I have come across another book that I recommend you get and read. It is Alex Krainer’s, Grand Deception: The Browder Hoax. I was floored by the information he presented in the chapter, The Enterprise. Krainer’s exposition of what happened to Russians in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union–the mass rape of a country by economic elites in the United States and Europe. Once you comprehend what the Russian people endured in terms of economic privation and the economic miracle that unfolded under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, you will appreciate that Putin is not a heartless thug clinging to power by using fear, intimidation and coercion. The horror described by Krainer is on par with the Holodomor experienced by Ukrainians at the hand of Stalin in the 1930s–an estimated 4 million Ukrainians starved to death because of Stalin’s policy while “Russia sustained between five and six million “surplus deaths” – deaths that couldn’t be explained by previous population trends.”
The economic collapse and the ensuing hunger and unemployment explains why people like my friend, Andrei Martyanov, emigrated from Russia and became citizens of the United States and Canada. We are not talking about something that happened 100 years ago. This transpired between 1992 and 1999. Russia became a true shit hole.
As I read Mr. Krainer’s excellent work, I began to wonder if the hell that the Russian people experienced is what awaits the people of Europe as their economies grind to a halt. Ditto for the United States. Here is the relevant portion of Krainer’s book that describes Russia’s fall into the abyss of hyperinflation and mass unemployment:
“The transition program engineered by the American deep state and its Wall Street patrons was nothing short of catastrophic for Russia. The perfect storm of sudden price liberalization, drastic curtailment of government spending and bank credit, and opening of domestic markets to unrestricted foreign competition produced a toxic brew that devastated Russian economy, destroyed its currency, and plunged much of the population into poverty and hunger.
After 1992, Russian middle class saw their savings evaporate and their real wages halve – if they were fortunate enough to receive them at all.[109] Economic reforms rapidly destroyed the nation’s agricultural production and store shelves went almost empty. In 1992 the average Russian consumed 40% less than in 1991.[110] By 1998 some 80% of Russian farms went bankrupt and the nation that was one of the world’s leading food producers suddenly became dependent on foreign aid. About 70,000 factories shut down and Russia produced 88% fewer tractors, 77% fewer washing machines, 77% less cotton fabric, 78% fewer TV-sets and so forth.[111] In all, during the transition years, the nation’s Gross Domestic Product fell by 50%, which was even worse than during the World War II German occupation.[112]
A huge segment of the population became destitute. In 1989 two million Russians lived in poverty (on $4/day or less). By the mid-1990s, that number soared to 74 million according to World Bank figures. In 1996, fully one in four Russians was living in conditions described as “desperate” poverty.[113] Alcoholism soared and suicide rates doubled making suicide the leading cause of death from external causes. Violent crime also doubled in the early 1990s and during the first six years of reforms, nearly 170 thousand people were murdered.
An acute health crisis emerged, resulting in epidemics of curable diseases like measles and diphtheria. Rates of cancer, heart disease and tuberculosis also soared to become the highest for any industrialized country in the world. [114] Life expectancy for males plummeted to 57 years. At the same time abortions skyrocketed and birth rates collapsed: in Moscow they were as low as 8.2 per 1000.[115] In all, Russia’s death rates increased by 60% to a level only experienced by countries at war.[116] Western and Russian demographers agreed that from 1992 to 2000, Russia sustained between five and six million “surplus deaths” – deaths that couldn’t be explained by previous population trends.[117] That corresponds to between 3.4% and 4% of the total population of Russia. To put that number into perspective, consider that during the course of World War II, the United Kingdom lost 0.94% of its population, France lost 1.35%, China lost 1.89% and the U.S. lost 0.32%.[118] Aleksandr Rutskoy was in fact not exaggerating when he called the reforms program an “economic genocide.”
Grand Deception: The Browder Hoax, by Alex Krainer
https://books.apple.com/us/book/grand-deception-the-browder-hoax/id1436761423
Krainer’s account of Russia’s collapse is followed by an equally compelling chronicle of Russia’s ascent from the ashes and economic rebirth thanks to the policies enacted by Vladimir Putin. This is objective fact. It is not Russian propaganda. Western elites would do themselves a favor and read Alex Krainer’s detailed explanation of what the Russian people have experienced during the last 30 years. Those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat them.
Larry, Thanks for the recommendation!
I suspect that of the European nations, Russia has suffered the most in the 20th century: suffering Bolshevism, WW2 and the collapse of the USSR.
Germany is likely in second place due to the f…ing Allies. The starting point for Americans to really understand WW2 is the excellent book “Twas a Famous Victory” by Benjamin Colby. The lies one must go through to justify starting a war that killed 60 million and willing handed over half Europe to the monster Joe Stalin. And of course the lies must continue to protect the guilty.
Thanks for the book recommendation – ordered.
I vividly recall that period. The Irish Time newspaper, then a fine journal, now a woke neo-liberal rag, had their then Moscow correspondent, one of our finest journalists reporting on the calamity that was that time in Russia. I recall him reporting on starving babushki trying to sell on the street whatever pathetic items they had to buy food.
With respect to Krainer, who was no admirer of Putin, he was requested by Browder to make a documentary re Browder story. While he was researching for this documentary, he discovered the lies, and made one much to Browders horror. Browder subsequently moved heaven and earth to have it banned, and succeeded in stopping its screening in the EU Parliament. The docu is linked here;
https://www.bitchute.com/video/NlrR5zFDoTRj/
Correction, I got my documentary maker mixed up. In fact it was Andrei Nekrasov who made the Browder/Magnitsky docu. Still it’s a very enlightening work.
Just watched. Awesome. Thanks for the reference.
i am a subscriber to realvision byGrant williams.Grant shows a higher moral fabric than most economists but be ware.it was grant who introduced me to Browder and his “Evil RUssia”shtick.idid some digging and quickly found that Browder was in fact a CARPETBAGGER true to his American Civil War ilk.He managed to get out of Russia with 400 mil $ before the FSB was onto him.There is an outstanding warrant in Russia for his arrest.I hope the warrant gets served.
I learned about this time reading blogs by Orlov about 15 years ago. I do believe similar things are possible in the West, though not inevitable. In those blogs the main thing I learned was human networking is the key to survival. After that is being handy. It won’t be fun like summer camp and you will need to make deals with murderous low lives at some point. I have been preparing ever since…
Did you order this through Apple Books? That was the only way I could get it. I posted another comment earlier explaining how Amazon & then, apparently, another seller called bookdepository (in the uk, I believe) appeared to be blocking the purchase of a paperback version of the book without explaining why it was impossible to complete the sale. Amazon claimed that they couldn’t deliver it to my address! Uh, ok….
Eric C
I got my copy through Apple books.
Who knew that Apple wasn’t as much into the censorship biz as other sources, or maybe this was an oversight on their part – not playing along with our puppet masters? Just a slip-up on their part?
anywho, Larry, I don’t suppose you or anyone else on the forum can tell me whether this Apple version of the book is the “real deal” or has, possibly, been compromised in some way (with redactions or whatever?). Anyone out there know how it compares with the original hardcover or paperback…is it identical/complete?
Guess this is what happens when free speech is under attack – one begins to be suspicious of everything that appears at first glance to be genuine.
Cheers, Eric C
This explains y u can’t order it from Amazon: https://thesaker.is/how-my-book-unmasking-bill-browder-was-censored-by-amazon-by-alex-krainer/
You can download a pdf of the original version of the book here:
https://dxczjjuegupb.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/TheKillingOfWilliamBrowder_PrintLayout_6x9-1.pdf
WOW! I have not encountered this before. This book is not listed on Amazon, which I completely understand, or BIblio.com, whi h is strange.
I have usually been able to find books that go against the official narratives at BIblio.com…this book must reveal too much, therefore I must get it.
where did you order? Amazon doesnt sell it?
Serbia suffered more per capita in both WWs.
I used to think it would be better for the Balkan countries to get closer to the West, but now I think Serbia has the right idea. Blood is thicker than water and the Russians are closer to us (my balkan hat on) religiously, culturally and linguistically than the West. The West just tries to control us and use us as a chess piece in their game of empire.
We (this time wearing my USA hat) used to be the good guys. Maybe we were naïve or maybe having absolute power corrupted us. Probably a little of both.
Regular Russians didn’t just suffer in the 20th century, suffering was the default mode of existence all throughout their history.
It wasn’t much better in the 19th century, in fact it was much worse in peacetime (famine was a recurrent event) but at least there wasn’t the grandest genocidal war in human history to endure.
“Bolshevism” isn’t responsible for that, quite the opposite.
WWI was an imperialist project.
The Civil War after that need not have happened, but it was instigated by the remnants of the previous regime joining forces with the Western powers so that the former than preserve their privileges while the latter can loot Russia’s resources (where have we seen that recently?).
That launched the Soviets on the path towards brutal repression and paranoia, because that was the only way to survive.
But had it not happened, things would have been quite different.
WWII is an external event imposed on them, and again instigated with the ultimate goal of pillaging the place.
The sole part of that tragic history you can perhaps blame the Bolsheviks for is the 1930s.
But, as usual, there is context.
If you see what they did through the prism of what later happened, you understand that they had no choice but to do extremely rapid industrialization and collectivization, and to secure their internal ranks through purges, otherwise they would have lost the war. And Stalin knew the war is coming already in the late 1920s.
Desperate times, desperate measures, etc.
What happens after that, however, is the most peaceful and prosperous time that region has ever known in its history — the 1950s to the early 1980s.
And collectivization actually was a success. Again, people don’t think about the context – you can’t have industrial mechanized agriculture with land parceled out into small holdings worked by individual peasants. Simply doesn’t work, you need large plots of land and centralized investment into the necessary equipment. Every country that has gone beyond subsistence farming has gone though some process of consolidation of land holdings so that it can do industrial mechanized agriculture.
Once the land was collectivized, famines, which, once again, had been chronic and recurrent previously, ended – there was a minor one immediately after WWII due to all the destruction that had happened plus a bad harvest, and that’s it. No famines ever since.
It’s just that the Soviets had to do in the span of a few years and they consolidated land holdings into large state-owned enterprises, while in e.g. the US the process was slow, took many decades (and is in fact still ongoing to some extent) and consolidated land into private hands. The main mechanism through which that happened was the destitution of family farms through usurious loans followed by repossession. Which approach is better for society long term? BTW, what is rarely understood is that during the same time that collectivization was happening in the USSR, the most intense period of the analogous process in the US was happening, aided by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Those pictures of desperate destitute starving human masses migrating West out of the plains? Yes, that is the equivalent of “collectivization” in the US – farmers had always been on the edge financially, and at some rate they had been losing their farms for decades, and the combination of those two events pushed vast numbers of them over the edge. Yet the situation in the USSR was “deliberate genocide” and a giant failing of the system, while what happened in the US we mostly don’t talk about.
Ironically, eventually the same outcome was eventually achieved in the post-Soviet space too – the state-owned agricultural enterprises did end up in private hands.
People are not objective in their judgement because of the need to take sides in the current conflict, but the truth is that even now Russia is a neoliberal shithole with extreme inequality and the safety net that made life in the second half of the 20th century so secure and tranquil largely gone.
BTW, the same applies to much of Eastern Europe that has “handed over to the monster Joe Stalin” too. Czechoslovakia and to an extent Hungary and (some parts of) Poland had advanced industry, being in Central Europe and part of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the rest of the region had been Third world plain and simple. It industrialized and developed thanks to communism, and given how it has deindustrialized and descended back towards Third world status since 1989, there is guarantee it ever would have developed had it not been for communism.
But it was all betrayed in the 1980s by those inside the party who wanted to loot and pillage and who were prevented in achieving those aspirations by the system. So the system had to go and indeed it was gone.
Which ensured that eventually we will be on the brink of nuclear annihilation because once that happened the American elites decided that they don’t need to abide by the same rules of mutual deterrence anymore – after all, they had won the Cold War, right? It wasn’t the case that a fraction of the Soviet elite forfeited, no, that was a real and complete victory proving once and for all the superiority of one system (and civilization too) over another, which gave it a carte blanche to do whatever it wanted after that. And the way things are going we might indeed see the end times if the situation is not resolved. So from the moment the USSR fell apart, what is happening now became an inevitability.
But you can’t expect people who were only concerned about looting and pillaging to think about such grand long-term issues.
Had more “monsters” followed after Stalin, none of this would have happened, but, alas, such exceptional individuals do not appear often in history…
When you call Russia a “neo liberal shithole” you must be referring to the fact that they live within their means, unlike western nations. I have travelled there and don’t agree with your assessment. They do have issues but they have come a long way from the misery of the nineties.
It was a very interesting write up by Tbx (thanks!) but that line struck a cord with me too. Does s/he knows what a neoliberal shithole looks like??
I know quite a few in Latin America and shithole is a most apt description. Now Russia?, meh, they are fine.
Good day Meso-Am
Ones mans garbage is another mans gold’Standard of living.
Opinion from people opining ‘ego concept of this life; a short span indeed//
My ego says ,PEACE is atop it all
=peace of mind contentment with my God, His provisions, being today 11-07 2022 ‘Shelter, Food,Clothes, one room, bed,microwave,running water,spaceheater a/c & insects as visitors. I mostly loved working.
I even seem to recall about 60% of earth people still live field farm to face. Here inside US beltway @ 60years + my experience now age 64 :my total life span is nucleus to the District of Corruption.( Dad born ,Washington D.C.
et al 10 person family to Live then RIP inside VA )and it had scores of fruitfulness- My 12 hour work days are past.My 8 hour 5 days are past-Walking the Wash Post 12 years,fun money- older my 4$ lawn cutting fee was ok early 1970s buy some toy soldiers and candy.then held job ‘Gasoline full service’ technician lol-
Most work is past and my first lemonade stands seem silly currently.when compared to my backyard ‘carnivals’ fee- Once married, increasing family units everything [material ]imaginable was mine but peace [anibseder] of mind was fleeting- seems one could lust for ever -Twice home-owner’leaser’but equity was a benefit// My entrepreneur heart is tired.I could attribute volumes, me writing how our Creator fills us up despite our dissatisfaction,lust for more.I always wanted a tiny acre farm field and when I could afford that the reality of sitting bumper to bumper so much on route 95 from Fairfax County [pop 1million+] to Fredericksburg VA we stayed put. Fairfax and Va suburb counties[some would say ALL is a shit#0le now]
Providence Kept me and wife in county that has for decades been # 1 income per capita USA hear and again.But Sht#0les are ‘where/when the mind is not at peace’- truism whatever. peace to you and yours!
>When you call Russia a “neo liberal shithole” you must be referring to the fact that they live within their means
No, I refer to the facts that there is a huge income inequality, that there is a flat and very low income tax, and that little of the social safety net that once existed remains.
Things have improved a bit since Putin came into power, but the fundamentals of the system remain neoliberal.
We will see what changes the war brings for it cannot be won decisively by such a system, there will have to be a deep shit in the way the country is run if it is to survive.
P.S. Just a couple examples:
1) Russia could have had a submarine fleet larger than that of the US, as the USSR did during the Cold War, had the money spent on megayachts for billionaires went into building SSBNs and SSGNs. Instead the third component of the nuclear triad is quite vulnerable now.
2) There are many, many thousands of $200-300K (and above) cars on Russian roads. A T-14 tank is supposedly $4M or so, so for 10-15 of those cars you get one T-14 tank, i.e. if the money hadn’t been spent on limousines and sport cars for the oligarchy, they could have had a couple thousand T-14s out in the field now. But they don’t.
Etc.
P.P.S. That was actually discussed in pretty much those exact terms in prime time on the main TV channel in Russia a couple months ago.
So there is hope.
Brief History Of Time: From Communism To Armageddon
Tbx, You have an interesting perspective. And indeed all our perspectives are colored by our pasts. Clearly, all of humanity was at the threshold of existence if one goes back a few hundred years. Although Russia was behind the advances of Western Europe, it was making strides in catching up and Nicholas was making reforms. Yet it was not fast enough for those who lusted after power and for a certain ethnic group who long felt dispossessed and wanted revenge. I do agree, however, that Nicholas was very stupid in conniving with the French and British to start WW1. I’m sure if he knew the outcome, he would have chose a different path. But power breeds arrogance which is often attended by stupidity.
Perhaps you are unaware of all the other human tragedies associated with communism, such as millions dead in China and Cambodia. Or the silly state of North Korea. Sorry, I’m not buying the utopian vision the communist always pedal. It is against God and human nature. I much prefer freedom and liberty, in as much as can be afforded. Totalitarian regimes run by evil egomanics who think they know how to run everything, is not a way to organize a society. But if you prefer to live in a totalitarian regime run by an ex-con, more power to you!
That said. I think Putin is a great man. I also thin Biden is a dumbass grifter.
Also, with regard to WW2, the same lies peddled in the West were also peddled in the East. The first casualty of war is truth and when this is your second time around feeding lies to your population (WW1 being the first) one learners that the truth can not be known. The backlash for such a calamity would have caused a revolution. Thus the government and the ethnocentric owners of much of media worked in concert to spin a myth that most people believe.
I very rarely comment on this blog though I do follow it regularly (similar with the Duran and other what I would describe as right/right-leaning spaces on the internet).
Wanted to give you (TBX) a thumbs up and say well done for spending the time to write such a good comment. Like you, I find it interesting seeing the constant attacks against the USSR which are 100% motivated by ideology rather than facts.
I’m totally okay with people hating the USSR and saying it was a shit hole because they disagree with the political system, but like….bro, there was a reason the socialist bloc was called the 2nd world in the ‘1st world 3rd world’ system that so many people know short-hand today. Living standards in the european socialist bloc during the cold-war were incredibly high by global (i.e. non-western) standards, and considering the absolute devestation that they all went through in WW2, and had absolutely no help in recovery from the U.S.A. which was basically unscathed after WW2 (unlike Western europe and Japan, which received a variety of support to recovery..).
Not to mention the incredible support the socialist bloc gave to countries across the world to liberate themselves from Western colonialism. We take it as given that ‘all’ countries are independent but that certainly wasn’t the case, and very recently too. All of those countries had to free themselves from outright Western control, and largely it was due to incredible support from the socialist bloc.
Many eastern european countries (or Russia for that matter…) still haven’t recovered to their pre-90’s average standards of living, and to be honest, are not likely to, bearing in mind even ‘independent’ countries like Russia are still controlled by capitalists that more or less (Russia) hew to orthodox neoliberal policies.
For all those who have been brought up on the standard Western toxic brew about how evil the USSR was throughout its entire history I highly recommend works like Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds (he has a YouTube lecture on this topic – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgTWnUpvNiM ) as well as Al Szymanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union (there is a scanned copy of this work on archive.org , it is fascinating).
Michael Parenti is no ‘tankie’ and has plenty of criticisms of the USSR. I hope anyone reading my comment will approach this topic with an open mind and give this lecture a watch, even if you disagree with my comment or viewpoint. Thank you!
I think the Gulag Archipeligo is a better bet
The Gulag Archipelago is a fictional account even admitted by S’s wife. Compare the US prison and criminal justice system to the USSR. Go spend time on an Indian reservation or vast swaths outside of the wealthier cities. Even San Francisco and New York have huge amounts of poverty and poverty induced crime. The Soviet Union, despite the entire capitalist world arrayed against it pulled the country from the brink, saved yours and my a$$ from fascism and still, having been devastated by them (with secret collaboration by the likes of Prescott Bush, IBM, GM. Ford,etc) accomplish far more in far less time with far less carnage than the bloodsoaked imperialist West.
Tbx , I appreciate your offering us a larger perspective. Historical forces and counter-forces create complexity that tempts analysts into over-simplification.
Still, no context can justify the Communists deliberately destroying the way of life and ultimately life itself for Ukrainian non-collective farmers. If that isn’t the worst kind of tyranny I don’t know what is.
I’m bookmarking this outstanding explanation and history of the Soviet Union.
I have written and will be posting a 4 part series of my recent trip to Russia, specifically, Three Hero Cities–Moscow, Volgograd (Stalingrad), and Sevastopol) in a brand new website. I provide a lot of historical context, using even US sources pre Cold War and during detente period of the 1970’s, to show how poisoned the discourse about Russia really is.
Here is part II. Follow links and videos found in the article for further context.
https://bumblebuddhist.com/my-trip-to-russia-2022-part-ii/
True, there are many misconceptions and outright lies told about the Soviet Union.
But things are looking up. Today Russia, under Putin, has the first good bald leader its had in a long time. If the cycle continues, expect Medvedev to grow a gigantic mustache and put things right.
Serbs suffered as much as Russians did, and are still terrorized (by those Germans you feel so sorry about, amongst others).
I’m not making excuses for the excesses of WW2. While Germans were running rough shod over Eastern Europe, major German cities where being fire bombed. Also it should be noted that Barbarossa was a preemptive attack against the USSR which was amassing troops ready for an invasion.
