy of the 20<sup>th</sup> century.  The case has all the trappings of a great story&#8211;a struggle between two titans (Hiss and Whittaker Chambers), a fallen idol, a divided nation over Hiss’s innocence or guilt, all occurring against the background of the important years in American history during the Great Depression and World War II. This story has drama – unlike the current cases where an individual spies for money.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Share with us some of the evidence that has surfaced over the recent years that confirms Hiss was a spy.</p>
<p><strong>Shelton: </strong>The most important evidence in recent years on Hiss’s role as a Soviet spy was revealed in KGB files and Hungarian state security records. The KGB archival material represents a significant breakthrough in shedding light on the KGB’s extensive penetration of the US government during the 1930s and 1940s.  In 1993, former KGB official Alexander Vassiliev was given access to KGB files.  After he defected, he had a friend send his notebooks of transcribed KGB documents to him.  Based on this material, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Vassiliev wrote <em>Spies: the Rise and Fall of the KGB in America</em> (2009).  Even though the material was from KGB files, there was some information on the GRU’s asset, Hiss.  In some cables, Hiss’s cover name was used, in others his name was cited in clear text. (Hiss had several cover names, among them ‘Jurist,’ ‘Leonard,’ and ‘Ales.’) One of the most damning KGB cables included a March 1950 document that noted  “the trial of the GRU agent ‘Leonard’ (Hiss) a division chief at the State Department and member of ‘Karl’s group’ (Chambers), had ended in his conviction at the beginning of 1950.”   Hiss was convicted in January 1950. It doesn’t get clearer than that!</p>
<p>Noel Field, a Communist, and former State Department colleague and friend of Hiss during the 1930s was arrested in Eastern Europe after the war and charged with being an American spy. Stalin had falsely accused him as part of his overall campaign to purge Eastern Europe’s Communist leaders. In 1992, Hungarian archivist, Maria Schmidt found the original transcripts of Field’s interrogation by Soviet and Hungarian state security.  In it, Field acknowledged that Hiss tried to recruit him in the 1930s in Washington DC.  Field said he told Hiss – in a moment of poor tradecraft – that he already worked for the Soviets as part of a KGB network (run by Hede Massing). This story of the attempted recruitment of Field by Hiss was corroborated by Chambers, Massing, and was in the KGB archival material.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What does your book do that no book has done before?</p>
<p><strong>Shelton: </strong>Most other books on Hiss focus on “the case.” In this book, I attempt to provide a strategic perspective, unique in the body of Hiss literature, by examining the case in the context of ideology. To understand Hiss and his actions, they must be seen from the perspective of what motivated his behavior – that is, his ideology.  I also emphasize the historical significance of the story based on Hiss’s role in foreign policy, specifically his importance in the founding of the UN and at the Yalta Conference.  Conventional wisdom is that Hiss was peripheral at Yalta; a low-level note taker.  In fact, evidence points to the centrality of his role at Yalta, as manifested in Secretary of State Stettinius’s diaries and personal papers.  In addition, I was able to portray the personal side and human dimension of Hiss with regard to his relationship with his first wife Priscilla and especially his son Tony. This caring, affectionate person is reflected in the hundreds of personal letters given to the NYU Tamiment Library by Tony Hiss.   His father was an inveterate letter writer and the library folders contain hundreds of letters written in the 1930s and during his 44 months in Lewisburg Federal prison.  As far as I know, this material, recently turned over to NYU, is not included in any other book on Hiss. And finally, although the most recent material from the KGB archives was covered in a book on overall espionage in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, for the first time all available evidence on Hiss is in a book specifically about Hiss.  This book contains the recent KGB information with regard to Hiss as well as material from the Hungarian archives.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What damage did Hiss do to America?</p>
<p><strong>Shelton:</strong>  Alger Hiss spied for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence).  Because GRU operational files never have been made available, the extent of Hiss’s damage is difficult to measure.  A damage assessment can be made directly only on a very small body of documentary evidence &#8212; documents of confidential military, State Department, and Navy cables Hiss gave to Chambers in the early months of 1938 (i.e. the so-called Pumpkin papers). These included, among others, summaries of cables by Ambassador Bullitt detailing pre-war events in Europe; activities of members of the anti-Comintern Pact, particularly in Asia, and detailed developments in China.  Therefore, because only a small amount of the many documents Hiss passed during several years are available a damage assessment also must be based on deductive reasoning. We know Hiss was a spy and we know he had access to highly classified material.  He had means, motive, and opportunity.  From his post at the State Department, Hiss had access to classified material on many issues, including US-China policy.  One specific example of deductive reasoning involves a State Department document relevant at the Yalta Conference.  Secretary of State Stettinius placed Hiss in charge of the “black books” – all the position papers for FDR on US strategy on issues to be discussed at Yalta. All this State Department material was to go directly to Hiss. One position paper noted that the State Department strongly opposed turning over to the USSR the southern Kurile and Sakhalin islands.  This memo never made it into the Yalta briefing books; Roosevelt thus was not aware of it, and therefore of State’s position.  Roosevelt conceded these territorial demands by Stalin.  But Stalin knew this position from his spy networks; a copy of this State Department memo was found in the Russian archives after the fall of the USSR.  So it was not only what Hiss gave to Moscow, but in this instance what he withheld from the US side that allowed him to influence plans and policy.</p>
<p>From Moscow’s assessment of Hiss, one could also deduce his value as an asset and the significance of the information he turned over to the Soviets. The GRU considered Hiss to be one of Moscow’s most important spies; evidence indicates he presumably was among the 5 GRU assets from the Washington DC apparatus that, according to Red Star, received Soviet decorations following the Yalta Conference in February 1945.  Moreover, following GRU defections and Stalin’s purges in his intelligence services in the late 1930s, GRU networks were in chaos and spies were being transferred to the KGB.  But not Hiss.  Indeed, a Soviet official in the KGB archives noted that if the KGB had ‘Jurist’ (Hiss) “no one else would really be needed.” Clearly, the GRU wanted to retain their high value asset.  This judgment of Hiss would have been based on the quality of his information and his ability to influence US policy toward Moscow from his post at the State Department.</p>
<p>Moreover, it was of great value to Moscow that it was able to use the documents Hiss had turned over to his GRU contact to break the State Department codes and tap into American diplomatic traffic.  This access, alone, to State Department plans and intentions prior to the onset of war would be invaluable to the Soviets. Sumner Welles, undersecretary of State (1937-1943) testified that the documents Hiss turned over to Chambers were critical to US security and specifically valuable to Moscow’s efforts to break US diplomatic codes.</p>
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		<title>Symposium: Russians vs. Vladimir Putin?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/symposium-putin-forever-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=symposium-putin-forever-1</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:15:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A distinguished panel gathers to discuss the KGB’s power and the new freedom movement in the streets of Russia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Putin9.jpeg"><img class="size-full wp-image-122728 alignleft" title="Putin9" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Putin9.jpeg" alt="" width="368" height="265" /></a></p>
<p><em>In this special Frontpage Symposium, we have gathered an All-Star panel to discuss the power of the KGB and the meaning of the new freedom movement in the streets of Russia. This symposium originally ran last week, under the title &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/17/symposium-putin-forever/">Symposium: Putin Forever?</a>,&#8221;  in our Feb. 17 issue. Due to the panel of titans that gathered and the vital dialogue that occurred, and in light of the events unfolding in Russia, the editors felt it appropriate to rerun this symposium.</em></p>
<p>Our distinguished guests in this symposium are:<strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Jim Woolsey, </strong>Director of Central Intelligence 1993-95.</p>
<p><strong>Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa</strong>, the highest-ranking official to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. Romania&#8217;s Communist president Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word for word out of Pacepa&#8217;s book <em>Red Horizons</em>, subsequently republished in 27 countries.</p>
<p><strong>Evgeny Legedin</strong>, a street-art painter and political activist from Yekaterinburg. As a coordinator of the youth anti-Putin movement &#8220;Oborona&#8221; and participant in the democratic movement &#8220;Solidarity,&#8221; he has organized countless rallies and demonstrations of protest, including the all-Russian campaign for freedom of rallies &#8220;Strategy-31.&#8221; He is the author of the mock prize &#8220;Golden Evsyuk,&#8221; the &#8220;award&#8221; given every year to the worst policemen in Yekaterinburg. In fear for being imprisoned on fabricated criminal charges, he fled Russia on August 16 and reached the UK, where he is seeking political asylum.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Igor Melcuk, </strong>Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Montreal and Member of the Royal Society of Canada. He left the Soviet Union in 1977 after being expelled from the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences because he defended Andrei Sakharov​ in a letter published in The New York Times​.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Gregory Glazov</strong>, a Rhodes scholar who is now Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Immaculate Conception School of Theology, Seton Hall University, USA and Program Coordinator of the Institute for Christian Spirituality&#8217;s Great Spiritual Books program which frequently focuses on spiritual writings in Soviet and Nazi prison camps. He is currently completing several manuscripts that include commentaries on <em>The Lord’s Prayer</em> and on <em>The Book of Job</em>, as well as an introduction to Jewish-Catholic relationships, entitled, <em>Brothers in Hope: Models of Judaism in Catholic Perspective</em> (NDU Press), and a translation and commentary on Vladimir Solovyov’s writings on Judaism and Christianity, an interest that bespeaks his spiritual legacy as the son of Russian dissidents, Yuri and Marina Glazov.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Jay Bergman</strong>, a Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University, where he teaches Russian and modern European history.  He received his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and his M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D from Yale University.  He is the author of <em>Vera Zasulich: A Biography</em>, published by <a href="../2010/10/14/the-life-and-thought-of-andrei-sakharov/">Stanford University Press</a>​; and articles in Russian intellectual history.  He is also on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars, a nationwide organization of professors committed to reasoned scholarship, intellectual diversity, and nondiscrimination in faculty hiring and student admissions. His newest book is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0801447313/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&amp;n=283155&amp;s=books"><em>Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov</em></a>, published by Cornell University Press.</p>
<p><strong>Yuri Yarim-Agaev, </strong>a former leading Russian dissident and a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Upon arriving in the United States after his forced exile from the Soviet Union, he headed the New York-based Center for Democracy in the USSR.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Theodore Dalrymple</strong>, a world-renowned and critically-acclaimed author, retired physician (prison doctor and psychiatrist),<em> </em>a contributing editor to <em>City Journal </em>and the author of the new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anything-Goes-ebook/dp/B005II64VS/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1317619775&amp;sr=1-8">Anything Goes</a>.</p>
<p>and<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Dr. David Satter, </strong>a Rhodes Scholar who is now<strong> </strong>a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was Moscow correspondent of the <em>Financial Times </em>of London from 1976 to 1982, during the height of the Soviet totalitarian period and he is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Dawn-Russian-Criminal-State/dp/0300098928"><em>Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State </em></a>and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Delirium-Decline-Soviet-Union/dp/0300087055/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1256004140&amp;sr=1-1"><em>Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union</em>,</a> which is being made into a documentary film. His new book is <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Long-Time-Never-Happened-Anyway/dp/0300111452/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1329562560&amp;sr=1-1">It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past</a>.</em><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Jim Woolsey, Evgeny Legedin, Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Igor Melcuk, Gregory Glazov, Theodore Dalrymple, Mike Pacepa, Jay Bergman and David Satter, welcome to this special edition of Frontpage Symposium. We are honored to be graced by such a distinguished all-star panel, which includes two ex-spy chiefs from opposite sides of the Cold War.</p>
