Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine has brough Colonel Putin’s fiefdom into sharp international focus. Various commentators bemoan the fact that our intelligence services and indeed Kremlinologists failed to see it coming. Yet again one hears regrets that Russia is too mysterious to be permeable. Repeated ad infinitum is Churchill’s phrase “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Russia is indeed full of mysteries. Some of them, however, are relatively easy to solve.
For example, in 2010 Russian sports shops sold 500,000 baseball bats, but only three baseballs and one baseball glove. Even assuming that this great sporting nation plays the game to a different set of rules, this is indeed a mystery, but it won’t remain one for long. Some mysteries present more of a challenge and are much more vital. Various media outlets, government officials and no doubt intelligence services keep wondering ‘Will he or won’t he?’
Will Putin, emboldened by the West’s feeble response to the rape of the Ukraine, keep going? Will he be satisfied with gobbling up the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, or will he want to swallow the lot? Does he have just the Ukraine in his sights or will he want to annex the three Baltic republics as well? Considering that they are Nato members, and this organisation’s charter stipulates that an attack on one member is an attack on all, the questions are quite interesting. And the answers are ominous.
Russia is rapidly building up her military muscle at the border with the Ukraine, and beyond. Russia’s armour is openly rolling into the Ukraine to support the so-called rebels, which are in fact Russia’s troops and proxies. In spite of the sham Minsk treaty, Russian artillery is in action, shelling Ukrainian positions from both outside and inside the country’s territory. Is this but a prelude to a larger conflict? If it is, the demob-happy West is in for a rough ride. The overall strength of the Russian army is about a million, a quarter of them reservists. Many training activities involve airborne troops, whose strength is being beefed up to 60,000, roughly four to five divisions. By contrast, the US army has only one fully trained airborne division, 82nd. (Some others are called airborne but don’t do any jump training.) Paratroops are offensive: they are too lightly equipped to be much use in defence. Tanks are another clearly offensive weapon, and here the comparison between Russia and Europe is most instructive.
The three biggest European armies, French, German and British, have, respectively, 423, 408 and 407 tanks. By contrast, Russia officially boasts 15,500 tanks in active service. But even that number is misleading. Unlike Nato, the Russians don’t destroy tanks of the previous generations. They mothball them in warehouses. Should the need arise, those obsolete but perfectly usable tanks can be taken out and thrown in. That’s what happened in the Second World War, when the Germans wiped out the regular Soviet tank force in the first few days.
Much to their astonishment, new Soviet tank divisions appeared out of thin air, and the German intelligence couldn’t figure out their provenance. How many of those mothballed tanks are there now? In the 1970-80s the Russians had 50,000 tanks, more than the rest of the world combined. Many of those machines can probably still be thrown into battle should the need arise. And the Russians are giving every indication that the need may arise.
They are calling up the reservists, constantly increasing both the duration and frequency of such call-ups. They are conducting joint exercises with their puppet Belorussian army. Other large-scale military exercises are being conducted in every border area from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Far East to Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg. Bilateral military treaties are being annulled unilaterally, a worrying development drowned by the shooting in the East Ukraine. These include the 2001 treaty with Lithuania, according to which Lithuania was to be informed of, and allowed to inspect, any military build-up in the Kaliningrad region, the westernmost part of Russia.
“This measure by Russia,” declared the Lithuanian Defence Ministry, “… may be regarded as yet another step towards the destruction of mutual trust and security in Europe.” It is just that – but have you seen this mentioned in our papers? I haven’t.
Putin is clearly creating two powerful salients, the southern one in the Crimea and the northern one in Kaliningrad, where short-range, radar-busting Iskander missiles are being deployed. For the first time since Brezhnev, Russian strategic bombers are regularly violating the airspace of Nato members, while Russian fighters are tracking Nato planes. Hardly a day goes by that Nato planes aren’t scrambled to intercept Russian bombers all over the world, including the California coast. Such developments used to worry people – why are we so complacent now?