There is no good guy here. That is what war brings. That is why it should be avoided. It is why the neocons and their ilk must be exposed. But if you look at the run up to WW2, a situation simial to Ukraine was playing out in Poland. The polish government was encouraging ethnic hatred against their German minorities. Washington and Britain where giving reassurances to Poland and telling them not to negotiate ( Hitler only wanted Danzig with its 90% Geman citizens and a rail corridor across the Polish corridor). But that was too big of a compromise for the Polish leaders ( with Poland only being form in1920 from the hide of pre WW1 Germany). It is interesting that Poland is acting in the same stupid and arrogant way now making demands on Germany and sending troops to Ukraine. I guess this must be the genesis of the Polish jokes that were so popular in my childhood…
> Barbarossa was a preemptive attack against the USSR which was amassing troops ready for an invasion.
Would it be true, USSR would have invaded in 1940, when Wehrmacht was busy in Western Europe and only paper-thin defenses were held in the east.
But USSR did not.
And it was summer 1940 when this “pre-emptive” operation started being drafted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Otto
Exactly AFTER Berlin was proven by facts on the ground Moscow is not going to attack. Well, if Moscow will not – then Berlin would.
P.S. one funny twist of the history was, in spring 1940 UK and France planned to attack USSR themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pike
Unaware of that Hitler started the offensive at Paris (France declared war on Germany year before, yet for moths both armies struggled to accumulate enough forces to attack one another) – which eventually painted Third Reich into the corner, while releasing USSR.
Would Hitler know more about this French military plan or would he choose to “walk slow” for nay reason – those would be France and UK fighting two fronts war, not Germany. Or, would Third Reich still attack USSR – it would be a perfect dogfight, a triangle where every party is at war with two others.
@Arioc, Russia didn’t invade Germany in 1940 because Hitler and Stalin were in cahoots via the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. This collaboration also explains the motivation for operation pike. Stalin entered into the agreement because he saw it as a means to start a war between Germany and France/Britian. Thus, instead of invading Poland with Germany he delayed for two weeks. The idea was to have the Western European powers go to war and exhausted themselves and the USSR would then sweep in and capture all of Europe. You see Stalin was much more clever than you.
Of course people in the “Stalin is Mother Teresa” camp have trouble digesting this.
But ultimately one only need look at the placement of airfields troops and supplies to know Stalin was planning an invasion. Or soviet aggression towards its neighbors: Baltic states, Romania, Finland. See Viktor Suvorov’s The Chief Culprit and Icebreaker or Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War.
> You see Stalin was much more clever than you.
Oh, man, that was sooo convincing! LOL.
> in 1940 because Hitler and Stalin were in cahoots via the Molotov Ribbentrop pact
So they were in 1941. The pact was exactly the same that year as it was year and two years before.
So, no one could attack in 1941. So, no on did attack. Because the paaaact!
You don’t need to tell me about wars, because I have lived trough them (and also expecting next one). There may not be the good guys in wars, but there definitely are the bad ones.
Hitler only wanted to exterminate/enslave all the Slavs (and other untermensch), which I am one of. I don’t know if I shoud attribute your attempts to rewrite history (and justify actons of Nazi Germany) to ignorance or to malice.
I’m sorry you have had to suffer. But the neocons always use the myth of “Evil Hitler” to justify all their wars. I’m just pointing out it is a false myth and that negotiations are preferable to war almost always.
Also goverments say terrible things about the otherside as a way to get their people to go off and slaughter other human beings. Similar thing were said about the Germans from the other side.
The following is from a Hitler speech declaring war on the US. Note he talks in glowing terms about the Slavs.
“If the German Reich, with its soldiers and weapons, had not stood against this opponent, a storm would have burned over Europe that would have eliminated, once and for all time, and in all its intellectual paucity and traditional stupidity, the laughable British idea of the European balance of power.
If the Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians had not also acted to defend this European world, then the Bolshevik hordes would have poured over the Danube countries as did once the swarms of Attila’s Huns, and Tatars and Mongols would then, on the open country by the Ionian Sea, force a revision of the Treaty of Montreux regarding the Dardanelles strait…”
As to your last question, neither. Perhaps you are misled. It’s nothing personal. I just have a different perspective than you. Between Stalin and Hitler, Stalin wins the most evil contest in my book. In fact I’d put Churchill and FDR on par with Hitler.
Do you even know who Slavs are? Are you just trolling me? Hitler’s speech? I guess your book is Mein Kampf.
Yes, I am misled by bones of my people that died for not being of proper “race”. I would say it’s kind of personal, but I might be mistaken because I haven’t read your book.
“While Germans were running rough shod over Eastern Europe, major German cities where being fire bombed.”
Well, running roughshod would be an understatement. Mass killing of both soldiers and civilians, mass raping, plundering and burning hundreds of villages, reducing entire cities to ruble … Major German cities were also bombed and many German civilians killed. However, the latter was not done by the Soviet Airforce. With a few exceptions, Berlin being a sad example, the mass killing from the air was mostly an Anglo-American practice …
“Also it should be noted that Barbarossa was a preemptive attack against the USSR which was amassing troops ready for an invasion.”
Barbarossa was a huge colonial project. Slaves, food and oil were the main goals. There is no evidence of plans for a Soviet invasion of Germany …
Talking about Poland, who was planning an invasion in 1934, seven years before Barbarossa?
https://www.newsweek.pl/historia/polityka-zagraniczna-ii-rp-hitler-stalin-pilsudski-czyli-taniec-z-diablami/jksv1d5
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/adolf-hitler-memorial-pilsudski-1935/
Eva you are mistaken. There is plenty of evidence including information that became available after the collapse and was declassified and made available ( before subsequently disappearing).
See for example Sean McKeekin’s book Stalin’s War.
Also the cruelty on the Eastern Front was due to Stalin. On the Western front both side agreed to the Geneva convention (even though the Allies violated it) on the Eastern front Stalin would not agree to the Geneva convention and the Germans responded to the Red Army in kind.
It is funny that Rezun’s books were published (in Europe) BEFORE the USSR collapse. It was only their translation to Russian that was published after.
And Rezun is Browder of military history. His books are cunningly written, with pervasive kissing up to the reader and wink-winking. “Me and you, oh the smart reader, are so much better and smarterthan those sheeple around us, who don’t know!” – this is convenient dressing and helps to swallow the books without digesting. Until some stretch happens o be too extreme, and then like Kramer with Browder, you start re-reading his nooks looking at the details. And there are Rezun critics just like there is Browder critics, but the true believers won’t bring them.
This all was chewed (yet again) 2-3 years ago on UNZ, when Ron was first exposed to Rezun’s slick storytelling and mesmerized, as we all initially were.
Just, don’t you bother with details…
By Rezun:
T-34 was “autobahn tank” designed to outrun any car on them perfect EU roads. The Russian mud handicapped it greatly and did not let it shine as it should.
To calculate fuel consumption by automobile for long travel you just take it’s per-kilometer rate and multiply by the distance. So simple. Despite a simple fact that 1930-s trucks could not run from Moscow to far east shores on one tank, and i think neither can modern long-range trucks even today. Rezun’s “ready to consume” formula made trucks carry fuel weight many times more than their maximum cargo load – but don’t let dull maths blunt the entertaining storytelling.
Just like Solzhenitsyn in hois Archipelago, Rezun brings several stories of his Great Revelation, of some personal experience that made him See The Truth through Soviet propaganda veil. All of them are well written and endearing too – but they are different, so at least (n-1) of them are false.
Perhaps, no need to copy-paste the whole forum thread here, but fdor the record, https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-when-stalin-almost-conquered-europe/?showcomments
I would also add the obvious. War is generated by the leaders, not the citizens. The leaders are culpable not the average Joe who’s trusts his lying leaders . I’m sorry for all the innocent who are killed in war on all sides. Unfortunately, the war criminals FDR, Churchill and even Stalin (see tbx above) are lionized by the same people they maliciously lead to slaughter. The human condition is indeed very strange!
“Also the cruelty on the Eastern Front was due to Stalin.”
Whatever you say. Both Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS and axis allies “innocent” guys …?
The links I have provided and you have not bothered to look at show one of the many photos (i.e. “primary sources”) that have not disappeared -unlike your imagined “archives”- and that show the friendship between nazi and Polish elites before 1939… What I see is Pilsudski with Goebbels, Lipski with Hitler and Hitler even mourning over the death of Pilsudski (!):
https://www.alamy.de/stockfoto-nach-der-beerdigung-verlasst-service-fur-jozef-klemens-pilsudski-hitler-die-st-hedwigs-kirche-mit-gefolge-48341197.html
What I find particularly interesting about the Polish-German non-agression agreement is the year -1934- before Munich (1938) and Molotov-Ribbentrop (1939). Even more interesting is the fact of the annexation of Zaolzie in 1938 …
Whatever happened to that German-Polish “friendship” to degenerate in the mass killing of Polish citizens -both Jewish and Catholic- from 1939 until the end of WWII is a mystery to me …
One thing is however obvious. That Poland had in those pre-war years “imperial ambitions”.
Hitler-Pilsudsky pact actually was the ice-breaker.
It was the new kind of pacts, and Hitler needed to “legitimize” it. So the new found Poland (who considered themselves a powerful predator and attacked all their neighbors except Germany) was willing to help.
The new aspect in Polish-style pacts was removing of guard clauses. Usually bilateral pacts only worked until there was a war. So they were “compatible” with collective defense treaties.
But Poland and Germany sought to preempt collective defense, so they drafted the guard-less pact templates. New bilateral pacts preempted collective treaties (that Poland detwrminatedly fought against).
The 1939 was one great comeback year in this aspect. As one treaty asked, UK declared war on Germany, but how the Chamberlain-Hitler pact asked, they comitted to non-aggression. Hence the sitzkrieg.
One of the greatest figures in 20th-century American Catholicism— as well as American culture who had a number one-rated show in TV— was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Sheen, while a strong critic of Bolshevism and communism, was a Russophile who had a great love for the Russian people and culture. His writings are full of references to Russian writers and poets.
“There are three great qualities of the Russian soul which warrant optimism as to the future brilliance of Russia: deep religious feeling, capacity for pain and suffering, and fellowship. First, the deep religious feeling. Atheism is not natural to the
Russian people; rather, it has been an importation from the Western world…”
“…The lesson is not to be forgotten: in a not too distant day when Russia, like the prodigal son, will return to the father’s house, let not Western civilization refuse to accept it back or absent itself from the feast celebrating the salvation of what was lost. Constant obedience is better than repentance, but the truly obedient will always rejoice in the repentant.”…. The land which once was known as Holy Russia may become again the wellspring whence a pure stream of Christianity may flow.”
(Fulton J. Sheen, “Footprints in a Darkened Forest” [New York: Meredith, 1967)
On what we in the West are currently experiencing:
“It is characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times. If there is no fixed concept of justice how shall men know it is violated? Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world; the great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on, because they have lost the vision of the heights from which they have fallen.”
(Fulton J. Sheen “Communism and Conscience of the West” [Bobbs-Merrill, 1948])
One of the greatest figures in 20th-century American Catholicism— as well as American culture who had a number one-rated show in TV— was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Sheen, while a strong critic of Bolshevism and communism, was a Russophile who had a great love for the Russian people and culture. His writings are full of references to Russian writers and poets.
A couple of relevant passages from Sheen:
“There are three great qualities of the Russian soul which warrant optimism as to the future brilliance of Russia: deep religious feeling, capacity for pain and suffering, and fellowship. First, the deep religious feeling. Atheism is not natural to the Russian people; rather, it has been an importation from the Western world… The lesson is not to be forgotten: in a not too distant day when Russia, like the prodigal son, will return to the father’s house, let not Western civilization refuse to accept it back or absent itself from the feast celebrating the salvation of what was lost. Constant obedience is better than repentance, but the truly obedient will always rejoice in the repentant… The land which once was known as Holy Russia may become again the wellspring whence a pure stream of Christianity may flow.” (Fulton J. Sheen, “Footprints in a Darkened Forest” [New York: Meredith, 1967)
Here’s relevant passage on what we in the West are currently experiencing:
“It is characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times. If there is no fixed concept of justice how shall men know it is violated? Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world; the great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on, because they have lost the vision of the heights from which they have fallen.” (Fulton J. Sheen “Communism and Conscience of the West” [Bobbs-Merrill, 1948])
PDF of book can be downloaded here:
http://62.182.86.140/main/573000/13127e584a19d4cf55f056efdda73989/Benjamin%20Colby%20-%20%27Twas%20a%20famous%20victory%20%281975%29.pdf
Who started WW2? Who murdered millions of people in death camps?
Technically, Japanese did.
Since Sino-Japanese and then Amero-Japanese wars are considered part of WW2, we have to mark the first early outbreak, and it was in Asia not in Europe.
Of course, for Western mind only what hapoens to Europeans matter, so this weird tilting. The war ended with defeat of Japan, but it did not start when Japan came to war. Go figure.
Assurément, la Russie est, de TRES LOIN, la nation qui a le plus SOUFFERT … INCOMPARABLEMENT PLUS que les JUIFS !!! Il y eut un DOUBLE GENOCIDE du peuple russe au XXème siècle :
1° celui perpétré par les “Russes-JUIFS” (la Révolution russe fut “l’œuvre” des JUIFS – il n’est que de considérer l’IMMENSE MAJORITE de JUIFS dans le “personnel” bolchevique ;
2° celui perpétré par l’Allemagne NAZIE et les “acolytes” du NAZISME en Ukraine et dans les pays baltes : 27 MILLIONS de morts ;
Depuis 1945, il n’est question QUE du GENOCIDE des Juifs … C’est bien plutôt de la nation russe qu’il FAUDRAIT parler …
You know it must be a good book when it’s banned on Amazon!
Available on amazon.ca
Doesn’t show up on my amazon.ca. It is available on indigo as an ebook and Kobo however. Priced at $20.
Yes, available here; however, the paperback can’t be shipped to the US (tried that) and the Kindle is available only to registered Canadian shoppers…
So sorry guys south of the Great White North — the book is clearly deemed too dangerous to you and therefore to your loved politicians!
Cheers, JaKo
Another book censored by Amazon and banned throughout the West in the 21st Century is an exhaustive 1,000-page biography of Jean Monnet by Éric Roussel. Perhaps because it explains how the CIA created the EU for Brussels to always dance to the tune of Washington. The EU is nothing more than Washington’s political arm to control Europe with such different countries. As NATO is Washington’s military arm for the same purpose. Not by chance, both based in Brussels.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/11/13/how-the-cia-created-the-eu/
To those talking about the book being banned.
It was banned on amazon, barnes and nobel, books-a-million and the others back in 2014, back before it was cool. It was banned at the personal request/threat of then acting secretary of state John Kerry. As soon as it started climbing up the best sellers lists, Kerry’s office started firing out letters to the heads of all these book retailers followed up immediately by pressure and “investigations” from multiple federal departments under the control of the executive branch, until the book was gone.
Then the DOJ and IRS went after the publisher, the publisher relented and dropped the book, but they went ahead and bankrupted them anyways.
When Krainer says “the Enterprise” he isn’t using it in the Vauge pronoun tense, he is specifically using the name that this group or network of oligarchs and globo-homo spooks refer to themselves as. This is the same “the Enterprise” Whitney Webb identified in her recent 2 volume book, the same Enterprise that Col. L Fletcher Proudy caught a glimpse of, and its the same Enterprise that keeps Ryan Dawson’s bell ringing.
*DING* *DING* *DING*
Exactly my thoughts. I have been saying for a long time that the USA’s position today is in many ways similar to the position of the USSR when the Berlin wall collapsed – government was spewing lies that nobody believed in any more.
Not quite, it is more similar to the late Brezhnev years.
Same sclerotic gerontocracy, down to the dementia and barely able to speak coherently (and it isn’t just the head of the state, that applies to others very high up in the hierarchy too).
In 1989 in the USSR that had been replaced by the next generation, those born during and shortly after WWII, which had no personal investment in anything, neither in the victory in the war nor in the system, and that wanted to burn it all down so that it can redistribute the riches to itself.
If the US is to follow the same pattern, it hasn’t yet hit the same point. Redistribution is a trickier prospect there though, as everything is already looted.
But the more important prospect is the collapse of the fracking miracle (or rather, it should be more appropriately called “mirage”). The US may have only a decade left before it slides so far down the net energy cliff that the system just collapses under its own weight. There won’t be another similar bail out after that – fracking went for the source rock, there is nothing left once it has been tapped.
And nobody (other than, curiously, the Russians) seriously invested in next-generation (or, really, any) nuclear (too late now), nor was anyone ever willing to even contemplate demolishing suburbia and moving into apartment blocks (also too late now).
On top of that you have climate change about to make the southern half of the US uninhabitable.
Which is probably why we have a war now – there is that big, still very rich with untapped resources piece of real estate in the far north of Eurasia that is the big prize everyone is after.
If that war is not won, it may well be Mad Max world for large parts of North America in the coming decades…
Huge untapped reserves in Alaska and offshore. Wishful thinking that USA is in danger of running out of oil.
“Climate change”, LOL.
As well as untapped oil reserves, the US has vast deposits of coal. and CO2 needs back into the air for the plants; levels are alarmingly low compared to geologic eras of the past- plant life>animal life! I don’t understand the alarm over the earth getting warmer- all great human development, expansions, took place during warming cycles. ah well.
” I have been saying for a long time that the USA’s position today is in many ways similar to the position of the USSR when the Berlin wall collapsed – government was spewing lies that nobody believed in any more.”
More specifically, they lied so predictably, people learned to look for the parts OMITTED and thus getting a somewhat accurate grasp how serious and bad was the situation.
Any similarity with current events is purely coincidental. 🙂
Yes, hence why most Russians now and especially in the last year despise the West .
this article is old news for me at least insofar as my wife lived through that period and we have spoken thoroughly about it and on return in 2006 we could see that the changes had already begun. It says something not only about those in the Kremlin, but also of the Russian People as a whole. As Hass suggests, the Russian people see through the lies and stupidity – and this was so with many, even back in 2006.
So the very same relatively small number of people who did this to arguably a well established super power in warp speed time have there own global west populations in their cross hairs with the same weapons that ruined the USSR. Hmph! Wonder oh wonder what the books gonna say about us in twenty years!
A helluva comeback story. Thanks for sharing, Larry. Kudos to Putin and the Russian people who put their faith in and supported him. And to think, they bounced back to Superpower status without going through the woke joke of questioning their sexual identities and without needing safe spaces from opinions they found hurtful. My god but we are a land of pussies. And the toughest times still await us. I don’t know that we are up to the enormous task ahead. Some are, but enough to save the Republic? I don’t know.
Putin never managed to save the Soviet Union. He did manage to save a lot of the Russian people however.
Do Americans want to save the qabal’s republic or do they want to save the people? priorities.
“A helluva comeback story.”
It really is. Putin is one of the great men of human history, not only to have shepherded his people through such a transition with his unitary leadership, but for being an exemplary faction balancer who will leave a movement behind capable of defending their people.
“Some are, but enough to save the Republic? ”
The Republic is already dead, raped and murdered in its sleep by internationalism both communist and crony cartel corporate. One can argue when exactly we made the transition from republic to empire. It was for us, like the Romans, a gradual process. However, the historical date is immaterial. We are an empire now.
The problem is not to save the republic, but to save our people during the death throes (which may last for generations) of this failed-state empire of which we are now subjects. The Democratic Party is filled with people who want us dead or enslaved. They are various pagan neo-conversos, worshipping anything but God. We aren’t going to have any more success with them than the Spanish did with the original conversos after the Reconquista. The Republican Party is still filled with hollow men who serve their globalist masters in exchange for fat stacks of cash. However, voting can still useful in conserving our people in those areas where Americans are still a majority and brazen vote fraud and corporate RINO treason can be brought under control.
New nations (and federations thereof) are born from the corpses of empires and old nations reborn, long submerged under imperial domination. The objective is to get a new country, shorn of crony cartel corporatism and anti-white communism.
This is proof that Putin is not the evil monster the Western economic vultures want the world to believe is the fact that he[Putin] enacted new economic policies to help the people. If he were a tyrant he wouldn’t need to do such things as he would be in power and have the same benefits.
You know a mans heart when he shows care for the children: this Putin does !
I saw the videos of Putin interacting and promising to help blind girls and other children disabled or on death bed, before ytube shadow banned Russian insights.
I have my own ways of verifying his emotions.
Interesting that Hitler was a great lover of children. Children loved him, there are many photos out there demonstrating it. And please don’t try to put the demonic modern interpretation of those words on him, they reflect way more on us than on him.
We are indeed entering a new Dark Age.
We are indeed leaving the age of satanic sin and war.
Putin, old China mate and the other Bric’s will usher in a new golden age.
“It’s only what l’ve heard!”
Sounds like an excellent companion to Douglas Reed’s The Controversy of Zion. That is an excellent examination of the period from the end of WW1 to 1950, by one of the leading foreign correspondents of the time. Reading that was my key to understanding the self destructive behaviour the West insists on engaging in.
You will not find it in print but can get it free as a pdf online via your favourite search engine.
A remarkable and absolutely revealing book. No wonder Reed, who was a famous and accomplished journalist at the time was mercilessly persecuted.
I would heartily recommend this book as well. Eyes will open wide once you begin to understand what has been going on for the last 2000 years or so right up to 1950.
I got it on Amazon recently. Highly recommended.