<p>Dr. Gregory Glazov, let me begin with you, since it was a letter written to me by you, about a previous symposium, <a href="../2011/08/26/symposium-russia-after-elena-bonner/"><em>Russia After Elena Bonner</em></a>, that inspired this symposium.</p>
<p>We have gathered today to discuss the power of the new KGB and the meaning and potential of the new freedom movement we have seen emerging in the streets of Russia. But let us first build the foundation to that discussion by going back to the fireworks in a previous symposium that will help crystallize the key themes that our panel will be dealing with today:</p>
<p>In <em>Russia After Elena Bonner,</em> the panelists ganged up on Yuri Yarim-Agaev who stated (or seemed to be stating) that the KGB no longer had much power in Russia. You felt that Yuri Yarim-Agaev may have been trying to say something different and that each side may have misunderstood – and misrepresented – the other.</p>
<p>Let’s begin with your thoughts on the collision in <em>Russia After Elena Bonner. </em></p>
<p><strong>Dr. Gregory Glazov: </strong>Thank you Jamie for inviting me to this discussion. Let me begin by reflecting, as you ask me to do, on the “<a href="../2011/08/26/symposium-russia-after-elena-bonner/">Russia After Elena Bonner</a>” Symposium. The Symposium took a passionate turn after nearly all of its participants took care to disagree with Yuri Yarim Agaev’s stipulation, in his second reflection, that the FSB, while the direct descendant of the KGB, cannot and will never operate with its former strength. I agree with all the arguments advanced in detail against this stipulation. It seemed to me, however, that the Symposium ended prematurely and required another round of discussion to clarify whether the disagreement was fundamental or resolvable.</p>
<p>In the interest of exploring the potential for some rapprochement between the views expressed, I would like to begin by underscoring the overall lessons I drew from the Symposium. First I think I understood the opening thrust of Yuri Yarim-Agaev’s second reflection. He regretted that a Symposium devoted to the memory of Elena Bonner turned out to emphasize the fearsome strength of the modern FSB over the fact of her victory over its predecessor. Wishing to refocus the Symposium on her heroic courage, Yuri Agaev did so by stipulating two things:</p>
<p>a) the modern FSB is continuous with the KGB but less powerful and fearsome, partly because</p>
<p>b) everybody else is even weaker, even the post-Soviet human rights community which is not continuous with the former human rights community, since its members lack, relatively speaking, people who have the courage of Bonner.</p>
<p>It would seem to me that this argument weakens Yuri Yarim- Agaev’s leading premise, namely the importance of Bonner’s legacy today. If Bonner has lessons to teach today about courage, these lessons demand a clear and detailed exposition of what is to be feared. These are the lessons set out in detail by Konstantin Preobrazhensky, Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa and Igor Melcuk.</p>
<p>The 144 journalists who have been killed under Putin’s presidency testify both to the fact that the KGB has entrenched itself in modern Russia and to the presence of self-sacrificing courage on the part of the journalists who continue to die for standing up to it. On what grounds can such courage be judged to be discontinuous with that of Bonner? In light of this, would it not be appropriate to change the conclusion of Konstantin Preobrazhensky’s response to Yuri Agaev by not denying that a new Elena Bonner could and does appear in Russia. That she would be shot down like Anna Politkovskaya and the many other real dissidents only underscores that all these are the re-instantiations of her type. The great question that remains concerns the nature of their or her power. If “she” is recurrently shot on appearing, it is so because of the fear that she generates in the echelons of “power.” But fear betokens weakness and the consciousness that the “power” in question cannot be taken seriously but is a “farce.” A good measure of the argument in the symposium turned on the connotation attributed to this last word. It would be good to clarify whether it can be used accurately to describe the nature of Putin’s pretensions without belittling his murderousness.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Thank you Dr. Greg Glazov.</p>
<p>Yuri Yarim-Agaev, your turn to clarify your position.</p>
<p><strong>Y</strong><strong>uri Yarim-Agaev:</strong> Let me make it very clear: I never said that Putin’s regime or the FSB are not vicious, fearsome, or criminal. On the contrary, I was among the first to expose and condemn their crimes, and continue to do so. I believe also that it is common knowledge that Putin’s regime is antidemocratic and has zero respect for human rights. However, the subject of this symposium is not how bad Putin’s regime is, but rather how strong and lasting it is, and there is a big difference between two.</p>
<p>Being vicious does not mean being strong. Our outrage at the atrocities of Putin’s regime is fully justified, yet if we become driven by emotion and fear we may grant Putin what he desires most: the overestimation of his power. I am really concerned about that, particularly in light of the most recent developments.</p>
<p>Many Russian and Western pundits and politicians readily accepted Putin&#8217;s re-nominating himself for the presidency, and granted him not only the next election but even the one after that&#8211;12 more years. This acceptance can only be explained by the belief that Putin has unlimited power and no one can challenge him for many years ahead. Such a generous recognition of Putin’s power is neither helpful for Putin’s opponents in Russia nor serving the interests of our country, and it should not be granted with such ease.</p>
<p>The fact that the KGB has returned to power in Russia, that it now occupies many top governmental positions, that it continues to suppress political opposition, and that it murders its critics is not proof of its omnipotence. We shall not ignore those facts and shall make them known to everyone. Yet there is a big difference between being vigilant about the ruthlessness and crimes of the regime, and being paralyzed by its atrocities.</p>
<p>Putin’s propaganda would have us believe that his regime is very strong. We should not give him a free ride, however, since it would seriously undermine our efforts to hold the regime accountable for its crimes. The adepts of realpolitik would say: &#8220;We know how bad Putin is but there is no alternative. He is here forever and we have to deal with him as he is.&#8221; That is why in analyzing Putin’s power it is important not to be overwhelmed by the omnipresence of the KGB and the crimes it commits, but also be cognizant of the many facts which indicate that Putin’s regime may be not so strong.</p>
<p>As bad as Putin’s Russia is, it radically differs from the Soviet Communist empire. Russia is no longer a totalitarian country, but rather an authoritarian one. The new rulers do not tolerate any political opposition, but on the other hand don’t interfere much into the private lives of ordinary citizens. In comparison with Soviet Communism, life for people in Russia has changed dramatically: they are now free to leave the country; they have broad access to information, and have substantial economic independence. No credit should be given for these changes to Putin or the FSB. If it were their choice, they would have probably cut back all those incremental steps of freedom. But they have not, and that fact in itself indicates limits on their power.</p>
<p>Despite the above evidence there is an argument, popular among the KGB professionals, that once it is free from the control of communist bosses, the FSB becomes much more effective and even stronger than the KGB. This sounds, however, like the typical belief on the part of many professionals that their political or business bosses merely restrict them, while they forget that those very bosses assure their ability to conduct their professional work. The KGB was created and empowered by the Communist system and it was on the edge of elimination when Soviet Communism collapsed.</p>
<p>The secret police cannot be a self-sustaining force and operate in a vacuum. They are a tool of political power which provides for its operation, but also imposes its control. The new political power in Russia is Putin and his comrades. It is true that they come from the KGB, and that their political philosophy and their loyalty have been determined by that organization. Yet when they moved to the top political positions, their role changed. Putin acquired many new responsibilities and has to balance his act. He cannot let the FSB run amok, but has to restrict it within the scope of his autocratic rule, much more limited than totalitarian communist rule. As a result, the FSB’s control over people’s lives, and hence its power, is much more restricted than the KGB&#8217;s.</p>
<p>The atrocious killing of political opponents does not prove either that the FSB became as strong as and even stronger than the KGB. First, the KGB has always carried out political murders and in Brezhnev’s time against dissidents as well; I testified before the US Congress in 1983 on that matter. But the Soviet authorities did not have to resort to this often since they had complete control over the courts, psychiatric institutions, and all the laws and regulations they needed. The projection of power is much stronger when it is implemented through the official system of government institutions than through secretive murders. So the fact that the new regime kills its political opponents instead of trying them is to me a sign of their weakness, rather their strength.</p>
<p>These murders, however heinous, neither deter the regime’s critics, nor terrorize the majority of the population. The authorities seem to be very selective in targeting only direct political opponents, and people know that. The current regime hardly rules by force and terror.</p>
<p>If we want to understand the real strength and longevity of the current Russian regime we should concentrate not on the physical force of the FSB, its numbers, and readiness and ability to kill, but rather on the strength of Putin’s political mandate.</p>
<p>So what secures Putin’s political power, and how strong is it actually? Briefly, the social contract which Putin has with Russia stands on two pillars: material well-being and stability. More specifically, the following factors have helped the KGB and Putin come to power and hold it.</p>
<ul>
<li>Disillusionment with democracy and the free market as Russians saw it in the 1990s.</li>
<li>Fear of lawlessness and striving for law and order.</li>
<li>The old habits of living in a deterministic society, particularly on the part of the older generation.</li>
<li>The high price of oil and natural resources, which allows for a comparatively decent standard of living without unleashing the forces of creativity and free enterprise.</li>
<li>The social systems and infrastructures, though shabby and deteriorating, inherited from Communism: cheap medicine, education, apartments, etc., which allowed the government to save on those expenses for some period of time.</li>
<li>Post Communism credit&#8211;a substantial increase in production and the standard of living in comparison with the utmost inefficient central planning economy.</li>
</ul>
<p>One can see that most of these factors are of a temporary nature: people’s memories are fading, the older generation is dying off, and the price of natural resources can fall at any moment, Any of these developments will weaken or undermine Putin’s authority or force him to drastic reforms, which would dramatically decrease his and the FSB’s power&#8211;or even oust them.</p>
<p>There are many signs that the Putin regime has never been very strong. It failed to create in Russia a modern competitive economy; it has mixed results at best in its attempt to impose control over the former Soviet republics; and it is losing continuously the most creative and entrepreneurial segments of the population to the West.</p>
<p>There are also signs that indicate that Russia’s ruling elite is not so confident in the strength and longevity of its position. Russia’s rulers try to extort as much money as they can and put it in foreign banks, keep their families abroad, establish foreign residence and even citizenship, and try to maintain good personal relations with influential Western friends. All that looks like the right escape route.</p>
<p>The Putin regime is far from omnipotent, but its weaknesses can cost it power only when challenged by political opposition. When demand of society for such an opposition becomes strong, Putin and the FSB will not be able to suppress it. It may take time, though, for such an opposition to become real political force, and we cannot do much to facilitate that process. One thing we can do, however, is stop helping to prolong Putin’s presidency, stop legitimizing it. For that purpose we should:</p>
<ul>
<li>Expose political crimes, hold Putin and the FSB accountable for each unsolved political murder, deprive them of the presumption of innocence.</li>
<li>Support democratic opposition in Russia.</li>
<li>Decrease our dependence on oil.</li>
<li>Realize that Putin’s Russia is not our ally and stop including Russia in multilateral negotiations, be it the Middle East, North Korea or others.</li>
<li>Minimize the role of the UN and its Security Council.</li>
<li>Stop granting residency and citizenship to the ruling Russian elite and their families.</li>
<li>Stop “reset” policy whose only purpose is legitimizing Putin’s government.</li>
<li>Spotlight the issue of Soviet Communism and its crimes, which will help undermine the legitimacy of the KGB and Russia&#8217;s current rulers.</li>
<li>And expose any weaknesses of the Putin regime.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Dr. Theodore Dalrymple: </strong>Surely the problem we are dealing with is the old one of continuity in change. No one would say either that nothing has changed in Russia or that everything has changed. And no one would have expected the country, with its history, to turn into a Scandinavian democracy.</p>