Russia is overhauling her armed forces to the tune of £290 billion pounds, with a particular accent, according to Putin’s pronouncement, being placed on strategic arms. New weapon systems are being brought on stream at a rate far exceeding Nato’s. Among them are disguised armoured trains loaded with nuclear missiles. This is being widely ignored, in spite of the obvious fact that Russia doesn’t need ICBMs to fight the Ukraine. Yet modern war isn’t all about troops and weapons – it puts a strain on the whole economy and the entire population.
Since Russia lacks any obvious allies, she has to prepare herself for going it alone, in conditions of total isolation. This was proved when the UN General Assembly condemned the annexation of the Crimea by 100 to 11, with the rest abstaining. Apart from the former Soviet republics located a few hours from Russia by tank, her 11 allies included Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Therefore Putin knows he has be prepared to fight his corner all alone.
Such preparations are going on at full speed. Putin has blocked the supplies of foreign foods, instead setting the goal of making Russia self-sufficient enough to prevent, this time around, widespread starvation in war time. Russia is supplying less and less gas on credit, demanding cash payments instead. At the same time Putin’s cronies, be it companies or individuals, are dumping their foreign assets with alacrity. The most glaring example is Gennady Timchenko, affectionately nicknamed ‘Gangrene’ in some circles.
Gangrene, who used to operate in Switzerland, is widely known to be Putin’s personal investment banker, the guardian of the colonel’s reputed 40-billion-dollar wealth. Well, Gangrene presciently sold all of his, and presumably Putin’s, Swiss assets the day before the first batch of Western sanctions went into effect. Russia’s central bank is busily buying up gold, building up the reserves. Since time immemorial this has been considered a tell-tale sign of a country preparing for war – have you seen any comments on this in our press? Probably not.
Does this all mean that Putin wants a Third World War? Not necessarily. What megalomaniac tyrants want is power, as much of it as possible, both in their own country and other people’s. That’s a given. But they’d rather achieve their goal without the devastation of major war. For example, Hitler had no intention of fighting the whole world. His aim was to scare the West into peaceful capitulation, and the West gave him every encouragement. Austria and Czechoslovakia were taken without a shot fired, and the Führer’s head swelled. Yet at some point Hitler overstepped a line. Suddenly appeasement ended, and the war wasn’t phoney any longer. For Hitler, read Putin; for Chamberlain and Daladier, read the EU; for Austria, read the Crimea; for Poland, read the Ukraine.
Putin is clearly gambling on the West’s capitulation, just as Hitler did in 1939. Hitler didn’t get it in the end; instead he got what every German schoolboy knew would be fatal: a two-front war. Will Putin get his bloodless victory? I don’t know, and neither does he. That’s why he’s preparing for a global war, which he knows may be hard to avoid if he does to a Nato member, say Lithuania, what he’s doing to the Ukraine. A resolute response from Nato and the EU could stop him in his tracks, avoiding a catastrophe – just like some fortitude on the part of Britain and France in, say, 1938 could have prevented the Second World War. So far no such response is in evidence. Is it forthcoming? I’m not holding my breath.
I know that parallels with Hitler may sound far-fetched to some. Putin, we hear from his English fans, such as Peter Hitchens and Christopher Booker, may be rough around the edges, but he is really our friend. He didn’t want to commit aggression against the Ukraine. His hand was forced by the EU’s overtures to the Ukraine, and by the plight of the Russian minority there. Putin, declares Hitchens, is the strong leader he wishes we had, a man who has turned Russia into the last bulwark of Christendom. Just like Lenin had many Western supporters, whom he lovingly called ‘useful idiots’, so does Putin. Except that Putin’s useful idiots come not from the left but from the right.
