Drugs, Russia and Terrorism, Part 1

"When we fight drugs, we fight the war on terror," President Bush explained on Feb. 12 as he announced an increase in the budget for the war on drugs.

He is right. Additionally, we cannot wage a real war on terrorism without waging a real war on illegal drugs, because the two are closely coupled.

The two are so intertwined that perhaps the real question is "How can we win a war on terrorism if we can't win a war on drugs?"

The players are the same in both games. Drug trafficking is a significant source of terrorist financing. The root of several terrorist groups is narcotics trafficking, and vice versa.

The few drug traffickers who are not terrorists depend on terrorists for protection and enforcement services that are usually paid for in drugs. This is just the start of the hidden side of the war on terrorism.

A little over a year ago, a U.S. government interagency group conducted a study of international organized crime. Its conclusions were more frightening than the 9-11 attacks.

Just the money-laundering part of international organized crime revenues was estimated to be at least $900 billion, possibly exceeding $2 trillion, a year. Other studies place their gross annual revenues at $2+ trillion.

Drug trafficking, with annual revenues at $500+ billion, is one of the major components of organized crime.

Another component is the sale of illegal goods and arms, most of which go to terrorists and terrorist regimes.

A third component is organized crime's role as an intermediary in helping terrorist groups and rogue nations acquire weapons of mass destruction.

The money dimension of organized crime – its use for buying favors, corruption and compromise – is probably of greatest concern. Only a few statements from the interagency report, "International Crime Threat Assessment" (December 2000), are needed to tell the story.

"Most organized crime groups have successfully corrupted those persons charged with investigating and prosecuting them."

"Criminal groups are most successful in corrupting high-level politicians and government officials in countries that are their home base of operations."

"International criminals are attracted to global finance and trade. They are able to avoid scrutiny because of the importance to businesses and governments of facilitating commercial and financial transactions."

"Criminal groups cultivate and rely on corrupt political elites, government officials, and law enforcement and security personnel to protect their operations and to provide cover."

"They use illicit proceeds to: finance political campaigns, buy votes, protect their operations, influence legislation, gain insider access, and pre-empt prosecutions."

One more. "One of the more significant developments since the end of the Cold War has been the growing involvement of insurgent, paramilitary, and extremist groups."

It is not just that terrorism feeds off drug trafficking. Rather, terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime are one big happy family.

Originally, these were independent operations that emerged in different regions and grew in an evolutionary manner. This is not the nature of these operations today.

This is because in the latter half of the last century, various states (mainly Communist states that were inherently criminal and terrorist in nature) recognized the potential of these operations as revolutionary weapons.

Thus they proceeded to build narcotics trafficking, organized crime and terrorism into major state intelligence operations.

The three operations – trafficking, terrorism and crime – are different but complementary. They work together while striving to appear independent of each other.

They do not compete with each other, but cooperate synergistically. The three have become so intertwined that war on any one of the three means war on all.

In reality, this is what needs to be done – to wage war on all three. They are all unacceptable, they are all covert state intelligence attack operations, each can have dire consequences, and all need to be eradicated.

Terrorism is the least damaging of the three because its main product is physical damage, in contrast to organized crime and drugs, which attack the moral basis of society and corrupt its leadership and institutions.

However, because of the built-in publicity that goes along with terrorism, it is terrorism that gets the lion's share of the attention. Witness the U.S. government's response to the 9-11 attacks.

Actually, far greater damage is done each year by organized crime and drug trafficking in terms of deaths, casualties, corruption and economic costs.

In organized crime, the top of the "underworld" is the "overworld." These are the people who pull the political and financial strings. (See David Jordan, "Drug Politics," University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.)

The level of importance of the overworld can be judged by the $2+ trillion in annual revenues, which buys a horrendous amount of corruption, compromise and complicity.

Its main targets are political parties, top government officials, judges, top law firms, financial institutions, news media, investigatory/police agencies and intelligence services.

As pointed out in the "International Crime Threat Assessment," the corruption and compromise achieved staggers the mind. This is a global phenomenon including corruption, compromise and complicity in the United States and in our allies as well as in the usual Middle East suspects.

