US/Biden Team Must Renounce Clinton Era Economic Reforms in Russia For Relationship Reset
In the interest of provoking discussion about how to define a "reset" in US-Russian relations, I am posting an excerpt from my 11 Part Special Report, "Trump's Really Good People, Nazis, Secessionists, Separatists, Militias and Boogaloos-- Russia's Fifth Column to Disrupt the Election" (link here)
https://therosenreport.blogspot.com/2020/09/trumps-really-good-people-nazis_17.html
This section, Part III, "What Motivates Putin and Russian Policy? Revanchism and the Third Rome", is an overview of the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact economies, and the Soviet system.
In order to understand the causes of Russia's current belligerence toward the US and its roots in Russian "grievance", and the re-emergent dynamic of the extreme Russian Nationalism which fed Putin's rise, (known as the "Third Rome" reflex) it is necessary for the Biden foreign policy team to revisit, understand, and yes, apologize for the Economic program imposed on Russia at that time, known as the Sachs Plan, named after Harvard Economist Jeffrey Sachs.
It was also referred to as "Shock Therapy", a radical Free Market model carried out in Margaret Thatcher's England, Israel, Brazil, and other countries who were being strangled by debt. Whether the debt was legitimate or due to draconian terms of lending by financial institutions, these nations were forced to impose radical austerity and privatization measures which greatly increased their death rates, and resulted in horrific levels of economic looting.
In the case of Russia, this policy was a thorough humiliation, an economic and cultural rape of the Russian people, which in many ways paralleled the post WWI dismantling of Germany under the terms of the vindictive Versailles Treaty.
The Sachs Plan, implemented under Clinton, with the cooperation of the drunken criminal kleptocrat, Boris Yeltsin and his crime family, had a similar effect in Russia as did the Versailles Treaty in Gernany, producing a virulent form of reactionary nationalism which led to chaos and dictatorship. This is what still drives the dynamic underlying Vladimir Putin's hostile antagonism toward the US, and serves as his justification for the full array of active intelligence warfare measures he continues to deploy against us to this day.
There is no Universe in which the Biden administration can try for a "reset" with Russia without acknowledging this fact, apologizing, and atoning for it. Americans have virtually no clue of the scale of damage inflicted upon the Russian people during the 8 year period of the Yeltsin Presidency due to Bill Clinton's misguided policy. The United States has little or no moral authority to dictate terms to Russia on Democratic reforms in light of the US role in the massive looting of Russia in the 90's.
If you want to take away Putin's power, take away the platform of grievance which he uses to justify his aggression. Take the wind out of the sails of "Blood and Soil" Russian nationalism by showing contrition for our actions then, and demonstrate that US has a national interest in the welfare of the Russian people, so that their leadership can reciprocate that interest, with or without Vladimir Putin.
Any other approach will ring hollow and empty, and virtually insure a continued devolution of our relations.
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– What Motivates Putin and Russian Policy? Revanchism and the “Third Rome.”
A partially disabled Soviet factory worker is playing chess with his six year old young son in 1958. The boy asks his father; "Papa, why do you walk so funny"?" I was injured in the War, Moy Malchik" "Did anyone else I know get hurt Papa"? "Yes, your older brother, who you never knew, got sick died of diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad. Your Babushka was killed by the Germans. And your two uncles disappeared". "Papa, why did they attack us"? "Because they wanted to kill or control us. They signed a treaty to not attack us, so we were all surprised when they did". "Papa, we should have attacked first. Oh, and check" "Moy Malchik, you just beat me with Bxh3, where did you learn that, you know its famous"? "I don't know Papa, I just did.”
That little anecdotal story might or might not be true. If the little boy who is the subect of it were to hear it today, he might like it enough to amend his autobiography to have it added.
The very idea that the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, would be using and deploying a wide garden variety of Neo-Nazis, Fascists, and Separatist networks to destabilize Western Europe and the United States at first seems like an absurdity, given the history of Russia, and his personal history. For a thoroughly indoctrinated Communist Apparatchik, (at least until 1993, when he announced his "conversion" to the Russian Orthodox Christianity of his Mother) KGB officer in East Germany, and head of the Russian Federation Intelligence services, the FSB, it is beyond counter-intuitive that Putin would be using Nazis as an irregular force in efforts to destabilize the West. Yet, he is. In order to understand why and how this is happening, we will need some context. (1)
We will start with a word which is illuminating and relevant. "Revanchist."
