The Strategic Dirty Secret Behind Putin's Praise For Czar Peter The Great-- Part One:

The Strategic Dirty Secret Behind Putin's Praise For Czar Peter The Great-- 

Introduction--

Three days ago, "The Guardian" reported that jailed Russian democracy leader Alexei Navalny is missing, according to his lawyer. "We have no such prisoner here" was the response of prison authorities when the lawyer arrived to visit his client. 

The Guardian cited background intelligence reports that Navalny was possibly being moved to an "ultra-max" highest level security prison, which is notorious for it's high death rate due to physical and psychological abuse of the inmates. If he is indeed being transferred to the referenced facility, and isn't dead already, it is an assassination in progress. It is intended to finish the bungled previous effort by Putin's FSB to murder him by placing the lethal nerve agent Novichok in his underwear before a flight to Berlin nearly two years ago. This, only two weeks after Russian media covered the story that Russian prosecutors intend to try him again, this time in absentia on additional charges of "extremism" to add fifteen years to his sentence on top of the twelve being currently served. In other words, it is a death sentence. 

In many ways, Navalny is Vladimir Putin's "Man In The Iron Mask," the lead character of Alexander Dumas' (author of The Three Musketeers) historical novel of that name.  As the story goes, an evil twin brother supplants his brother, the rightful heir to the throne, arresting and imprisoning him in a bolted shut full iron mask to hide his identity, locking him away to die of suffocation as his hair and beard grew in. The plot centers around the efforts to free him and depose the imposter. The dictator in power realized that facilitating the death of the legitimate king in secrecy was the key to his keeping the throne. 

The reality of Russia today is that Putin is desperately seeking to cement his power and legacy as the greatest of Russia's Czars, but to accomplish this he needed a war against an external enemy, which he could claim was an existential threat to the holy blood and soil of "Matushka Rus," Mother Russia. He fabricated the threat of invasion by Nazis in Ukraine, backed by the so-called degenerate West, armed by NATO. 

The question then becomes why this act of desperation, in light of the extreme international condemnation and reprisals by the world community, especially that of Russia's primary customers for energy in western Europe. Is the seizure of Eastern Ukraine and it's Russification worth the casualties, expenditures, and sheer global chaos unleashed by his actions? Is it really about seizing a new gem for the Czar's crown, in the tradition of previous conqueror Czars such as Peter The Great, as Putin's public comments on the matter seem to indicate?  Or, is it something else? And what does all of this have to do with Navalny? We will get to that. 

But first, it's important that any attempt to unravel the motives behind a strategic move of this sort is properly begun by asking three simple questions. Why now? Who benefits?  And what is the larger context within which it is occurring?  Often we find that the timing of an event is as important as the event itself. 

Part One: What motivates Vladimir Putin? 

Let's go to square one, and restate what we already know. Putin is driven by three factors, each of which have intensified since his return to the Russian Presidency in 2012 after a sojourn of four years serving as Prime Minister, spent steering Russia from the background and retrenching politically and financially.  

(For more background, see chap 3 of my blog special report on Trump, Putin, and the threat to the election from September of 2020)

1) Russian nationalism--  The "Third Rome" faction of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Oligarchy which is loyal to it's doctrines are the leading factor. It is central to the cultural outlook of Russia, rooted in the 600 year old prophecy of the Monk Philotheus of Pskov, which foretold of Moscow becoming the new world center of Christianity. Moscow would replace the fallen Rome and Byzantium, while the "infidels" of the West would perish in a rain of fire. 

Paradoxically, Putin, who has no real spiritual life and is a godless, murderous cynic, is at the same time a Russian Orthodox Christian fundamentalist (much like his "partners" in the US phoney-Christian Right) who believes that his Russia is fated to restore itself as an empire which controls the entirety of the Eurasian landmass. 