This phenomenon and its implications need to be understood. Our war-on-terrorism objective is to destroy terrorism around the world, in the process drawing no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them.

The implications need to be made explicit. Terrorism is critically dependent on the financial, logistic, material supply and political corruption networks that involve or overlap those of organized crime and state intelligence services.

We cannot cut the terrorists' principal financial support without invading the heart and soul of organized crime: finance and money laundering.

Further, organized crime has 10 times more lawyers and finance specialists than our Justice Department and FBI, and they are all much better paid, better connected and more committed.

This is where the war-on-terrorism rabbit hole takes us and the end is still not in sight.

Another critical yet overlooked facet of the terrorism problem was raised briefly during the recent Senate Intelligence Committee National Security Threat hearings. The key question was asked by Sen. Evan Bayh: "Are Russia and China involved with enabling evil?"

This question was highly relevant because certain facts with respect to China and Russia, both of which presumably joined us in the war on terrorism, have been missing in discussions about the war on terror.

It is well known that China has been one of the biggest supporters of Middle East terrorists and rogue regimes seeking to acquire long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Even more involved has been Russia. In its former incarnation as the Soviet Union, Russia is the granddaddy of international terrorism.

Today's international terrorism is fundamentally the product of Russia's military intelligence, the GRU, and to a lesser extent its civilian intelligence, the KGB. Both the KGB and GRU are alive, well and more powerful today than they were under Communism.

Further, the greatest sources of potential weapons of mass destruction, missiles and submarine proliferation over the past decade have been the various Russian laboratories and organizations (e.g., military and intelligence).

Thus, the possible involvement of Russia and China should have been under intense CIA covert scrutiny for many years, and Sen. Bayh deserved an honest and straightforward answer. What he got was a near-incoherent response.

Consider Director Tenet's answer: "Well, sir, I would say that, first of all – and it's all separate. The reasons may be different. And at times we have distinctions between government and entities. And that's always – and I don't want to make it a big distinction, but sometimes you're dealing with both those things."

Translation: "Yes, Senator, we believe there is involvement, but we don't understand the role of those who are involved, whether they are independent 'entities' or government representatives. Obviously, because we are trying to build a friendship with Russia and because we would not know what to do if they were involved, we would rather not discuss this subject at this time."

To answer Sen. Bayh's question, we need to go back 50 years, to the origins of today's international terrorism, narcotics trafficking and organized crime.

This is not an easy subject to address because of the efforts within academia, political circles, the news media and policy centers for 80 years to keep silent about the crimes of Communism, as eloquently explained in the recent study "The Black Book of Communism" (Harvard University Press, 1999).

Because of this silence, data on Communist crimes come as a shock to most people and, hence, is hard to believe.

This "silence" is the cornerstone of the political protection that is largely responsible for the unprecedented growth of organized crime, drug trafficking and international terrorism over the past 50 years. This is the hardest lesson of all, and it has not been learned.

That organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorism are Russian (and Chinese) STATE operations is hard for people to accept and even harder to incorporate into their thinking and planning because of the long history of political, news, and academic leadership silence respecting these crimes of Communism.

How can these be state operations when our own leaders are silent about them? The implications of this question are equally troublesome.

The origins of today's terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime were experienced first-hand by the former top-level Czech Communist official, Gen. Maj. Jan Sejna. He was chief of staff to the minister of defense and was on the inside of the planning and execution of all three operations by various Communist state intelligence services, most notably the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.

No one in the U.S. government wanted to hear what he had to say, including (or especially) the CIA, because his information was politically most incorrect. (See the book "Red Cocaine," Edward Harle, 1999.) What Sejna had to say with respect to the Soviet operations can be summarized as follows.

When Khrushchev came to power in 1954, he set about renovating the Soviet Union's global revolutionary war movement, which had stagnated under Stalin.

Under Khrushchev's direction, the Soviets quickly dropped the "revolutionary war" moniker and henceforth referred to the activity as wars of "national liberation" to reflect a new deception, that these were only national liberation movements and not internationally stimulated revolutionary war operations, which is what they really were.

Concurrent with this change, three new strategic intelligence operations (that is, ones of strategic importance) were adopted: international narcotics trafficking (to undermine the society and weaken its leaders), international organized crime (to corrupt the politicians and financial institutions) and international terrorism (to destabilize the countries and create revolutionary situations).