Hence every time I describe Putin’s regime as kleptofascist, some of my conservative friends target me with their slings and arrows. Yet Putin’s regime is just that, kleptofascist, and to prove that I propose a short list of characteristics shared by all fascist regimes, different as they may be otherwise. Let’s see how many of these characteristics Putin can claim, how many boxes he can tick.
BOX 1: Populism combined with chauvinism.
All fascist regimes rally the masses by redirecting their social or economic resentments and a sense of national humiliation or inferiority into the conduit of jingoism. It’s the regime’s task to correct a historical wrong and restore the nation to her past grandeur. For Hitler that was the Germanic conquest of the Holy Roman Empire, for Mussolini the glory of ancient Rome.
Putin is doing exactly the same with Russia. He has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, and vowed to right that wrong. Putin is rallying the largely starving population under the banners of Russia’s past redemptive glory both under the tsars and the Bolsheviks. Russia’s present shrill, mendacious propaganda of naked jingoism would put Dr Goebbels to shame. All my Russian friends who remember Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s time agree that Putin outdoes the past dictators in the scale and thunderous tone of his propaganda offensive.
TICK this box.
BOX 2: Externalising evil.
Since Russia herself is a priori perfect, whatever humiliation or privation people have ever suffered or are suffering has to be put down to the perfidy of outside enemies. All fascist regimes, including Putin’s, cast the non-fascist West in that role, especially those greedy ‘Anglo-Saxon’ vermin inhabiting Wall Street and the City of London. In addition, each fascist regime has enemies it reserves for private use, such as Jews for Hitler or Ethiopians for Mussolini. In Putin’s Russia these are so-called ‘persons of the Caucasian nationality’ or ‘Ukrainian fascists’ and – again Hitler springs to mind – those immediate neighbours who cling to a modicum of independence. TICK.
BOX 3: Internalising the good of the nation within the person of the leader, whose approval ratings (or their equivalents) must gravitate towards 100 per cent.
In Russia this idolisation of Putin is reaching Stalin’s proportions, though his public support is still somewhat short of the 105 per cent Stalin tended to score. Last month Viacheslav Volodin, Putin’s Deputy Chief of Staff, summed up this process with commendable honesty: “If there’s Putin, there’s Russia. No Putin, no Russia.” Putin’s Western fans cite this adulation as proof of Putin’s virtue. Vox populi vox dei and all that. Doesn’t public support justify any regime? Not wishing to flog the parallel with Hitler to death, when public support begins to gravitate towards 100%, the only thing it justifies is the certainty that the country has no free press.
TICK.
BOX 4: State control of the media and their almost exclusive use for propaganda purposes.
This year’s military parade in Red Square and attendant civilian festivities put Nuremberg rallies and their Italian equivalents to shame. Such outbursts of public enthusiasm require a population house-trained to respond on cue. Hence the use of media for that purpose, accompanied by the suppression of dissenting publications or broadcast channels. And it’s not just the media. Last week Putin addressed historians and explained to them that their task is to defend “our views and interests”.
The scholars readily agreed but begged the leader to illustrate his point, to make sure they didn’t misunderstand. Putin kindly obliged. An example, is that what you want? Well, here it is: the Nazi-Soviet pact. Toxic falsifiers of history claim that it pushed the button for the Second World War. The two most satanic regimes in history formed an ad hoc alliance to divide Europe between them. They then kicked off history’s most devastating war by assaulting Poland from two sides. Yet, if we accept Putin’s belief that truth is anything that advances his interests, none of this is true.
The Pact, explained the colonel, proved Stalin’s peaceful intentions. And as to Poland, she had only herself to blame. Didn’t she grab a chunk of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when the Germans moved in? Those media outlets in Russia that don’t go along with Putin’s view of the world have been either shut down or brought under government control.
Even the pro-Western websites I regularly read here have been blocked in Russia. TICK this box also.