I lived through that hell of a time and experienced it all first-hand. I was a university student during 1989-1994. Then I went to a grad school to conduct research towards my PhD (Candidate of Science). During the first year of grad school, I had to work as a night guard at a medical clinic. Then I got lucky – I found a job at a weekly newspaper as a computer pagemaker/designer. I would work only one day per week (start around 10 am and finish whenever the newspaper was ready, sometimes around 1-4 am of the next day ), but that paid me more money than the graduate stipend. After getting a PhD, I stayed at my institute, working and publishing, but the things were not going well with the science in Russia, and there was no hope for any positive changes. So I moved to Canada as a postdoctoral researcher in the fall of 1999. A couple of months later Putin became the president of Russia. There was a very long “induction period”, but eventually things started to improve.
I have been living in the US for nearly two decades now. During recent years, I started having a foreboding feeling that the US might go through a similar collapse, and it might be much worse. I was younger back then. There was more cohesion between the people in the post-Soviet Russia. Finally, I was in my country. Here I still feel myself like a foreigner.
Russian people changed a lot when compared to cold war times. I think they became wiser as a nation. I don’t think there was a similar (or rather any change) in the US. That is the root of the current problems.
From Alex to Alex: when I submitted my post, I did not notice that there is already an Alex here. Sorry! Next time I will be posting as AlexR, like I am doing now.
Alex,
Time for you to vote with your feet again. Better to be a couple of years early, than one day too late.
Myself and every non-western immigrant I talk to, have the same foreboding feeling. My wife and I have been researching alternative destinations for the last few years. Was thinking more of going “back home” but they are in the clutches of EU/USA so not sure where to go….I am just tired of the lies, the taxation without representation and the meddling everywhere, not to mention all the violence and the increasingly aggressive police state. If I am going to be paying taxes, I want them put to use for me. If I move to some “lesser place” where I get nothing in return, at least in those places there is almost no taxation….
A great recommendation. This is Krainer’s own account of WHY you haven’t heard about this book before (if you haven’t). https://thesaker.is/how-my-book-unmasking-bill-browder-was-censored-by-amazon-by-alex-krainer/ Thank you Larry!
Also thank you to all those on this site who visited my Substack site for my last article, which was informed (as usual) by Larry’s writings.
https://julianmacfarlane.substack.com/p/russia-rollin-rollin-the-update
Excelent article, as usual. I really appreciate your analysis on the Russia vs NATO conflict (where the brainwashed Ukranians are only the cannon fodder). However I must make an important criticism to the phrase “The horror described by Krainer is on par with the Holomodor experienced by Ukrainians at the hand of Stalin in the 1930s–an estimated 4 million Ukrainians starved to death because of Stalin’s policy”. Your assertion is wrong, but I assume that this part of Russia-Ukraine-USSR’s History is not your area of expertise, hence you are excused for making this unintionally wrong phrase. If you don’t mind, I would like to tell you why the Golodomor you mentioned is a fake:
1. The Famine of 1932-33 affected the whole USSR, not only Ukraine.
2. The Famine was caused by an excepcionally rainy season and a outbrake of a fungus, colloquially known as Rust, which decimated entire crops. The rainy season also caused an overpopulation of mice and rats, which attacked the stored grain, and the growth of weed which also devastated crops. You can look for the works of Proffesor Mark Tauger of Virginia University on this topic. They are available of PDF format for free.
3. Stalin and the Politburo were indeed slow to react, because they think the peasents and the kulaks were intentionally hiding the crops, and is true that they made the things worse ordering that all the grain should be delivered on 18 November 1932. But when Politburo’s member Lazar Kaganovich arrived a month later to Kiev and saw the reality on the field, immediatelly telegraphed Stalin to cancel this order on 23 December 1932. My source for this is the book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-33 by British historians R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft.
If you want me to, I can provide you with the articles and books that I use as sources to prove you that Golodomor is a fake. As a matter of fact, Golodomor was initially a Nazi invention used by Nazi Germany to discredit the Soviet economy as a failure, and since 1991 used by the Ukronazis and the US CIA and NGOs to poisson the relationship between the former brother-peoples of Russia and Ukraine.
Truly yours, Diego Zampini
Your summary above does not match my very good Ukrainian friend’s depiction. His father served in the Wehrmacht. His depiction is that Stalin first tried to nationalize the Ukraine kulak farms but they defended themselves with arms. Stalin then took away their arms, enabling the later theft of the Kulak’s farms. At the time, Stalin was paying for Germany to build aluminum plants, and foreign grain sales were the hard currency needed to pay for them. Soviets sold the grain and starved the people to pay Germany.
I wouldn’t trust anything written out of Great Britain. As mentioned in an above comment, The Controversy of Zion makes it pretty clear that Great Britain had been subverted.
It’s interesting that once we recognize the lies of today, we start to go backwards in history and dissect everything we were taught. For instance, the US govt is completely illegitimate today because the US Constitutional Convention was never authorized by The States. It was a coup.
There is a lot of conflicting accounts of what was happening those years.
Even today, with Internet and smartphones, we are not quite sure what is going on in Ukraine exactly. Much less people knew back then.
So is it Moscow’s diktat or Kiev’s mismanagement that made Ukraine economy sink after 2014? Was it in 1930? Are today accusation of Moscow for “ethnociding Ukrainians” just? Were then?
It is not event clear if it was famine or poisoning. Why there is no “propaganda photos” left and all the photos we are spoon-fed were made in different years and places (even USA famine photos are pushed as Holodomor proof)?
Reportedly those very years USA banned ergot export from Ukraine as it became very bad quality.
Why those deaths were mostly registered in summer not winter?
What about non-grain food sources, like rivers? Ukraine prohibited fish export to the main USSR, add berries and mushrooms in woods, the most fertile land in the USSR…
In 1980-s and 1990-s we did not cultivated wheat or rye to survive “Catastroika”, we cuktivated potato mostly, and radish, and even cucmbers. North of Moscow. In Ukraine they did not had to cuktivated it, just “throw seeds to soil, come month later to reap”.
Polish-occupied Ukraine went through the same mass deaths too, just no one there botheted to count aborigines and recoe statistics, less so reverse pre-contracted state export because of it. Yet paper archives (but who would bother going to Poland to sieve through paper archives of Polish-language papers) reportedly were full of UK charity calls to feed Ukrainians. Anekdotal evidence tell Ukrainians from Lvov region accusing Stalin no less passionate than Ukrainians from eastern regions.
Was West, with their permanent moral high ground, refusing taking grains from USSR in 1930-s, or was it introducing sanctions against every other kind of Soviet exports and demanding USSR continue and increase moving grains and nothing but grains?
Were “smart” western peasants really forming jointstocks (kolkhozes) just to take state loans and close the enterprize, which killed the initial plans of “soft” collectivization and pushed for “hard” option? Was the reported forced extraction of wheat the enforcement of loan contracts?
One thing for sure though, Holodomor is so much paraded because it was the last mass-scale famine or poisoning in Russia/USSR. There is nothing comparable later, that could be used for Moscow-bashing.
So, so, one believes also here still in the so-called “Holodomor”?
Well, in any case, a certain Mark B. Tauger, professor at West Virginia University,
https://wvu.academia.edu/MarkTauger
has dealt with this topic in detail.
Literature: among others there and here in Russian:
https://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/99596/Tauger_-_Mark_Tauger_o_golode%2C_genocide_i_svobode_mysli_na_Ukraine.html
One should not believe everything that comes about Stalin and the USSR in general, and e.g. from Appelbaum and consorts in particular …
One should not believe everything that is rambled about Stalin and the USSR in general, and e.g. comes from Applebaum and consorts in particular …
The Holodomor exists.
Which exactly events and causes are described by this word is open to discussion. But the term, the frame of reference undeniably does exist.
Holodomor is no term looking for meaning. Holodomor is a premeditated genocide like the Holocaust. Just look up its definition even on the wiki. What was real were the famines and deaths. But no proof to this day that a premeditated plan for these deaths! Much less for a genocide of the Ukrainian people. Therefore the Holodomor only exists in the head of those who believe in this genocide without proofs. Like one religion!
Since concluding that nobody starved to death in China during the ‘great famine’ of 1959-61, I’ve assumed that most or all atrocity stories about Communist countries are propaganda, often handsomely recompensed.
The UL, US, and Taiwan paid millions to the author of ‘China’s Great Famine,’ despite the fact that even the cover image [a starving child] was taken 20 years before the alleged ‘famine’ but the author used it because, ‘”there were no photographs of famines from 1959-61”. Duh.
Another funny media about China is the famous video of one hipster intimidating and blocking the whole tank column.
It is bona fide spinned as a proof blood commies were killing their citizens by tank, despite the video clearly documents the reverse situation: the tank column being harassed by a single citizen, documenting the really harsh (and known publiclh) constraints imposed on the army. I still wait to see a similar team of single American hipster blocking a column of SWAT MRAPs.
I agree about the west’s permanent moral high ground. The past also tends to be far murkier than the morality play many people seek to make it out to be.
British people (of whom I am one) quite merrily cite what they believe they know about Holodomor but totally ignore the Second World War famines in British India that killed millions. Going even further back, the Irish Potato Famine (which caused my own ancestors to leave Ireland) is usually skipped over quickly too.
Right now, history is being used selectively to demonize Russia. This is totally wrong. It also ignores the fact that Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians were all part of one state and have been intertwined with each other politically and culturally for centuries. The west now seeks to portray Ukraine as The Shire and Russia as Mordor. This is total nonsense. The reverse is also wrong, just as the West itself is not The Shire either.
Unfortunately, if you push a message enough in a consistent way with selected facts then many people will believe it. We must resist and push back on the evil war mongers who want to create conflict and death as part of their power fantasies.
Ukraine is definitely Saruman the White and NAto stan is Mordor Qabal davos.
Russians are the Dunedain, lost descendants of the Elven bloodline.
Let’s see if it works now:
https://history.wvu.edu/faculty-and-staff/faculty/mark-b-tauger
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark-Tauger
(See here a list of publications)
Prof. Mark B. Tauger, West Virginia University, obviously a real expert on agriculture and history has taken apart the demagogic myth of the so-called “Holodomor”.
for example:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272378615_After_the_Holodomor_the_enduring_impact_of_the_great_famine_on_Ukraine
This is one of your own people …
And we have more there, but Russian sources, even if they present original documents from that period, are not asked there …
One more thing to add – famine was a regular occurrence in Galicia when it was ruled by Austria.
There was a famine there every other year, and people died of hunger in the tens of thousands.
On many occasions food was exported out of the region while that was happening.
That was the poorest and least developed region in all of Europe.
So widespread and regular were poverty and starvation that while the official name of the region was “The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” the nickname was “Golicia and Golodomeria” (from “naked and hungry”).
And yet how often do you hear about the genocide against the Ukrainians that the Austrians were committing for many decades?
Never.
Which can be either because there were no “Ukrainians” at the time that modern Ukrainians recognize as such, or because of some quite serious hypocrisy and historical revisionism. I can’t really think of another explanation.
Quite interesting and informative what you explained here. I wasn’t aware of the joke “Golocia and Golodomoria”. And I think that the explanation is simple hypocresy. I am not against revisionism, as far as it reconcile us with the truth. But to call “revisionism” to the manipulation of History to make two sister peoples (not casually the Russians and Belorussians speak about the “Tri siestri” = Three Sisters, when they speak about Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) to fight each other, oh boy, that makes me angry…
Excelent post. I liked very much this back and forth in time you did, showing the differences but also the similarities between 1932-33 y 2014-22, together with other insights.
Rogue:
What your friend’s father said is partially true, indeed. Yes, Stalin embarked the USSR in the Quinquenal Plan to Industrialize the country (the aluminium plants you mentioned), and the foreign grain sales were the hard currency needed to pay for them, 100% true. And the kulaks indeed resisted the Soviet Politburo’ decision.
But what the father of your friend did not tell him is that Kulaks were known for exploting other peasants (that’s why they call them ‘kulak’ = fist, in Russian) and to intentionally hide a big part of the harvests, even in good years, without famines. That’s why Stalin did not trust them, and for very good reasons. Did Stalin make a horrible mistake underestimating the reports of crops failing, and taking the grain by brute force from ? YES, OF COURSE. But once he understood that there was a real famine in proccess, he immediatelly took serious measures to counter it. The book I mentioned about (Years of Hunger, by Davis and Wheatcroft) described such measures very clearly.
Furthermore, if your friend’s father served in the Whermacht (probably in the 14th SS Division ‘Galitzien’? Or the Nachtgail Battalion?) most likely was from the Western Ukranie, from the regions of Galchina (Galitzia) and Volinya. Both regions DID NOT BELONG TO THE USSR IN 1932-33, BUT TO POLAND!!! How could he possibly know exactly what happen accross the border? And if he heard stories, almost certainly were distorted (I could be wrong about this last topic, of course).
Respectfully yours,
Diego
Thanks Diego,
Concur that it’s difficult to get to “whole truth”. I would argue that it’s impossible because of varying perspectives. In any case, my friend’s father’s land was not in Poland, he made that clear in our conversation.
It’s really amazing how even today most history books are still fiction. Or a version of the story. As in the case of wars, always on the winning side! 99% of what was written in the West about Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution was nothing more than propaganda. Because communism scared the West so much. Communism is nothing but the Soviet interpretation of Marxism. Since Marx never wrote a line about communism. Marx was only concerned with the distribution of wealth after the Industrial Revolution. Where he saw an exploitation that did not differ much from feudalism. Bolshevik Revolution which it must also be said died with Stalin’s rise to power. 10 years later. Which, in the best of hypotheses, institutionalized a corporatist Dictatorship identical to many Dictatorships of the Right in the 20th century! Another myth I liked to dismantle is about the defeat or demise of communism that was no longer communism. In fact capitalism in the US still failed first! With the Vietnam War in the 70’s! But like today, he found a way for us all to pay off this bankruptcy. With the petrodollars abandoning the gold ballast, the IMF and even the BM. Or does anyone know any success stories of these two great financial institutions? The IMF exists only for the world to finance the US debt and energy wars! Through the very debt to which it is forever tied after being stripped of its greatest riches by the IMF back office.
And we finally come to the Holodomor fraud. That before the US thought of intervening in Ukraine with the Color Revolution of 2004 – after the failure of the Color Revolution in Georgia – was only recognized by 3 or 4 countries in the entire world. The usual suspects. US, Ukraine, Poland and little else. Do I need to say more? Perhaps famines have always been natural and frequent in the rural world. Since its inception and the less control of natural phenomena, the more serious. As in Eastern Europe in the early 1930s, after multiple famines, when it combined with Russia’s despair for multiple reasons to have entered the 20th century as a still very rural nation, far behind the Industrial Revolution. And with WWII already on the horizon, it put enormous pressure on peasant production.
Both in Russia and Ukraine as all the Soviet archives proved it. Not even any credible investigator denies the great famines, but an intentional plan of Ukrainian genocide on the part of Russia. Which is what defines Holodomor. Which is obviously just another Ukrainian Russophobic fraud that the West has recently welcomed. Just as the EU itself passed an infamous Resolution in 2019 blaming both Russia and Nazi Germany for WWII. Yet another attempt to rewrite history 75 years after WWII! And almost 30 MM souls on the Russian side. But Brussels is known for having no heart already integrated into the propaganda campaign of the current conflict in Ukraine. And just look at the delay of the USSR in the 1930’s to realize that the USSR could never want WWII! After the disaster he suffered in the WWI created solely by the British financial imperialism as soon as he became aware of the approach of the German Kaiser to the Tsar of Russia. The two cousins also of King George V of England. Who even went so far as to offer asylum to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II, which was promptly denied by the English political-financial establishment!
Finally just a note about the Munich agreements also mentioned here in the comments. Where England and France tried to extract Hitler’s promise that he would only attack Russia! To which Stalin responded with Pato Molotov-Ribentropp to try to delay the Nazi war machine! That the EU 75 years after WWII infamously interprets the declared will of Russia to desire WWII in the 1930s?! Decade in which second official documents Stalin got tired of request England to both stop Hitler before it was too late! And it was enough to listen to Hitler’s speeches blaming the Jews and the Communists for everything to understand where the war was headed! The same EU that in December 2021 at the NU refrained from condemning the glorification of Nazism!!! Perhaps because she had seen him back in Ukraine when she was prevented from investigating the Odessa massacre by the joint cabinet of Victoria Nuland and the Kiev Govt putsch! A resolution passed overwhelmingly at the UN by 130 votes in favor and 2 against. From the US and Ukraine, of course! An EU that had already legitimized the 2014 coup in Ukraine against all the principles enshrined in the EU Treaties! Including also legitimizing the first interim president of Ukraine – Oleksandr Turchinov – already condemned in the European Parliament for being openly neo-Nazi shortly before! And we should also stop being innocent about so much hatred for Russia in the more developed West.
Even if it doesn’t go beyond 10-12% of the world’s population and we constantly think of it as the whole world. Against the background of as much hatred of Russia today as in the past are Russia’s natural resources. About 2/3 of the world’s resources. And I’m not saying for the common citizen who is manipulated by the Financial Empire. Now no longer in London, which is no more than a US satellite, but in NY. On Wall Street. Just because they didn’t have the courage to listen to perhaps the best economist of the entire 20th century, Keynes! Gem Brit! Especially between wars. Wall Street which of course also controls the elected official of the White House. Which was also what prevented the EU from helping Russia like Poland at the time of the dissolution of the USSR. Topic of Larry’s text and as any economist with common sense would recommend. As they recommended several. Like Jeffrey Sachs who was at the time in Europe as one of the chief economists of the Washington establishment. Which unfortunately only managed to get approval for the loan to Poland as it is known even for its drastic consequences in Russia. But fortunately, and contrary to some economist colleagues, I believe that we are finally passing the rubicon of the unipolar World Order that we embraced at the end of the 20th century, which brought so much misery to the whole world. Measured in MM of dead and MM of refugees. From Iraq, Libya and Syria mainly. Even because I don’t see how the EU would now cope with a new horde of migrants from a Ukraine without electricity! But let’s see!
Keynes’ grand work, General Theory, was first published in German – see the preface, writing that only a Totalstaat like Hitler’s Germany could implement it.
One of the reasons Keynes’ Bancor proposal was refused by FDR and Dexter-White at Breton Woods.
Lord Maynard Keynes, London School of Economics, Eugenics Society treasurer and head.
I, too, found books and articles by Wheatcroft (what a fitting name!) very helpful. See my reply to the original post below.
Mr. Zampini is correct .
The fundamental cause of the crop failure was the climate .
The reason that this caused a famine was the traditional structure of Russian agriculture which was subsistence farming .
This makes the population vulnerable to famine .
The Irish potato famine of 1845 is a good example.
This fact is obscured by ideology and politics .
So you really need to dig deep to understand what happened in the Soviet Union .
Hello Diego, I would be really grateful for a list of sources about the Golodomor – thank you for being prepared to take the trouble.
Dear Anna:
I apologyze for not being able to reply you earlier. I was at work, mondays is the bussiest day of my working week.
Well, I already mentioned one of my main sources, “The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-33” by R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311227125_The_years_of_hunger_Soviet_agriculture_1931-1933
The works of Mark B. Tauger (West Virgina University):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236612231_Stalin_Soviet_Agriculture_and_Collectivization
https://cpcml.ca/publications2019/2001-MarkTauger-Natural_Disaster_and_Human_Actions_in_the_Soviet_Famine_1931-33.PDF
If you can’t download them, give me an e-mail address where I can send them to you.
Other source is “Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands Is False” by Professor Grover Furr. Regarding this last one, Furr took the supposed “7 Proofs” that Stalin intentionally and artificially created the Famine to kill as many Ukranians as possible, shown by Timothy Snyder , and literally destroyed them with primary sources which contradict what he says.
I’m aware that both Tauger and Furr are dismissed as “Golodomor deniers” by many. AFAIK, they do not deny the Famine of 1932-33 or the mistakes made by the Soviet government, but what they deny is that was artificially made, and more important, that was made with the intention to kill as many Ukranians as possible. IMHO, they proved that very clearly, accessing to primary sources not used neither by Conquest, nor Snyder, nor Applebaum, nor any of the authors that accuse Stalin of genocide.
Any doubt you can write me here: dzampini@gmail.com
I lived in Petersburg during 1999 and 2000. The shocking statistics don’t do the reality justice, but trying to describe it always falls short. You’re dead on about how and why Russians support Putin; there is a personal trust there even when Russians mostly retain a deep cynicism about power and government.
It could have been worse. Throughout the 90’s there were still holdovers from communism. There may not have been money but there was usually an apartment with utilities. Sometimes I try to tell fellow Americans what to expect when a developed country collapses, but they don’t want to hear it or believe me. The few who sort of look forward to it are going to be disappointed at how banal and grinding it will be. Those with experience in black markets will have an advantage because organized crime fills in the negative space left by the state.
IMO, it will be worse in the US than it was for Russia. I don’t think we’re as deeply strong as the Russians and I think the effects will be worse for common people because people won’t have a roof or heat or water or electricity like Russians (mostly) did. Maybe if the decline is slowish we’ll have time to adapt, but if there’s any suddenness to it I expect things will be very ugly.