<p>The FSB is powerful and active, the descendant of the KGB; the KGB privatized Russia largely to its own benefit. But the one thing that it lost was a patina of ideological justification. Even lip service to the idea of freedom and democracy imposes certain limitations, unwelcome as they may be. That is why the killing of journalists appears more like common gangsterism: the old authoritarianism is there but it dares not speak its name, it has no justification beyond the preservation of power whose only justification for itself is that it brings order and supposed strength, as well as the kind of respect abroad that a mugger demands in the Bronx.</p>
<p>It follows from this that I think Yuri Yarim-Agaev&#8217;s distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in Russia is an important and sound one, and of fundamental importance. Since the new authoritarianism is lacking in any kind of ideological justification that transcends the present conjuncture, I think it is inherently unstable &#8211; but is therefore unpredictable and, given the situation and traditions of the country, dangerous. A change in the price of oil &#8211; downwards, of course &#8211; would almost certainly effect a big change, though the other former republics would have much to fear in this event.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. David Satter: </strong>The purpose of the KGB was to create reality. The KGB forced every Soviet citizen to participate in an ideological play and it was its effort not just to destroy any and all opposition but to force each citizen to demonstrate his “happiness” that was the secret to its enormous power.</p>
<p>The FSB is quite different. Like the KGB, it is concerned to destroy opposition but as Yuri points out, it leaves Russians free to think what they like. It has no higher purpose beyond assuring the regime’s power. It is the backbone of the regime and it benefits from it. But it does not try to remold people but only to teach them that serious opposition could pose a danger to their lives.</p>
<p>Putin bases his power on the FSB but not only. He draws on a ruling clan that is itself divided into clans many of which are at war with each other. This small group which controls vast property and monopolizes power is uneasy precisely because its members are united by nothing but greed but aspire to be a permanent leadership. They seek to do this, moreover, without the instruments of repression that were available to the KGB. Had the Soviet Union not imploded from within, it could have withstood any level of external pressure. This is far from the case for Putin’s Russia. The FSB is therefore the uneasy watchdog of a situation that could rapidly slip out of control.</p>
<p>Against this background, the most urgent necessity is the development of a democratic consciousness in Russia, which appeared briefly during the perestroika years, and then was drowned in the criminality of the Yeltsin era and the Putin succession. The dissidents under the Soviets were important because their opposition was a fundamental moral opposition. This is a lesson that the present Russian opposition, with its emphasis on fighting corruption – a mere symptom – does not seem to have learned.</p>
<p>Well, is the Putin/FSB regime strong or weak? The question cannot be answered in only one way. It is strong in that it has vast potential for violence and, at the moment, faces very little opposition. But it is weak because it aspires to a degree of exploitation and perpetual control that is not possible under non-totalitarian conditions. In the event of a serious, systemic crisis, the FSB’s violence could well be unleashed. (A good example of the moral level of the Putin regime was the decision to open fire with flame throwers and grenade launchers on a school gymnasium packed with hostages during the 2004 Beslan school crisis.) This could lead to horrific bloodshed signaling the birth of a new, fully terroristic dictatorship. The best hope of preventing such a development is the strengthening of a democratic consciousness in Russia capable of motivating Russians to use the freedoms that do exist to assure a peaceful transition.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Igor Melcuk:</strong> Sorry, I don&#8217;t know whether Putin&#8217;s regime is strong or weak; but that it is disgusting is not questionable. I&#8217;ll try to focus my ideas about today&#8217;s Russia and organize them in a logical way.</p>
<p>I emphasize that I don&#8217;t have sufficient information: a few fleeing observations during a short visit to Moscow, exchanges with friends and leafing through the press.</p>
<p><strong>1) The Present State of the Russian State.  </strong></p>
<p>Yes, Mr. Yarim-Agaev is right in that modern Russia is an authoritarian rather than totalitarian state; as Dr. Satter correctly notes, there are no visible ideological underpinnings. Russians are allowed to travel, to think and say aloud what they think or even criticize the government, including Putin and Medvedev personally. Unfortunately, I see the reason for this “liberalism”:  the authorities understood that there is no danger for them in all that. They allow Russians to let off some steam, which is very smart of them.</p>
<p>They know that the Russian people are massively and resolutely behind them: that was my impression in Moscow, reinforced by conversations with acquaintances and colleagues. And we should not forget that the authorities ruthlessly stop any attempt to do them any real harm: remember the deaths of Magnitsky and Litvinenko. Russia remains a rogue country, supporting Chávez and North Korea, protecting Iran, sending its spies in UK and USA, etc.</p>
<p><strong>2) A Probable Future of the Russian State.</strong></p>
<p>If energy prices drop dramatically, the internal situation will become desperate. Yet I doubt that the popular fury will then be leveled at the government and the political class. Russians are <em>not </em>Europeans: they will hate Europeans and Americans, as they always did. I am afraid the ruling gang will unleash another wave of Great Terror against intellectuals, Jews and Westerners (which is one and the same for an average Russian). I hope only for this bloodbath to remain within Russia&#8217;s borders and to not spill over—although this is by no means precluded. In the worst scenario, Russians (and Russia) will collaborate with radical Islam: this is exactly the ideology that an average Russian needs (even if he does not know it).</p>
<p><strong>3) The Ideology of the FSB.</strong></p>
<p>True, the FSB, in sharp contrast to the KGB, does not enforce any ideology, but only the brutal power of a few mafia clans. So what? It is much easier. The idea that the rulers need an ideological reason for their survival is totally incorrect, when applied to Russia.  What ideology had Latino-American dictators and their families? Their rule was limited only by assassination. And Russians are much easier to rule than Mexicans or Venezuelans. Seventy years of well-directed terror and several indescribable wars have changed the genetic pool of Russian people. And the FSB will have no trouble herding the miserable remains.</p>
<p><strong>4) Opposition: There is None. </strong></p>
<p>Not enough decent people among Russians. There seems to be not enough decent people among the French or the British, or even the Americans; what can we expect from a population that has been subjected to such an un-natural selection for such a long time? Under the Soviets the dissidents fought because they had hope: they believed that it would be sufficient to push the Communist tyranny out—and Russia will become at least a quasi-normal country. (By the way, I also hoped for such a change.) But then it turned out that the Russian people did not want democracy. Putin does not have to rig up elections: he will get an absolute majority anyways. For two centuries, the Russian social elite were lionizing the Russian people, worked for it and died for it; and then the people showed their real colors—supporting the Bolshevik bloody regime. And just 20 years ago, we saw this for a second time. Russians have today what they are worth.</p>
<p><strong>5) What Can Be Done:</strong></p>
<p>Inside Russia: To tell the truth, I don&#8217;t know. If I had to live there now, I would try to do my job as well as I can and to spread the normal human mentality. History has time.</p>
<p>Outside Russia: To oppose the regime on every step. For instance, to limit the mobility of Russian strongmen and especially of their capitals. Exactly, because they are simple Mafiosi, they need our banks and our markets. This makes it so much easier to pressurize them. Modern Russia is our deadly enemy, and it should be treated as such. Without an outside pressure nothing normal will happen in this half-Asiatic country.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Jay Bergman:</strong> I agree with other participants in this symposium that the FSB exercises considerable power in Russia.  In light of Russia’s history, this is hardly surprising.  As early as the seventeenth century, when serfdom was formalized into law, Russia was a country based on mutual fear: the people feared the government and the government feared the people.  The only conceivable alternative to autocracy was not democracy but anarchy, and the anarchic violence pervasive in the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century, and later in the peasant revolts of Razin, Bulavin, and Pugachev, caused Russia’s rulers, then and thereafter, to take whatever steps were necessary to defend the political status quo.  By the twentieth century Russia had become a monarchical police state, in which the political police (the Okhrana) captured political criminals, and in the absence of any judicial proceeding or determination of guilt, imposed punishment.  The same phenomenon, on a much larger scale and with infinitely greater brutality, occurred in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.</p>
<p>But the influence of national culture and history isn’t the only reason Putin, largely through the FSB, suppresses dissent.  Another is that he considers the political system he has fashioned since assuming the Russian presidency almost eleven years ago – for public relations purposes he calls it “managed democracy” – to be weaker than it actually is.  In Putin there seems to be a nagging sense of political and personal insecurity that causes him not only to engage in juvenile exercises in machismo, such as riding a horse bare-chested in Siberia, but also to deal more harshly with critics than the substance of their criticism would seem to require.  The journalists killed by the FSB, for example, by and large did not call for the overthrow of the regime, or even for its radical transformation.  And yet Putin, like the Soviet leadership in the Brezhnev era in responding to dissidents such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, seems to consider criticism of any kind, no matter how constructively intended, destructive of his own legitimacy and that of his regime.  Entrusting to the FSB the task of silencing &#8212; if necessary by actual murder – those who criticize his policies is therefore a perfectly logical reaction given Putin’s subjective evaluation of his own security and power.</p>
<p>To be sure, Putin’s regime, unlike the Soviet Union in the Stalin era, is not engaged in massive projects of social engineering like the collectivization of agriculture, or in creating a new managerial elite by physically destroying the old one, as Stalin did through the terror he  unleashed in the mid 1930’s.  As a result, the FSB has not nearly the responsibilities, nor the enormous power, of the old Soviet OGPU and NKVD.  Putin’s actions, first as president and then as prime minister, make clear that his principal objective is not to transform Russia internally but rather to increase and expand its influence externally.  Incorporating into Russia the countries contiguous to it that declared their independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 – what Russians call collectively “The Near Abroad” – is the foremost objective of Russian foreign policy.  In fact, reconstituting the old Soviet Union, albeit without its legitimizing ideology of Marxism-Leninism, is for Putin the means of achieving the legitimacy he believes he needs.</p>
<p>And so, while it seems unlikely that Russia will soon degenerate into a kind of neo-Stalinism, in which mass terror is always a threat and occasionally a reality, the absence of democracy and the violations of human rights other participants in the symposium have focused on are sure to continue for the foreseeable future.  Among the factors making this prediction plausible, above and beyond the present-day requirements of the Putin regime, is Russia’s distinctive political culture, one of the most durable features of which is the belief of Russian rulers, tsarist as well as Soviet, that the Russian people are children and therefore too immature and irrational to share in governance.  Unfortunately in this instance, although national cultures are capable of changing, they usually do so only very slowly and incrementally.</p>
<p>I wish I could be more optimistic about Russia’s immediate future.  No, Putin will not rule forever.  But his successors will not be radically different.  And no amount of soothing rhetoric from American presidents about “resetting” Russian-American relations will change that.</p>
<p><strong>Evgeny Legedin: </strong>I agree with Yuri Yarim-Agaev characterizing Putin&#8217;s Russia as an authoritarian state with unique features. Besides the FSB’s total infiltration of all important political and civil institutions, I see one crucial property: Putin&#8217;s gang simulates democratic institutions: elections, the mass-media and the judicial system. Putin&#8217;s propaganda tries very hard to produce the illusion of &#8220;democracy.&#8221; And who are the consumers of this illusion?</p>
<p>I think Putin creates pseudo-democracy for Russians first of all. That&#8217;s his message for common people: We, like the West, have democracy and elections but there&#8217;s no need of riots and revolutions to change the government. In other words, the Kremlin tries to transform all protest activity into one action, when passive people go to polls one time in four years and &#8220;vote&#8221; for puppet parties.</p>