"Revanchism (French: Revanchisme, from revanche, "revenge") is the political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement. Revanchism draws its strength from patriotic and retributionist thought and is often motivated by economic or geopolitical factors. Extreme revanchist ideologues often represent a hawkish stance, suggesting that their desired objectives can be achieved through the positive outcome of another war" (2)
Putin has described in interviews his own personal reaction to the East German Revolution which brought down the government, the Berlin Wall, and reunified Germany in 1989, during his activity there as KGB "Rezident." He had been there with a cover as an Embassy flack and German translator, using both his language skills and higher education in understanding international trade. Covertly, however, he was aiding and abetting the communist terrorist group, the "Red Army Faction", which was active in West Germany. RAF took credit for many bombings and assassinations, including that of Chancellor Kohl's close ally and leading banker, Alfred Herrhausen. (1)
He said that he was personally humiliated and horrified at the implications for the Soviet Union, as he rushed back to the Soviet Embassy to shred and destroy documents which they feared might fall into the hands of demonstrators and find their way to the West. He was soon recalled to Moscow to recruit for the KGB on university campuses, and also to ferret out potential dissidents. During this time, he had a bird's eye view of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ensuing chaos of that period.
Years later, Putin expressed his belief that the Soviet collapse was the greatest political catastrophe of the 20th Century. This was not because of his continuing belief in their dying and unsalvageable system, which he had known was on life support. He was no longer a "Communist" in his identity at that point, rather a Russian Nationalist. (This is the most essential concept to grasp for a deeper understanding of the current strategic danger, and why his "Revanchism" is the key to forecasting what he will do, and how to respond.) (1)
The aftermath of the "1991 Russian Revolution" saw radical and dramatic changes, which Putin and those of his Russian Nationalist ilk would describe as "subjugation". Western politicians, bankers, technocrats, economists and corporate kingpins descended on the carcass of the collapsed Soviet economy and demoralized population in a literal feeding frenzy, using their prerogative of "to the victor goes the spoils" .
Putin and his allies believe that they were subjected to a process as punitive as the grossly retributive Peace Treaty of Versailles after WW I, punishing, looting and wrecking Germany, with the result we are all aware of in 20th Century history. There is a great deal of truth to this, they are not wrong. (3)
Russia was soon in the grip of a new government led by the "West Friendly" Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a corrupt, incompetent drunk, who in league with family members and cronies, began the privatization and looting of Russian enterprises, under the rubric of a program called "Shock Therapy". This program, drawn up by a Harvard team, was supervised by economist Jeffrey Sachs, (who to his credit has renounced and apologized for his program and actions) which literally caused, and exacerbated an even greater economic catastrophe for Russia. (4)
The Sachs plan, as it was also known, began with the premise that Russia, in order to become prosperous like the West, had to go through a period of "structural adjustment", which would entail some "painful short term suffering" to make the transition to a Market economy, free of regulation, state control, or protections from foreign speculators. Price gouging, speculation on prices of commodities, and Western foreign investment to exploit cheap labor were all fair game. The pre-existing "cradle to grave" protections for the standard of living of the Russian people were to be suddenly ended to "incentivize" them to work harder, since they were profiled as lazy and unmotivated. The Sachs program dismantled public sector services and demanded extreme austerity, a savage reduction in living standards and public health, while privatized Russian companies were placed in the hands of former KGB Kleptocrats, who looted them, sold off assets for dollars, parked their loot overseas and offshore, and organized themselves into criminal syndicates. A new class of Russian Oligarchs emerged. Their fortunes were amassed quickly, out of which the Yeltsin family received a substantial cut. The Holy Grail of the western looters was always the enormous supply of undeveloped raw material wealth of Russia, which was extracted by these corrupt billionaires and sold at below market prices to speculators, who put none of this wealth back into the country or people. In effect, Russia, which was a nuclear superpower, very advanced in science and culture, was treated like a Third World country and economically raped. (3 and 5)