Lex, I agree it will be worse – there is no safety net, there are more guns than people, and it is a good question if the United States is United or just a collection of minorities with a sense of entitlement. For example, bus riders kept driving the bus even though they werent paid for months, doctors saw patients – that aint hapening here!
Russia and nearly every European nation is committed to a social safety net. The government is committed to providing everyone with food, shelter, health care, and a job or small check. This is not fully embraced by the US government. Thousands die each month due to a lack of health care while millions live on the streets. It unaffordable because so much of the nation’s wealth is devoted to the empire.
High inflation can only be curtailed by slashing government spending. Will they slash empire spending, or safety net spending? They will cut social spending at a time when needs triple. Waving in millions of poor foreigners to drive down wages further is making things much worse.
….IMO, it will be worse in the US than it was for Russia……
Much worse – the US will likely experience something akin to the Chinese Warlord period of the 1920s -1940s. Widespread Atrocities of unimaginable horrors – will make the Spanish Civil War seem like nothing
And yet Putin still wants to do business with them, go figure.
United States, European countries, UK are responsible for a lot of places going to hell and back in the last 100 or so years. In fact, the biggest reason why everyone in the West is upset with Putin is that he threw a wrench in the collective west’s wonderful lives of travel to cheap places, youtube vlogs, 5th wheels and second homes, total domination powered by cheap slaves somewhere invisible and amazon dot com.
Being from ex-Yugoslavia, I can relate to the sentiment. But then again, the people of my former country did a lot of stupid s*it that they themselves are only responsible for. Any marriage (country, people) are as strong as all the parties involved.
But, never mind the past, the lesson here is that today Russia is what America was (or wanted to be) in the 1950-1980 period and America is what Soviet Union used to be at the end of the same period. Only the propaganda is so strong in the States and people are so invested, for two centuries now the official line driven into everyone’s head is that we are the best and nobody else counts/matters/knows anything.
Reality has a way of interfering, they say and I think it is going to be a hard landing, harder than anyone has ever seen…..
You totally nailed it in my opinion….my country was as close to heaven as God could make it, except for one thing, us!…… We destroyed it ourselves….the Cubans and the other parasites that took advantage only did that after we Seppuku’d ourselves.
I grew up admiring the USA….now I see it for what it has become, the evil empire …..what a sad turn.
When I first read Greek tragedy, i thought it painted too negative a picture of reality….boy, was I young and naive….Greek tragedy is an understatement.
What’s coming to the USA is something they have no concept of…..like my parents used to say: i hope it catches us after confession….(confesión at the church, for those alien to Catholic upbringings….)
Good luck everyone….we’re going to need it….
Yes, Interesting. Blocked by Amazon and Amazon Japan too.
But, Kobo e-books (Japan) has it and Scribd has it as an e-book.
Scribd also has a 30 day free trial.
Thanks for the recommendation.
If Amazon don’t like it. It’s got to be must reading.
Bill
You may Google for “reinventing collapse” by Dmitry Orlov.
The guy is Russian ethnic American, who witnessed the Soviet collapse as a kind of tourist or operative.
So he lacks the personal “in depth” perspective, but he gained the wider overlook and a perspective rooted in American mindset.
There were also lot of short memories from people surving urban collapse in former Yugoslavia or Brazil/Argentina, “preppers how-tos”.
Those exhibits seem to describe yet more extreme conditions.
Was intrigued by finding a reference to euromaidanpress in this blog, when talking about Holodomor. The essential part of the “Holodomor” as a term is “mor”, which I would loosely translate (in this context) as “extermination”, i.e., the actual intent to eliminate has to be the necessary ingredient. Regarding this, I found a short paper by S. Wheatcroft very helpful and valuable:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326562364_The_Turn_Away_from_Economic_Explanations_for_Soviet_Famines
I found this paper on wiki, in the “Critique” section for Anne Applebaum’s “Red Famine” book.
P.S. I do not argue with the actual quantitative argument (~4 millions), just thought to share what I think is a valuable piece of info/discussion on Holodomor. Also the same paper reveals (or at least speculates on) how Applebaum, and other similar “journalists”, approach this (and many other) topic.
Excelent post. And I did not know this article from Mr. Wheatcroft. I will download it and read ASAP. Thank you very much for sharing it. And thanks for the comments to my previous post on this topic here.
I can’t say how that stem mor/мор was used in emigrant-Ukrainians societies, who coined the term, but in Russian it is just massive death, usually from some pandemics.
https://kartaslov.ru/%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5-%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0/%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%80
For example it can be used when fish massively suffocates under thick ice, though then it usually has a prefix added, za-mor, замор.
At least in Russian this stem does not imply intention or plan, but refers to massive scale instead.
I agree, it is open to interpretation. That is why I put that “(in this context)” in there. It occurs to me that whenever “Holodomor” is said, people interpret the term as a man-made intentionally caused (!!) famine. I agree with your general interpretation of “мор” as something not necessarily intentional. Intent is probably more clear in something like “уморить”.
The Holodomor (not Golodomor, this latter is recent “second export” English -> Russian -> back to English ) is clearly Ukrainian word not Russian.
It could well be that in Ukrainian (and especially the American/Canadian dialects of Ukrainian) that stem really represented intention.
“Krainer’s exposition of what happened to Russians in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union–the mass rape of a country by economic elites in the United States and Europe. Once you comprehend what the Russian people endured in terms of economic privation and the economic miracle that unfolded under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, you will appreciate that Putin is not a heartless thug clinging to power by using fear, intimidation and coercion.”
Larry, I am NOT minimizing the abject misery of the Russians following the rape of their economy there. But wondering what awaits the Europeans is moot. It’s been happening here in the U.S. since the mid-70s. From Appalachia to the factory towns where once tens of millions of people earned a living and raised their children, the economic landscape is one of ruin and despair because the economists moved industry overseas without a thought or worry about what they left behind. The grandchildren of the old industrial base annually murder each other by the thousands in every great old city east of the Mississippi, there are no other jobs besides defending drug turf. And now with the fentanyl wars, the despair, the sheer poverty and homelessness of the American landscape now advanced from sea to shining sea, in regions, I’d say the Americans, if not yet the Europeans, have caught up in absolute numbers of population, if not percentages. I’ve been riding my bike all over the U.S. and region after region, when you get outside the DC region and away from state capitols the U.S. is an awful shithole pretty much everywhere. But those folks have no power, no representation, they are invisible. Actually, they are becoming more so.
The Americans outside of financial and MIC centers have been getting a taste of Russian misery for decades from New England clear to California. It is after all, the same entities that did it to us both. I hope this comes across as thoughtful and not insensitive to the Russians. And the Russians weren’t traveling the globe destroying country after country as the US has since forever, post-1991, making our system far worse. And where is our Putin? Our corrupt system is utterly incapable of producing one, would you not agree? We could use a Putin. Martyanov said in a video a few days back he doesn’t recognize the country he came to way back when. I concur. Very, very tragic.
I believe there are many competent, good people capable of leading the US to economic health and sanity. But they will not be allowed anywhere near real power while the current elite reigns. We still have Michael Hudson, for one.
You’re onto something here. For the longest time, the militia movement, rooted in these post industrial and rural areas, have just been saying leave us the hell alone. All of a sudden Trump comes along and they realize, it’s not enough to say just leave us alone. This is why the ruling elite hated Trump so much! Not that he was good at it, but they saw that it was possible for these forces to coalesce around a leader who would speak for them.
Hi Larry, really good to have you point out what a simple non-violent economic collapse actually looks like. Dmitry Orlov wrote quite profoundly about it in his early work.
This USSR birth vs death chart tells the story most dramatically in one simple visual
https://image1.slideserve.com/1679063/slide24-l.jpg
The big takeaway that needs appreciating is that the rest of the world was doing just fine economically over that period and world markets were buoyant. That meant Russia’s own collapse was not terminal. Its oil and other abundant natural resources enabled it to claw its way back under Putin’s leadership.
How might America fare by comparison in its current condition? What would that nation have to offer that the rest of the world wanted, 300 million failed consumers in a collection of warring states with trillions in debt? And then there’s utterly resource bereft UK with No Way Back.
Dmitry Orlov Is THE source for economic collapse from a ground level perspective. Every American should read his book.
There are also some good texts from Argentines circulating on the web.
Finally – another useful text is the book ‘When Money Dies’ the experience of Weimar Inflation. This is more high level economic history but also has lots of examples of how people survived ( or prospered ) during the monetary collapse in Weimar.
this came out about it and yes it is coming to the west. in my opinion the rule of the survival of the fittest will be implemented again
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2014/09/02/dying-russians/
It is widely though (in English, you can see Orlov’s “reinventing collapse”) that in USSR it was largely softened by two aspects:
General collectivistic disaster-averting mindset of Russia/USSR population which made people share things they owned, give one another small loans, etc. The mindset reportedly was less about trading for personal profit than sharing for common survival.
Late Soviet decline making many people partially self-sustaining and more or less engaged into “parallel economy” or “natural economy”. Personally in beginners school, living in decent sized town (in the vaccuming shadow of Moscow megacity, but still) i remember septembers of 1980-s as shovelling squotted clay for potato under slow cold rains in soaking coat. I hate gardening ever since. But on a good side, 1990s change for us meant we can squot soil patches in areas previously unavailable, more sunny and fertile.
Huge ruggedness and redundancy in Soviet economy. Often obsolete it still could function as isolated unmantained isles, or even be sold as scrap metal for years.
Taking this drift “to eleven”, as the civilization rolls backs around you to levels of past, you would make more use of lo-tech XIX style factory than of any super-hi-tech FIRE economy. You can make ad hoc fixes (cannibalization, etc) to failing worn out steam engines, but not to microprocessors.
So, it is widely speculated while Golfstream makes EU climate an earthly paradize, comparing to USSR, the social and economic patterns would be amplifying damage rather than demphing it.
P.S. ukro-canadian Orest Subtelny used to compare western and eastern Ukrainians, and how different climate translated into different social structures and behavior patterns, optimized either to maximize opportunities grabbing (in good days, but crashing badly in bad days) or minimize losses (in bad days, missing/overlooking opportunities in good days).
P. P. S. The so vocal today Baltic states those years were Europe leader of metal exports, their borderguards protecting smugglers from Russian police.
Soon, we in the west will be taking lessons from Cuba. An admirable and resilient society, by the way.
You mean those who would live long enough to start taking lessons. It is anyone’s guess how many….
Thank you, Larry Johnson! I’ve been trying to find a book that covers that era in detail. I wanted to find out more about Browder who Lee Stranahan said in a YouTube video years ago was the source of the lies about Putin. I wanted something in writing so I can study it. Also, because some of those Russian surnames aren’t easy to spell or understand when hearing the story orally. I wanted more specifics on their economic situation in the 1990s too. I knew some of it, but not enough specifics. This looks like the ticket. I will be ordering it for sure.
It is funny if Europe would go through it faster than America.
Soviet emigrants in USA were telling USA as a governing structure went into the same snowballing petrified dementia like the infamous 1970-s USSR, just waving different banner and slogans.
Oh, forgot the anchor.
It was not about Biden or Trump.
It was said about early 2000-s USA with surface still looking good and full of potential (but so looked surface of 1970-s in USSR).
BTW, while USSR obviously had no woke-ism, reportedly the replacement in the middle layers of uncomfortable opinionated people rooted in STEM with “politically correct”/”party line” vocal go-along-get-alongers happenned in those sunlit 1970-s. Can not witness it personally, but sounds plausible. When challenge came – people of authority were mostly preserving their carriers and expected someone else to “patch holes with their bodies”.
There are two separate stories here.
One is the end of the rotation of cadres.
This had been a known issue since the start of the revolution – it was predicted (Trotsky wrote about it extensively) that eventually the nomenklatura will become a bourgeoise class of its own and will launch a counter-revolution. Which is what indeed happened – that is in fact the real story of the USSR collapse.
Stalin’s solution was to do purges, and thus prevent ossification of elites and development of feudal fiefdoms. It worked quite marvelously — if you were the director of some enterprise and you f**d up, you got shot, and then replaced by someone young and hungry from below. That tends to ensure that people work hard and honestly, and it is how you go from a backwards mostly rural country to the first nation in space in the span of three decades.
But then Khrushchev comes and there were no more purges. Now, if you f**d up, you got moved horizontally to a position of similar rank but in some unrelated field. Needless to say, that wasn’t very good for productivity – if you were an incompetent boss in some manufacturing sector and then got moved to rule over e.g. theatre, it is highly unlikely you would do a good job there either.
And yet the worst was yet to come – under Brezhnev if you were corrupt and incompetent, you mostly weren’t even touched. With some exceptions.
Once that was the norm, the system quickly feudalized. It is quite visible even at the top state-level and republic-level managerial positions – whereas in the first 4-5 decades people occupied those for a few years, then were replaced, it is very noticeable how from the 1960s onwards you see the same person in the same position for 15, 20, or more years. And that is how the system degenerated.
BTW, the Chinese are still doing purges for not doing your job. You (mostly) don’t get shot in some basement, but you sure get replaced. And this is why they achieve real results.
But then there is the second story, which is the fight between the party nomenklatura and the technical nomenklatura, i.e. the former were pure useless bureaucrats who spent all their time fighting with each other for power and influence, while the latter were the engineers who ran the design bureaus, factories, etc.
What happened in the 1990s was in no way in the interests of the technical nomenklatura, what it needed was a preservation of the system, although after a deep reform that would give it more power to make technical decisions.
But it had no chance in the fight against the party nomenklatura, as the latter were well trained for winning political battles and doing shady business, after all that is all they were doing day to day. Even more so given that some members of the technical nomenklatura moved to the dark side (look at the biographies of the Russian oligarchs, a lot of them were engineers).
Still, at least in the MIC and some other fields, enough was preserved to later start a process of regeneration, slow and painful as it is.
However, I don’t even see that distinction in the US. In the US the STEM people are mostly fully on board with the current system and doing their best to loot whatever piece of it they can while they can. They are not an opposition to the slimy FIRE sector creatures at all.
“BTW, the Chinese are still doing purges for not doing your job. You (mostly) don’t get shot in some basement, but you sure get replaced. And this is why they achieve real results.”
Exactly. Also through the promotion/demotion process. For instance, if you’re a young poverty alleviation cadre and you can’t get the job done at the township level, you will find yourself out in the boonies working the villages.
If those above still believe in you, you will get a second chance, and if you put in the hours and properly learn your trade, the sky may no longer be the limit, but you could find yourself in a few decades time making it all the way up to the municipal level.
But the provincial level and above? No way. You lost that chance in your youth.
Note: re “mostly”
The Chinese do execute their oligarchs when they go astray. I can’t tell you how much blowback I’ve gotten over the years for stating this is a proper policy for a sovereign nation-state to pursue.
“F*ck you Max424! I don’t care if my oligarchs commit treason, they are the innovators and the job creators, and without them, we will be helpless!”
Let’s be completely clear that Stalin didn’t shoot people for being inefficient, as western propaganda has always told us. Inefficient people were sent down the ladder and end of.
The death penalty was applied to people in positions of responsibility whose level of corruption made them take positive action against the state: traitors that posited a serious threat to the USSR, collaborationist, cultists leaders and saboteurs.
And, what to say? I don’t personally think that is so wildly inappropriate in a society that counted the richest countries as avowed enemies.
Stalin was a realist and had a vision for his people. Can’t anybody think of anyone in the US and U.K. who, if not deserving of a shot on the head, they’d deserve the next thing? Because I can.
“Western elites would do themselves a favor and read Alex Krainer’s detailed explanation of what the Russian people have experienced during the last 30 years.”
They would do what they always do Larry, with this type of material, they would use it a playbook, on what not to do.
“Ok, so that’s where we went wrong. We were too soft in the implimation of our Neo-liberal Shock Therapy. Plus we allowed the rise to power of one who we thought was our own, but he turned out to be, not who we thought him to be.”
“We can’t risk making this mistake again. Better to just level the place, move on in, subdivide the remains, and start pumping out those resources, that are now ours all ours!”
It isn’t talked about much, but the Russian Federation nationalized the Big Boy, Gazprom, in 2006. That’s about the time when Putin began to be eyed with deep suspicion in the West.
“This son of a bitch might not be a cold blooded globalist afterall, in fact he might just be a half and half, half a neo-liberal and a half a sovereign do gooder. Vladimir Putin might just be a traitor to our treasonous cause! He must be eliminated!”
Plus the Russian Federation, to its credit, (thanks mostly to the despised – but sovereign! – commies in the Duma!), never did privatize their nation right of existence, which is what the Federation, regardless of leadership, was expected to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_Russia
Old Vlad. Spent a lot of hours of my life with the former Atlanticist. Who is he really? Is he indeed a half and halfer? If the West gave him one last chance to join in their neo-liberal globalists games, would he leap at the chance to take it?
I sure hope not. As I’ve saying for that past decade and a half; I wish for Vladimir Putin to have his Saul of Tarsus moment soon, because I like the man, and I’d hate to see him enter his twighlight years as an enigma unto himself.
It makes me wonder how much back channel communication is happening with the nations of the EU and Russia? They would be suicidal not to make plans that can be implemented on very short notice. Immediately after they give the EU the boot. What is happening in Ukraine is happening to a smaller extent all over Europe. Privation, inflation, fuel shortages. They don’t have missiles landing on them and would probably like to make that a permanent condition. I have wondered if the EU has the guts to surrender regardless of what the US tells them to do. There are riots now and conditions do not allow for them to get better any time soon.
Chaos desired by some, and to be avoided at any cost by others. Add freezing to the other issues involving staying alive. Basta.
Went to Germany a month ago, prices up a bit but nothing has changed much, it’s a warm winter and gas reserves are there. Plus they are welcoming Ukrainians. The visible minorities in Germany are perplexed at how well Ukranians are being welcomed v the non-white refugees of America’s wars.
So economically, and in standard of living, Europe does not seem that badly affected yet, life is pretty normal. This means many Europeans are not that bothered about the war. Yet.
Its the nine meals problem. As long as people get their food and water, things can be held up. If not, the transition will be sudden.
Also, in Russia there was a certain amount of self-sufficiency. In the west self-sufficiency is probably below 1%. Throw in the population density, and the horror depicted in some zombie-movies might well come true.
True re meals.
However the huge Beyer (German technically) owns Monsanto owns majority of seeds and seed banks, owns millions of acres of farmland globally. Europe won’t starve. It will just have less choice. French CAP subsidised farms. US and Canada plus NZ and Oz for meat, West can feed itself. It just has to adjust for that a bit but capacity easily there if it organises production sensibly. West has 3 continents and 1bn or so people. It’s more fuel than food issue for West in my view.
The question is it can feed people only on back of €400 billion yearly subsidy.
If it is unable to give that subsidy there will be a churn.
Agriculture in third world countries will become profitable and power shift will occur.
the reserves in EU are 20% of normal usage.The EU has 80% full reserves,Thats 80% of 20%.The inevitable outcome is obvious.BRRRRRRRRRR
Larry, I’m going off topic here.
Most, but not all, believe in some form of Creator, God, Holy Father. I have come to the realisation that this is not enough. We have to understand that in our universe of duality the opposite must exist also. I am more and more beginning to think that in turning to this Creator we must also turn away from the Dark Shadow of Evil – whatever name one gives it, it must be named, recognised, and rejected.
Since we take nothing with us when we leave this world, what darkness possesses rich old men and women to plot the destruction of entire nations to rob them, killing millions in the process?
Time we called it by its name.
“I want to do your country a lot of good…But first it may involve killing a lot of people… 500,000 dead children will be worth it. It may also make us very rich. We came, we saw, he died… Har! har! har! har! ha!!!”
If you like the book you’ll find this fascinating:
TraumaZone (2022)
“An epic documentary by British director Adam Curtis illustrating in seven parts state and decline of the Soviet Union and the development in Russia 1985–1999 using material from the BBC archives.”
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/traumazone-2022/
addition to the proportion of dead in the total population in the 2nd WW (rounded):
USSR 14%
Germany (German Empire including Austria)1939 10%
In absolute numbers, the USSR had the most deaths in WWII (24 million). 2nd place on this shocking list: China 20 million and 3rd place: Germany 7.6 million and Poland 5.6 million dead. US: 419,000 dead.
Source: https://de.statista.com/statistics/data/studie/1055110/umfrage/zahl-der-toten-nach-staate-im-zweiten-weltkrieg/
I met my beautiful wife in Russia during that time. It was truly like the wild West – Jewish mafia running things and entirely corrupt politicians in every seat of power. Good food was difficult to come by and few got paid for their work. Households traded and shared what they had – some had potatoes, some had some flour, others had onions – they would barter. What saved most people from total destitution was the fact that under Stalinism, most everyone had a flat of their own, so thankfully few went homeless.
God, what a shithole it was! Have been back several times since and the change in infrastructure and the people’s attitudes and spirit have undergone a remarkable change.
But in spite of the horrors brought on by the American elite during this time, the Russian people still had this image of America as the “shining city on a hill”, to quote Reagan. As I talked to people they would tell me how Russia should team with America and how the American way of life should be pursued. When I would explain to them that America was not their friend in any way, they would laugh at me, and explain that such a thing could not be true.