2) Revanchism. The desire to exact revenge on those who caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, and treated them as a conquered nation in the 1990s, looting their economy, labor force, raw materials, brain power, and cultural heritage. Putin came to power on a mission to "Make Russia Great Again."

3) Autocracy.  There was never going to be allowed a post-Soviet transition in Russia toward western democratic values, the proof of which, according to Putin, was the nine nightmare years of  crime and chaos under the reign of the drunken US puppet and kleptocrat Boris Yeltsin. 

Yeltsin's mafia-style crime family served as "compradors" for the looting and exploitation of the Russian people on behalf of western corporations, in the name of the "free market" and democracy. 

Putin came to power with the pledge to nationalize Russia's resources, restore Russian culture, and to crush Islamic insurgencies within Russia's sphere in Chechnya and their southern tier. To do this he needed a second Chechnen war to create a state of emergency, under which he would whip a unified Russian population and political class into line. 

"How did he do this, you are asking?"  Well, on the model of many dictators in history, from Nero to Hitler, he had his FSB bomb Russian apartment buildings killing hundreds, blamed Chechen terrorists for the attack, and pledged to "slaughter the terrorists in their outhouses." War against those hostile to Russia became his pathway to power inside of Russia, as he won his first election to the Russian Presidency on this basis, just as he is doing on larger scale today in order to keep it. 

Part Two:  Why Now?

1) Vladimir Putin is dying. He has, according to recent reports, both cancer and Parkinson's.  Knowing the history of deception, secrecy and lies regarding the health of Russian dictators, from Peter the Great's sick and dying brother Ivan V, to Catherine the Great's brother Paul, to Soviet premiers Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, etal, it is likely he has known this since before Biden's inauguration. 

He is preoccupied with his personal legacy, desiring to be ranked among the greatest of Russia's Czars. He is consequently in a persistent rage state, driven by paranoia about plots to undermine him. This is the real story behind "the long table" at which he sits alone at one end, with all the others in the meeting 20 feet away. He is paranoid about covid, poison, or any other surprises. Putin was KGB, and has personal experience with the various ways in which people can be killed, whatever outsized security precautions are in force notwithstanding. 

One of the reasons for his paranoia is because he is failing, mentally and physically. (I have seen how this operates personally in my previous career caregiving for Parkinson's sufferers).  He has been sloppy in his intelligence warfare, leaving trails of evidence of hacking, arming the Taliban, and screwing up the Navalny assassination by using amateur hour clowns who used trackable personal FSB-issued cell phones.  And not least, he bet wrong on Trump staying in power because of his belief that the US Supreme Court would throw out Biden's win. 

Much of what Putin did during the Trump presidency was calculated with the belief he would never be held accountable, thanks to his "special relationship with Trump. Putin badly miscalculated that Trump had successfully rigged the election.  He bet the wrong horse. 

When Biden assumed office, that knocked Putin's chessboard off the table, a leading factor in his recent expressions of volcanic rage. 

2) He is determined before dying to unleash further division, chaos and bloodshed inside the United States, to humiliate President Biden, and strengthen the Christian nationalist religious extremists who are Putin's beneficiaries, with or without Trump. 

He is escalating now to time his operations with the US midterm election cycle to inflict maximum damage. His timing for the invasion of Ukraine is tied to this. Though it is Ukrainians he is murdering, the actual targets of it are NATO, the US, and Biden personally. Putin is playing 3-D chess, and attempting to draw us into a political trap. 

As has been his ongoing operation since the mid-2000's, he has been playing a "left vs right" game of conflict in both the US and Europe.  Putin has played the US Religious Right like a violin, while also developing assets on the left which he could deploy as a "straw opposition," with the intention of radicalizing both sides. Russian Intelligence disinformation trolls have been working both sides of the aisle for years, finding useful idiots on the left to fuel right-wing talking points and fundraising. Dividing the Democrats was at the core of his operation in 2016 in leaking the DNC email attacks on Sanders by the Clinton campaign. Frankly, that operation worked. 