<p>I dare to draw a parallel with the movie &#8220;Matrix,&#8221; in which machines employing humans as electric cells, create for each person a virtual reality in order to prevent revolution. How long will Putin&#8217;s Matrix last? It depends on his popularity. If Russians collectively disobey Putin, he will lose power. Civil resistance can be very symbolic and effective. For example, all dissidents can boycott the Duma and Presidential &#8220;elections&#8221; by drawing caricatures or writing protest slogans on polling bulletins, taking the pictures of these bulletins and downloading them on Youtube.  Thousands of people will see such a video. For instance, even some TV channels and magazines published pictures of my protest bulletin.</p>
<p>In 2008 after the Presidential &#8220;elections,&#8221; I downloaded a video unto the internet; it was of how I had drawn a caricature of Medvedev on the polling bulletin. Watching this video of active boycotting, people are forced to ask themselves if they agree with my key-message or not. And when people begin to ask such questions, that&#8217;s the ground for a revolution of minds, after which is the turn for street revolutions.  If we want that revolution to be a peaceful one and without blood, like &#8220;classic&#8221; revolutions (French of 1789 or Russian of 1917), then the Russian opposition has to teach common people the ABC of Ghandi-style civil resistance. The Kremlin clearly sees the danger of Ghandi-tactics and oppresses mainly civil activists who promote the Ghandi-like Strategy-31 campaign.</p>
<p><strong>Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa:</strong><strong> </strong>I greatly appreciate Dr. Gregory Glazov&#8217;s initiative for resuming the conversation of our Symposium on <em>Russia After Elena Bonner.</em> It was indeed stopped in midstream.</p>
<p>I agree with the core of what had so far been said in this follow-up Symposium. Gregory&#8217;s prediction that a new Elena Bonner in today&#8217;s Russia will not be sent to the gulags but will be shot like Anna Politkovskaia, is my guess as well. Yarim-Agayev&#8217;s view that the KGB&#8217;s assassination of its critics does not prove omnipotence is, in my view, also right on the money. And, as always, I concur with Dr. Satter&#8217;s vision: the KGB&#8217;s historic violence could indeed lead to horrific bloodshed signaling the birth of &#8220;a new, fully terroristic dictatorship.&#8221;</p>
<p>The KGB role in Soviet Russia was, however, a lot broader than just squelching political opponents, although most of its other tasks were so highly classified that few who were outside its <em>inner sanctum</em> knew about them.</p>
<p>For example, the KGB was also the custodian of all the Soviet Union&#8217;s nuclear arsenal. This super secret task was given to the KGB (at that time called NKVD) on September 29, 1949, when the first Soviet nuclear bomb, built with American technology stolen by Soviet spies (the Rosenberg network) was successfully exploded at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan.</p>
<p>When I left Romania for good, the KGB was safekeeping some 6,000 nuclear bombs, along with many thousands of nuclear artillery shells.</p>
<p>All these nuclear weapons had been developed and manufactured in KGB-managed cities hidden throughout Russia. Not a single such secret town was listed even on the Soviet Union’s most highly classified maps. Chelyabinsk city in the Urals was on the map of the Soviet Union, but Chelyabinsk-40, a city of 40,000 people also located in the Urals, was not. Nor did any maps show Chelyabinsk-65, Chelyabinsk-70, Chelyabinsk-95 and Chelyabinsk-115, all in the Urals. Krasnoyarsk city was shown in eastern Siberia, but there was no mention anywhere of Krasnoyarsk-25, Krasnoyarsk-26 and Krasnoyarsk-45.</p>
<p>After a nuclear accident at the East Siberian city of Tomsk-7 in April of 1993, ten newer “secret cities” located in that part of the country were disclosed. Recent information has shown that the nuclear military industry of the former Soviet Union might alone have had as many as 87 &#8220;secret KGB cities,&#8221; some occupying whole islands, such as the military laboratories on Vozrozhdeniye and Komsomolsk islands in the Aral Sea.<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a></p>
<p>These secret KGB cities are so enormous, they almost cannot be disassembled. Nothing so far indicates they have been. They, and the custody of the country&#8217;s nuclear arsenal, made the KGB the most powerful—and most dangerous—intelligence organization in the world.</p>
<p><em>Glasnost</em> and its spectacular outcome in Eastern Europe made an instant hit in the West. The nuclear-armed KGB, however, proved to be a horse of another color. On June 22, 1991, its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, informed the Soviet parliament that the motherland was on the brink of catastrophe. He then revealed “secret” KGB information showing that Western intelligence services were drawing up plans for the occupation of the Soviet Union. By remarkable coincidence, his speech was “clandestinely” videotaped and broadcast on Soviet television that same evening.</p>
<p>Soon after that, the world was horrified by news of a KGB <em>coup d&#8217;état</em> in Moscow.</p>
<p>The official Soviet version is that the KGB coup collapsed. The main loser, however, was the Communist Party, not the KGB. The Party was disbanded, and nobody within the country missed it. Until Lenin came along, Russia had never had a significant political party anyway.</p>
<p>The KGB survived with new nameplates on its door, and it became the only disciplined, well financed, and heavily armed force in post-Soviet Russia.</p>
<p>On December 31, 1999, the KGB organized a new coup. Speaking in front of a gaily-decorated New Year’s tree, Russia&#8217;s first freely elected president, Boris Yeltsin, stunned the world by resigning. “I understand that <em>I must do it</em>, and that Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians.&#8221;<a title="" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a> Yeltsin then signed a decree transferring his power to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin.<a title="" href="#_edn3">[iii]</a> For his part, the just <em>appointed</em> president pardoned Yeltsin—who was allegedly connected to massive bribery scandals—“for any possible misdeeds” and granted him “total immunity” from being prosecuted (or even searched and questioned) for “any and all” actions committed while in office. Putin also gave Yeltsin a lifetime pension and a state <em>dacha</em>.<a title="" href="#_edn4">[iv]</a></p>
<p>I have here recalled those old specifics of the past, because I want to set the record straight about what Russia really is. In spite of what we read in newspapers and hear on TV, Russia is not yet a democracy. It is rather <em>the first intelligence dictatorship in history</em>.</p>
<p>Two years after the December 1999 KGB palace coup that deposed Yeltsin, over 6,000 former KGB officers were in the driver’s seat, running Russia’s federal and local governments, and nearly half of all top bureaucratic positions in Russia’s governmental institutions were held by former officers of the KGB.<a title="" href="#_edn5">[v]</a></p>
<p>Behind a façade of democracy, these former KGB officers restored the legal right of the KGB to electronically monitor the population without judicial approval, to control political groups, search homes and businesses, infiltrate the federal government, create its own front enterprises, investigate cases, and run its own prison system.</p>
<p>Now Putin and his ex-KGB cronies seem to own Russia not only politically, but financially as well. According to the respected British <em>Guardian, </em>Putin has secretly accumulated over $40 billion, becoming Europe’s richest man. He is said to own at least: 37% of the stocks (worth $18 billion) of Surgutneftegs, Russia’s third largest oil producer; 4.5 % of the stocks (worth $13 billion) of Gazprom, the largest extractor of natural gas in the world; and 75% (worth $10 billion) of Gunvor, a mysterious oil trader based in Geneva.<a title="" href="#_edn6">[vi]</a> Vadim Medvedev—who will be the Russian president until 2012, when Putin will return to the Kremlin’s throne—was chairman of Gazprom, which accounts for 93% of Russian natural gas production and controls 16% of the world’s reserves. Putin’s first deputy prime-minister, Igor Sechin, is chairman of Rosneft, the biggest oil company in the world.<a title="" href="#_edn7">[vii]</a></p>
<p>Oil and gas account not only for Putin&#8217;s exorbitant wealth, but for 50% of the Russian budget and 65% of its exports as well. When the price of oil went over $122 a barrel on May 6, 2008, analysts pointed to attacks on pipelines in Nigeria and turmoil in Iraq. The oil production of these two countries was dramatically reduced. Russia, however, made a fortune. Other disruptions of foreign oil supplies may give Russia—and Putin—other fortunes. Putin and his KGB seem to be well aware of that possibility.</p>
<p>In 2010, the European Union-sponsored Gulf Research Centre, which provides journalists an inside view of the Middle East, found out that the terrorist Hezbollah&#8217;s military forces were armed with a large quantity of the &#8220;Soviet-made Katyusha-122 rocket, which carries a 33-lb warhead.&#8221; Hezbollah was also armed with Russian-designed and Iranian-made Fajr-5 rockets that can reach the Israeli port of Haifa, and with Russian- designed Zelzal-1 rockets that can reach Tel Aviv. Hezbollah also possessed the infamous Russian Scud missiles, as well as Russian anti-tank missiles AT-3 Sagger, AT-4 Spigot, AT-5 Spandrel, AT-13 Saxhorn-2, and AT-14 Spriggan Kornet.<a title="" href="#_edn8">[viii]</a></p>
<p>With the passage of time, evidence has begun to mount that Putin&#8217;s Kremlin was involved in igniting, and then stealing, some of the 2011 Islamic revolutions as well. In Egypt, for instance, anti-government demonstrations started on January 25, 2011, when people carrying Hezbollah&#8217;s green flags mixed with red hammer-and-sickle banners took over Cairo&#8217;s Tahrir Square. The leader of the Russian-armed Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, admitted to being involved in organizing and boosting those street protests.<a title="" href="#_edn9">[ix]</a></p>
<p>I agree with our Dr. Bergman’s view that Putin will not rule forever—nor did my former boss, Ceausescu, who also thought he owned his country. I knew how to help Romania get rid of its tyrant because I got to know him well. But I know little about Putin. Even his co-workers calls him the “Gray Cardinal” for his secrecy and Vatican-like mastery of backroom intrigue. Putin, of course, spent most of his working life as a spy and has secretiveness in his blood.</p>
<p>Fortunately, former director of Central Intelligence, James Woolsey, has agreed to join our Symposium. The CIA, by far the world’s best intelligence organization, decisively contributed to demolishing the Soviet empire without firing a single shot. The CIA will also decisively contribute to ending Putin&#8217;s reign. Let&#8217;s now listen to James Woolsey, who is a superb expert on Russia and an internationally recognized oil authority as well.</p>
<p><strong>Jim Woolsey: </strong>General Pacepa&#8217;s characterization of Russia today as an &#8220;intelligence dictatorship&#8221; is quite apt.  It is clearly a heavily authoritarian state and, with respect to its neighbors (e g Georgia, Ukraine), domineering in the extreme.</p>
<p>Its power is highly fragile, however, and quite possibly within the reign of Czar Vladimir the Bare-Chested, or at the latest shortly thereafter, three relentless trends are likely to weaken it severely.  Whether these will produce a withdrawn, isolated and resentful Russia or a Russia that seeks to compensate for its weakness with bluster, aggression, and braggadocio is difficult to say. In neither case does a move away from authoritarianism seem likely. But it will of course matter greatly to Russia&#8217;s neighbors. In either case, however, Russia&#8217;s power to influence world events is likely to be heavily degraded.</p>
<p>First, the demographic squeeze created by Russia&#8217;s short male life expectancy and low birth rate may, according to some observers, reduce Russian population by mid-century to near or even below 100 million.  Its conventional armed forces already appear to be inadequate to the task of defending its borders &#8211; this may even be more challenging by mid-century against, say, a China that has never recognized Russia&#8217;s claims to much of Siberia and that is hungrily eying its oil, gas, and minerals.</p>
<p>Second, Russia&#8217;s leverage over its neighbors due to its being their supplier of natural gas is likely about to be severely degraded.</p>
<p>Since it is expensive to liquify gas for shipment other than by pipeline, gas pipeline geopolitics became a major league sport in the last decade.  It is highly likely that, in Putin&#8217;s eyes, Georgia&#8217;s great sin was to permit the construction on its soil of a gas pipeline that did not pass through Russia. Russian artillery now sits on Georgian soil, ranging that pipeline. And when Putin is angry at Ukraine he need only fashion a gas cost dispute and cut it off, sending a bracing message to the rest of Central Europe as well.</p>
<p>Russia&#8217;s use of gas for its own geopolitical purposes, however, is about to be badly crippled.  The technique of hydrofracturing to recover gas from deep shale formations is creating a whole new set of possibilities for extracting gas, and making gas far more affordable.  Today it is, for an equal amount of energy, about one-fourth the price of oil.  One place that seems to have extensive deep shale gas formations is Poland.  If Ukraine and other states in Russia&#8217;s &#8220;near abroad&#8221; have ready alternative supplies of affordable natural gas Russia&#8217;s leverage over them is heavily undercut. In light of Poland&#8217;s having been carved up by its neighbors over the centuries, there is an attractive irony in the possibility that it will be able, because of its underlying geology, to protect both Ukraine and Germany against a Russia once again seeking domination.</p>
<p>One wryly humorous aspect of the current maneuvering for advantage in the natural gas geopolitics is Mr. Putin&#8217;s newly-discovered environmental fervor.  Although a recent major study by MIT discounts the environmental risk of hydrofracturing (which has been carried out in one form or another since the 1860&#8242;s), there are still environmental and regulatory issues that need to be dealt with in order to make the combination of horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing environmentally benign.  Mr. Putin, however, widely publicizes environmental fears about hydrofracturing. One wonders why we haven&#8217;t seen him wearing this bright shade of green before &#8211; e g on issues such as Russian nuclear-fueled submarines deteriorating in arctic waters, about which there is no reasonable controversy regarding environmental damage.</p>