They are not laughing now. They realise at last what evil they escaped.
Putin is a veritable hero and the most important world leader of the 21st century. God bless him for what he has accomplished. But not only him – the Russian people. Culturally, they respond to strong central leadership (someone specific to blame if things go wrong – LOL) and they responded wholeheartedly to Putin – and look where they have come now.
Americans and Europeans have no idea what suffering they have brought to this remarkable people. But they will – in coming years. God help them.
In Europe, any informed citizen is aware of what the US assault on Russia was like at the time of the dissolution of the USSR. Or how a Russia very economically weakened with the drop in oil prices combined with the Saudis was deceived by the West after promises to agree to the reunification of Germany. Or the story of the Russian oligarchs who are nothing more than the front men of the US that the US installed in the most profitable public companies to bleed Russia for Wall Street and the City after privatization. And let it be clear that the problem was never the end of the USSR wanted by all but the way the EU did not manage or help a large part of Europe as Jeffrey Sachs still defends today because he preferred to let the US steal Russia’s resources at will during more than a decade.
As indeed he was getting ready to do now if the US got another change regime in Moscow! And the post-Putin economic indicators are also very clear. Hence the great support it has always had among the older population. Which he lifted from the poverty line during his first term. And it is also necessary to remember that soon after Russia began to be sanctioned economically! Russia is not experiencing anything new today from an economic point of view. At most the sanctions tightened to levels never seen before and the theft of Russian reserves was exposed.
P.S. Holodomor is nothing more than a Ukrainian myth that appears in Europe after the 2014 coup. 75 years after the events that Ukraine remembered to complain now. Which alone should say everything to any enlightened person! Namely in 2016 at the beginning of the Russophobic propaganda campaign in the EU that is so much discussed today. And it’s not about wanting to exonerate Stalin. Great famines have always been a natural phenomenon in the rural world over the centuries. And the famines at the beginning of the 30’s were a reality both in the territory of Russia and in the territory of Ukraine. Nor could it be otherwise. As well as the death of thousands of peasants in both territories. As it is also proved that Stalin put a lot of pressure on the agricultural communities shaving more and more the bottom of the production trunk in both Russia and Ukraine because he was desperate for weapons to be able to face Hitler!
But the peasants were still needed for the next harvest! And this is where I agree more with Martyanov as in the case of Solzhenitsyn. It starts from a background of truth and fictionalizes the story according to the times! What has never been proven because it never existed apart from a few English films is a genocide plot by the Ukrainian peasants! Which is how Ukraine defines the Holodomor today. A genocide like the Holocaust. It even denies Ukraine’s participation in the Holocaust. Martyanov also thinks he talks about a great film set in Belarus where 628 peasant villages were burned between Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists. And holodomor has never been proven for a very simple reason! Because it has been completely refuted by several historians ever since! There was never any Holdomor in Ukraine! What happened in Ukraine during WWII was a huge participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust! And that’s just what the current Ukrainian Govt wants to camouflage. In fact, even today after the enormous pressure from the US, how many countries in the world recognize the Holodomor?
Dear Mr Johnson,
By quoting Mr Krainer’s words on “transition program engineered by the American deep state and its Wall Street patrons” you are drawing attention to historical facts that Western propaganda was happy to label as “communist failure”… No empathy for the appalling loss of life. After all, Russians were experiencing “freedom” and the New World Order (George H. Bush) was already in place…
Who engineered such as program? I came across Prof. Jeffrey Sachs by chance (who by the way has expressed criticism towards US foreign policy in a series of videos available in youtube), when listening to different opinions on the war in Ukraine and the deterioration of the relationships between the collective West and Russia…
Thanks for reading and have a very good day!
The word Holodomor is used by the current Ukrainian regime to accuse the Stalin regime of having programmed the death of millions of Ukrainians with a famine in the years 1932 and 1933.
Ukrainian nationalism (which would become an ally of Nazism) used this word (parallel to the word Holocaust, which designates the genocide ordered by Hitler) and proclaimed the mass murder of 12 million people.
In 2003, on the eve of the Ukrainian Color Revolution, UN representatives from several Eastern European countries that had emerged from the fall of the USSR, including Russia, some Arab countries, Timor-Leste, Canada and the USA, sent the Secretary-General a declaration on the great famines in question – for some the Holodomor – in which the number of victims is estimated at a low value of 7 to 10 million Ukrainians.
The American historian Timothy Snyder – with connections to the Ukrainian lobby in the US – who also unsurprisingly defends the existence of the crime of genocide in the book Lands of Blood: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, of 2010, however, reduces that number to 3 ,3 millions. Something like 1/4 of what many say. It would be nice if they agreed on a number. Timothy Snyder who wrote in the NYT that “President Viktor Yushchenko does his country grave harm by claiming ten million dead, thus exaggerating the number of Ukrainians killed by a factor of three; but it is true that the famine in Ukraine of 1932- 1933 was the result of intentional political decisions and killed an estimated three million people”. Viktor Yushchenko was also the President who emerged from the Color Revolution in 2004 that began passing legislation to discriminate against the Russian population in Ukraine. The artist whose face swelled up only during the election campaign because he was also allegedly poisoned by Putin’s Machiavelli. Which just never gets right with the radiation dose. A donkey!
Therefore, about the Holodomor, not even those who claim it understand the scale of the crime. But I know how many Jews the Bandera sect killed in Ukraine! The question of whether or not there was genocide depends on the outcome of the investigation into whether the famine of the Ukrainians was intentional and whether there was a political decision with the explicit purpose of eliminating them. Because nobody denies the great famines and deaths in both Ukraine and Russia.
The best-known Western historian in this field was Robert Conquest, who devoted much of his life to the study of the Soviet Union and was a “hero” for anti-communist scholars. Only the US Govt showered him with decorations. He reviewed his studies after the Soviet archives became available. He concluded as follows: “Did Stalin purposefully inflict the famine of 1933? No. What I argue is that, with the famine imminent, he could have avoided it, but he put the “Soviet interest” ahead of feeding the hungry first, therefore, consciously inciting it.”
Moreover, in these famines, several million people also died in Russia itself.
Another non-Marxist historian, (like all those I purposely cite here) Arch Getty, goes even further and is explicit in denying genocide. He writes that “the overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working on the new archives . . . is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist rigidity and not of some genocidal plan.”
Therefore, about the Holodomor there are many and serious doubts about whether the genocide propagated by anti-communism really existed.
All existing regimes, democracies and dictatorships, have provoked genocide and massacres. The American Republic nearly eliminated native Indians; in Africa capitalist colonialism slaughtered millions of human beings; there is debate as to whether the Turkish empire’s slaughter of Armenians between 1915 and 1923 is or is not genocide; fascism/nazi provoked the Holocaust; numerous dictatorships had programs of physical elimination of opposition supporters (a kind of ideological genocide) or of ethnic groups with nationalist claims.
There is no form of regime that escapes the authorship of the crime against humanity that means the word genocide and all, too, had their periods of violent famines causing millions of deaths.
All these cases, including the eventual Holodomor, must be studied with seriousness and loyalty, never with ideological hysteria. The dead deserve it and, if they could speak out, they would certainly dispense with the ongoing political manipulation.
Solzhenitsyn unveiled the truth of Bolshevism. They were not Russians and in fact hated the Russian people. This is the hidden hand behind much of the problems in that region and also USA. A religious movement of fanatics.
200 years together has no official English translation. I read the pdf here and it is easy to understand why. After all, Ye sacrificed 1.5 billion for similar reasons.
https://ia803108.us.archive.org/2/items/200YearsTogether/200%20Years%20Together.pdf
As time goes on, the “conspiracy theories” begin connecting dots to each other ,and finding out how Davos are connected to other conspiracies and how Fauci is connected to Wuhan and Wuhan to Darpa/US military funding. Why wouldn’t this also apply to Ukrainian and Russian history?
…Judeo-Bolshevism, again and again, and again.
The self-exhonerating myth, created by “white guards”, by pro-western liveral Russians (as in citizens), who destroyed Russian Empire during “February 1917 Revolution” AKA Russian Revolution #2.
Then in just half a year those smarties run the nation into the ground. Surely, tzarist family was corrupt and incompetent, there can be no 3 revolutions one after another in any healthy nation. So, those liberals – and much of the nation – thought nothing can be worse than tzar’s rule. In just half a year those west-worshipping liberoids proved they are much more incompetent than even rotting tzarism was.
Just half a year after their triumph and being everyone’s dear – those liberals had to run for their lives to Europe. Fiasco.
They tried hard to remove this glaring failure from memory – their own memory and public memory too. So they created that myth of perfect tzar Nikki, of striving Russian Empire, and of infernal omnipotent judeo-blosheviks who destroyed it all by a snap of their allmighty finger.
It really is a funny perversion. Saker’s grand-parent most probably worked passionately hard to destroy the monarchy in Russia, at least most of their strate did if not them personally. Yet today their offspring worship the very monarchy their ancestors slain.
Not even bolsheviks themselves claimed such a might, though later they liked this White Guards propaganda and stopped cotradicting it. What is bad when your enemies call you allmighty?
The problem though… It was the liberal pro-Western “February Revolution” that was Jew-driven at large. The infamous Azef. The Bund party and half-dozen other Jewish parties in 1917 Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevno_Azef
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_socialists
Including, perhaps, Mensheviks – the lesser wing of the same SocDem party, that Bolsheviks were part of. Run by this guy, BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Martov
Among Bolsheviks Jews were too, but they were mostly abnormal Jews: anti-religious and anti-trading ones.
What Bolsheviks did was basically COUNTER-revolution, which some monarchists openly admitted BTW. Bolsheviks reverted the disastrous liberal western cargo cult of February Revolution, backstabbed the backstabbers.
Frankly, when Russian emigrants cry about Judeo-Bolsheviks destroying Russia – they cry about themselves, and they – consciously or not – are attribituing their fathers deeds to Bolsheviks, trying to erase the history.
Down the memory hole, did not happen!
The Bolshevik Revolution lasted 10 years until Stalin. And Solzhenitsyn can’t stand 10% of what he wrote. And once again I’m not denying that Stalin was even more brutal or that the Gulags existed. My country also went through a brutal right-wing dictatorship with terrible prisons in a colony in Africa for political prisoners who never came back alive! One was called a frying pan! How vulgar it was at the time with many ideologies. Neither Obama closed Guantanamo in the 21st century! We can never interpret history with the eyes of the present. Much less how we would like it to have been. And the success of Solzhenitsyn’s work is only due to the fact that it fits like a glove in Western propaganda. When the great US Democracy was committing crimes against humanity of the same magnitude in other latitudes. Agree or not, the anti-USSR bible of the West, Gulag is a work of fiction with a background of truth as Martyanov says! And I’m not given to conspiracy theories either. I’m an economist. By nature a social scientist. I only work with facts. Even Walesa, who now complains that he doesn’t have money for vodka, they bought him a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, the prize money has already been spent. And now he says he wants to see Russia balkanized in 10 nations to see if he gets a few more bottles of vodka.
> Agree or not, the anti-USSR bible of the West, Gulag is a work of fiction
If it was a bible, lol. It is a phoney doll, everyone must worship but no one must read.
Among the claims in the Archipelago:
War rape is no big deal. Even if you rape your peers, other members of your army. You just can not know the stress accumulated in people for days surviving deadly shellings. They need to unload that indescribable stress, and using civic, peaceful estimations to that behaviour is pointless. I was in school when i read it, and i was shocked. I could not argue the logic “you did no experience THAT” but i could not forget it either.
“Stalin’s purges” were well-aimed if not intentionally. Those were “Lenin’s old guards” who perpetuated massacres and could not quell their bloodlust. The myth of 1937 was created by the well-connected and literate murderous elites, who were finally sucked by the death machine they created – so they left behind a trove of texts. The real victims, their victims, much more numerous, were 1932-1936 “silent columns” who died without leaving behind written memories that were retroactively glorified and propagandized by their relatives. Soviet citizenry saw 1937 as belated justice, as well deserved retribution, as estyablishing public safety by shooting off rabid dogs.
Khrushchev did not stop political purges, just re-decorated them. Where Stalin would frame mundane crime as politic one to make sentence harsher, Khruschev was doing the opposite to make statistics look benign. He also closed most of the labor camps and overly ambitiuos infrastructure projects, like trans-Taiga “railroad of death” those camps sustained. However it was facelifting rather than dismounting of the system.
Whether those claims are true or not – they were explicitly made. Basically, any TRUE worshipper of the “Solzhenytsyn’s Bible” should know those claims by heart and repeat them – but try to find any article lionizing Solzh or “Archipelago” that does. The “useless” claims are glossed over, made forgotten. Only few items of the thick “bible” were cherry-picked, the rest is ignored.
While the collapse was still going on I taught a one semester MSc course with the ludicrous title “Growth and Transformation in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe “.
I attended a conference on teaching economics in the New Russia in Moscow in 1994. Having spent a month in the Soviet Union in 1990 I could make a first hand comparison.
Personally , I found it upsetting .
Professor Gilbert Doctorow also discussed this subject here: https://gilbertdoctorow.com/
We in Nigeria experienced the same dramatic disastrous reduction in our socio-economic life after the Western institutions, the IMF and the badly-misnamed World Bank, descended on us in the 1980s with their advice cum recipe.
All the state-provided social services that made life meaningful and livable were wiped out by the dog-eat-dog, man-eat-shit Jurassic economic impositions that wiped out our nascent middle-class, and turned our currency, the Naira, into a inutile Monopoly money.
Unfortunately for us, there was no V Putin to come to our rescue. The local officials, nurtured by the western Institutions became compradors, eager to please their Masters while feathering their own nests.
Thanks for the insight in Nigeria.
Note, Putin refused IMF ‚help’ circa 2001-02.
https://www.rferl.org/a/1096252.html
https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/5049213.pdf
There is a very good book about Western behaviour in 1990s Russia by the late Professor Marsahll Goldmann ‘Piratization of Russia: reform goes awry’. It was published in 2003. He was a real expert on the Soviet Economy. He died in 2017.
The problem: We in the west are so stupid that we do not realize any dangers any more. Neither poverty, nor nuclear threat, nor war at all. Because our supermarket is full of goods.
We are as intelligent as a house cat that is dayly fed and knows no cold times.
We are not sheeps, we are pets. We will starve because we never learnt to hunt.
The question is just how long can we fill our supermarkets.
I know Russia in the 90th. Most of the European people don’t know it. That is why they don’t fear it.
I’d also recommend Michael Hudson’s “Super Imperialism” to get an idea of what the US elites are able to do to the rest of the world through the financial system and dominating organizations like the IMF and the World Bank.
How do you know he was right? Because when he wrote his book, the only people initially interested and who ordered many copies were the State Department and the neocon Hudson Institute (under Herman Kahn at the time) who saw the book as a how to do it method for being an imperialist.
Mathew 13:57 “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country …”
When the American patriot Michael Hudson lectures in China, his audience has been known to exceed 60,000, yet here in America I doubt one in ten million have ever heard his name.
An interview with Prof. Hudson on his latest book.
http://thesaker.is/platypus-interviews-michael-hudson-on-the-destiny-of-civilization/
Hudson: “The question is who’s going to control the state? Is the state going to be run by leaders who are engaged in long-term planning as to how to make the economy more productive and raise living standards, or is the state going to be taken over by a financial oligarchy that wants to increase the cost and deindustrialize?”
If you’re an American, I think you know the answer to that question.
Or maybe not.
Do you know what I like about China? You cannot take a walk in a city there, no matter the size, could be population 1 million, could be population 30 million, doesn’t matter, and move 500 meters in any direction without finding yourself in a public park.
Most of them majestic.
I don’t even like parks, but I do like the idea of “The Commons,” which is what parks and other public spaces and services in China, which are ubiquitous, represent, because without such an idea of “The Commons,” your nation is not long for existence.
Strange thing is, I emigrated from the “free and democratic” West to Russia, as it were, in 1992, having studied for 1 year in the USSR 1989-1990. Having graduated in the UK in 1991, I went back to Russia — the Russian Federation — to seek work, as having graduated in my native country, I could not find any employment. Having returned to Russia, I lived hand-to-mouth, but I got by. And it was hell for the Russians. I was paid half in dollars and half in rubles every week, but all around I saw abject poverty, drunkenness and desperation. And criminality and prostitution. And Westerners whooping it up in Moscow, in the “Wild East”, in bars full of girls who were going cheap. In 1997, I got married to a Moscow girl. She still is my wife and has borne me 3 beautiful Russian children. On my wedding day, I went to work until 10:00, got wed at 12:00, had a small celebration in our small 2-room apartment in a Soviet “Khrushchyovka” house, and it was back to work next morning. Russians who lived through those times have not forgotten them and never will. And then it all began to change here in 2020, after the “Evil Tyrant” had become president of Russia.
Well Mr. Johnson…..
none of our younger ones know anything about it, if they’ve never read anything, they can’t imagine it.
I had a school colleague who worked at the Swiss embassy in Moscow in the 90’s.
Back then, girlfriends got one for each finger. Switzerland….. seemed like paradise to the Russians. For francs you got everything……
I’ve read all of it…….. At that time there wasn’t a good Internett yet, but newspapers that knew their craft still existed.
Well, what was going on was incredible.
However, the Russians turned out to be more able to withstand the wind than expected……… only, those are mostly called oligarchs today.
Many were and are thieves, corrupt criminals… but they felt that the wealth was not just for others.
Many companies that went to Russia in the 90’s returned 3 years later. They weren’t used to the harsh customs. The oligarchs fought back……..and everyone struggled to survive.
Some hired a dozen police officers from the police force, paid them themselves, and went after their competitors.
The police officers who hadn’t received a wage for months……… they were just happy about the money to survive.
Nobody could imagine something like that here…….. and it frightened many very much.
At that time I read a survey that had been made among Russian schoolgirls…….. They were asked what they wanted to be after school, how they saw their future.
Over 50% answered that they want to become prostitutes.
That was a wake-up call for me at the time…… because where something like this appears as a result, the conditions must be extremely bad.
How do you have to see the world and your time to see almost the only possible future in prostitution?
Well, there was really a great deal of hopelessness.
And I explain to everyone that Putin turned things around, and for that many are grateful to him.
If we Swiss had to experience how the Russians lived from 1991 to 2000……… everyone would be looking for a strong man like Putin here.
I’ve believed since this started that this was all a “Three Card Monte” game. Get everyone to concentrate on Russia while destroying the economies of Europe. Getting Europe to get rid of their military weapons was useful. Goal was and is to buy the European businesses for pennies on the dollar just like what the elites did to Russia. Like many I was in Russia after the fall. Despite the incredible hardships, the culture didn’t seem to die. Oddly enough even with all that we were doing to them, they didn’t seem to hate us.
I read some articles by Alex Krainer on the truth about the 1938 Munich agreement that was very awakening for me. if you’re interested it’s at https://canadianpatriot.org/2021/12/18/appeasement-the-shocking-truth-about-the-1938-munich-agreement-part-1-of-3/
I’ll have to read his book now. Thanks Larry.
For an example of how it could have been different for Russia, see ; Isabella M. Weber : How China escaped shock therapy-The market reform debate.
The Chinese spent a lot of time and effort during the 80’s trying to work out how to modernise their economy without destroying the people’s livelihoods.
I am German and travelled extensively in Russia in the Nineties. I witnessed the total breakdown of a society. But truth be told: it was in a way also inevitable. I talked to a high KGB man and adviser to Antropov who told me that already in 1980 the Politburo knew that the system was unsustainable. Regarding agriculture in the USSR it was a catastrophy ever since collectivisation. The USSR although having the most fertile land in the world, time and again had to buy grain abroad. Unshackeling the forces of the market made Russia the leading exporter of grain that she is today.
Finally regarding the resurrection of Russia: my late father who – as a Mathematician – had extensive contacts in Russia even during the cold war was absolutely sure that Russia would get out of the chaos and reestablish herself in the world.
About the West: we have it coming. Indeed. And our breakdown will be just as logically caused by the forces of history as the breakdown of the USSR
100%. I lived in Siberia in the 90s and remember Yeltsin talking about the politics of Revansh after the default. I also spent time in former collective farms and heard from administrators who were clear that all the farms sovxoz and kolxoz were bakrupted by the collapse of the USSR as requisitions were made and then not paid for. Don’t get me started on Industry. Defense concerns in volgograd being retooled to mass produce dildos and entire towns being impoverished to the point where I saw advertisements for cleaners (retired) salary 7usd per month.
I was speaking to a commoditie trader talking about it andnhighlighting inequality. He said you are right but its worse than that – 10 people own 80% of Russia.
Until the west understands this kind of stuff, they have literally no idea what they are dealing with.
And yes Europe is going the same way, except there is no destination.
What happened in the soviet union was referred to as the socioeconomic impact of transition.
Whats the transition for the west?
Here is the E book for $11.99 — https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/grand-deception-the-browder-hoax
It not just the economic collapse with the disintegration of the USSR’s and Comecon’s supply network, but the immense drain of resources from this area.