Terrorism and drug trafficking were run mainly out of the GRU and organized crime was run mainly out of the KGB.

The Soviets already had considerable experience in these operations. Since its inception, the Soviet Union has been synonymous with terror. As explained in "The New KGB" (William R. Corson and Robert T. Crowley, Morrow, 1986), "No nation in the world can claim parity with the USSR in this bloody arena."

The chief instrument in the orchestration and implementation of terror was the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB. Its head was Felix Dzerzhinsky, who spent many years in prison (1897-1899, 1900-1902, 1912-1917) prior to the overthrow of the Russian czar in February 1917.

While he was in prison, his toughness and leadership ability won him the respect of the prisoners, most of whom were members of the Russian criminal underworld and from whom he learned the fine art of crime. He was even made an honorary member of the Russian underworld.

Lenin appointed him head of the Cheka a few weeks following the November coup, and Dzerzhinsky proceeded to build the Cheka into a Mafia-like instrument of terror whose sole goal was the protection of the Bolshevik regime.

As in the Mafia, novitiates had to earn their keep by obediently carrying out acts of murder and brutality and live according to their oath of secrecy and loyalty until death.

The Russian criminal underworld that Dzerzhinsky knew so well was actually used as a mechanism for propping up the failing socialist economy. However, it was thoroughly penetrated and watched to ensure that it did not become in any sense a threat to the state.

The Russian Mafia, from the beginning of the Soviet Union, was, in effect, an informal extension of the Cheka (KGB). By the time of Dzerzhinsky's death in 1926, the culture was set.

As foreign intelligence operations grew, narcotics were used to both trap and corrupt foreign officials. Contraband smuggling, an organized crime activity, was actually facilitated because it provided an ideal mechanism for inserting intelligence agents, later spetsnaz (Russian special operations forces) professionals, under the cover of a common criminal activity.

Up until 1955, these operations – crime, drugs and terror – were mainly internal security operations and low-level tactical foreign operations. But beginning in 1955, this quickly changed as decisions were made to build serious strategic intelligence operations in all three areas – organized crime, illegal drugs and terror – in support of the new wars of national liberation.

For each area, strategic deception operations, another traditional Russian forte, were devised to safeguard the operations by masking their connection to the Soviet intelligence services and by keeping the spotlight of publicity away from especially sensitive components such as the banks.

During the latter half of the 1950s, there was a planning and organizing phase during which operational strategies were worked out, intelligence cadres were trained, logistics and material supply lines were organized, and special covert communications were established.

By 1960 the base had been built and field operations were initiated, with indigenous people from various countries recruited and trained to run the foreign country aspect of operations.

In drug trafficking, by 1965 the Soviets (assisted by their East European satellite intelligence services) had multiple indigenous drug production and distribution operations around the world, but most important in almost every Latin American country and half of the Caribbean Islands.

By 1968, the KGB estimated that the Soviets controlled over 37 percent of the drug trafficking into the United States. The growth in cocaine trafficking, beginning in 1967, was almost 90 percent the result of Soviet operations set up in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia between 1963 and 1966. Venezuela was a major organizing and money laundering center.

In terrorism, the Soviets recruited, organized and trained terrorist groups around the world, from Japan and Indonesia to Cuba and Latin America, but particularly those in the Middle East Middle East.

The Soviets had been particularly adept in penetrating the Muslim religious groups, going back to Indonesia in the 1920s. They helped create Arafat's core group in 1957 and the PLO in 1964, which acted as a Soviet surrogate in the late 1960s and 1970s.

By 1984, the role of the Soviet Union in organizing, training, sponsoring and equipping all terrorist groups was documented and terrorism was acknowledged to be a "global force." (See, for example, Benjamin Netanyahu, editor, "Terrorism: How The West Can Win," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986.)

In organized crime, by 1960 there were over 80 Soviet penetration agents within just the Italian mafia. By 1968 they had penetrated most of the 200 international organized crime groups around the world (their count) and had organized over 75 new groups. Czechoslovakia itself ran or had infiltrated 50 organized crime groups around the world.