3) He had to go into Ukraine now because the lid was about to blow off inside of Russia, due to the growing support for Navalny's anti-corruption campaign, which struck hard and deep against Putin personally, exposing his obscene wealth and patterns of having his opposition killed. Putin needed a national security crisis as his pretext for banning Navalny's organization, and for conducting mass arrests of dissidents. 

A generation of Russian millennials was deeply affected by what they witnessed in person while traveling, and on the internet, as Russia modernized and gained access to information technology. They began to want what the West has, and therefore became a personal threat to both Putin and his agenda. This nascent Russian youth movement coalesced around Navalny's leadership and was verging on a breakout. This was another factor in Putin's timetable, born of desperation. 

Part Three: Who Benefits? 

1) Donald Trump. Not much to elaborate on here.

2) The Russian state media's US partners at Fox News. Tucker Carlson is now a superstar in Russia, and the semi-official voice of the FSB and Red Army.

3) The white supremacist, Christian nationalist GOP, which is now effectively Putin's Trojan horse. 

Don't be fooled by their votes for Ukrainian military aid. They had to do that to cover their tracks and do damage control after Trump's insane comments praising Putin and his invasion. 

The GOP is still sticking with their Faustian deal with Putin to obstruct and sabotage Biden at every turn. The GOP is supposed to get both the House and Senate as their end of the bargain, and Putin gets to tie Biden's hands by getting an Impeachment going. Quid pro quo. 

4) The right-wing fascist billionaires clique of Koch Industries, Elon Musk, the Mercers, DeVos, Thiel, etal. 

By undermining Biden, unleashing civil conflict and bringing the fascist Trumpian GOP to power, Putin's favorite billionaires will have free reign to loot, pillage, steal and destroy the US economy.  Putin's right-wing US business partners (literally in the case of Koch) will profiteer off of the destruction of what is left of US regulation. Putin in return gets his sanctions lifted if the GOP prevails, NATO will be defunded, and Russia given free rein to operate in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It is "win-win" for all concerned. 

5)  The emerging right-wing dictatorships of Hungary, Belarus, Brazil, Turkey, Philippines, and other nations modeling themselves on autocratic Christian theocracies such as represented by Putin's Russian Orthodox Church. 

What Trump's GOP and Putin's resurgent Empire represent today  is the pacesetter for countries following the Russian autocratic model. Everything that Putin gets away with today helps these regimes consolidate their grip. 

Part Four:  The Strategic Context

The big picture is that the weight and power of the world economy is shifting inexorably towards Asia, away from the post World War II US-led western alliance.  China is outstripping the US in almost every area except for digital entertainment. Also transportation, (especially high speed Maglev rail) water management and energy infrastructure, steel production, construction projects, foreign investment, manufacturing, space programs and genetic engineering, fusion energy and robotics. Between China, India and Indonesia, that part of the world comprises almost one half of the world's population, which is why it is the global economy's center of gravity.

Russia is in economic partnership with China, and they are collaborating on the BRI, "Belt Road Initiative," which is a high tech modern version of the old "Silk Road" trade and transportation corridor, stretching from Shanghai and Beijing, to the western province of Xingiang, then into the former Soviet Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, (each of which are landlocked and mountainous or desert, soon to be connected) and eventually through to North Africa. 

China and Russia both violate human rights and act in Imperial fashion, but the economies of Asia are the nonetheless the fastest growing in the world, and China has the fastest growing middle class. 

Putin's goal in aligning with China is geopolitically designed to upend the "unipolar world" dominated by the US since the collapse of the Soviet Union. China and India are buying Russian oil and raw materials. Essentially, Russia and China have formed an anti-US "tag team" which is not necessarily geared toward direct military conflict, but instead toward leaving the US economically in the dust by expanding their economic spheres of influence.

This is the major reason Putin was not deterred from invading Ukraine by the threat of economic sanctions. China and India were always his fallback if the US, the EU and G-7 cut Russia off. 