BOX 5: The leader’s will replacing the rule of law. This means, for example, that the leader can choose how many or few people he wants to terrorise. How many he does terrorise therefore reflects not the essence of his regime, but its current needs. Hence such numbers are irrelevant (except to the victims). On Putin’s watch the number of people killed or imprisoned for political reasons is in the thousands, not the tens of millions Russia lost under Stalin. But no safeguards exist to prevent Putin from unleashing mass terror should he so choose.
Law enforcement in Russia doesn’t enforce the law. It has been turned into a giant Mafia family, specialising in all the traditional Mafia pursuits, mainly extortion and protection rackets, but also robbery and contract killings. Russians are scared of the police more than of criminals, because the police are the criminals. Beatings and torture are everyday occurrences in Russian police stations, yet, on the rare occasions such crimes reach the courts, the sentences are either derisory punishment or acquittal. TICK.
BOX 6: Acquisitive aggression against neighbours. Fascist regimes see expansionism as a great part of their raison d’être. They equate greatness with size, the bigger the better. As a pretext for aggression they highlight their former ownership of an adjacent country or parts thereof, or else the plight of their ethnic brothers in that country, such as Hitler’s Polish and Czech Germans – or Putin’s Ukrainian Russians. Putin has personally started three aggressive wars: against Chechnya in 1999, Georgia in 2008 and now the Ukraine. The capital of Chechnya Grozny was bombed flat, even though its population was 80% Russian. Hence the plight of the Russian minority there as casus belli wouldn’t have sounded credible even to the Russians.
Georgia was baited into attacking her former province Abhazia, which Putin’s stooges were using for provocations, including the shelling of Georgian territory. That gave Putin the pretext he needed to bring Georgia back into the fold. The Russian minority, unlike the Jewish one, was never oppressed in the Ukraine, but facts aren’t being allowed to interfere with a good story. Bringing to mind the words ‘teapot’ and ‘kettle’, Putin’s media are describing the Ukraine’s Poroshenko government as fascist, out to exterminate the Russians, along with every other minority. This even though the extreme-right parties only polled a mere 1.5% of the Ukraine’s electorate, as opposed to the 25% such parties routinely get in Russia herself. Regular neo-Nazi marches carry their swastikas through Russian cities without being harassed in any way.
TICK.
BOX 7: Creating or, if they already exist, supporting likeminded groups around the world.
The pattern is well established. The Bolsheviks bankrolled every communist party of the world and used them both for espionage and general subversion. The Nazis did exactly the same by financing their own network, including such organisations as Friends of New Germany, the German American Bund or the British Fascist Union. Following the example set by his role models, Putin is actively cultivating neo-fascist groups in Europe. It recently came to light that the Russians are financing France’s National Front, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Northern League, Austria’s Freedom Party.
When these facts came to light, Marine Le Pen insisted that accepting Putin’s millions doesn’t mean following Putin’s policies. Of course it doesn’t. Her party supports the rape of the Ukraine on merit, while Putin provides funding for altruistic reasons alone. Conquests don’t succeed by arms alone – political influence is just as important, and sometimes it has to be bought.
TICK.
BOX 8: Corporatist economy.
Unlike socialist or communist states to which they are closely related, fascist regimes typically eschew de jure nationalisation in favour of de facto control. Rather than shooting owners, the regime turns them into managers beholden to the regime and its leader personally. In Putin’s Russia it’s possible to amass a large fortune only by Putin’s permission. What’s in Russia called the vertical of power goes right through the economy, with the so-called oligarchs having only the leasehold on their wealth. When they step out of line, their businesses are either destroyed or taken over by Putin’s cronies, while they themselves either flee abroad, if they’re lucky, or are killed or imprisoned.
TICK.
BOX 9: Rapid militarisation of the economy. This can be used either for actual aggression or blackmail. It’s also a time-proven trick of getting a failing economy back on track. Both Stalin and Hitler used that stratagem in the 30s. We’ve already seen that Putin’s Russia ticks this box many times over.