By 1990, Russian organized crime was regarded by police and national law enforcement agencies in both the United States and Europe as far and away the most vicious and controlling of all the organized crime groups.

Initially, these were three complementary but independent operations. Gradually, the three operations became integrated. The roots of integration were present as early as 1965 when the Tri-Continental Congress, called to coordinate terrorist planning, first met in Havana.

It looked (at the secret level) like a terrorist coordination meeting. But at the top secret level, the meeting was used to cover the coordination of drug trafficking and money laundering, which at that time was in the process of being redesigned by top-level experts within organized crime and international finance.

Over the subsequent years, the synergism and need for coordination to keep the operations from stepping on each other's toes led to their natural integration. In the case of drug trafficking and terrorism, this merger was recognized in the West in the early 1980s and labeled narco-terrorism.

It would be nice to think that these activities were discarded by the KGB and GRU after the Soviet Union metamorphosed back into Russia in 1991. But no one yet has explained why they would ever want to discard such immensely profitable and powerful entities as drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorism, especially when no one in the West complained.

That would have been politically incorrect, not to mention impolite. It would also have meant breaking the silence in a meaningful way, which no one in a position of authority has done.

What is most unfortunate, and almost unbelievable, the instant Russia emerged in its new garb, the United States cut back to the bare bone intelligence collection directed against the former Soviet Union. This was at the precise time when, from a national security perspective, intelligence collection should have been expanded.

This was the best time in 70 years to run collection operations, due to the temporary confusion present in the former Soviet Union. Moreover, it was tremendously important to know what was happening then.

The Russians were notorious for their use of Ptomkin-like deceptions to get the West to believe they had changed and were no longer a threat (e.g., Lenin's New Economic Plan in the 1920s, Khrushchev's "peaceful coexistence" in the 1950s, Brezhnev's "detente" in the late 1960s, and Gorbachev's perestroika in the 1980s).

In 1982, Yuri Andropov, a master of deception and chief of the KGB, was made general secretary of the Communist Party, and the KGB moved into the Kremlin. As noted in "The New KGB," it had been Andropov's goal as early as 1967 to modernize the KGB and orchestrate its assumption of full control of the Soviet state.

The world revolutionary movement was again stagnating, and Andropov believed that the KGB "solution" was the only practical way to get rid of the bureaucracy that was choking both the Party and the government.

That something big was about to happen was actually signaled in 1988 and 1989 when Georgiy Arbatov, a top Russian theoretician and director of the Institute of the USA and Canada, stated several times that they were going to do a terrible thing to us – they were going to deprive us of their enemy image (see Anatoli Golitsyn, The Perestroika Deception, Edward Harle, 1998).

Rather than increase our vigilance, however, U.S. intelligence curtailed intelligence collection.

Henceforth, U.S. intelligence about and understanding of what was happening in Russia went from poor to worse.

The seriousness of this U.S. intelligence cutback is magnified because this was also the culmination of what increasingly appears to be a Soviet effort, timed to coincide with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and rebirth of Russia, to switch its direct support of international terrorism from the GRU and KGB offices to organized crime operations, to achieve a measure of deniability.

The recognition of Soviet ties to and sponsorship of international terrorism had become embarrassingly evident by the early 1980s (See Herbert Romerstein, "Soviet Support for International Terrorists," Foundation for Democratic Action, 1981) and the image of this relationship had to be cleaned up.

The sudden emergence of the Russian Mafia (which in reality was a KGB operation) around the world as a "consequence" of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 now appears to have been one of the mechanisms employed.

Joseph Douglass Jr., PhD (Cornell University, 1962), has 35 years experience in national security matters as a researcher, author, and frequent speaker. He is a recognized authority on U.S. and Soviet nuclear strategy, chemical and biological warfare, Communist decision-making, and Soviet strategic intelligence operations.

Over the past twenty years his work has focused on the international narcotics trafficking and the war on drugs, the leading role of Russian intelligence in international terrorism and organized crime, chemical and biological warfare agents for use in political and intelligence operations, US defense policy, and on the fate of missing American POWs, which is the subject of his most recent book Betrayed.