<p>The third reason Russia is likely to lose power in the relatively near term is the growing possibility of our being able to replace its principal cash cow, petroleum, with fuels available from other than petroleum sources.</p>
<p>In recent years it has been remarkable how much Russian physical and verbal aggression has coincided with oil prices.  For example, its invasion of Georgia in August of 2008 coincided almost perfectly with the peak oil price of $147/barrel.  Russia typically lobbies for the maximum price for oil on the world market. Although it is not a member of OPEC, its interests often coincide with those members, such as Iran, who also seek to maximize oil prices.</p>
<p>Russia&#8217;s vulnerability to oil (and gas) price competition stems from the fact that its production costs are high and it is rapidly depleting its reserves. Costs are high because of weather, geology, great distances that must be traversed, and the deteriorating nature of much of its infrastructure. Consequently the Saudis, who can lift oil for a fraction of Russia&#8217;s cost, are much less vulnerable to price declines.  If oil drops to $50/barrel the Saudis may feel a bit strapped, but the Russians are devastated: their major source of income is trashed.</p>
<p>Russia&#8217;s undoing may turn out to be a century-old idea &#8211; famously advocated by Henry Ford &#8211; that cars should be fueled by alcohol, not gasoline.  Grain alcohol (ethanol) can be made from sugar cane, corn, and several other plants, including in the near future agricultural waste. Wood alcohol (methanol) can be made from wood chips but also natural gas and coal. Because of the low price of natural gas today &#8211; as a result of hydrofracturing - methanol now beats gasoline hands down as a cost-effective fuel.  It requires only a few dollars per vehicle to make it possible for a car to run on methanol or ethanol as well as gasoline, as is the case in Brazil, where consumers all have cars that let them choose between gasoline and ethanol at the pump.</p>
<p>If we can just bring ourselves to be as wise and decisive as the Brazilians, alcohol fuels and hydrofractured natural gas may move a depopulated Russia, before long, to being just another country whose mood swings rouse only a modicum of interest in the rest of the world.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Gregory Glazov: </strong>I would like to summarize and highlight antitheses in the above reflections:</p>
<p>The debate in the first symposium turned on Yuri Yarim-Agaev description of Putin’s power as a “farce” and his suggestion that modern Russia’s opposition lacks the courage of former dissidents like Bonner.  In the present symposium, he has affirmed the brutality of the regime but has detailed its weaknesses and recommended how the West can stop prolonging the life of the regime.  The second of these ways entailed western support for the democratic opposition.</p>
<p>Question: If the regime’s power is limited, does the opposition need courage equal to that of Bonner’s generation?</p>
<p>In affirming Yarim-Agaev’s totalitarian-authoritarian distinction, Dr. Darlymple underscored that the new regime is dangerously destabilized by lip-service to democratic ideals.</p>
<p>Question: Isn’t this a warning to make haste slowly?</p>
<p>Dr. Satter noted that unlike the opponents of the former totalitarian regime, the present opposition fails to focus on fundamental moral issues by concentrating on corruption, a mere symptom of the problem. Why is this? Is it because the opposition lacks moral character or because it is weary and afraid of the abyss that might follow?</p>
<p>Igor Melcuk articulates this danger while issuing the bleakest response, viz. that the Russian people, genetically changed by seventy years of war and terror, are massively behind the regime, anti-western, and deserving of the regime they have. There is no democratic opposition.  What hope remains depends on time and western resolve. If the regime collapses, the people will side with radical Islam.</p>
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		<title>Symposium: Putin Forever?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/symposium-putin-forever/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=symposium-putin-forever</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:34:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medvedev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[russian protesters]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[An All-Star panel gathers to discuss the KGB’s power and the new freedom movement in the streets of Russia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Putin9.jpeg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122728" title="Putin9" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Putin9.jpeg" alt="" width="368" height="265" /></a></p>
<p>In this special Frontpage Symposium, we have gathered an All-Star panel to discuss the power of the KGB and the meaning of the new freedom movement in the streets of Russia. Our distinguished guests are:<strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Jim Woolsey, </strong>Director of Central Intelligence 1993-95.</p>
<p><strong>Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa</strong>, the highest-ranking official to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. Romania&#8217;s Communist president Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word for word out of Pacepa&#8217;s book <em>Red Horizons</em>, subsequently republished in 27 countries.</p>
<p><strong>Evgeny Legedin</strong>, a street-art painter and political activist from Yekaterinburg. As a coordinator of the youth anti-Putin movement &#8220;Oborona&#8221; and participant in the democratic movement &#8220;Solidarity,&#8221; he has organized countless rallies and demonstrations of protest, including the all-Russian campaign for freedom of rallies &#8220;Strategy-31.&#8221; He is the author of the mock prize &#8220;Golden Evsyuk,&#8221; the &#8220;award&#8221; given every year to the worst policemen in Yekaterinburg. In fear for being imprisoned on fabricated criminal charges, he fled Russia on August 16 and reached the UK, where he is seeking political asylum.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Igor Melcuk, </strong>Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Montreal and Member of the Royal Society of Canada. He left the Soviet Union in 1977 after being expelled from the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences because he defended Andrei Sakharov​ in a letter published in The New York Times​.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Gregory Glazov</strong>, a Rhodes scholar who is now Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Immaculate Conception School of Theology, Seton Hall University, USA and Program Coordinator of the Institute for Christian Spirituality&#8217;s Great Spiritual Books program which frequently focuses on spiritual writings in Soviet and Nazi prison camps. He is currently completing several manuscripts that include commentaries on <em>The Lord’s Prayer</em> and on <em>The Book of Job</em>, as well as an introduction to Jewish-Catholic relationships, entitled, <em>Brothers in Hope: Models of Judaism in Catholic Perspective</em> (NDU Press), and a translation and commentary on Vladimir Solovyov’s writings on Judaism and Christianity, an interest that bespeaks his spiritual legacy as the son of Russian dissidents, Yuri and Marina Glazov.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Jay Bergman</strong>, a Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University, where he teaches Russian and modern European history.  He received his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and his M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D from Yale University.  He is the author of <em>Vera Zasulich: A Biography</em>, published by <a href="../2010/10/14/the-life-and-thought-of-andrei-sakharov/">Stanford University Press</a>​; and articles in Russian intellectual history.  He is also on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars, a nationwide organization of professors committed to reasoned scholarship, intellectual diversity, and nondiscrimination in faculty hiring and student admissions. His newest book is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0801447313/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&amp;n=283155&amp;s=books"><em>Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov</em></a>, published by Cornell University Press.</p>
<p><strong>Yuri Yarim-Agaev, </strong>a former leading Russian dissident and a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Upon arriving in the United States after his forced exile from the Soviet Union, he headed the New York-based Center for Democracy in the USSR.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Theodore Dalrymple</strong>, a world-renowned and critically-acclaimed author, retired physician (prison doctor and psychiatrist),<em> </em>a contributing editor to <em>City Journal </em>and the author of the new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anything-Goes-ebook/dp/B005II64VS/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1317619775&amp;sr=1-8">Anything Goes</a>.</p>
<p>and</p>
<p><strong>Dr. David Satter, </strong>a Rhodes Scholar who is now<strong> </strong>a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was Moscow correspondent of the <em>Financial Times </em>of London from 1976 to 1982, during the height of the Soviet totalitarian period and he is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Dawn-Russian-Criminal-State/dp/0300098928"><em>Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State </em></a>and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Delirium-Decline-Soviet-Union/dp/0300087055/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1256004140&amp;sr=1-1"><em>Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union</em>,</a> which is being made into a documentary film. His new book is <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Long-Time-Never-Happened-Anyway/dp/0300111452/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1329562560&amp;sr=1-1">It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past</a>.</em></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Jim Woolsey, Evgeny Legedin, Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Igor Melcuk, Gregory Glazov, Theodore Dalrymple, Mike Pacepa, Jay Bergman and David Satter, welcome to this special edition of Frontpage Symposium. We are honored to be graced by such a distinguished all-star panel, which includes two ex-spy chiefs from opposite sides of the Cold War.</p>
<p>Dr. Gregory Glazov, let me begin with you, since it was a letter written to me by you, about a previous symposium, <a href="../2011/08/26/symposium-russia-after-elena-bonner/"><em>Russia After Elena Bonner</em></a>, that inspired this symposium.</p>
<p>We have gathered today to discuss the power of the new KGB and the meaning and potential of the new freedom movement we have seen emerging in the streets of Russia. But let us first build the foundation to that discussion by going back to the fireworks in a previous symposium that will help crystallize the key themes that our panel will be dealing with today:</p>
<p>In <em>Russia After Elena Bonner,</em> the panelists ganged up on Yuri Yarim-Agaev who stated (or seemed to be stating) that the KGB no longer had much power in Russia. You felt that Yuri Yarim-Agaev may have been trying to say something different and that each side may have misunderstood – and misrepresented – the other.</p>
<p>Let’s begin with your thoughts on the collision in <em>Russia After Elena Bonner. </em></p>
<p><strong>Dr. Gregory Glazov: </strong>Thank you Jamie for inviting me to this discussion. Let me begin by reflecting, as you ask me to do, on the “<a href="../2011/08/26/symposium-russia-after-elena-bonner/">Russia After Elena Bonner</a>” Symposium. The Symposium took a passionate turn after nearly all of its participants took care to disagree with Yuri Yarim Agaev’s stipulation, in his second reflection, that the FSB, while the direct descendant of the KGB, cannot and will never operate with its former strength. I agree with all the arguments advanced in detail against this stipulation. It seemed to me, however, that the Symposium ended prematurely and required another round of discussion to clarify whether the disagreement was fundamental or resolvable.</p>
<p>In the interest of exploring the potential for some rapprochement between the views expressed, I would like to begin by underscoring the overall lessons I drew from the Symposium. First I think I understood the opening thrust of Yuri Yarim-Agaev’s second reflection. He regretted that a Symposium devoted to the memory of Elena Bonner turned out to emphasize the fearsome strength of the modern FSB over the fact of her victory over its predecessor. Wishing to refocus the Symposium on her heroic courage, Yuri Agaev did so by stipulating two things:</p>
<p>a) the modern FSB is continuous with the KGB but less powerful and fearsome, partly because</p>
<p>b) everybody else is even weaker, even the post-Soviet human rights community which is not continuous with the former human rights community, since its members lack, relatively speaking, people who have the courage of Bonner.</p>
<p>It would seem to me that this argument weakens Yuri Yarim- Agaev’s leading premise, namely the importance of Bonner’s legacy today. If Bonner has lessons to teach today about courage, these lessons demand a clear and detailed exposition of what is to be feared. These are the lessons set out in detail by Konstantin Preobrazhensky, Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa and Igor Melcuk.</p>
<p>The 144 journalists who have been killed under Putin’s presidency testify both to the fact that the KGB has entrenched itself in modern Russia and to the presence of self-sacrificing courage on the part of the journalists who continue to die for standing up to it. On what grounds can such courage be judged to be discontinuous with that of Bonner? In light of this, would it not be appropriate to change the conclusion of Konstantin Preobrazhensky’s response to Yuri Agaev by not denying that a new Elena Bonner could and does appear in Russia. That she would be shot down like Anna Politkovskaya and the many other real dissidents only underscores that all these are the re-instantiations of her type. The great question that remains concerns the nature of their or her power. If “she” is recurrently shot on appearing, it is so because of the fear that she generates in the echelons of “power.” But fear betokens weakness and the consciousness that the “power” in question cannot be taken seriously but is a “farce.” A good measure of the argument in the symposium turned on the connotation attributed to this last word. It would be good to clarify whether it can be used accurately to describe the nature of Putin’s pretensions without belittling his murderousness.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Thank you Dr. Greg Glazov.</p>