Fex. Hungary with a yearly GDP between 100-130B USD suffered a capital drain ESTIMATED up to 240B USD (between 1980 and 2010), this hit Russia at a much worse ratio.
Much of the hatred towards Putin comes from his closing of these taps.
Hi Larry,
The excess mortality taken from 1991 to 2007 was estimated by some to be 12.5 million.
These deaths were caused by diseases of despair, alcoholism, suicides and starvation. I did some research on it about a year ago. The Lancet, the esteemed British Medical magazine published research papers on it. It was real and it was appalling and it was caused by Clinton, the Chicago School Neo-Liberals and the alcoholic Yelstsin.
They failed to deliver the final blow because Putin got there just in time to stop it. He knows what happened yet he still tried to deal with the US.
You will also be interested that Russian inequality as measure by the Gini coefficient which was extreme in the early 2000’s has been coming down since about 2010 and is now below. China and the USA. That’s thanks to the the “Evil” Putin as well.
China’s is also coming down and both China’s and Russia’s are lower than the US which has about the highest inequality out of all the big democracies and it still going up.
See:
https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality
Qaddafi was another Putin for Libya. And guess what Nato stan did. Putin decided he wasn’t gonna end up like qaddafi.
I have managed to download the book and will read it.
Another book I recommend is “Russia Against Napoleon” by Dominic Lieven. He is a British professor of Baltic German ancestry, whose distant family relations served the Tsarist monarchy.
Highly sympathetic account of how Alexander I in 1812 defeated a European coalition that Napoleon had organised, then built his own new coalition, liberated Germany and ultimately reached Paris in 1814. In Britain we focus on Waterloo but the Battle of Leipzig (for example) dwarfs both that and the Peninsula Campaign.
The parallels between Putin’s approach and Alexander’s are uncanny too. My guess is that Putin knows the history of the era. There is so much continuity. This even extends down to the willingness of Putin to abandon territory that is exactly in line with Alexander plus Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly as his key generals. The Russian Napoleonic era army was also the most artillery dense army in Europe, just as it is today. Just as Putin has done, Alexander needed to build internal support for the war and consciously prepared for a long conflict that played to Russia’s strengths. Napoleon wanted quick victories, just as the west does too.
It is a very good antidote to the histories that just assume that the winter defeated Napoleon and which fail to recognise Russia’s real achievements at that time. Just as most 1941-5 histories by people such as Antony Beevor fail to do too by making implied claims that pretty much every Russian soldier committed assault on civilians and focusing on steamroller tactics and the narrative that Guderian and Manstein created for the west.
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t have a Stalin that is a murderous monster and a Stalin that lifts the USSR from backwardness, sets the conditions for the triumph over Nazi Germany and the space program, etc. and whose very death frees the hands of those people who led Russia to the 1989 debacle.
Something does not compute. There is no harmless capitalism, as we shall see a few years from now when Russia achieve her present goals.
Dimitry Orlov has long said that America is going to experience a collapse similar to the one experienced by the USSR,
he has gone so far as to move back to Russia from the United States,
Russian emigres have the eyes to see that which many in the West are still blind to.
I distinctly remember the 90’s, watching the Berlin Wall fall with wonder, for it to turn to horror as Russia descended into anarchy whilst oligarchs and foreign carpet baggers carved up the country,
Bill Browder is a slippery snake, if you want a taste of the twists and deceptions involved I highly recommend the suppressed documentary: The Magintsky Act- Behind the Scenes,
https://swprs.org/the-magnitsky-act-movie/
Jeffrey Sachs has been speaking with a lot of candour lately, he was involved in advising former Soviet states at a high level and all his recommendations were followed by Washington except when it involved Russia, then the officials said; no, it ain’t going to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmOePNsNFw0
FF to 13mins 5secs for the question and then Sachs’ explanation.
the UK economy is in a real mess at the moment, the American economy isn’t as exposed and is a bit behind in the decline, the EU is in a real pig in a poke, debt is the real problem, constraints on energy supply mean the real, physical economy is contracting whilst the liabilities and obligations of the financial economy, effectively a Ponzi scheme, demand growth to fund repayment,
liabilities, which include the shortfalls of derivatives when they’re wound up, will drag down the West into an economic collapse,
we can only hope that Russia and China aren’t as intransigent as Washington was when the Soviet Union collapsed.
What I really expect is that the Russian people is aware about the past and present moments. The Russian people cannot accept another coup against their land, since everybody knows that the west imperialist want to put Russia on its knees and slave the people.
Thanks Larry for the recommendation.
I was already conscious of what happened in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet system. Careful analysis making it possible for me to have learnt over the years how President Putin used his political power to improve the lot of ordinary people. His contribution to the well being of his country will I hope he fully recognised outside of Russia itself, it was an outstanding achievement by a man who actually has been interested in his own nation. What a contrast he is to the self serving western political elites, perhaps that is why they hate him, he shows them up for what they are.
The western elites to an overwhelming extent don’t care if the people suffer as long as they themselves are fine and grow their net worth.
They rationalize they are doing what is correct and the fate of people is their fault unless they are of a entitled group. It will be on display as the results of the US election are completed.
The voters will be called stupid, racist, homophobic…Biden sounds like he will be the tip of the spear promoting this rhetoric.
So the U.S. elites plundered Russia. It would seem they followed the same template used during the Reconstruction period, when the defeated South was likewise ravaged. One wonders how many of those Gilded Age fortunes were watered by Southern blood. The US has been a gangster nation from Lincoln on.
Krainer is very good – I’m just getting into him.
There is also a documentary by a film-maker who set out to write the anti-putin story of Magnitsky and soon realised that the real story was that this was a Browder/US Fake.
Banned pretty much everywhere like Krainer’s book.
On the Holodomor, it does seem to be exaggerated – or at least conditions in Ukraine were not substantially different to much of the Soviet Union. The peasants preceived to be be rich (Kulaks)that were targeted in Ukraine were targeted everywhere. It was a Soviet tragedy, not a Ukrainian one, although obviously that is not how the Ukrainian nationalists and their western backers tell it.
Thanks to Diego Zampini and others for explaining this above.
On the movie, one peculiar thing is how polar are “reviews”, they are even maxed out or subzero.
The content of those reviews is tellign too, either something personal, or just a copy-paste of PC bullet points.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6028446/reviews/?ref_=tt_ql_urv
It seems the moview with German subtitles is yet available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEI24t84GSU
I laugh when U.S. experts predict a coup and/or massive popular uprising against Putin.
Russians remember the Yeltsin years when Russia’s poverty rate hit 40%.
Western leaning Oligarchs ruled Russia in the Yeltsin years paying virtually no taxes.
Putin let the Oligarchs keep the property but forced them to pay taxes. Putin was able to resume Russia’s Social Security system which was suspended under Yeltsin. U.S. ‘experts’ cluck about ‘Putin’s kleptocracy’ and ignor that Putin reigned in Yeltsin’s kleptocracy.
May I also suggest John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” as a prelude.
The sell-out of Russia by Western and Russian oligarchs linked to RAND Corp. and a (fake or not) internal report from early this year, which fits in perfectly with the US Wolfowitz doctrine since the 1990s (after the fall of the Soviet Union). Now you see the Neoconservative Kagan family (including others and Victoria “Fuck the EU 2014 Ukraine file” Nuland) and the Biden administration continuing this. See the 1992 New York Times article: https://archive.ph/wlBz5
RAND Corp. is among the most influential military and political advisory bodies in Washington DC and influences strategic (and therefore tactical) policymakers. The Ukraine dossier is directed not only against Russia but also against Europe (read Germany and France). The Wolfowitz doctrine in question is always directed against a strong economic bloc between Europe and Russia, as this is considered the greatest danger against the US.
My LinkedIn article of 13 September 2022 caused quite a stir with the result that I have been permanently banned from this platform. Everything has been deleted and blocked. All the more interesting to read and raise the attachments.
All arrows from Washington DC and now also from Brussels (and unfortunately our own country together with the European Commission within the EU) are focused on this. The failing US/EU gas and financial sanctions and the current Nordstream 1/2 event seamlessly match the report and US policy of the past 30 years. Europe is paying a very high bill and citizens (read also farmers) are the ultimate victims.
Herewith are some interesting additions if you really want to counter the current technocratic and dictatorial regime of the European Commission of Ms Von der Leyen (read Albrecht) and in the Netherlands PM Rutte and vice PM Kaag and block them in the interest of the Netherlands/Europe and our parliamentary democracy.
I am providing you with a Dutch press article from earlier this year, which concerns a case example of Russia’s plunder and is mine personally during my active service as a Tax lawyer and investigation and intelligence specialist for the Dutch government (1994-2008) and afterwards as an independent expert, which fits perfectly into the strategic US policy plans since the 1990s with the aim of tying Europe (read also the Netherlands) as Washington DC’s lackey and preventing a strong European economic bloc on the old continent of Europe. Besides the European Commission led by the unelected Von der Leyen (and Frans Timmermans) and the current Dutch cabinet Rutte (since its 12-year reign) and Kaag are still implementing this with their ridiculous enforced and imposed Neoconservative and Liberal Democrat idiocy, including the Green Deal. I don’t need to explain all this to you anymore, but please take advantage of all the information below because the Netherlands is dear to me and worth too much.
The NRC article in question: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/04/15/hun-roebels-wegsluizen-dat-deden-russische-oligarchen-via-hoofddorp-a4113830
It has been further translated into the foreign press:
https://prigovor.ru/en/article/khodorkovskys-dirty-money-in-the-netherlands
https://i-aml.com/financial-crime/25052022/
https://flb.ru/1/4716.html
https://flb.ru/1/4725.html
Also knowing, the French and German governments have woken up and accused the US of their quadruple profit margins in supplying inferior LNG compared to the cheaper and not inferior Russian gas. A friendly NATO partner does not make absorbing profits while Europe has an issue proclaimed in Paris and Berlin. I am currently hearing these signals frequently in the Netherlands too.
As always brother you know the Deep State details and no one explains it better than you. Much respect 🙏
Thanks brother. Just doing the right thing. See you around!
Risk mitigation and threat assessment: Rothschild, Valmet, Khodorkovsky and the hidden transfers and schemes of Yukos and Menatep.
Author’s Note: The underlying non-shared and non-disclosed information on which all contributions are based is restricted and sensitive and NOT reported on this platform. This does not apply to the named open sources.
According to sources and also known to me in view of my expertise from 1994 until now, it has been established and known for 25 years that political, economic and strategic interests are at stake in the casuistry. In the worst-case scenario, the integrity of the democratic legal order, the financial system and the political dependence that can result from economic dependence have already been gradually damaged and compromised.
The fact that the Netherlands plays a transit role in the financial traffic to and from Russia and Ukraine is, after 25 years, well-known to sources and me. It is therefore no longer necessary to state that the Dutch financial, tax and legal system is potentially attractive to Russian and Ukrainian capital flight. In fact, it facilitates it.
In view of the large sums involved (too many billions annually) – which are possibly only the tip of the financial iceberg – one must speak of a highly undesirable situation.
For the time being, this means that after 25 years the Netherlands must finally make an effort in the known casuistry to get to the bottom of things and make a clean sweep before questions are raised.
The abuse of the Dutch system must be blocked and its integrity safeguarded. The reputation is at stake.
Now a slightly broader view concerns the Netherlands and Haute Finance (considering the whole banking, tax, advisory and legal system) linked to Russia and Ukraine.
The Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles are known for all kinds of tax-legal divergent facilities, which within the legal frameworks and regulations can be applied side by side and separately from each other. These include:
• Bilateral tax treaties
• Trust (Anglo-Saxon phenomenon)
• Special Financial Institutions (BFIs, Dutch variant of the Anglo-Saxon trust)
• Non-resident schemes (quasi-banking activities)
• Holding structures
• Intercompany pricing (financing within business units)
• Rulings (agreements with the tax authorities in respect of multinationals regarding a predetermined profit tax)
• Different business forms (with or without legal status)
• Incentive schemes (Ministry of Finance)
According to sources and also known to me in view of my expertise from 1994 until now, it has been established and known for 25 years that political, economic and strategic interests are at stake in the casuistry. In the worst-case scenario, the integrity of the democratic legal order, the financial system and the political dependence that can result from economic dependence have already been gradually damaged and compromised.
It should really be investigated which criminal offences are involved, especially in relation to:
• Capital flight
• Asset stripping
• Investment (domestic and or international).
• Money laundering
• Tax avoidance and evasion (international tax planning)
• Abuse of legal entities
• Participation in criminal organizations (white-collar)
So far a first glimpse.
It is interesting to see the reactions of the Russian oligarchs.
Knowing, that after the fall of communism at the time of the Yeltsin period, these persons acquired almost all of Russia through Financial-Industrial Groups (FIG). And not always through legal means, but also through illegal means and brutal violence. The FIGs and oligarchs had no understanding of the international financial world and structures and were assisted by Western lawyers, accountants and other trust specialists. Most of these firms were based in the UK and the UK financial spiderweb of former colonies.
In fact, there was a sell-out of Russia’s strategic industry (oil, gas, steel and banking system). This took place in the period from 1990-2005. Capital flight and tax avoidance and evasion, money laundering structures and annual funnelling of billions in Russian money.
When Yeltsin resigned and was given immunity from Putin, the latter began a renationalization of Russia’s strategic industry, otherwise, there would be a huge risk that Russia would be controlled by foreign shareholders and stakeholders. A valid argument from a Russian point of view.
The renationalization was accompanied by a gentleman’s agreement between Putin and the oligarchs. This included the following: The oligarchs were NOT allowed to interfere in Russia’s political affairs.
An example of an oligarch who broke this accord was Michael Khodorkovsky (FIG Menatep-Yukos Oil) he disappeared to Siberia for years and the FIG was renationalized in the well-known Russian way.
Many other oligarchs adhered to the accord (Abramovich and Fridman being some well-known examples).
With some oligarchs feeling the financial pain of sanctions and other international measures, there is some commotion among them. Some of them respond publicly or withdraw their responses afterwards due to internal pressure.
But knowing that the oligarchs are also afraid of the reactions of Putin and the faithful. The consequences are not good for them. Putin does not listen to them, he has tolerated them for the last 20 years and or uses them as a domestic and foreign policy tool.
Putin only listens (especially now) to his small group within the FSB, SVR and the military. The oligarchs do not belong to this and they know it (see the cases of Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky, Litvinenko, Curtis, and Samuelson are shining examples of them).
According to source information:
“The Khodorkovsky file was a set-up by the US and UK to eventually obtain the Yukos oil fields. Geopolitical games. Yeltsin and his oligarchs sold out Russia and Putin put a stop to it.” …
“Sanctions against Putin and Russia now and the staged Ukrainian story? The hypocrisy of the highest order.” …
“In 1988, CIA-front Riggs Bank bought a controlling interest in a little-known company based in the Isle of Man called the Valmet Group. According to the 9/11 report, Riggs-Valmet “immediately began business contracts with Russian KGB operatives,” and it was this relationship that led to the creation of Khodorkovsky’s Bank Menatep. Both Riggs-Valmet and Menatep then became conduits for moving KGB money out of Russia. In 1994, Riggs reduced its stake in Valmet after Menatep purchased a 25% share in the company.” …
“So not only was Valmet allegedly used to stash Yukos assets, if you remember my last post, this means it was tied in with the Bank of New York money laundering scandal and the missing IMF funds.” …
“Khodorkovsky was once the richest man in Russia because of his companies, Bank Menatep and Yukos, which were both tied to the KGB, Valmet, the CIA-front company, Riggs Bank, the Bank of New York scandal, and the missing 7 billion USD IMF funds.” …
“Mentioned KGB operatives were during the Yeltsin era. Not Putin’s. Also is known that former KGB employees worked for oligarchs after the fall of the USSR.”
You can ask yourself the legal question of the 50 billion USD claim of the former Yukos shareholders is still valid after reading this article. Multiple verdicts are based on insufficient legal grounds because of the lack of all necessary financial information.
According to source information, all verdicts were based on incomplete grounds and should be dismissed. A proper look into the whole picture shed a no go for the former Yukos shareholders and their 50 billion USD claim towards the Russian state.
Perhaps a settlement between the US and Russia to close the file after the dust in Ukraine is gone?
In 2013, by the way, Dutch PM Rutte and Foreign Affairs Minister Timmermans appeased Putin and oligarchs in the NL embassy in Kyiv. Advertising!
So the Dutch ARTEMIS 2001-2003 investigation was not a frivolous or bogus affair, but hard-nosed financial geopolitics that showed that Russia needed to be financially squeezed and robbed of its assets.
Source confirmation of the parallel reason for the sell-out of Russia with the support of money laundering and tax evasion schemes of an oligarch/robber baron:
“More than 17 years ago, on June 23, 2005, an annual meeting of shareholders of the oil company Yukos took place” …
“Apart from that, in May 2005, the Meschansky District Court of Moscow passed a guilty sentence upon Mikhail Khodorkovsky for a series of economic crimes, including tax affairs. Nevertheless, the gathered in the meeting headed by the former main banker Viktor Geraschenko, radiated optimism. He didn’t mention that the losses were the result of activities of Khodorkovsky if not direct accomplices of machinations”…
“Apart from that, the banker admitted that in 2003 Yukos had been preparing to sell at least 40% of its shares for more than 25 billion USD to one of the biggest US and UK oil companies” …
“Negative ramifications of such selling had been obvious. The US/UK would have disposed of Russia’s mineral resources through Khodorkovsky. For that Russia would have constantly pointed at its inferiority and would have constantly given instructions by the US/UK.”
On May 20, 2022, the Russian Ministry of Justice included Khodorkovsky in the list of foreign agents.
Further according to sources Khodorkovsky has financed the US proposal to increase the military help to Ukraine up to 1 billion USD a year and the UK thesis about “Why Minsk-2 cannot solve the Ukraine crisis”
How? By breaching again the gentlemen’s agreement between the oligarchs and Putin not to interfere with state interests.
It is known that he and his foundation Future of Russia one of the key sponsors of the analytical centre The Atlantic Council, attached to NATO and the British centre Chatham House.
Even the former US ambassador in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution expresses warm gratitude to Khodorkovsky’s foundation.
The Atlantic Council confirms the fact of the financing by the Future of Russia Foundation on the list of its benefactors. Chatham House confirms that Khodorkovsky’s Future of Russia Foundation is its constant sponsor.
The yearly funding of both is between 100,000 and 150,000 GBP each.
Questions are raised. Which state pursues an active policy and interferes in the affairs of other states? Is it, really, only Russia, as the political analysts from The Atlantic Council and Chatham House assure, among others bought with the money of Khodorkovsky’s foundation?
According to source information:
In 1998, Khodorkovsky had been released in the IMF case in which he was accused of helping to launder USD 10 billion through his own Menatep bank and the BoNY. He had very influential friends in the USA, it turned out. Look further in the Edmund Safra saga.
With his billions, in fact, stolen from the Russian people, he made some powerful friends. He set up a foundation on the model of the Open Society of American Soros, which he called the Open Russia Foundation. He invited two powerful men to the board of directors: Kissinger and Jacob Rothschild. He then forged links with some of the most powerful circles in DC, where he was appointed to the advisory board of the private equity firm Carlyle Group, where he attended board meetings with fellow advisers such as George H.W. Bush and James Baker III.
Khodorkovsky landed behind bars in Russia was the fact that he was also engaged in a US-backed coup to win the Russian presidency during the planned 2004 Russian Duma elections. He lost because the plot failed miserably and the rest is history. Obama and Hillary had their value judgements ready, of course.
At the time of his arrest, Khodorkovsky was negotiating through his Carlyle friend Bush, father of then-President George W. Bush, the sale of 40% of Yukos to either Rice’s former company, Chevron or ExxonMobil, in a move that would have dealt a crippling blow to the only asset Russia had left to use in rebuilding Russia’s devastated economy: oil and exports via state-owned pipelines to the West for USD. During the subsequent Russian state prosecution of Yukos, it came to light that Khodorkovsky had also secretly contracted with UK’s Lord Rothschild not only to support Russian culture through Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia Foundation but also to support the Russian economy. In the event of his possible arrest (Khodorkovsky apparently knew he was playing a risky game by trying to stage a coup against Putin), 40% of his Yukos shares would pass into Lord Rothschild’s hands.
Pecunia Universal Ltd? Yukos Finance BV? The Isle of Man and NL?
A proper look into the whole picture shed a no go for the former Yukos shareholders and their 50 billion USD claim towards the Russian state.
So a final verdict based on all the facts in the case referred back by the Supreme Court to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal will make Justice prevail.
Khodorkovsky was once the richest man in Russia because of his companies, Bank Menatep and Yukos. We all know what happened to him.
An interesting diagram portrays the way in which the Menatep/Yukos oligarchs transferred their shares in a number of complicated stages ultimately hiding their ownership.
As previously reported, they were assisted by UK specialists such as Peter Michael Bond, Stephen Curtis, Christoper Samuelson and Valmet Trust. Many suspicious transactions went through the recently bankrupt Russian bank the Amsterdam Trade Bank in the Netherlands.