BOX 10: Either banning political opposition or keeping it on for window-dressing only. The nation’s parliament is either disbanded or else emasculated, used merely as a rubber-stamping tool. Any real opposition is nipped in the bud. Such conditions existed in Germany and Italy, and they are also observable in Putin’s Russia. The country’s Duma is filled with Putin’s cronies either overt or covert. Many criminals, such as the murderer of Litvinenko Andrei Lugovoi, were fast-tracked into the Duma to protect them from criminal prosecution behind the wall of parliamentary immunity. Political protests in Russia are actively discouraged. Those daring to protest are often prosecuted on trumped-up charges, roughed up or murdered.
Over 40 journalists have been murdered during Putin’s tenure, all of them his opponents, and I’ll talk about this later. Most of those murders go unnoticed in the West, and only the more spectacular ones, such as that of Anna Politkovskaya, reach our papers. Of course, the murder of Alexander Litvinenko did make a bit of a splash, mainly because of the esoteric murder weapon, Polonium.
Another TICK, I’m afraid.
BOX 11: Subjugating the Church and making the clergy choose between martyrdom and collaboration. More priests were martyred under Hitler than under either Mussolini or Putin, but under Putin practically the entire hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, including its patriarch Kiril Gundiayev, codename Mikhailov, is made up of career KGB operatives. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini succeeded in such an undertaking.
Col. Putin ticks all these boxes. Comparing him specifically to Hitler, however, one must out of fairness point out significant differences, and this is why I describe Putin’s regime as not just fascist but kleptofascist. First, Hitler’s regime wasn’t organically fused with gangster groupings – in fact both he and Mussolini suppressed organised crime. Putin, on the other hand, has a long history of not only working hand in glove with the gangster capitalists but actually being one himself. Under him Russia’s economy is criminalised from top to bottom. In the same vein, Hitler didn’t keep billions in personal offshore accounts, while Putin is one of the world’s richest men.
On the plus side, Putin so far hasn’t murdered millions of people, although, as I suggested before, there exist no moral or legal restraints to prevent him from doing so should the need arise. In that event there are intimations that he’ll rely on more sophisticated agents than cyanide gas (various radioactive isotopes spring to mind). Yet Putin is still claiming his share of fans in the West, mainly among otherwise good, conservative people. They are so frustrated with their own ineffectual, self-serving governments that they seek the greener grass elsewhere.
They read that Putin bans homosexual propaganda and nod their approval. But then neither Hitler nor, say, Osama bin Laden was known as a champion of homosexual marriage. They read Putin’s criticism of Western decadence and agree enthusiastically. But then ISIS are saying exactly the same things about the West, most of them correct – are we going to support them too? They see footage of Putin and his cronies going to church, and don’t realise that these new-fangled believers often forget that Orthodox Christians cross themselves from right to left, not from left to right as in American films.
Yet Putin is getting a free ride with many of those who really ought to know better. They insist that any frank assessment of Putin’s regime is a sign of Russophobia, even if it comes from independent rating agencies. I looked at such ratings – only to find confirmation for the feeling deep-seated in the breast of most Russians and Peter Hitchens: the whole world is against them. All those rating agencies collude to cast Russia in a bad light. Judge for yourself. In the rule-of-law category Russia came in at Number 92, out of 97 countries rated. That’s one rung below Belarus but – a glorious achievement! – one above Nicaragua.
In terms of upholding fundamental rights, Russia’s rating was even higher: 82, one behind the UAE, where you can go to jail for a little hanky-panky outside marriage. One is prepared to rise and salute, but then one’s ardour is doused by the cold water of some other ratings. Russia ranks 148 out of 179 on freedom of the press, which is widely regarded as a guarantor of legality. The Russophobes jeer, for that rating places Putin’s Russia below Bangladesh, Cambodia and Burundi. Those haters of Russia refuse to look on the positive side: Putin’s bailiwick is still above, if not by much, Iraq and Gambia. If that’s not the crowning achievement of Putin’s reign, I don’t know what is.