Dr. Douglass has worked in the AEC’s Sandia Laboratory, the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Department of Defense and several national defense corporations. He has taught at Cornell University, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is a frequent speaker and author of over a hundred scholarly articles, op ed pieces and a dozen books, including Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and, most recently, Betrayed: Missing American POWs. He is also the co-author of America The Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical/Biological Warfare, Why the Soviet Union Violates Arms Control Treaties, CBW: The Poor Man's Atomic Bomb, and Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War.

Krimeski-extorski.....[some excerpts from a tripod net site]
Moscow

Around 1990 divided 5 Russian crimegroups the rackets in Moscow. In Moscow had the Ljubertsi the prostitution, the Dolgoproedny were the extortionists. There are also the Solntsevoskaya and the Kazanskaya. They concur with the Azeri who control the drugs and the markets. The Ingoesjen are the smugglers. And also there are the chechenians who are the most violent and who control the carsales market and work as assassins. The russian and Ukranian markets where flushed with opium from Afghanistan, Ukraine and Kirgizistan. Then there is also strong evidence that about 40% of the foreign cars that drive around in Russia are stolen in Western europe.

In april 1992 ended the DEA a Russian heroingang in Brooklyn. The undercover bought from Alexander Moysiff and Katz who also supplied the sicilians instead of the sicilians importing themselves. At every flight from West Berlin there was heroin worth a million dollars, the heroin came from Bangkok via Moscow and East Berlin in West Berlin, then it was send by plane to the USA. 9 Russians were convicted but many escaped. Every day goes from Kennedy Airport a plane to Moscow with 100 million dollars and even sometimes a billion dollars for the bosses in Russia, that is why they have become the biggest moneylaunderers of all international groups

Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport.,Semion Mogilevich
He controls everything that goes in and out of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, a "smugglers' paradise, " says Elson. Mogilevich bought a bankrupt airline in a former Central Asian Soviet republic for millions of dollars in cash so he could haul heroin out of the Golden Triangle.

Rosbiznesbank, Director Ivan Kivelidi killed 4 August 1995 was the banker Ivan Kivelidi (46) with his female secretary poisoned. Kivelidi was the director of the Rosbiznesbank one of the biggest banks of Russia. Also he was the head of an influential group of entrepeneurs called the Russian Round table for Businessmen of which he was the 9th murdered member. The last 3,5 years were 80 murder attacks at businessmen of which half died.

Duma member Sergej Markidonov killed At the end of november 1995 was the Duma member the liberal Sergej Markidonov (34) shot dead by a bodyguard. He is the 4th parliamentarian who since the elections of 1993 was killed.
Duma candidate Michail Leznjev killed 8 December 1995 was the Russian candidate Michail Lezjnjev (48) killed before the elections for the Duma on 17 december. He is from the party of prime minister Tsjernomyrdin.

Antwerp, Belgium

the Russian mafia officially lost the liquor import/export company Kremlyovskaya Group in November 1996, which had been used as its main cover in the port area. The company's chairman, mafioso Riccardo Marian Fanchini, is under investigation for allegedly laundering Moscow mafia money through Geneva to Antwerp for investment in residential real estate.The fall of Fanchini, tagged by the FBI as probably one of the biggest mafia drug bosses active in Western Europe, until 1996, began with the repeal of Russian president Boris Yeltsin's decree allowing the import of liquor duty free, with the tax going to sports associations. It was repealed in December 1995 and the Belgian company's financial crash came in April 1996. Media reports about the Kremlyovskaya Group's mafia ownership soon had its legitimate partners running for cover from the company and its representatives. The 1996 Monaco grand prix was one of the last big sporting events with which the group was associated; after that, its formula one partners dissolved their partnership with the Antwerp company. Peugeot was the first to bale out, and Eddie Jordan, another partner in the same sponsorship project, followed somewhat later.

21 March 1996 was Valentin Smirnov (62) in Jekaterinenburg shot dead, he was one of the most famous scientists for the Russian defence industry and the murder was possibly connected to the by him invented rocketcountersystem S 300V, the Russian counterpart of the American Patriot system, there was a 60 million dollar contract to the USA, later was found out that his businesspartner was behind his murder and had hired an assasssin.