This concerns hundreds of millions of USD transactions, the majority of which ultimately ended up via Russia, Switzerland and the Netherlands with a shell company managed by the above-mentioned trust company on the Isle of Man with the exotic name Pecunia Universal Ltd. And this is just the money laundering scheme, a snapshot. But hard facts. This is purely meant for money laundering.
The former shareholders and oligarchs of Yukos Oil, namely: Hulley Enterprises Ltd (Cyprus), Yukos Finance Ltd (Isle of Man) and Veteran Petroleum Ltd (Cyprus), formerly GML (Gibraltar) have made since 2014 an absurd claim of more than USD 50 billion to the Russian Federation for the expropriation and bankruptcy of Yukos Oil.
See the comparison of Yukos Finance Ltd and Pecunia Universal Ltd (Isle of Man) and the same period, namely 1999/2000. A stock shell company and a money bag shell company.
And as you may know, the Dutch case has been referred back to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal after the Supreme Court overturned the two verdicts of the Hague Court of Appeal from 2018 and 2020 at the end of 2021. The reason was fraudulent information by the claimants from the start of all lawsuits. Also, the same sort of case is ongoing in de USA.
Going back to my previous statement, the links between Khodorkovsky, Kissinger and Rothschild are concerned. See the name change from the Open Russian Foundation to the Future of Russia Foundation and scroll down.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/04529663/officers
Then you will encounter them yourself.
When I mention to friends the rape of Russia after the end of the USSR, they don’t know what I am talking about. They also don’t know what I am talking about when I say, the planned Russian offensive in Ukraine, will be of a great nation so enraged and so totally disrespected. To the fools that think this is wishful thinking on my part, I say, wait and see. If you think Iraq was Shock and Awe, this will be something else. Putin is a very patient man as we have all seen, a man who has reached the clarity that nothing else matters except an extreme show of force to those cowards who only respect force.
I only hope military men will step up to the plate and prevent the Neocon morons in DC from sending our kids into this meat grinder.
Putin has hidden allies like me and Donald.
Larry, I suggest that you get Martin Armstrong on for an interview/discussion on the Browder thing. Also would like to see Martin and Michael Hudson and perhaps others on for a round table, I think that would make a very interesting show.
Wow, this is a little mind-blowing (to say the least, or maybe it’s my own naivete), but I just tried to order Krainer’s book – first at Amazon (nice try)….they informed me (painfully obvious b.s.) that they couldn’t deliver the book to my address – then, I tried to order from bookdepository (think they’re located in the uk?)…got this source from GoodReads…bookdepository let’s me add the book to my “basket”, then after trying again and again to place my order, just will not proceed to complete the purchase. I sent them a message explaining the problem – let’s see what they have to say about that, provided they respond at all. Anyone here having similar difficulties ordering this book?
Thanks for any help in advance, Eric C
I think Amazon also own GoodReads…that would explain it
I read browder’s book. With no other information, his own book only, anyone with a bit of brain could only draw the obvious conclusion. This is a story that incarnates the very meaning of evil. These people are a threat to humanity.
So, can’t wait to read Krainer’s book, if I could find it. Guess what, not on amazon.pig !
Another podcast on the same subject – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USCEfWKi4ZQ. The Lies of Bill Browder & the Magnitsky Hoax [Lucy Komisar Canadian Patriot interview]
I do not enjoy E books, so I looked for the dead tree version. The actual book is not available in the US… Amazon.ca has it but cannot ship it to the US! Is this a great country or what!!?
That pissed me off!
I found it at “The Book Depository Ltd. UK for $29.72; free world wide shipping. 10-13 business days.
******************************
I also concur with Stephen above and recommend “Russia Against Napoleon” by Dominic Lieven. It is based on Russian military archives and memoirs. It is one of the best books I’ve read.
Karma is what happens to a nation when it does things to other nations and people. If you conquer and destroy another nation, your own nation is required by divine law to suffer the same. The fact that it may happen 100, 500, or 1000 years later, tends to confuse people as to there being a direct connection.
So why would Europe and America not suffer what they did to others? How are you supposed to learn if you don’t get hit in a fight that you start? Just win all the time like a bully? No such thing as winning 100 battles out of 100 for those that neither understand themselves nor know their enemy.
Once again on the theme of Putin and Stalin: why the excess mortality that Putin’s policy in Ukraine is acceptable but in the time of Stalin isn’t?
Could it be because we take into account the external pressures present day Russia is under while we ignore them in the case of the USSR? For no reason I can discern, other than Putin’s capitalism=good; Stalin’s communism=bad.
But the truth is both were trying to preserve Russia’s space in the world against the onslaught of Western colonial capitalism.
I’m not sure if a link to site called Euromaidan Press is supposed to be some kind of trolling. I’ve just put Bandera in search box there, and found out that “Stalin was a greater fascist than Bandera or Mussolini”:
https://euromaidanpress.com/2014/07/26/stalin-was-a-greater-fascist-than-bandera-or-mussolini/
Thanks for the article and the book recommendation. Alex Krainer has some interview videos on youtube (surprised they didn’t ban him as well). He also has written some articles. Here is a link to the ones about Putin; https://thenakedhedgie.com/2018/09/21/is-vladimir-putin-evil-1-3/. Keep up the good work Larry.
I sent the following email to RT, et al.:
https://sonar21.com/did-the-former-soviet-union-experience-what-awaits-europe/
Larry,
I knew none of this, zero. I did not know Russia went through such an economic experience. What else is our beloved Western media not telling us?
Is it not time to restore a good government in America in a Strictly Legal manner? Don’t you think most Americans want to do what is right and honorable, what is in their best interests, what makes for a good country and a peaceful world?
You also answered my question as to why Andrei Martyanov emigrated to the U.S. But given most Americans no longer recognize their country, what should we do?
BTW, my Polish friend who suggested Putin is sick obviously believes Western media lies.
I saw this:
“Putin appeared vigorous and fully alert, with a prodigious grasp of detail, during his three and a half hours on stage at Valdai.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57319.htm
“Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).”
Are you and Ray McGovern friends?
And thanks to Dr. Roberts, I saw this: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57321.htm
Looking up Christopher Black, I found this:
In 2006, Black reported of death threats from the CIA[6]:
“I was approached by a CIA agent in a bar in Arusha at the ICTR* (the man was identified to me by someone else as CIA, backing up the agents claims to be connected to the CIA) a week before I left. He began a conversation stating that many people have been murdered at the ICTR. He told me about several people (some of whom I was aware of from press releases re their deaths from supposed illness and accidents) some I was not aware of. He told me that the CIA had used an undetectable poison in several cases that dissolves the blood vessels resulting in death in several days. He went on at length about this, ostensibly being very friendly with me and telling me for “my own good” and stated that people who don’t keep a low profile at the Tribunal don’t live long.
He backed up his “warning” by stating he had been a US Army officer in the first Gulf War, had then been transfered to Nato HQ in Brussels for several years, then New York and then placed in a civilian job at the Tribunal. He pumped me for information as well as my companion. It made us both very nervous.This is not the first time I have been threatened there or “warned”. My client thinks it is not serious and that they are simply trying to intimidate me. But it is making me nervous. The last time I was threatened was by the RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front) and I stated so in open court and asked for protection. But the Tribunal investigated me instead of those who made the threat and tried to make me look like I was making it up to cause political trouble so I have no confidence in reporting this strange conversation to them now.
I state this for two reasons; first to raise the question of whether the CIA is involved at the ICTY and at the ICTR. It is my feeling that there are several CIA agents involved in various functions.
Second, I want this on record somewhere in case.”
https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Christopher_Black#Death_Threats_from_CIA
Have you ever been threatened by the CIA with a death threat before?
Mr. McGovern,
Has the CIA ever threatened to kill you?
Jim Giles
Mississippi Rebel
https://youtu.be/8kdf_gCg_VM
P.S. Ms. Simonyan, I would want to have Ray McGovern, Andrei Martyanov, Christopher Black, Larry Johnson, et al., as guests at RT frequently. I would ask them lots of questions.
P.P.S. Messieurs McGovern, Martyanov, Black and Johnson, I would appreciate your endorsement of my application to be a Host at RT.
P.P.P.S. Director Wenbin, I would especially appreciate your endorsement to be a Host at RT where I would invite you to be a guest to comment on American aggression towards Taiwan, on a regular basis. Like most Americans, I don’t know what is really going on but I would ask you to explain the situation. I trust you one million times more than I trust Western media. And to be fair, I would invite the opposing side to offer their views as to why Taiwan is a legal American colony and part of the American empire. BTW, I never knew the U.S. Navy was so vulnerable until Mr. Martynov explained it to me.
Dear Larry, your blog is one of the few that I read and enjoy. Myself compelled me, even though I avoid this kind of interactions, to attach the following link “Grover Furr on the myth of the Holodomor (1932-1933)” because of the context in your article. I think you and your readers might enjoy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3-uh_idO_0
This connects to Ukraine and the Donbass, with this excellent summary here.
https://barnesreview.org/the-donbass-rebellion-and-the-political-idea-of-novorossiya/
Of course social media and the disinfo propagandists aren’t telling you the truth about Ukrainian sentiments and the Donbass. Because they themselves don’t understand jack. Not even Jack Dorsey understands jack.
My Russian wife was able to buy a pair of winter gloves at the end of the 90s after 3 months of internship as a teacher.
Her father had no wages for 3 months and after the bankruptcy of the entrepreneur, of course, the backlog of salaries was not paid.
Since her famlie lived near the city but in the countryside, it was not as bad as the city people had it.
Now we live in Russia until at least April and wait what happens in Europe, especially in Germany. We have sublet our apartment there.
There is everything here and nothing is missing. The fish – like today the catfish – we get from the nearby river, from an angler. A bigger and a small catfish cost 1600 rubles, about 16 euros. The animal was freshly caught and had to be gutted by ourselves. The angler comes directly to us and we usually get the animal fresh.
Practically, we could even take care of ourselves. Cows, chickens, ducks and goats are there. Two goats were recently slaughtered. A young cow was recently purchased for 50,000 rubles and will be slaughtered in the spring. The meat is incredibly red. It is simply a delight.
Perhaps we should offer a simple life for managers for a few weeks.
My wife does home office and we defacto hardly need money.
Good morning:
I am Cuban and I know what people suffer under communism, but let’s not forget that it was the Russians, like us Cubans, who accepted that economic system for 70 years.
I just read that the USA recommended Zelensky to sit down to negotiate with the Russians and I wonder: how is it possible for this to happen if the Russians are losing the war for the entire West?
I lived through it. It was bad, especially for older people like my parents, who never recovered from it psychologically. I love to watch Gone with Wind movie, which reminds me post Soviet collapse. We were all given “ 40 acres and mule” vouchers and big theft started. My father, very high ranking civil engineer, refused to sell his voucher. Now I understand why. By the way, former KGB agents came to power later in all former Soviet republics , except Balkans. They did stabilize economies. The only country which is still being robed under symbol of democracy is Ukraine. When I visited home recently, I was in pleasant shock how country developed with full scale capitalism, I frankly think US is declining every year.
Of course the US is declining. It’s expensive to run an empire, make war on everybody and have a “rob Peter to pay Paul” economic system.
Frankly, many of us have gotten sick of it.
They say Europe is socialist, but all I know is that when I was in the Netherlands about 10 years ago, I was struck by how nice everything was. If this is what high taxes buys you, I’d be inclined to take it.
Traditionally, I’ve been a conservative, but I’m at the point where I think they’re all full of crap. Thank you Donald Trump for showing everybody the light.
It’s only socialist in the sense that Klaus Schwab is a socialist.
I wouldn’t get my hopes up about the Netherlands, Rutte and the VVD are gutting the social welfare system. More cuts are coming, at a time when they are set to be flooded with Bandera-enjoyer refugees. On top of that they’re going to war with their own farmers. Insanity.
It’s going to be an unlivable shithole soon and I’m glad I bailed when I did.
Here’s a beautiful song, such by Russian pop stars, which I think is partially representative of the Russian culture and its soul.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/3XPAoGkpkEbW/
I read this a few years back when researching Browder — poster boy for the Wall Street rapists who swooped down on Russia after the collapse. After barely getting out of “Dodge” incensed for getting “caught” running a tax scam with his accountant, he wrote a poison pen book and then using/devleoping major contacts in the U.S. Congress, he was chiefly responsible for “ginning up” the Magnitsky Act (built on a pile of extraordinary bombast and lies), which was the opening salvo of Cold War II, targeting Russia.
I read Alex’s book years ago. It was initially available on Amazon but was removed and censored at the request of William Browder–I just checked, it’s still not available on Amazon. Browder has been very successful at defusing any inquiry or criticism. He successfully censored a documentary produced by Andrei Nekrasov called “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes” https://www.bitchute.com/video/NlrR5zFDoTRj/ . Mr. Browder was also behind the adoption of the Magnitsky Act in the USA and most European countries–with no dissenting votes or factual hearings. The act resulted in the first sanctions against Russian citizens since the dissolution of the USSR. Mr. Browder appears to be very well connected.
William Browder was one of the big financial players in Russia during the 1990’s using money he raised from people like Edmond Safra. He came to my attention beginning in 2007 when it was reported that over $250 million in tax revenue had been fraudulently stolen from the Russian government by parties representing themselves as his investment company, Hermitage Capital Management, requesting a tax refund. The investment company and Mr. Browder were later accused of tax fraud by the Russian government. Mr. Browder left Russia but the investment fund’s accountant Sergi Magnitsky was arrested on these charges in Russia. (Mr. Browder claimed that Mr. Magnitsky was his attorney but admitted in a deposition that Magnitsky had no legal training) Mr. Magnitsky died in prison in 2009–leading to a huge anti-Russian propaganda campaign and the passage of the Magnitsky Act.
Mr. Browder’s primary objective may be to keep his fortune and stay out of prison in Russia, but the negative coverage he has generated regarding Russia certainly helped to lay the ground work for Russiagate and today’s events.
Dear Mr Johnson,
another very insightful article from you – thanks a lot for the splendid work you do – 25 years ago I could enjoy articles like yours in the press (yes, they existed) – now I have to rely on blogs like yours to have a real “Lesefreude” (joy of reading).
In regards to the Holodomor, I’d like to add that its beginning or rather its cause is still debatable I guess – like many other topics, where certain “truths” are against certain political necessities – so just like in the question, if the German attack on the SU was a pre-emptive strike or in the topic of Pearl Harbour (that it was known to the US government, that the Japanese would attack the base) – it may take some time for these issues to be finally presented as truths to everybody (that is IF they are truths – I am also not 100% certain about them).
Anyhow – in regards to the Holodomor, I would like to recommend to everybody who wants to know, how a famine feels “on the ground” the marvellous book “I chose Freedom” by Victor Kravchenko, a SU defector, who, being part of a team of Soviet businessmen, who worked in the USA during WW2, fled his country and sought (and found) asylum in the United States in 1944. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Kravchenko_(defector)
A wonderful read – it gives the reader valuable insight into life in a totalitarian state – the permanent propaganda, the fear of being watched, of having to be very careful, what to say to whom, of being surrounded by spies, the necessity to show enthusiasm, once officialdom demands it and all these internal wrenches, one has to do just to survive…. Unimaginable to us westerners but reality for Russians (and Ukrainians for that matter).
But to speak of the Holodomor: According to Kravchenko, who was sent as a young man (he was a devout communist) to the East of Ukraine (he was Ukrainian himself) to help with the collection of the harvest, the famine of 1932 was wilfully caused by Stalin – not only to Ukraine, but to other parts of the SU also, though it hit Ukraine very hard.
He describes in detail terrible scenes he watched – Ukrainian farmers, refusing to hand in their harvest, were beaten, tortured, sent into prison camps. Many farmers and their families starved to death, horrific scenes of suicides, farmers who set their farms on fire rather than be taken away from them, who were savagely beaten by the GPU, the secret police and the constant hunger everywhere shocked the young communist Kravchenko and shattered his belief in his socialist ideas. He watched people eating dung to survive and also how the dead were put together on piles to be carried away to their grave.
It has to be added, though, that the famine of 1932 had a predecessor – the famine of 1921, when a great drought had happened in Ukraine and – shortly after a brutal and vicious civil war, which caused millions of deaths – farmers and their families were starving in the hundreds of thousands. Kravchenko tells the reader, how dogs, cats, horses, all animals apart from what the communists could save as necessary (like cows or some horses) were eaten by the peasants, as well as grass or birchbark – how the countryside was suddenly so quiet, because the barking of dogs could not be heard anymore. How there were cases of cannibalism (in 1921 just as in 1932).
What the Russians and Ukrainians had to endure during these years is unbelievable – the things they went through…. These people know how to endure things – the most terrible things. We do not.
We will find out the hard way the next years, if we can keep some sanity, when things start getting insane. I honestly fear, that we may see the most gruesome things throughout the west – things, our societies haven’t seen for a long, long time….
So – in order to prepare (also mentally) the reading of books like “I chose freedom” is very instructive. As is reading your blog, Mr Johnson – and I hope, it and you will be with us for quite a while. 😊
The parallels between the collapsing Soviet Union and America in its current state are all pretty obvious to those who pay attention. Let’s hope it doesn’t get that bad in America, but the banksters and pirate capitalists have run out of places to rape, so it may.
Well, this is a pleasant read, but I differ that nobody is going to be looting or investing in Europe or a failed United States. They are going to be treating it more like a disease. I suggest you all read this, from the Saker web site. Written by a Russian and a very perceptive one too. He KNOWS:
https://thesaker.is/the-trojan-horse-presidency/
Remember: Success is failure, and failure is success. And you will understand what is happening.
There is a guy named Peter Zeihan. He had one good idea. About changing demographics. He was a STRATFOR Pentagon toady. He has the idea that the USA has so many advantages we will win. We will win whatever, whenever, however. Outside of him being an NSA and CIA puppet, I find this ludicrous. And Mr. Johnson is spot on. You can have everything you need, and with idiot leaders, it will go to shit. We have a lazy, drug addicted populace. Since weed has been legalized, I have watched multiple friend’s self-destruct. They don’t go meth whore crazy, they are just worthless. They don’t do shit. What is funny is that these are 6 figure a year guys. “Working” from home. And their employers don’t do anything about it. That is our country in a nutshell. There is zero accountability across the board. F35 program goes 1 Trillion over budget? Who cares. Teachers took your kids to a drag queen twerkoff that as a parent you did not care enough to find out about? Who cares. So, yes even with the incredibly lucky abundance we have. We will find a way to fuck it up.
You are bang on. Same in Canada. No one knows shit, no one has time to investigate and no one cares. The West is a fucked up POS group of countries following a debt ridden Finance capitalism model after it threw away the Industrial capitalism model of the 1940s – 1970s. Now it’s sleazy Wall St financiers and BS tech stocks that make up a huge part of the GDP but the US doesn’t manufacture or produce enough real consumer good or industrial goods to be relevant anymore. And we have WEF marionettes as “leaders” and our morals and ethics and common sense are in the toilet. We are spiraling downward with no ability to fix it.
“I suspect that of the European nations, Russia has suffered the most in the 20th century: suffering Bolshevism, WW2 and the collapse of the USSR”
And logically and obviously the 21st century WILL BE a Russian century.
Putin will clean the Ukrainian abscess and devitalize the rotten tooth that is NATO then he’ll fade into the sunset, leaving his country entering an era of peace and prosperity.
Wanna bet?
Picture this: at the time of the post-Soviet collapse, there were Russians of advanced age who had lived through the Stalinist terror and the German invasion and, in their final years, a new collapse. How much devastation can the people of a nation survive and keep their will to carry on?
Even so, aside from Russian Jews, there wasn’t a lot of out-migration. It’s hard to doubt that something in the Russian character draws immense strength from its history, its land, its Orthodox Christianity. Putin seems to exemplify that spirit and encourage it in his people. No wonder Russia is surviving and even thriving in this latest test of its will, when much of the Western world opposes it with weaponry and hatred.
Nothing is guaranteed, but I suspect that today’s Russians will emerge strong and triumphant.
Thanks, Larry for recommendaion! Absolutely essential for me to obtain.
Back in the day, I lived and worked in Moscow 1995 to 1998 until the ruble blew up.
As you noted, Larry, the imposition of shock therapy, which the western “experts” put in place, was criminal.
( Larry Summers, clinton’s sec treausry, led the charge ably assisted by his looting cronies from Harvard.) The neo con intent then, as it is today, was to loot and destroy Russia.
I had a language tutor who could not find food in stores for her family-multiply that by millions of Russians and the scale of the criminality becomes apparent, meanwhile the looting went on at fast pace.
Krainer has done excellent work on tracking the criminal activities of browder; copies of the book should be sent to the neo con menendez and his fellow neo cons on senate foreign relations committee. (of course, they would never read it)
They brought browder in to appear for the hoax and fraudulent magnetsky act, whereby he issued lie after lie and they never challenged him, indeed applauded him.
Another goos source by Anne Williamson.
The Rape of Russia:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-rape-of-russia-explained-by-anne/
In Kristen Ghodsee’s “Red Hangover” is a chapter entitled “Three Bulgarian Jokes”. Two of these are:
Question: What did Bulgarians use to light their houses before they started using candles?