This also explains in part Putin's operations to undermine NATO, to openly back the "America First" isolationist groups in the US, and the Brexit forces in Europe. He is gaming us to induce our strategic withdrawal into our own hemisphere, to concede to him greater influence in the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. 

These points are not a comprehensive overview, rather a summation of lesser-addressed but vital features of Putin's mindset and operations as I see them. 

Part Five:  What Does It Really Mean That Putin Praised Peter the Great? 

This is where we diverge from the line of most of the Russia experts who take Putin's quotes at face value, rather than analyze what is implied or even left unsaid. 

First off, I'll say that I am not a "Russia expert." I do not speak or read Russian, and have no formal credentials, so to speak, in Russian studies. I've not traveled there, and my writings on Russia are not published anywhere but on my blog. 

Yet, I have qualifications based on 35 years of political organizing experience in which I was involved day to day in international issues, both receiving and giving daily briefings on matters of strategic importance. 

I was involved with a think tank which was deeply involved with Russia beginning in the 80's, but especially after the Soviet collapse. Deeply enough in fact that my former organization was corrupted and became assets of Russian Intelligence, and I resigned in part for that reason. So I know my Russian history, and have followed developments there closely for nearly five decades. I have readers,  correspondents and friends with networks there, so I would say I'm qualified, but not expert. 

There are similarities between Peter the Great and Vladimir Putin, but in my view not enough to weave a whole narrative which explains what Putin is doing now in Ukraine. Putin himself blundered recently in a children's school event, conflating Peter's seven year long war with Charles XII of Sweden with the Great Northern War in the Baltics in which Peter was allied with Sweden. A young student infuriated Putin by correcting him in public. 

Recently the 350th Birthday of Peter  was commemorated widely with events throughout Russia. This was the context of Putin's speech in which he praised Peter's expansion of the Russian Empire militarily by "taking back what was Russia's."

Putin was born and raised in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) named for the Czar, in fact built by him. St. Petersburg was Russia's window to the west, a first major step toward absorbing western science and culture for purposes of modernization.  It became over time a center of Universities, museums, theaters and Opera houses, Ballet and staged drama. It was truly a cosmopolitan international city.  In the early 1800's, the very first railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow was surveyed and built with help from the US Army Corps of Engineers, and the famous US General George Washington Whistler, father of the famous artist. It was built for the Czar Nicholas I and his family to visit their Winter Palace.

As has been emphasized by his biographers, Peter was determined once coronated as Czar to modernize Russia, especially their military and Navy. Peter became an avid sailor, and studied all of the different designs of ships big and small, merchant or Military. 

He undertook a tour of Europe in 1697 which became known as "The Great Embassy" in which he visited the Capitols and Courts of many countries and their monarchs. He met with the great Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, an inventor and innovator of the telescope, who studied the rings of Saturn and discovered it's Moon, Titan. Peter also visited the shipbuilding yards of Venice to see how their Galleys were designed. In part, he intended his trip to be a kind of industrial espionage, as he traveled in disguise as a Russian infantryman accompanying the royal train. But it was a farce, since Peter was 6'8" tall, with a wild shock of red hair, clearly recognizable to all. Putin is a much better spy than Peter ever was, because he could "blend in." 

Based on the recent media coverage, one is left to believe that except for these unfortunate expansionist wars that kept popping up, Peter was "pretty cool" as far as Czars go. And this is the awful mistake. 

Peter The Great was in fact a "split personality."  Putin praised one side of him which was a case of "cherrypicking" in order to justify his invasion of Ukraine, claiming Ukraine to be Russian. But that isn't the whole story. To understand fully what side of Peter's personality Putin most identifies with, you have to go back to Peter's childhood. 

Part Six:  Growing Up In The Kremlin, Murder, Conspiracy, Byzantine Warfare In The Royal Family.