WE ARE BUILDING CAPITULATIONISM! – PICTURE-BOOK TO REMEMBER MOSCOW — John Helmer

There were many British and American experts inside the Russian government at the time; they were either intelligent [sic] agents or Harry Lime types, usually both at the same time. Their orders were to demolish the Soviet system as swiftly as possible; their motive was to transfer the profits to their governments and themselves….

It is a virtue of Stephenson’s book that, as he says at the end, “I have avoided the temptation in this book to compare the old with the new.” Thus has he avoided propaganda, and also cheap nostalgia. Ergo, this is a book is for all Muscovites who lived through that terrible time. It’s a reminder of the duty those who survived owe to those who didn’t.

Dances with Bears
WE ARE BUILDING CAPITULATIONISM! – PICTURE-BOOK TO REMEMBER MOSCOW BY
John Helmer

John Helmer — The President’s Inferiority Complex , His Advisor’s Russia-Hating Obsession, And The Putsch Plotter With The Itchy Trigger Finger

Second installment on Zbig and Jimmy Carter. Another eye-opener.

Accounts such as these make it clear that there are no "good guys." "Our guys" are thugs, too.

These games of liquidating others in the cause of defeating the Kremlin has invigorated Carter, even today when Carter himself is on his last legs. Drawing the Russians on to the field of battle was his and Brzezinski’s aim; Afghanistan, after the Soviet military intervention began in December 1979, was their main chance. Their successors in the White House have the same chance against Russian forces on the battlefields of Syria and Ukraine. Though he has tried, Brzezinski is no longer in a position to advise them that if they don’t dare, they can’t win. Carter is still alive to demonstrate that if they dare, they are likely to lose.

It isn’t sure that’s what KGB trainee Putin scribbled down during his lectures at the Andropov Red Banner Institute in 1984. It’s certain he has noted it down now.

Helmer's accounts explain much about the current Russophobia in the government and press.

Dances with Bears
THE PRESIDENT’S INFERIORITY COMPLEX , HIS ADVISOR’S RUSSIA-HATING OBSESSION, AND THE PUTSCH PLOTTER WITH THE ITCHY TRIGGER FINGER
John Helmer

Back to the Future: From the USSR to the Eurasian Century

Get ready, because the thick of the action starts now.

Sputnik International
Back to the Future: From the USSR to the Eurasian Century

Pepe Escobar

Does Putin really intend to restore the Soviet Union? — Interview with Richard Sakwa

RD Interview: Professor Richard Sakwa from the University of Kent talks about Russia’s foreign policy and explains why Russia is creating alternative regional institutions such as the Eurasian Economic Union.

Short and important.

Russia Direct
Does Putin really intend to restore the Soviet Union? Interview with Richard Sakwa
Alexey Khlebnikov, Nikolay Shevchenko

Oleg Egorov — Over 50 percent of Russians miss the Soviet Union

When the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords on December 8, 1991, dissolving the Soviet Union, Marat was just a few months old. He did not know life in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he says he misses that country.
Marat, whose real name is being withheld at his request, is now 25 years old. He works in one of the Russian ministries, is satisfied with his salary and life, but still believes that things must have been better in the USSR.

"Free education, free medicine," Marat said, listing the advantages of the Soviet state. “People lived modestly but the state took care of them. Now money controls everything. The inequality is immense. Whoever is stronger is right. It wasn't like this in the USSR."

Marat is not alone in his nostalgia. Sociological surveys indicate that more than 50 percent of Russians today regret the collapse of the Soviet Union. In an April 2016 poll by the Levada Centre, 56 percent of the respondents said they wished the Soviet Union still existed. A recent survey by the All-Russian Centre for Public Opinion (VTsIOM) showed that 64 percent of Russians would vote for the preservation of the USSR if a referendum was held today, similar to the one held on March 17, 1991, which asked Soviet citizens if it was necessary to preserve the country in that form.

Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is highest among Russians over the age of 55, and those who live in rural areas, according to Karina Pipiya, a Levada Centre sociologist. But there are a number of those like Marat — young people who are successful, integrated in modern society and who do not remember the Soviet Union — who long for it. A huge 50 percent of young people surveyed on the topic by VTsIOM share Marat's opinion, said Mikhail Mamonov, director of the VTsIOM research projects.….

Mamonov said those who are positive about the Soviet Union always point out the same three things: "A small but guaranteed salary, employment, things that are guaranteed for you." In an era of harsh market competition, people want to retreat to a time when they think all these things existed, Mamonov explained.

People don't miss the USSR as much as the socialistic welfare state. Polling shows that there is little support for recreating the Soviet Union and the Communist Party is stuck at least that 15% of the vote. Neoliberals advocating close ties with the West, Western liberalism, and a market sate are under 5%. It appears that Russians prefer something along the lines of the Scandinavian social democratic model or democratic socialism.

Russia & India Report
Over 50 percent of Russians miss the Soviet Union
Oleg Egorov, RIR

Alex Christoforou — Prime Minister Viktor Orban says Hungary must stand up to Europe’s “Sovietization” and defend its borders

How some in formally USSR states see the EU.