Answer: Electricity
Question: What is the worst thing about communism?
Answer: The thing that came after it.
The West has morphed very closely (the morphing isn’t finished yet) to what the communist East was, having severed itself from the cheap Russian fossil fuels, is now also pushing for a cut off from the cheap labour of China even though her massively low cost of labour has kept inflation in the West down for decades through the supply of virtually everything we wear, have around us or use each day.
Without the cheap oil&gas and low cost labour the West’s economy will be toast, not unakin to the uncompetitive economies of the communist East that in the end couldn’t ‘feed’ its own people, crumbled.
Energy is the most important component of not only the economic life of every country, but of life altogether, the West paid for one million Btu of piped Russian gas eight dollars, it now pays over thirty bucks for the Europe landed LNG.
The current leadership of the West, the American Governing elite, is redolent in age of the old Soviet Politburo, almost all geriatric, it’s a miracle they can stand up and open their mouths.
And lastly and most importantly, today’s decision making in the West is based on lies, half-truths and deceptions, just as it was in the Bolshevik’s controlled Kremlin Empire of the East, it couldn’t have lasted, it was inimical to human nature.
The death toll in the former Soviet Union and its satellites would have been many times higher had not the KGB (I believe that it was the section with which Putin was associated) made a recommendation in the 70’s, based on a very realistic analysis of the economic prognosis for the USSR, to the Politburo that they allow their people to register to use small plots of land (think allotments in Great Britain) so that they might raise some of their own food. This was a radical reversal of Stalin era policies which sought to force people to be as reliant on the system as possible. This new system was also subsequently adopted throughout the Soviet sphere of influence, although it was somewhat less necessary because not all of Central and Eastern Europe was fully collectivized (Poland continued to mainly rely on peasant agriculture throughout the communist period). These plots and the reliance of city dwellers on relatives who remained in the villages (not applicable in most of the Soviet Union proper) produced an enormous amount of food which just about kept millions of people alive who otherwise would have starved to death.
In comparison our CIA seems to be doing everything possible to perpetuate the illusion of American prosperity. Add to this the lack of any direct connection to the land for the vast majority of Americans and it is not hard to see that the U.S. is potentially in for a much rougher ride than even the Russians experienced in the 90’s. This is not to even mention all of the things that our oligarchy and the government it controls is doing to shorten the lives of Americans, because the guiding ideology of the American elite is eugenics (not Capitalism (something at least as elusive as “full Communism”)). Communism was a horror. Eugenics is far and away worse.
“Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has compared the anticipated battle for Kherson between Russian and Ukrainian forces to the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II, warning that aftershocks from the fighting would be felt far outside the conflict zone.”
https://www.rt.com/russia/566054-kherson-stalingrad-vucic-ukraine/
Larry,
Do you agree with Vucic?
Another brilliant text by Alastair Crooke from the beginning of October that I missed and explains very well everything that is happening in our part of the world today. That above all, it doesn’t take conspiracy theories to understand the western geostrategic board and the world today. In a more practical and clear way than is normal in Alastair Crooke. Less and less committed to our world. Where only the greed of a few does not allow to see that in the long run no one gains anything from the misery of the other. Like Europe today on the verge of losing its connection to Russia and China. In other words, everything that interests Europe. Only paying precisely for not having run to the aid of Russia in the 90’s, as this text by Larry also deals with.
Alastair Crooke, for those who don’t know is a former senior British diplomat, ex-MI6 and former EU diplomat. Positions he left as soon as he got married to join the Beirut Conflict Forum. An organization that advocates more liaison between political Islam and the West. As anyone with common sense should defend. But above all, he is someone who is always worth reading. Even because he knows our dirty and corrupt world like few others. Where he also played an important role. In addition to this text, another text that is very worth reading in the same publication by Alastair is the essay on Oct 23, in which he calls Borrell dumb. I myself have a hard time imagining anyone dumber today. Well, maybe two of Alastair’s countrymen. Boris and Liz. And Ursula.
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/the-curious-silence-surrounding-the-baltic-gas-bubbles
Yes, I remember this time well, the men working at the Lada factory and others still waiting for pay after 6 months. It was such a desperate time for those poor people that in my minds eye I can still see the faces of those poor souls from the tabloid photos. My Polish friend came to CA in 89, told me her horror stories but Russia was worse. She ended up going to Russia filming documentaries on the abandoned children living in the subways to try bring some agency to their plight. Putin is a truly heroic figure to be able to pull his nation out of such a tragedy.
I have not read the Kraimer book – although it looks like a good reference. But I would be very surprised if the statistics quoted did not come from “Shock Therapy; the Art of Ruining a Country (With Some Professional Help from Sweden)”, by Dan Josefsson and Stefan Lindgren (translated from Swedish). The figures appear to match pretty closely. Perhaps that source is footnoted as a reference by Kraimer; as I said, I haven’t read the book.
http://josefsson.net/arkiv/990101_the_art_of_ruining_a_country.html
There is a considerable amount of detail in their work, over and above the statistics. The part played in the Soviet debacle by Anders Aslund looms large, possibly because he also is a Swede. Aslund is a petulant blowhard who has spent much of his lifetime dabbling in one Russian regime-change project after another. Briefly, for about an hour or so , perhaps as the result of a brain injury of some sort, he argued on Russia’s side in favour of it joining the WTO, but he was soon back to whining about Putin must do this, Putin must do that. Fortunately for Russia, he never again gained the influence in Russia he held during the period discussed by Kraimer, when he was an economist on the team of Jeffrey Sachs’s ‘Harvard Boys’. But he’s still a big noise in western think tanks like The Atlantic Council.
It’s worthy noting that Sachs now advocates for Russia occasionally; he was kicked off the program by Bloomberg TV for accusing the United States of having blown up the Nord Stream I/II pipelines. He’s at Columbia now, but it’s the same guy.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/jeffrey-sachs-yanked-off-air-after-accusing-us-of-sabotaging-nord-stream/
Networks never mention the part he played as team leader in the ‘shock therapy’ wrecking of the Soviet state economy.
Well, as I saw him, Browder was an Armand Hammer wannabe, replete with similar communist family credentials and a vulture capitalist’s appetite, all packed into a charlatan’s suit. Frankly, just a nasty, conniving character overall.
On another note; I spent a few years back and forth to Moscow during the worst of the 90’s and frankly, did not find it even then to exactly be a ‘shithole’. More of a depressed industrial city somewhere in the midwest or northeast that had seen its heyday. I suppose they’d meet the same ‘shithole’ criteria but that’s another subject. That I could walk anywhere, through any neighborhood (and I saw most of them), certainly set it apart from some of its American counterparts. Then again, NYC and a few other domestic & foreign cities had already taught me a good dose of streetsmarts at an early age, that and a good dose of tolerance.
But, to each his own.
The Holodomor never happened. It was anti-Soviet propaganda and has been thoroughly debunked by academics such as Grover Furr.
“The “Holodomor” is a Nazi-inspired myth. There was no “Holodomor” – meaning, deliberate famine to starve Ukrainians (or anybody else). There has never been a shred of evidence of any such thing.
The “Holodomor” is a falsification, an invention by pro-Nazi Ukrainian Nationalists. The notion of “deliberate famine” does not appear before 1953, when it is used by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators who fled to Canada and the USA.
There was a serious famine in 1932-33. There had been famines every 2-4 years in Russia for at least a thousand years. There was a serious famine in 1921-2, another in 1924, and another in 1928.
The famine of 1932-33 was not caused by the Soviet leadership in any way: not by collectivization, nor by the exporting of grain, and certainly not deliberately.
Collectivization of agriculture solved the perennial problem of periodic famines! After 1933 there were no more, except for one serious famine in 1946-1947, again not the fault of the Soviet government.
The Soviet collectivization of agriculture was one of the greatest triumphs of social engineering of the 20th century. If capitalists gave prizes to communists – which, of course, they do not – the benefits of collectivization would have won Stalin and the Soviet government the Nobel Prize. It unquestionably saved the lives of tens of millions of people who would have died in succeeding famines.
It also permitted the industrialization of the USSR and the defeat of the Nazis, thus saving Europe and all of us from Nazi genocide.”
I am from Russia. IMany years ago I worked together with a Ukrainian woman. We sat close by in the open office space. I worked with her for several years, she was an honest hard-working person. Honest and reliable. So I believed what she told me.
She told me her Ukrainian grandmother was the only remaining child out of seven. The rest died during Holodomor after the soldiers took all the food from the family. Only the youngest survived.
They had enough food – only it was taken away from them.
The level of poverty was so high that that girl learned about underwear existence only when she grew up.
Obviously, this is only a story. And it can be endlessly argued how things can be distorted when someone tells something. But… Living in Russia throughout all of my life I do not know a single fact or a set of facts that DISPROVES the existence of a great famine happening in Ukraine fuelled by hard actions from the government.. Though I think that this was not the original intention of Bolsheviks to starve the Ukrainians. It seems to have been by-product of what was going on.
By the way, a very hard famine also happened in Kazakhstan around when Bolshevik reforms changed the traditional means of kazakh substanance and diminished their cattle herds. But this is a lesser known fact.
Anecdote is evidence of nothing. People lie, embellish, misremember. Read some Grover Furr for the truth.
In the aftermath of USSR collapse I lived in Moscow region and, later on, in Moscow. My family worked for state and was rather poor.
Times were very difficult. But nothing apocalyptical, there was food to eat, clothes to wear – and high heeled shoes too. Higher education was still mostly free. Though buying two Big Macs was a luxury for me. I even went occasionally to dance at Moscow night clubs mostly because they were quite cheap if one does not order food and drink.
But I do not really know what was going on territories outside Moscow region…
Still, If I were an American or a EU citizen, I would be concerned. No one really predicted the fall of the USSR. There were a few people both inside and outside that system who did foresee but no one listened.
The USA and EU economy is extremely strained now. The massive debt overhang, the bloated financial sector, large-scale economic disproportions are very telling. Economic feedback loops are essentially turned off by QE etc. And this has been going on for a long time – far longer than was the case for the USSR.
There is a very high likelihood, that when a system collapse happens, no one would see it coming beforehand. Definitely, not from within the system. And the collapse could be severe due to the many years economic feedback loops were turned off by money printing. This is one of the major blind spots for the EU and USA.
The funny thing is that people who lived thru the fall of the USSR are in a far better position to see the severe system issues and potential collapse of EU and USA than people inside. Not because of greater intelligence or foresight. Simply because of having the relevant experience and being outsiders to the system they have better chances of actually reading the writing on the wall.
But there is still some time to go for the EU, USA has still some capacity to sustain the unsustaineble system. Although I would bet some money that another Lehman Brothers moment is coming within the next several months.
You revealed that wonderfully!
“Russia in the 1990s: “The rate of annual population loss has been more than double the rate of loss during the period of Stalinist repression and mass famine in the first half of the 1930s…. There has been nothing like this in the thousand-year history of Russia.”–Sergei Glazyev”
Dr. Sergei Glazyev, current EAEU economist , published in English “Genocide: Russia and the New World Order”, in 2000.
Putin always said to Macron et al, that Donbass was threatened with genocide since 2014.
Thank you! I value this.
The former USSR was a closed economic system without the ability to get loans from the IMF and the economy collapsed under the weight of massive expenditure and a unworkable economic system. Condensed version. The shortages in luxury goods compelled the population to be self sufficient…..few luxury items available where cherished and repaired. A lean hardy population used to making do with whatever was available and knew how to raise chickens or small gardens even in high rise collective housing….when the 90s came around and the economy crashed to such extremes…the population was still self sufficient and housing was still socialized so no masses kicked out onto the streets….and they grinned and bared it. Over the decades because of commodity prices the economy in Russia improved greatly…..when the power and water cuts out in a Western consumer economy where all products are made to be thrown away and all food is produced by a few multinational consortiums who are compelled by profit motives to peddle ultra processed foods to a overweight sickly weak upside down mentally ill population. The former Soviet union was also quite homogeneous…..even though there are 180 ethnic groups …these where quite nationalistic and unified…no identify politics to divide and scare the voters…for every 2 Germans there is 1 migrant in Germany currently..the most popular name in England is Mohammed….the rape statistics of Sweden are mind boggling….What Europe is about to go through will be biblical
Anyone who has studied economics knows what a planned economy is. And if you’ve read anything about the USSR, you know why the Soviet economy stagnated. But what leads to the failure of commitments for the first time in the history of Russia, to technical bankruptcy, was the drop in the price of oil that the US agreed with the Saudis. That’s how the bear fell! Saudis who, curiously, are now on Russia’s side!
In the 1970s a French demographer called Emmanuel Todd came across a few Soviet statistics. Namely, an increase in child mortality, suicide rates, etc. He had an intuition that something was seriously wrong in the USSR, dug a little deeper and in 1976 published a book where he predicted that the USSR would disappear by 1984 (and I’d remind everyone that what he did wasn’t an easy feat as everyone thought at the time the USSR would was there to stay for a very long time).
Now back to the “West”. This is from NPR: “Around 2000, for white Americans between 45 and 54, average life expectancy was no longer increasing; in fact, it was actually declining — in a pattern seen almost nowhere else on Earth.” I’m French and I’ve been wainting for some years now to come across a statistics in Europe that would suggest that something ominous is about to happen in the formerly industrialized world. And guess what, in France the child mortality rate has been rising since 2012.
The collapse is already happening. Some of us, because we have better lives and because the MSM is a machine to desinform and distract, don’t see it yet. For centuries, European and American elites have been pillaging the World. For the last 40 years, since Reagan and Thatcher, they’ve been busy destroying (successfully) the livelihoods of their “fellow citizens” (mainly because of class hatred: they utterly despise the working class). Their stupidity when it comes to Russia has only accelerated the coming Final Fall (the name of the book by Todd). Honestly, with their criminal cruelty, I hope they get what they deserve: a revolution.
“Did The Former Soviet Union Experience What Awaits Europe?”
Probably.
I cannot imagine what awaits USA with so many guns and such an individualistic culture …
PS: it’s really great to read here the experiences from people from USA, Russia, Finland, England, Portugal … my best wishes for all of you.
This is what people should do, talk, not send their sons to kill the sons of other people.
What awaits the US. Two words. Civil war.
A good question. Hadn’t thought about it. It is difficult to imagine how Europe’s descent into bankruptcy will actually look, but the Russian case does help picture it, doesn’t it?
Who doubts that Western “elites” are quite willing to inflict such an horror on European and North American populations?
Actually, they’ve already started – with the Covid “measures” and the shots.
And they’ll laugh about it, too. Just look at Scholz laughing at a German baker telling him about his problems. The image is clear, even if you don’t understand German. It’s the first two minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daFq7FDOE_c
A psychopath and sadist like little Macron is probably already licking his chops at the mere thought of it.
Gonzalo Lira did an 11-minute video on November 4th headlined “Masks off” which is relevant to this subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AetydkN5Y2Y
Larry,
A number of rigorous studies have concluded that the Holodomor was a myth created by Ukrainian Nationalists and the US as part of their decades long campaign to hurt the Soviet Union. In particular, I read a book by a Canadian author recently that deconstructed the entire saga, but, the name/author is currently escaping me. I will find and post title later. It’s a fascinating read.
Thanks for your great work!
Perspective. Romania got my attention. They had a Soviet/Communist government that was evicted in a revolution. Yet they joined NATP and accepted US combat troops. I am certain that Russiawent into rhe Ukraine to secure the gas, oil, coal reserves that might compete with that from Siberia. Russian politicians have said that they will have to exterminate 1-2million to properly de-Nazify (de-nationalize) the Ukraine.
The Ukraine (the western part, especially) was once part of the Polish-Lithuanian- Viking empire. There is a commonality. The Ukraine remembers the Holodomor, inflicted by the Bolshevik Russians. That memory is kept alive by the behavior of the Russian forces in places like Limon and Buccha. Poland remembers the murder of their officers, officials, teachers, and priests at places like Katyn Forest by the Russian KGB. The Finns have posters of the smiling snipers who fought the Russian invaders to a standstill. Europe tends “socialist” but Eastern Europe has mdmories of Russia. The Russian behavior in the Ukraine shows that they haven’t changed much. Still, I was shocked that Romania accepted “foreign” US troops.
Corruption is everywhere. Our Tight likes to point out the corruption in the Administrations of Biden and Zelensky, but it is everywhere. Russia kept Western investors out of Russia after Yeltsin (Sp?) but when Putin went into the Ukraine in February, he found the most of the resources which had been meant for training, up grades, and maintenance for the military had ended up in Western Banks, yachts, and land purchases.
Putin’s success will depend on his ability to get the population to fight in the Ukraine with insufficient uniforms/clothing, insufficient weapons and equipment, and crappy leadership while the Ukrainians/NATO, with the exception of Javelins, HIMARS, and Harm missiles, hVe been putting up a pretty good fight with retired Western weapons. In WWII the Russians put up a pretty good fight with Western supplies. Now, they are getting supplies from Iran and North Korea. Russia has “mass”. I guess we will see what Putin can do with it.
Of course, no one knows what the Western nations can do. Or what the Ukraine can do with what they get.
Perspective. Romania got my attention. They had a Soviet/Communist government that was evicted in a revolution. Yet they joined NATP and accepted US combat troops. I am certain that Russiawent into rhe Ukraine to secure the gas, oil, coal reserves that might compete with that from Siberia. Russian politicians have said that they will have to exterminate 1-2million to properly de-Nazify (de-nationalize) the Ukraine.
The Ukraine (the western part, especially) was once part of the Polish-Lithuanian- Viking empire. There is a commonality. The Ukraine remembers the Holodomor, inflicted by the Bolshevik Russians. That memory is kept alive by the behavior of the Russian forces in places like Limon and Buccha. Poland remembers the murder of their officers, officials, teachers, and priests at places like Katyn Forest by the Russian KGB. The Finns have posters of the smiling snipers who fought the Russian invaders to a standstill. Europe tends “socialist” but Eastern Europe has mdmories of Russia. The Russian behavior in the Ukraine shows that they haven’t changed much. Still, I was shocked that Romania accepted “foreign” US troops.
Corruption is everywhere. Our Tight likes to point out the corruption in the Administrations of Biden and Zelensky, but it is everywhere. Russia kept Western investors out of Russia after Yeltsin (Sp?) but when Putin went into the Ukraine in February, he found the most of the resources which had been meant for training, up grades, and maintenance for the military had ended up in Western Banks, yachts, and land purchases.
Putin’s success will depend on his ability to get the population to fight in the Ukraine with insufficient uniforms/clothing, insufficient weapons and equipment, and crappy leadership while the Ukrainians/NATO, with the exception of Javelins, HIMARS, and Harm missiles, hVe been putting up a pretty good fight with retired Western weapons. In WWII the Russians put up a pretty good fight with Western supplies. Now, they are getting supplies from Iran and North Korea. Russia has “mass”. I guess we will see what Putin can do with it.
Of course, no one knows what the Western nations can do. Or what the Ukraine can do with what they get.
As an addition, the behavior of the Russian forces, especially in Buccha and Limon goes a long way toward convincing “players” that Russia cares only about Russia. The theft of personal property convinces people that Russians will steal anything they need.
–Have you been reading this blog at all? Bucha and Liman are staged events by Ukraine propagandists. They don’t pass a basic smell test.
–Katyn forest was a joint operation of the Waffen SS and the KGB.
–Everyone forgets the famous Winter War ends with the Russians blowing through the Mannerheim line in the spring of 1941 and forcing the Finns to surrender to Timoshenko’s reorganized army.
–The Russians have shown remarkable restraint in Ukraine.
–Omg man. You’re buying into Western media heavily. Almost none of which you say is true. Please read this blog previous articles.
–Everything you are talking about in your concluding paragraphs has been debunked on this blog and other independent blogs. My guess is you’re a troll so I wont waste anymore of my time. But if you aren’t go back and read this blog as well as the Dreizin report and others to find out how deluded you are.
This is why Jeffrey Sachs should be banned from any promoted commentary, good or bad. He was an architect of genocide, and his methodology remains, if the conclusions have changed. GZ, hear me?
Concerning the ‘Holodomor’ in Ukraine and the famine in Russia (1932/3) as Stalin said ‘ a lot of rubbish will be heaped upon my grave but the winds of time will blow them away’…it seems there is now much dispute amongst historians over what actually happened…Russia and Ukraine suffered from famines every four to five years for over a thousand years. This was nothing new.
Collectivisation was understandably unpopular with many farmers and some out of anger burned their crops (if I can’t have it, then the State won’t) which may have been a factor in the severity of the famine. Whatever your thoughts on Communism and collectivisation, 1933 was the last famine Ukraine and Russia ever had.
As for the Katyn forest massacre, I believe studies show 96% of bullet shells found in the area of the massacre are German…the only ‘evidence’ of Russian involvement is an ‘admission’ made by Khrushchev in a spurious letter which is universally accepted by the west as writ…for obvious reasons not necessarily to do with the search for truth.
Khruschev’s sudden admission may have been to discredit newly deceased Stalin and further his own liberalisation policies, who knows? But evidence either way is lacking and the case far from clear.