<p>Yuri Yarim-Agaev, your turn to clarify your position.</p>
<p><strong>Y</strong><strong>uri Yarim-Agaev:</strong> Let me make it very clear: I never said that Putin’s regime or the FSB are not vicious, fearsome, or criminal. On the contrary, I was among the first to expose and condemn their crimes, and continue to do so. I believe also that it is common knowledge that Putin’s regime is antidemocratic and has zero respect for human rights. However, the subject of this symposium is not how bad Putin’s regime is, but rather how strong and lasting it is, and there is a big difference between two.</p>
<p>Being vicious does not mean being strong. Our outrage at the atrocities of Putin’s regime is fully justified, yet if we become driven by emotion and fear we may grant Putin what he desires most: the overestimation of his power. I am really concerned about that, particularly in light of the most recent developments.</p>
<p>Many Russian and Western pundits and politicians readily accepted Putin&#8217;s re-nominating himself for the presidency, and granted him not only the next election but even the one after that&#8211;12 more years. This acceptance can only be explained by the belief that Putin has unlimited power and no one can challenge him for many years ahead. Such a generous recognition of Putin’s power is neither helpful for Putin’s opponents in Russia nor serving the interests of our country, and it should not be granted with such ease.</p>
<p>The fact that the KGB has returned to power in Russia, that it now occupies many top governmental positions, that it continues to suppress political opposition, and that it murders its critics is not proof of its omnipotence. We shall not ignore those facts and shall make them known to everyone. Yet there is a big difference between being vigilant about the ruthlessness and crimes of the regime, and being paralyzed by its atrocities.</p>
<p>Putin’s propaganda would have us believe that his regime is very strong. We should not give him a free ride, however, since it would seriously undermine our efforts to hold the regime accountable for its crimes. The adepts of realpolitik would say: &#8220;We know how bad Putin is but there is no alternative. He is here forever and we have to deal with him as he is.&#8221; That is why in analyzing Putin’s power it is important not to be overwhelmed by the omnipresence of the KGB and the crimes it commits, but also be cognizant of the many facts which indicate that Putin’s regime may be not so strong.</p>
<p>As bad as Putin’s Russia is, it radically differs from the Soviet Communist empire. Russia is no longer a totalitarian country, but rather an authoritarian one. The new rulers do not tolerate any political opposition, but on the other hand don’t interfere much into the private lives of ordinary citizens. In comparison with Soviet Communism, life for people in Russia has changed dramatically: they are now free to leave the country; they have broad access to information, and have substantial economic independence. No credit should be given for these changes to Putin or the FSB. If it were their choice, they would have probably cut back all those incremental steps of freedom. But they have not, and that fact in itself indicates limits on their power.</p>
<p>Despite the above evidence there is an argument, popular among the KGB professionals, that once it is free from the control of communist bosses, the FSB becomes much more effective and even stronger than the KGB. This sounds, however, like the typical belief on the part of many professionals that their political or business bosses merely restrict them, while they forget that those very bosses assure their ability to conduct their professional work. The KGB was created and empowered by the Communist system and it was on the edge of elimination when Soviet Communism collapsed.</p>
<p>The secret police cannot be a self-sustaining force and operate in a vacuum. They are a tool of political power which provides for its operation, but also imposes its control. The new political power in Russia is Putin and his comrades. It is true that they come from the KGB, and that their political philosophy and their loyalty have been determined by that organization. Yet when they moved to the top political positions, their role changed. Putin acquired many new responsibilities and has to balance his act. He cannot let the FSB run amok, but has to restrict it within the scope of his autocratic rule, much more limited than totalitarian communist rule. As a result, the FSB’s control over people’s lives, and hence its power, is much more restricted than the KGB&#8217;s.</p>
<p>The atrocious killing of political opponents does not prove either that the FSB became as strong as and even stronger than the KGB. First, the KGB has always carried out political murders and in Brezhnev’s time against dissidents as well; I testified before the US Congress in 1983 on that matter. But the Soviet authorities did not have to resort to this often since they had complete control over the courts, psychiatric institutions, and all the laws and regulations they needed. The projection of power is much stronger when it is implemented through the official system of government institutions than through secretive murders. So the fact that the new regime kills its political opponents instead of trying them is to me a sign of their weakness, rather their strength.</p>
<p>These murders, however heinous, neither deter the regime’s critics, nor terrorize the majority of the population. The authorities seem to be very selective in targeting only direct political opponents, and people know that. The current regime hardly rules by force and terror.</p>
<p>If we want to understand the real strength and longevity of the current Russian regime we should concentrate not on the physical force of the FSB, its numbers, and readiness and ability to kill, but rather on the strength of Putin’s political mandate.</p>
<p>So what secures Putin’s political power, and how strong is it actually? Briefly, the social contract which Putin has with Russia stands on two pillars: material well-being and stability. More specifically, the following factors have helped the KGB and Putin come to power and hold it.</p>
<ul>
<li>Disillusionment with democracy and the free market as Russians saw it in the 1990s.</li>
<li>Fear of lawlessness and striving for law and order.</li>
<li>The old habits of living in a deterministic society, particularly on the part of the older generation.</li>
<li>The high price of oil and natural resources, which allows for a comparatively decent standard of living without unleashing the forces of creativity and free enterprise.</li>
<li>The social systems and infrastructures, though shabby and deteriorating, inherited from Communism: cheap medicine, education, apartments, etc., which allowed the government to save on those expenses for some period of time.</li>
<li>Post Communism credit&#8211;a substantial increase in production and the standard of living in comparison with the utmost inefficient central planning economy.</li>
</ul>
<p>One can see that most of these factors are of a temporary nature: people’s memories are fading, the older generation is dying off, and the price of natural resources can fall at any moment, Any of these developments will weaken or undermine Putin’s authority or force him to drastic reforms, which would dramatically decrease his and the FSB’s power&#8211;or even oust them.</p>
<p>There are many signs that the Putin regime has never been very strong. It failed to create in Russia a modern competitive economy; it has mixed results at best in its attempt to impose control over the former Soviet republics; and it is losing continuously the most creative and entrepreneurial segments of the population to the West.</p>
<p>There are also signs that indicate that Russia’s ruling elite is not so confident in the strength and longevity of its position. Russia’s rulers try to extort as much money as they can and put it in foreign banks, keep their families abroad, establish foreign residence and even citizenship, and try to maintain good personal relations with influential Western friends. All that looks like the right escape route.</p>
<p>The Putin regime is far from omnipotent, but its weaknesses can cost it power only when challenged by political opposition. When demand of society for such an opposition becomes strong, Putin and the FSB will not be able to suppress it. It may take time, though, for such an opposition to become real political force, and we cannot do much to facilitate that process. One thing we can do, however, is stop helping to prolong Putin’s presidency, stop legitimizing it. For that purpose we should:</p>
<ul>
<li>Expose political crimes, hold Putin and the FSB accountable for each unsolved political murder, deprive them of the presumption of innocence.</li>
<li>Support democratic opposition in Russia.</li>
<li>Decrease our dependence on oil.</li>
<li>Realize that Putin’s Russia is not our ally and stop including Russia in multilateral negotiations, be it the Middle East, North Korea or others.</li>
<li>Minimize the role of the UN and its Security Council.</li>
<li>Stop granting residency and citizenship to the ruling Russian elite and their families.</li>
<li>Stop “reset” policy whose only purpose is legitimizing Putin’s government.</li>
<li>Spotlight the issue of Soviet Communism and its crimes, which will help undermine the legitimacy of the KGB and Russia&#8217;s current rulers.</li>
<li>And expose any weaknesses of the Putin regime.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Dr. Theodore Dalrymple: </strong>Surely the problem we are dealing with is the old one of continuity in change. No one would say either that nothing has changed in Russia or that everything has changed. And no one would have expected the country, with its history, to turn into a Scandinavian democracy.</p>
<p>The FSB is powerful and active, the descendant of the KGB; the KGB privatized Russia largely to its own benefit. But the one thing that it lost was a patina of ideological justification. Even lip service to the idea of freedom and democracy imposes certain limitations, unwelcome as they may be. That is why the killing of journalists appears more like common gangsterism: the old authoritarianism is there but it dares not speak its name, it has no justification beyond the preservation of power whose only justification for itself is that it brings order and supposed strength, as well as the kind of respect abroad that a mugger demands in the Bronx.</p>
<p>It follows from this that I think Yuri Yarim-Agaev&#8217;s distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in Russia is an important and sound one, and of fundamental importance. Since the new authoritarianism is lacking in any kind of ideological justification that transcends the present conjuncture, I think it is inherently unstable &#8211; but is therefore unpredictable and, given the situation and traditions of the country, dangerous. A change in the price of oil &#8211; downwards, of course &#8211; would almost certainly effect a big change, though the other former republics would have much to fear in this event.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. David Satter: </strong>The purpose of the KGB was to create reality. The KGB forced every Soviet citizen to participate in an ideological play and it was its effort not just to destroy any and all opposition but to force each citizen to demonstrate his “happiness” that was the secret to its enormous power.</p>
<p>The FSB is quite different. Like the KGB, it is concerned to destroy opposition but as Yuri points out, it leaves Russians free to think what they like. It has no higher purpose beyond assuring the regime’s power. It is the backbone of the regime and it benefits from it. But it does not try to remold people but only to teach them that serious opposition could pose a danger to their lives.</p>
<p>Putin bases his power on the FSB but not only. He draws on a ruling clan that is itself divided into clans many of which are at war with each other. This small group which controls vast property and monopolizes power is uneasy precisely because its members are united by nothing but greed but aspire to be a permanent leadership. They seek to do this, moreover, without the instruments of repression that were available to the KGB. Had the Soviet Union not imploded from within, it could have withstood any level of external pressure. This is far from the case for Putin’s Russia. The FSB is therefore the uneasy watchdog of a situation that could rapidly slip out of control.</p>
<p>Against this background, the most urgent necessity is the development of a democratic consciousness in Russia, which appeared briefly during the perestroika years, and then was drowned in the criminality of the Yeltsin era and the Putin succession. The dissidents under the Soviets were important because their opposition was a fundamental moral opposition. This is a lesson that the present Russian opposition, with its emphasis on fighting corruption – a mere symptom – does not seem to have learned.</p>
<p>Well, is the Putin/FSB regime strong or weak? The question cannot be answered in only one way. It is strong in that it has vast potential for violence and, at the moment, faces very little opposition. But it is weak because it aspires to a degree of exploitation and perpetual control that is not possible under non-totalitarian conditions. In the event of a serious, systemic crisis, the FSB’s violence could well be unleashed. (A good example of the moral level of the Putin regime was the decision to open fire with flame throwers and grenade launchers on a school gymnasium packed with hostages during the 2004 Beslan school crisis.) This could lead to horrific bloodshed signaling the birth of a new, fully terroristic dictatorship. The best hope of preventing such a development is the strengthening of a democratic consciousness in Russia capable of motivating Russians to use the freedoms that do exist to assure a peaceful transition.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Igor Melcuk:</strong> Sorry, I don&#8217;t know whether Putin&#8217;s regime is strong or weak; but that it is disgusting is not questionable. I&#8217;ll try to focus my ideas about today&#8217;s Russia and organize them in a logical way.</p>