After Korzjakov was fired Fjodorov took again his post at the national sport fund, later he told that general Korzjakov had tried to extort 40 million dollars from him and when he refused he was arrested for possession of a small amount of cocaine, he is soon free again but had to step down from his post as director of the national Sport Fund because of the planted cocaine, soon after this he was severely wounded in the summer when he was shot down near his house.

Bank of New York scandal

In februari 2000 confessed former manager for the Bank of New York, Lucy Edwards, that she and her husband Peter Berlin had laundered 7 billion dollars for russian bankers. Firstly there was said that it was connected to Semion Mogilevich and that there had been money deposted that was stolen from the IMF help for Russia. Now it was only announced that it was money from the russian banks Depozitarno Kliringovy Bank and the Sobinbank. The Sobinbank was largely owned by the SBS Agro Bank which is owned by 3 tycoons with close ties to Jelsin.

Bank of New York scandal #2

In august 1999 newspapers wrote that police had started an investigation against a laundering operation at the Bank of New York. The Inkom Bank paid 56 dollars per wire transfer which is 6 times as high as standard rate and Bank new York accepted the money from Semjon Mogilevitsj. Police investigate the firm Benex which was suspected of having ties with Semion Mogilevich. Mogilevich was born in the Ukraine and was connected to the Bank of New York launderingscandal to which were also connected the oilgigants Lukoil and Sibneft and carmaker Avtovaz. Also connected to this scandal was the russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chairman of Yukos oil company who once led Menatep bank for which also Konstantin Kagalovski had worked as vice president. They had also stolen about 299 million dollars of IMF credits. The 4,2 billion dollars were laundered in 1998 in a short time by bankdirector Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovski and her husband Konstantin Kagalovski. It becomes known as Kremlingate when the FBI finds out in august 1999. According to Jiggs the Mogilevich group infiltrated the Bank of New York and began laundering what has been estimated at 10 billion dollars, the contact was the wife of an associate who was the banks president.

"It is, in fact, a carefully considered method of subversion and control. The whole purpose of Communism is for a small, self-elected group of people to amass wealth and power over everyone else. To achieve that end, all means are justified."

I agree completely. Very few people understand this extremely fundamental point. The reasons why this point are so little understood are obvious, as one of the primary purposes of communist subversion is too obscure this point.

However, I would like to ask what you think about Russia and China now that both have in their own ways, "transcended communism." I could guess the answer, but would nonetheless like to hear what you have to say.

China of course is still ruled by a communist government and their economy still runs by the old communist model to a significant extent, perhaps 50%. The government, of course, follows the form you describe above as all communist government do. Having abandoned the communist type of economy, however, the communist Chinese government has lost the excuse for their brutal rule.

Russia is not ruled by a remnant of the old communist government---the KGB. They have abandoned the old communist economic model completely, though I am well aware that what they have does not much resemble our system, nor can it with every type of freedom completely suppressed.

However, they had gone beyond this and pretty much left the old Communist Party out in the cold (except for a few privileged former leaders, who are now major "capitalists.") There is a great efficiency in this in that most of the millions of worthless nomenklatura a who used to live well off the old system have now been pretty much cut off. As with the Chinese, the Russians are able to deliver a higher level of economic performance---virtually any system can using communism as the baseline.

The key point for me, however, is that the KGB ran the old system of worldwide subversion that has completely undermined Europe and made significant inroads into the U. S. Now, as far as I'm concerned, the same organization simply runs the same system---with a difference that the KGB is no longer an organ of the Soviet government, but is the Soviet government itself. (I realize that the KGB has been renamed FSB, but I sometimes prefer to refer to the current rulers of Russia as the KGB and leave them distinct from the current members of the FSB. In effect, these senior former KGB agents such as Putin are no longer members of the secret police, but are now government bureaucrats. Of course, one could just as easily say that the government bureaucracy has become its self simply a form of the secret police. This is not a shocking as it seems, since the old Soviet government was not so very different from that.

Yes, I agree with you. The Soviet Union currently seems to be run by former KGB agents and their allies. It strikes me as something like government by the Mafia, a terms that is often applied to Russia's current business leaders.