Oh yes, I do. Russia, I’ll have you know, didn’t drop any lower than Number 127 on the corruption rating, where she finds herself in a nine-way tie with such bastions of legality as Pakistan and, again, Gambia. And still some conservatives cheer Putin on. A certain lack of knowledge and understanding is definitely to blame. Those good conservative people don’t realise what it means that the Russian government, from Putin down, is made up almost entirely of former KGB and Party nomenklatura.
Yet top Party and KGB officials could under no circumstances rise to their positions without being profoundly evil men. All communist countries had this in common, which incidentally raises interesting questions about Angela Merkel, who held a high-ranking nomenklatura position in the East German Young Communist League. Hence Western triumphalism about the collapse of communism in Russia was misplaced. Communism didn’t collapse. Following the First Law of Thermodynamics is was simply transformed into something else, evil by any other name.
After all, the precedent of Nuremberg trials established that membership in a criminal organisation, in that instance the SS, ipso facto constitutes a crime. Yet the SS was responsible for 10 million murders. The KGB, in which most Russian rulers including Putin served, murdered 60 million Soviet citizens – and yet its members are respectfully received in the West as statesmen. There’s an important difference between the SS and the KGB however. The German government has repented Germany’s sins and atoned for them.
In Russia there was no repentance and no atonement. On the contrary, Colonel Putin and his gang are openly proud of the Soviet Union and its criminal history. “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” Putin once said. “This is for life.” Had Western leaders and commentators had the benefit of the kind of experience I’m cursed with, they would have been less enthusiastic about the post-Soviet leaders Gorbachev, Yeltsyn and Putin. They would be less prepared to disarm, with the British army, for example, being reduced to a size it hasn’t seen since Napoleonic times.
And they certainly wouldn’t be singing hosannas to Putin, the strong leader of Peter Hitchens’s fancy. In general, the need for a strong leader only seems urgent in the absence of strong society and strong institutions. When those are in place, the leader’s personal traits hardly ever matter. For example, before Alan Bennett’s play and subsequent film, only the educated people in this country knew that George III was mentally unbalanced. However every Russian child knows this about Tsar Paul I, who reigned roughly at the same time. The difference is that in some countries mad kings are, and in some others they aren’t, allowed to create mad kingdoms.
The facts of Putin’s Russia are in the public domain, accessible even to Peter Hitchens. Putin’s biography is one such fact. I have read the Russian-language facsimile of the old KGB/FSB dossier on Putin. The dossier is in the standard format used by the FSB to collate embarrassing material on high government officials. In this instance it chronicles Putin’s activities in St Petersburg where, before his transfer to Moscow, he was second in command to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. The dossier states that Putin’s “quest for personal enrichment and absence of any moral barriers became obvious at the very onset of his career.”
As early as 1990 a group of Municipal Council deputies conducted an investigation of Putin’s activities in issuing licenses for the export of raw materials. In particular, the investigation dealt with export licenses to exchange raw materials for food. Such materials dutifully left Russia. No badly needed food came back. According to documents cited by Russia’s then-Deputy General Prosecutor Mikhail Katyshev, Putin also used the children’s home of Petersburg’s Central Borough to “export” children abroad, a practice outlawed in Britain since 1807.
The dossier states that Putin was responsible for licensing a number of casinos, charging between $100,000 and $300,000 for each license. From 1992 to 2000 Putin also sat on the advisory board of two German estate companies, which German authorities have since investigated for money laundering. The dossier documents that in cahoots with Sobchak and Vice-Governor Valeri Grishanov (ex-Commander of the Baltic Fleet), Putin had a former naval base converted to a port called Lomonosov. This was used for two-way contraband activities, with various goods entering Russia and natural resources leaving it.