<p>I emphasize that I don&#8217;t have sufficient information: a few fleeing observations during a short visit to Moscow, exchanges with friends and leafing through the press.</p>
<p><strong>1) The Present State of the Russian State.  </strong></p>
<p>Yes, Mr. Yarim-Agaev is right in that modern Russia is an authoritarian rather than totalitarian state; as Dr. Satter correctly notes, there are no visible ideological underpinnings. Russians are allowed to travel, to think and say aloud what they think or even criticize the government, including Putin and Medvedev personally. Unfortunately, I see the reason for this “liberalism”:  the authorities understood that there is no danger for them in all that. They allow Russians to let off some steam, which is very smart of them.</p>
<p>They know that the Russian people are massively and resolutely behind them: that was my impression in Moscow, reinforced by conversations with acquaintances and colleagues. And we should not forget that the authorities ruthlessly stop any attempt to do them any real harm: remember the deaths of Magnitsky and Litvinenko. Russia remains a rogue country, supporting Chávez and North Korea, protecting Iran, sending its spies in UK and USA, etc.</p>
<p><strong>2) A Probable Future of the Russian State.</strong></p>
<p>If energy prices drop dramatically, the internal situation will become desperate. Yet I doubt that the popular fury will then be leveled at the government and the political class. Russians are <em>not </em>Europeans: they will hate Europeans and Americans, as they always did. I am afraid the ruling gang will unleash another wave of Great Terror against intellectuals, Jews and Westerners (which is one and the same for an average Russian). I hope only for this bloodbath to remain within Russia&#8217;s borders and to not spill over—although this is by no means precluded. In the worst scenario, Russians (and Russia) will collaborate with radical Islam: this is exactly the ideology that an average Russian needs (even if he does not know it).</p>
<p><strong>3) The Ideology of the FSB.</strong></p>
<p>True, the FSB, in sharp contrast to the KGB, does not enforce any ideology, but only the brutal power of a few mafia clans. So what? It is much easier. The idea that the rulers need an ideological reason for their survival is totally incorrect, when applied to Russia.  What ideology had Latino-American dictators and their families? Their rule was limited only by assassination. And Russians are much easier to rule than Mexicans or Venezuelans. Seventy years of well-directed terror and several indescribable wars have changed the genetic pool of Russian people. And the FSB will have no trouble herding the miserable remains.</p>
<p><strong>4) Opposition: There is None. </strong></p>
<p>Not enough decent people among Russians. There seems to be not enough decent people among the French or the British, or even the Americans; what can we expect from a population that has been subjected to such an un-natural selection for such a long time? Under the Soviets the dissidents fought because they had hope: they believed that it would be sufficient to push the Communist tyranny out—and Russia will become at least a quasi-normal country. (By the way, I also hoped for such a change.) But then it turned out that the Russian people did not want democracy. Putin does not have to rig up elections: he will get an absolute majority anyways. For two centuries, the Russian social elite were lionizing the Russian people, worked for it and died for it; and then the people showed their real colors—supporting the Bolshevik bloody regime. And just 20 years ago, we saw this for a second time. Russians have today what they are worth.</p>
<p><strong>5) What Can Be Done:</strong></p>
<p>Inside Russia: To tell the truth, I don&#8217;t know. If I had to live there now, I would try to do my job as well as I can and to spread the normal human mentality. History has time.</p>
<p>Outside Russia: To oppose the regime on every step. For instance, to limit the mobility of Russian strongmen and especially of their capitals. Exactly, because they are simple Mafiosi, they need our banks and our markets. This makes it so much easier to pressurize them. Modern Russia is our deadly enemy, and it should be treated as such. Without an outside pressure nothing normal will happen in this half-Asiatic country.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Jay Bergman:</strong> I agree with other participants in this symposium that the FSB exercises considerable power in Russia.  In light of Russia’s history, this is hardly surprising.  As early as the seventeenth century, when serfdom was formalized into law, Russia was a country based on mutual fear: the people feared the government and the government feared the people.  The only conceivable alternative to autocracy was not democracy but anarchy, and the anarchic violence pervasive in the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century, and later in the peasant revolts of Razin, Bulavin, and Pugachev, caused Russia’s rulers, then and thereafter, to take whatever steps were necessary to defend the political status quo.  By the twentieth century Russia had become a monarchical police state, in which the political police (the Okhrana) captured political criminals, and in the absence of any judicial proceeding or determination of guilt, imposed punishment.  The same phenomenon, on a much larger scale and with infinitely greater brutality, occurred in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.</p>
<p>But the influence of national culture and history isn’t the only reason Putin, largely through the FSB, suppresses dissent.  Another is that he considers the political system he has fashioned since assuming the Russian presidency almost eleven years ago – for public relations purposes he calls it “managed democracy” – to be weaker than it actually is.  In Putin there seems to be a nagging sense of political and personal insecurity that causes him not only to engage in juvenile exercises in machismo, such as riding a horse bare-chested in Siberia, but also to deal more harshly with critics than the substance of their criticism would seem to require.  The journalists killed by the FSB, for example, by and large did not call for the overthrow of the regime, or even for its radical transformation.  And yet Putin, like the Soviet leadership in the Brezhnev era in responding to dissidents such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, seems to consider criticism of any kind, no matter how constructively intended, destructive of his own legitimacy and that of his regime.  Entrusting to the FSB the task of silencing &#8212; if necessary by actual murder – those who criticize his policies is therefore a perfectly logical reaction given Putin’s subjective evaluation of his own security and power.</p>
<p>To be sure, Putin’s regime, unlike the Soviet Union in the Stalin era, is not engaged in massive projects of social engineering like the collectivization of agriculture, or in creating a new managerial elite by physically destroying the old one, as Stalin did through the terror he  unleashed in the mid 1930’s.  As a result, the FSB has not nearly the responsibilities, nor the enormous power, of the old Soviet OGPU and NKVD.  Putin’s actions, first as president and then as prime minister, make clear that his principal objective is not to transform Russia internally but rather to increase and expand its influence externally.  Incorporating into Russia the countries contiguous to it that declared their independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 – what Russians call collectively “The Near Abroad” – is the foremost objective of Russian foreign policy.  In fact, reconstituting the old Soviet Union, albeit without its legitimizing ideology of Marxism-Leninism, is for Putin the means of achieving the legitimacy he believes he needs.</p>
<p>And so, while it seems unlikely that Russia will soon degenerate into a kind of neo-Stalinism, in which mass terror is always a threat and occasionally a reality, the absence of democracy and the violations of human rights other participants in the symposium have focused on are sure to continue for the foreseeable future.  Among the factors making this prediction plausible, above and beyond the present-day requirements of the Putin regime, is Russia’s distinctive political culture, one of the most durable features of which is the belief of Russian rulers, tsarist as well as Soviet, that the Russian people are children and therefore too immature and irrational to share in governance.  Unfortunately in this instance, although national cultures are capable of changing, they usually do so only very slowly and incrementally.</p>
<p>I wish I could be more optimistic about Russia’s immediate future.  No, Putin will not rule forever.  But his successors will not be radically different.  And no amount of soothing rhetoric from American presidents about “resetting” Russian-American relations will change that.</p>
<p><strong>Evgeny Legedin: </strong>I agree with Yuri Yarim-Agaev characterizing Putin&#8217;s Russia as an authoritarian state with unique features. Besides the FSB’s total infiltration of all important political and civil institutions, I see one crucial property: Putin&#8217;s gang simulates democratic institutions: elections, the mass-media and the judicial system. Putin&#8217;s propaganda tries very hard to produce the illusion of &#8220;democracy.&#8221; And who are the consumers of this illusion?</p>
<p>I think Putin creates pseudo-democracy for Russians first of all. That&#8217;s his message for common people: We, like the West, have democracy and elections but there&#8217;s no need of riots and revolutions to change the government. In other words, the Kremlin tries to transform all protest activity into one action, when passive people go to polls one time in four years and &#8220;vote&#8221; for puppet parties.</p>
<p>I dare to draw a parallel with the movie &#8220;Matrix,&#8221; in which machines employing humans as electric cells, create for each person a virtual reality in order to prevent revolution. How long will Putin&#8217;s Matrix last? It depends on his popularity. If Russians collectively disobey Putin, he will lose power. Civil resistance can be very symbolic and effective. For example, all dissidents can boycott the Duma and Presidential &#8220;elections&#8221; by drawing caricatures or writing protest slogans on polling bulletins, taking the pictures of these bulletins and downloading them on Youtube.  Thousands of people will see such a video. For instance, even some TV channels and magazines published pictures of my protest bulletin.</p>
<p>In 2008 after the Presidential &#8220;elections,&#8221; I downloaded a video unto the internet; it was of how I had drawn a caricature of Medvedev on the polling bulletin. Watching this video of active boycotting, people are forced to ask themselves if they agree with my key-message or not. And when people begin to ask such questions, that&#8217;s the ground for a revolution of minds, after which is the turn for street revolutions.  If we want that revolution to be a peaceful one and without blood, like &#8220;classic&#8221; revolutions (French of 1789 or Russian of 1917), then the Russian opposition has to teach common people the ABC of Ghandi-style civil resistance. The Kremlin clearly sees the danger of Ghandi-tactics and oppresses mainly civil activists who promote the Ghandi-like Strategy-31 campaign.</p>
<p><strong>Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa:</strong><strong> </strong>I greatly appreciate Dr. Gregory Glazov&#8217;s initiative for resuming the conversation of our Symposium on <em>Russia After Elena Bonner.</em> It was indeed stopped in midstream.</p>
<p>I agree with the core of what had so far been said in this follow-up Symposium. Gregory&#8217;s prediction that a new Elena Bonner in today&#8217;s Russia will not be sent to the gulags but will be shot like Anna Politkovskaia, is my guess as well. Yarim-Agayev&#8217;s view that the KGB&#8217;s assassination of its critics does not prove omnipotence is, in my view, also right on the money. And, as always, I concur with Dr. Satter&#8217;s vision: the KGB&#8217;s historic violence could indeed lead to horrific bloodshed signaling the birth of &#8220;a new, fully terroristic dictatorship.&#8221;</p>
<p>The KGB role in Soviet Russia was, however, a lot broader than just squelching political opponents, although most of its other tasks were so highly classified that few who were outside its <em>inner sanctum</em> knew about them.</p>
<p>For example, the KGB was also the custodian of all the Soviet Union&#8217;s nuclear arsenal. This super secret task was given to the KGB (at that time called NKVD) on September 29, 1949, when the first Soviet nuclear bomb, built with American technology stolen by Soviet spies (the Rosenberg network) was successfully exploded at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan.</p>
<p>When I left Romania for good, the KGB was safekeeping some 6,000 nuclear bombs, along with many thousands of nuclear artillery shells.</p>
<p>All these nuclear weapons had been developed and manufactured in KGB-managed cities hidden throughout Russia. Not a single such secret town was listed even on the Soviet Union’s most highly classified maps. Chelyabinsk city in the Urals was on the map of the Soviet Union, but Chelyabinsk-40, a city of 40,000 people also located in the Urals, was not. Nor did any maps show Chelyabinsk-65, Chelyabinsk-70, Chelyabinsk-95 and Chelyabinsk-115, all in the Urals. Krasnoyarsk city was shown in eastern Siberia, but there was no mention anywhere of Krasnoyarsk-25, Krasnoyarsk-26 and Krasnoyarsk-45.</p>
<p>After a nuclear accident at the East Siberian city of Tomsk-7 in April of 1993, ten newer “secret cities” located in that part of the country were disclosed. Recent information has shown that the nuclear military industry of the former Soviet Union might alone have had as many as 87 &#8220;secret KGB cities,&#8221; some occupying whole islands, such as the military laboratories on Vozrozhdeniye and Komsomolsk islands in the Aral Sea.<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a></p>
<p>These secret KGB cities are so enormous, they almost cannot be disassembled. Nothing so far indicates they have been. They, and the custody of the country&#8217;s nuclear arsenal, made the KGB the most powerful—and most dangerous—intelligence organization in the world.</p>