What's hard to say is where this system will go. It still is a command economy to some degree, as we see with the current effort to take back the oil industry. Although it is not tied to Communist rigidities, command economies tend to be inflexible and respond poorly to changing technology or other conditions. On the other hand, it has some elements of a market economy, where the capos can prove themselves by succeeding, or if they fail, can be removed or eliminated.

The Russian people have never enjoyed much political freedom, and it's not clear that they even want it, as long as their bosses are strong and capable. But there does seem to be some pressure of expectations on Putin to prove himself by regaining control over the former Soviet Republics, which I think is both dangerous to others and self-destructive to Russia.

Russia needs to do what it failed to do in the 1890s and early twentieth century: modernize, develop some sort of parliamentary system that actually works, and somehow renew the Orthodox Church, which is in pretty bad shape after 70 years of cooperation with the communists. At the moment the Russian Church is more interested in power for itself and for Russia than in Christianity as such, although they do retain their sacraments and rituals, which may be the grounds for a renewal.

"Russia needs to do what it failed to do in the 1890s and early twentieth century: modernize, develop some sort of parliamentary system that actually works, and somehow renew the Orthodox Church, which is in pretty bad shape after 70 years of cooperation with the communists."

Yes, but realistically that will not happen under the current government. As far as what the Russians want, I would put it this way: they thought they were getting democracy with Putin. This seems absurd now, but I will confess that I believed it myself at one point. Having been fooled, the chance at freedom such as it was is now gone.

Throwing off the yoke of the current rulers would require a very strong desire for change among the Russian people, including a willingness of many Russians the citizens to die in the struggle for freedom. Right now, I don't think many Russians are ready for this.

From the US point of view, I would say the relevant thing to keep in mind is that we will probably be facing a clever, ruthless, totalitarian opponent in Russia for the forseeable future. I think the Russian government now understands that subversion is their greatest talent. In the past, I believe they made the mistake of thinking military power would be their best card to play.

Personally, I believe that the Russians have taken subversion to a new level in the history of the world. That is to say, I believe they are the best ever in this particular skill. A cursory examination of Western Europe will reveal the tremendously devastating affect that Russian subversion can have on a free society over time. The US shows great effect too---but so far I would not describe it as devastation.

Subversion can be powerful, but it has a week chink in its armor---the possibility of detection. if Republican conservatives as a whole were to become aware of the fact that Russian subversion was behind Islamo-fascism, that the Russians were secretly in deep, extremely friendly alliance with the Chinese and have been for decades (with their differences primarily a staged "show" for our benefit)...if Republican conservatives could become aware of these kind of things including the fact that Russian agents of influence have deeply penetrated the American Left and/or currently beginning the process of penetrating the American Right...then Russian subversion could be stopped in its tracks.

Of course, one of the primary goals of Russian subversion is to prevent such a perception from taking place. Hence, "everybody knows" that fonts such as I'm expressing here are actually insane. This is "foil hats" thinking. The point is, this attitude toward conspiracy theories is not accidental. It is, in fact, something the Russian agents of influence (journalists, academics, politicians, and others) have carefully been building up in American society for 50 years or more.

Out of curiosity, how would you respond to the notion that the post-Soviet Russian government has an intimate connection with Islamic terror worldwide?

Yes.....but Russia has redefined its posture in this.
Russia's political manuever and veto may be more power to Islamist terror...than their current play in support of Iran..or older shelf weapons sales.
Syria has Israel destroy expensive Phase array Radars......and Moscow says little...except..."Show us the money...and we will happily send you another Bashar"

Putin has been busy with inhouse money shuffle and homage yeilding by Oligrachs,Corporations ...and of course....all the Crimeski types.
Relations with Sunni/Arab league have dropped off.
Poor showing of Russian weapon systems in Arab/Israeli wars...with Saddams military getting thrashed.
allong with Chechnya, and Russia's backing of Serbs in the Balkans.
Syria has no money.....Iran is the only player worth the time now that Sunni are pissed off.

Pasty skinned Russian agents and assets to teach technicals are easy see in Islams realms now.
Its not like the old days anymore.

No Russian wants an assignment with the nutcase Muzzies...unless he is getting major money for his time.

Their will be lots of Russians in Iran.....but not to many elsewhere in Moon Children world.

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