Warships, including submarines, were also sold at bargain prices to unidentified foreign buyers. The organisation nominally in control of the warships did not always go along with the racket, as witnessed by the murder of its deputy general manager in 1994. Sobchak lasted longer: he and two of his aides died simultaneously under mysterious circumstances in 2000. In 1999, having held several important jobs in Yeltsin’s government, Putin took over the country.
Within weeks of assuming office he consolidated his position by starting the Second Chechen War, using explosions in four Moscow apartment blocks as a pretext. Rumours immediately circulated that Putin had ordered the bombings, taking his cue from the Reichstag Fire. Putin’s KGB colleague Alexander Litvinenko put together a dossier of evidence to that effect. He then published it as a book (Blowing Up Russia), eventually attracting rather toxic literary criticism from Putin’s lifelong employer.
After the explosions, Putin made his immortal speech on the fate awaiting Chechen terrorists: “We’ll find ’em wherever they hide,” Putin promised. “If they hide in a toilet, we’ll whack ’em in the shithouse,” he added in the underworld slang used throughout the KGB. And he was as good as his word. Over a hundred thousand Chechens, most of them not terrorists, were “whacked” in the next few years. When they tried to fight back by taking hostages, they were all “whacked” together. One such action was undertaken in a Moscow theatre, when the “whacking” was done with a poison gas whose composition still remains unknown.
In Putin’s Russia, the “whacking” is not limited to real or presumed terrorists. Opposition politicians and journalists are a particularly high-risk group. Yuri Shchekochikhin, opposition MP, died of a mysterious illness, with his internal organs collapsing one by one. His skin went blotchy and he lost all his hair. Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of the Russian Forbes, was riddled with bullets in Moscow. Andrei Kozlov, of Russia’s Central Bank, who had tried to stamp out money laundering, was shot dead. Anna Politkovskaya, who had publicised Russian brutality in Chechnya and attacked Putin as a dictator, likewise. Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who blew the whistle on a major corruption scam reaching all the way to the top, died in prison.
The Kommersant magazine reporter who had exposed Russia’s secret supplies of arms to Iran and Libya just happened to fall out of a window. Human-rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov was shot in broad daylight, together with the young journalist with whom he was talking, Anastasia Baburova. Just tell me where to stop. Under Putin more and more businesses have been brought under state control. Owners who objected too loudly have been either killed or, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoned. The media, especially of the broadcast variety, are used exactly as they were used under Stalin et al: for government propaganda.
In fact, in response to the derisory sanctions introduced by the US government, Dmitry Kisiliov, Putin’s mouthpiece at the TV channel RT1 kindly informed the Americans that Russia is capable of reducing their country to radioactive dust. This is the language of my childhood. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose, as the French would say. Until recently at least electronic media were free to criticise Putin and his kleptofascist state. Now they’ve been blocked in Russia, though they can still be followed here.
That’s why the Russians have nowhere to go in search of answers to such questions as “Is Putin about to plunge Europe into a major war?” We too may ask some of the same questions, along with some others, such as “Is Col. Putin really the kind of strong leader we need, as Peter Hitchens tells us?” And, as we have seen, every characteristic of a fascist state is clearly visible in Russia.
Unfortunately the West has severe learning difficulties when it comes to lessons of history. The Second World War could have been easily prevented by a resolute early response to German aggression. Instead the West vacillated. The mantra of appeasement and ‘peace in our lifetime’ was the order of the day. Even when Hitler attacked Poland, and Britain and France declared war, Germany’s western border was left unprotected. There wasn’t a single tank there, while France and the British expeditionary corps had almost 2,000. They could have ridden all the way to Berlin largely unopposed, yet we all know what happened next.
Of course nuclear weapons have changed the dynamics of power, but not so much that the West wouldn’t be able to stop Putin’s Russia in her tracks before it’s too late. Yet in our case, forewarned means foredisarmed. I hope and pray that no catastrophe will ensue. I fear it might.