<p><em>Glasnost</em> and its spectacular outcome in Eastern Europe made an instant hit in the West. The nuclear-armed KGB, however, proved to be a horse of another color. On June 22, 1991, its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, informed the Soviet parliament that the motherland was on the brink of catastrophe. He then revealed “secret” KGB information showing that Western intelligence services were drawing up plans for the occupation of the Soviet Union. By remarkable coincidence, his speech was “clandestinely” videotaped and broadcast on Soviet television that same evening.</p>
<p>Soon after that, the world was horrified by news of a KGB <em>coup d&#8217;état</em> in Moscow.</p>
<p>The official Soviet version is that the KGB coup collapsed. The main loser, however, was the Communist Party, not the KGB. The Party was disbanded, and nobody within the country missed it. Until Lenin came along, Russia had never had a significant political party anyway.</p>
<p>The KGB survived with new nameplates on its door, and it became the only disciplined, well financed, and heavily armed force in post-Soviet Russia.</p>
<p>On December 31, 1999, the KGB organized a new coup. Speaking in front of a gaily-decorated New Year’s tree, Russia&#8217;s first freely elected president, Boris Yeltsin, stunned the world by resigning. “I understand that <em>I must do it</em>, and that Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians.&#8221;<a title="" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a> Yeltsin then signed a decree transferring his power to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin.<a title="" href="#_edn3">[iii]</a> For his part, the just <em>appointed</em> president pardoned Yeltsin—who was allegedly connected to massive bribery scandals—“for any possible misdeeds” and granted him “total immunity” from being prosecuted (or even searched and questioned) for “any and all” actions committed while in office. Putin also gave Yeltsin a lifetime pension and a state <em>dacha</em>.<a title="" href="#_edn4">[iv]</a></p>
<p>I have here recalled those old specifics of the past, because I want to set the record straight about what Russia really is. In spite of what we read in newspapers and hear on TV, Russia is not yet a democracy. It is rather <em>the first intelligence dictatorship in history</em>.</p>
<p>Two years after the December 1999 KGB palace coup that deposed Yeltsin, over 6,000 former KGB officers were in the driver’s seat, running Russia’s federal and local governments, and nearly half of all top bureaucratic positions in Russia’s governmental institutions were held by former officers of the KGB.<a title="" href="#_edn5">[v]</a></p>
<p>Behind a façade of democracy, these former KGB officers restored the legal right of the KGB to electronically monitor the population without judicial approval, to control political groups, search homes and businesses, infiltrate the federal government, create its own front enterprises, investigate cases, and run its own prison system.</p>
<p>Now Putin and his ex-KGB cronies seem to own Russia not only politically, but financially as well. According to the respected British <em>Guardian, </em>Putin has secretly accumulated over $40 billion, becoming Europe’s richest man. He is said to own at least: 37% of the stocks (worth $18 billion) of Surgutneftegs, Russia’s third largest oil producer; 4.5 % of the stocks (worth $13 billion) of Gazprom, the largest extractor of natural gas in the world; and 75% (worth $10 billion) of Gunvor, a mysterious oil trader based in Geneva.<a title="" href="#_edn6">[vi]</a> Vadim Medvedev—who will be the Russian president until 2012, when Putin will return to the Kremlin’s throne—was chairman of Gazprom, which accounts for 93% of Russian natural gas production and controls 16% of the world’s reserves. Putin’s first deputy prime-minister, Igor Sechin, is chairman of Rosneft, the biggest oil company in the world.<a title="" href="#_edn7">[vii]</a></p>
<p>Oil and gas account not only for Putin&#8217;s exorbitant wealth, but for 50% of the Russian budget and 65% of its exports as well. When the price of oil went over $122 a barrel on May 6, 2008, analysts pointed to attacks on pipelines in Nigeria and turmoil in Iraq. The oil production of these two countries was dramatically reduced. Russia, however, made a fortune. Other disruptions of foreign oil supplies may give Russia—and Putin—other fortunes. Putin and his KGB seem to be well aware of that possibility.</p>
<p>In 2010, the European Union-sponsored Gulf Research Centre, which provides journalists an inside view of the Middle East, found out that the terrorist Hezbollah&#8217;s military forces were armed with a large quantity of the &#8220;Soviet-made Katyusha-122 rocket, which carries a 33-lb warhead.&#8221; Hezbollah was also armed with Russian-designed and Iranian-made Fajr-5 rockets that can reach the Israeli port of Haifa, and with Russian- designed Zelzal-1 rockets that can reach Tel Aviv. Hezbollah also possessed the infamous Russian Scud missiles, as well as Russian anti-tank missiles AT-3 Sagger, AT-4 Spigot, AT-5 Spandrel, AT-13 Saxhorn-2, and AT-14 Spriggan Kornet.<a title="" href="#_edn8">[viii]</a></p>
<p>With the passage of time, evidence has begun to mount that Putin&#8217;s Kremlin was involved in igniting, and then stealing, some of the 2011 Islamic revolutions as well. In Egypt, for instance, anti-government demonstrations started on January 25, 2011, when people carrying Hezbollah&#8217;s green flags mixed with red hammer-and-sickle banners took over Cairo&#8217;s Tahrir Square. The leader of the Russian-armed Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, admitted to being involved in organizing and boosting those street protests.<a title="" href="#_edn9">[ix]</a></p>
<p>I agree with our Dr. Bergman’s view that Putin will not rule forever—nor did my former boss, Ceausescu, who also thought he owned his country. I knew how to help Romania get rid of its tyrant because I got to know him well. But I know little about Putin. Even his co-workers calls him the “Gray Cardinal” for his secrecy and Vatican-like mastery of backroom intrigue. Putin, of course, spent most of his working life as a spy and has secretiveness in his blood.</p>
<p>Fortunately, former director of Central Intelligence, James Woolsey, has agreed to join our Symposium. The CIA, by far the world’s best intelligence organization, decisively contributed to demolishing the Soviet empire without firing a single shot. The CIA will also decisively contribute to ending Putin&#8217;s reign. Let&#8217;s now listen to James Woolsey, who is a superb expert on Russia and an internationally recognized oil authority as well.</p>
<p><strong>Jim Woolsey: </strong>General Pacepa&#8217;s characterization of Russia today as an &#8220;intelligence dictatorship&#8221; is quite apt.  It is clearly a heavily authoritarian state and, with respect to its neighbors (e g Georgia, Ukraine), domineering in the extreme.</p>
<p>Its power is highly fragile, however, and quite possibly within the reign of Czar Vladimir the Bare-Chested, or at the latest shortly thereafter, three relentless trends are likely to weaken it severely.  Whether these will produce a withdrawn, isolated and resentful Russia or a Russia that seeks to compensate for its weakness with bluster, aggression, and braggadocio is difficult to say. In neither case does a move away from authoritarianism seem likely. But it will of course matter greatly to Russia&#8217;s neighbors. In either case, however, Russia&#8217;s power to influence world events is likely to be heavily degraded.</p>
<p>First, the demographic squeeze created by Russia&#8217;s short male life expectancy and low birth rate may, according to some observers, reduce Russian population by mid-century to near or even below 100 million.  Its conventional armed forces already appear to be inadequate to the task of defending its borders &#8211; this may even be more challenging by mid-century against, say, a China that has never recognized Russia&#8217;s claims to much of Siberia and that is hungrily eying its oil, gas, and minerals.</p>
<p>Second, Russia&#8217;s leverage over its neighbors due to its being their supplier of natural gas is likely about to be severely degraded.</p>
<p>Since it is expensive to liquify gas for shipment other than by pipeline, gas pipeline geopolitics became a major league sport in the last decade.  It is highly likely that, in Putin&#8217;s eyes, Georgia&#8217;s great sin was to permit the construction on its soil of a gas pipeline that did not pass through Russia. Russian artillery now sits on Georgian soil, ranging that pipeline. And when Putin is angry at Ukraine he need only fashion a gas cost dispute and cut it off, sending a bracing message to the rest of Central Europe as well.</p>
<p>Russia&#8217;s use of gas for its own geopolitical purposes, however, is about to be badly crippled.  The technique of hydrofracturing to recover gas from deep shale formations is creating a whole new set of possibilities for extracting gas, and making gas far more affordable.  Today it is, for an equal amount of energy, about one-fourth the price of oil.  One place that seems to have extensive deep shale gas formations is Poland.  If Ukraine and other states in Russia&#8217;s &#8220;near abroad&#8221; have ready alternative supplies of affordable natural gas Russia&#8217;s leverage over them is heavily undercut. In light of Poland&#8217;s having been carved up by its neighbors over the centuries, there is an attractive irony in the possibility that it will be able, because of its underlying geology, to protect both Ukraine and Germany against a Russia once again seeking domination.</p>
<p>One wryly humorous aspect of the current maneuvering for advantage in the natural gas geopolitics is Mr. Putin&#8217;s newly-discovered environmental fervor.  Although a recent major study by MIT discounts the environmental risk of hydrofracturing (which has been carried out in one form or another since the 1860&#8242;s), there are still environmental and regulatory issues that need to be dealt with in order to make the combination of horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing environmentally benign.  Mr. Putin, however, widely publicizes environmental fears about hydrofracturing. One wonders why we haven&#8217;t seen him wearing this bright shade of green before &#8211; e g on issues such as Russian nuclear-fueled submarines deteriorating in arctic waters, about which there is no reasonable controversy regarding environmental damage.</p>
<p>The third reason Russia is likely to lose power in the relatively near term is the growing possibility of our being able to replace its principal cash cow, petroleum, with fuels available from other than petroleum sources.</p>
<p>In recent years it has been remarkable how much Russian physical and verbal aggression has coincided with oil prices.  For example, its invasion of Georgia in August of 2008 coincided almost perfectly with the peak oil price of $147/barrel.  Russia typically lobbies for the maximum price for oil on the world market. Although it is not a member of OPEC, its interests often coincide with those members, such as Iran, who also seek to maximize oil prices.</p>
<p>Russia&#8217;s vulnerability to oil (and gas) price competition stems from the fact that its production costs are high and it is rapidly depleting its reserves. Costs are high because of weather, geology, great distances that must be traversed, and the deteriorating nature of much of its infrastructure. Consequently the Saudis, who can lift oil for a fraction of Russia&#8217;s cost, are much less vulnerable to price declines.  If oil drops to $50/barrel the Saudis may feel a bit strapped, but the Russians are devastated: their major source of income is trashed.</p>
<p>Russia&#8217;s undoing may turn out to be a century-old idea &#8211; famously advocated by Henry Ford &#8211; that cars should be fueled by alcohol, not gasoline.  Grain alcohol (ethanol) can be made from sugar cane, corn, and several other plants, including in the near future agricultural waste. Wood alcohol (methanol) can be made from wood chips but also natural gas and coal. Because of the low price of natural gas today &#8211; as a result of hydrofracturing - methanol now beats gasoline hands down as a cost-effective fuel.  It requires only a few dollars per vehicle to make it possible for a car to run on methanol or ethanol as well as gasoline, as is the case in Brazil, where consumers all have cars that let them choose between gasoline and ethanol at the pump.</p>
<p>If we can just bring ourselves to be as wise and decisive as the Brazilians, alcohol fuels and hydrofractured natural gas may move a depopulated Russia, before long, to being just another country whose mood swings rouse only a modicum of interest in the rest of the world.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Gregory Glazov: </strong>I would like to summarize and highlight antitheses in the above reflections:</p>
<p>The debate in the first symposium turned on Yuri Yarim-Agaev description of Putin’s power as a “farce” and his suggestion that modern Russia’s opposition lacks the courage of former dissidents like Bonner.  In the present symposium, he has affirmed the brutality of the regime but has detailed its weaknesses and recommended how the West can stop prolonging the life of the regime.  The second of these ways entailed western support for the democratic opposition.</p>
<p>Question: If the regime’s power is limited, does the opposition need courage equal to that of Bonner’s generation?</p>
<p>In affirming Yarim-Agaev’s totalitarian-authoritarian distinction, Dr. Darlymple underscored that the new regime is dangerously destabilized by lip-service to democratic ideals.</p>
<p>Question: Isn’t this a warning to make haste slowly?</p>
<p>Dr. Satter noted that unlike the opponents of the former totalitarian regime, the present opposition fails to focus on fundamental moral issues by concentrating on corruption, a mere symptom of the problem. Why is this? Is it because the opposition lacks moral character or because it is weary and afraid of the abyss that might follow?</p>
<p>Igor Melcuk articulates this danger while issuing the bleakest response, viz. that the Russian people, genetically changed by seventy years of war and terror, are massively behind the regime, anti-western, and deserving of the regime they have. There is no democratic opposition.  What hope remains depends on time and western resolve. If the regime collapses, the people will side with radical Islam.</p>
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