Additionally, during this period there was a demographic collapse in the Russian population, due to the harsh austerity, reduction in living standards, shortages, escalating prices for foodstuffs and essentials, and lack of potable fresh water due to slashing of the public sector. People were forced to stand out in the cold for hours in long lines with buckets, miles from home to draw well water. The Sachs/Harvard plan accelerated the Russian death rate and infant mortality, as well as the abortion rate, and literally depopulated the country by millions during that period. Additionally, Russia suffered a debilitating "Brain Drain" with a mass emigration and poaching of their doctors, scientists, engineers, and researchers, all leaving to pursue the greater money available in the West. (3)
But the worst of the indignities suffered by the Russian people, in the mind of Russian nationalists such as Putin, was the Western attack on the cultural identity of the Russian People during this period of "spoils acquisition.” They would refer to it as the "Flooding of Russia with the filth flowing from the cultural sewer of the West". During this time, the Sachs plan promoters pushed the idea that it was the organized crime syndicates and oligarchs who were the natural leaders of the new entrepreneur and business class of the emerging Free Market dynamo in Russia, and should be allowed full autonomy to make money in any way they saw fit. There was a joke going around at the time which asked if the "Chicago School" of economics was founded by Al Capone. Russia was flooded with strip clubs, sex clubs, large scale producers of hardcore porn, and was overwhelmed by human trafficking, organ trafficking, and the drug trade. Underage Russian girls became a very hot commodity internationally, as did the sale of black market babies to prospective adoptive families in the West. Not the least of these humiliations was the looting of Russian heritage and art treasures, which were bought up and sold off for cash, robbing the Russian people of their precious and tenuous connection to their past. And this all happened suddenly, within a five year period, in which Russia, its leaders, its people, its wealth were either corrupted, exploited or stolen, and “the dollar became king. This, in a Nation which had been regimented, structured, and despite its abuses, was relatively stable. (3)
Russian Nationalists equated the immediate Post Soviet period with an economic, and political invasion whose scale of devastation was comparable if not equal to those of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Adolf Hitler. This Western policy brought the beast of Russian Ultra-Nationalism out of hibernation, which is the dynamic that fueled Putin's rise to power. This is not to extol the " good old days" of Soviet Era primitive accumulation and Gulags, or justify and defend anything that Putin has done, rather, to explain it, to see these events through their eyes.
So, for a moment, take all of this into consideration, and try to put yourself into the mind of Vladimir Putin as I do, who when he was a boy had the above conversations with his Papa, or something like it, asking why World War II happened. You are living through this, you see it happening, and you decide on a course of action. You decide that you need to act, as a Russian Nationalist, as an Orthodox Christian, as a military man, as an autocrat in the tradition of almost a millennium of Russian Czars. You look into the mirror and make a solemn promise to "Make Russia Great Again". And you are prepared to do so by taking your revenge against those who subjugated your people. You know that militarily you are outgunned and outmanned. You resolve to use a strategy of asymmetric warfare, and you will use every asset, lever, weapon and capability to wage it. You look at your western adversary, and ask, "what is available to me as a large and growing social/political tendency that is truly unhinged, untethered, and irrational, which by being enabled and weaponized can unleash maximum chaos and damage to my adversary"?
This is the mindset of Vladimir Putin: Revanchist, Russian Nationalist, strategic chess master. He will likely lead Russia until the Year 2036, barring anything unforeseen. Any strategic planner or policy maker who does not take this bigger picture into account is as blind as a bat, and has very little idea what means Putin will try to use to disrupt our November election. I write and speak with the authority and knowledge of Russian History, with involvement in these issues going back to 1983.
We will pick up in Part IV with the story of Putin's rise to power, his amassing of enormous personal wealth, and his emerging strategy of deploying Neo-Nazi terrorists against the West.
Sources:
1 Wikipedia Biography page on Putin
2 Definition of Revanchism
3 Author Sergey Glazyev, "Genocide, Russia and the New World Order" 2004.
4 Jeffrey Sachs-- "What I Did in Russia,", acamedia. info, May 14. 2012
5 The Nation-- "The Harvard Boys Do Russia", May, 1998