An excellent dissertation, from someone who should know a thing or two about subject. Particularly interesting after our discussions today on this week’s thread.
It will be very interesting to see what other Wallsters think of this primer of the ultimate owner of the current leaders of the EPL. Don’t suppose Jose Mourinho has the time to read CHW; pity! Who knows, “The One” might spring to the defence of his paymaster. He might even send “Big John” Terry around to kick one of us to death in the shit-house. ‘Pour l’encourager les autres’ – of course.
It be would also be interesting to see whether Peter Hitchens deigns to answer the pungent points enumerated by Mr Boot.
I sit back,with a cup of Bovril – and await developments. Andy Car Park – how’s about that then? As you waxed all cerebral in your last post (much appreciated) stay with it, me ol’ mukka.
One hopes that the G & G of the Monday Club get their act together and start to address some of the ‘what ifs’ I mentioned the other day, in light of their new knowledge. And this is just one of the many sources of grief that we currently face. No mention in Osborne’s projections today that he intends to provide the wherewithal to provide me with a 303 when the time comes to defend my bungalow from external invaders from East entering from The Wash; or Muzzie insurrectionistsfrom the wild west of South Yorkshire, when they finally finally get their act together and get the “Go” from Muz Bros.
Who cares if the Barclay Bugle has closed its comments section; let’s have it for The Wall 😉
Seriously though, this a damn fine piece of work by our Russian friend. If I was forty years younger I’d organize his security for him – gratis.
Frank P @ 19:13
Now, here’s a question for you, Frank.
What to say in response to a long rant by a man who writes about a country he hates deeply, and her leader he hates deeper still, a man who bears a chip on his shoulder double the size of the landmass of mother Russia, a man who makes allegations left and right without ever furnishing any evidence for the most ‘damaging’ of them for everyone to see?
Not much, Baron reckons, hence just three small points.
Those who scan the web pages for more than a brief enjoyment from porn must surely know what truly happened at Maidan, which country spent $5bn in Ukraine financing, amongst other things, a TV station for a man groomed to take over when the right time came, which undemocratic set-up fritted away Eu430mn there (and we’ll never know what on because this set up refuses to have its books audited independently), who was the low ranking female State Department officer caught on camera, posted on u-tube nominating Ukrainian post Maidan PM, selecting the future President of the country …
Those who know, and there are millions of them, then pick up Mr. Boot’s rant, and what do they read? “Will Putin, emboldened by the West’s feeble response to the (his) rape of the Ukraine, keep going?”
For even the marginally objective this should have been enough to stop reading, not bother losing time unnecessarily, click on something else like P Hitchen’s blog or, if they speak Russian, want a measured dose of criticism of the KGB colonel the web TV station ‘The Rain’.
The joke about the bat sales in Russia seems to get repeated by Mr. Boot over and over again. Time to replace it? Why not mention that since about few weeks ago, in Russia, ordinary people can own small arms for personal protection. (In this country, one can get arrested for possessing an air gun). If the one who likes stripping to the waist were that much of a dictator, hated by his people, despised by his friends and enemies alike yet as omnipotently powerful as Mr. Boot suggest, would he had allowed this statute to pass?
And thirdly, sleep soundly, Frank, if you ever need your trusted 303, it wouldn’t be because a Russian is at your gate.
The sad thing is, Baron, that it is conceivable, within the Great Scheme of Things, that both you and Alex Boot might be right; for evil, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and the judgement often based on empirical experience. I shall continue to read the output of both you and Mr Boot (nor to mention Hitch minor) with interest and respect and form judgments on a case by case analysis. And I’m delighted to hear that you are up and about again. Polemical discourse is obviously good for your constitution. Perhaps Mr Boot himself may address some of the points within your robust critique? 🙂
OTOH he may feel that he already has …
I think he may well feel that he has already marshalled enough evidence to justify his position. I am seeing him next Friday and I’ll try to ask him to reflect at more depth on these criticisms.