At a commemoration of a 1956 anti-Communist uprising, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Hungary must stand up to defend its borders against mass migration.

The Duran
Prime Minister Viktor Orban says Hungary must stand up to Europe’s “Sovietization” and defend its borders

Alex Christoforou

See also

On the website of the Employers’ Association he estimated that the refugees are getting roughly 360,000 Euro per year. There is no official confirmation on the numbers yet.

Syrian refugee in Germany with 4 wives, 22 kids sparks social media fuss over welfare

James Bamford — Commentary: The world's best cyber army doesn’t belong to Russia

The United States is, by far, the world’s most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.

There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War. In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to the Russian people the “Big Lies” of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies through eavesdropping and other espionage.

Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar, with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be “shocked, shocked” that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States….

Espionage, of which hacking is a tool, is one aspect of cyber warfare. The second is introducing malware to disrupt information and control systems.

The first known use of cyber warfare aggressively against a perceived adversary was Stuxnet worm into Iranian computers apparently to take down their nuclear program without bombing. Experts believe that only a state-sponsored group would have been able to do this and the main suspects are the US (CIA) and Israel (Mossad), perhaps acting jointly.

Reuters
Commentary: The world's best cyber army doesn’t belong to Russia
James Bamford

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard — The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover

What was that about conspiracy theories again?

The Schuman Declaration that set the tone of Franco-German reconciliation - and would lead by stages to the European Community - was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a meeting in Foggy Bottom. "It all began in Washington," said Robert Schuman's chief of staff.…

For British eurosceptics, Jean Monnet looms large in the federalist pantheon, the emminence grise of supranational villainy. Few are aware that he spent much of his life in America, and served as war-time eyes and ears of Franklin Roosevelt.

General Charles de Gaulle thought him an American agent, as indeed he was in a loose sense. Eric Roussel's biography of Monnet reveals how he worked hand in glove with successive administrations.…

Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project.…

The key CIA front was the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE), chaired by Donovan. Another document shows that it provided 53.5 per cent of the European movement's funds in 1958. The board included Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, CIA directors in the Fifties, and a caste of ex-OSS officials who moved in and out of the CIA.…

 A memo dated June 11, 1965, instructs the vice-president of the European Community to pursue monetary union by stealth, suppressing debate until the "adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable". This was too clever by half, as we can see today from debt-deflation traps and mass unemployment across southern Europe.… 

Who knew?

The Telegraph
The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Alexander Mercouris — Fighting in Nagorno Karabakh: A Headache for Moscow

Backgrounder on Nagorno Karabakh, Armenia and Azerbaijan in relation to Turkey, the former USSR and now Russia — and other Sunni-Shia confrontation. Oh, and there's oil, too. Expect to be hearing a lot more about the Caucasus.

Russia Insider
Fighting in Nagorno Karabakh: A Headache for Moscow
Alexander Mercouris

Russ Wellen — Gorbachev Was Just Too Far Out Front of the United States

A different take on the collapse of the USSR and a story of opportunity lost. Regrettably, this story continues to unfold as the US pushes a policy of global neo-imperial hegemony.

Foreign Policy in Focus
Gorbachev Was Just Too Far Out Front of the United States

Russ Wellen

David Ellerman — Neoclassical Economics as the New Social Engineering

This is a preprint of a paper on the role of neoclassical economics in the disastrous “Big Bang” or “shock therapy” advice given by Western academics and Western advisory agencies (World Bank, IMF, USAID,…) to the post-socialist countries. The paper is published as: Ellerman, David. 2016. “Neoclassical Economics as the New Social Engineering: The Debacle of the Russian Post-Socialist Transition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics, edited by George F. DeMartino and Deirdre N. McCloskey, 520–33. New York: Oxford Univeristy Press.

Click here to download the preprint.

How"the Harvard boyz" and international institutions almost destroyed the countries of the former USSR with their "expert advice."  

Russia was on the ropes being pummeled by mafiosi until Marshall Putin rode into town and established new rules. The West has never forgiven him for shutting down the table.

Neoclassical Economics as the New Social Engineering

David Ellerman

Tom Winter — How Ukraine became as poor as Tajikistan in just one year

The economic and social costs of civil war are staggering.

Fort Russ
How Ukraine became as poor as Tajikistan in just one year
Analysis of Iran French Radio

Translated by Tom Winter

Graham Stack — The rise and fall of the Russian oligarchy

Newly declassified U.S. documents, released to bne IntelliNews, show how Vladimir Putin’s candidacy was a compromise after a fierce battle between pro-US oligarchs and pro-state conservatives.

Johnson's Russia List
The rise and fall of the Russian oligarchy

Graham Stack | Business New Europe

Alexander Reed Kelly — Former Ambassador: Russia Responding to Years of U.S. Hostility

The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine are a response to years of hostility from the United States, including the eastward expansion of NATO, the bombing of Serbia and the expansion of American military bases in eastern Europe.

Thanks to neocons controlling US foreign policy.

Truthdig
Former Ambassador: Russia Responding to Years of U.S. Hostility
Alexander Reed Kelly — Democracy Now!