Russia: Putin’s Past Becoming a Hot Internet Topic in Moscow

Eurasianet.org ^ | January 6, 2016 | Alexei Sobchenko

[nickcarraway]

In late December, an unsigned piece posted on a popular Russian-language blog, headlined “Companions in the Fight,” caused a stir on the Russian Internet by shedding light on a largely unexamined facet of the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s background.

While many analysts who try to understand and explain Putin’s worldview tend to focus on his KGB past, the “Companions” article suggests that Putin’s early exposure to the criminal underworld exerted considerable influence in shaping his way of thinking.

Putin himself has mentioned how street gangs of his native city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, made a mark on his memory. And in his official biography, “First Person,” he fondly recalls his interactions with a certain Leonid Ionovich, who served as his judo coach. The unsigned article goes on to elaborate on Leonid Ionovich’s character: his full name was Leonid Ionovich Usvyatsov, and he allegedly had connections to organized crime. He twice served 10-year prison terms – one on a rape conviction, the other for illegal currency dealings.

According to the blog item, during the time between serving his two jail terms – 1968-1982 – Usvyatsov came into contact with Putin. In addition, it asserts that other young men coached by Usvyatsov later became members of Putin’s inner circle, including two powerful entrepreneurs – Arkady Rotenberg and his brother, Boris – as well as Vasily Shestakov, a State Duma legislator. The article also claims that Usvyatsov in 1970 arranged for Putin’s admission to the prestigious Law School at Leningrad State University. Putin reportedly gained a spot under an athletic quota.

In 1992, when Usvyatsov was released after serving his second jail term, Putin had already retired from the KGB, and was serving as a top official in St. Petersburg’s city government. At this point, the article states that Usvyatsov was a prominent member of the so-called Tambov Gang, a group that had become notorious in St. Petersburg for engaging in a wide variety of criminal activity. Two years later, Usvyatsov was killed in an apparently organized crime-related dispute.

The article goes on to illustrate some tangential connections tying Putin associates to the Tambov Gang. The article also suggests the Tambov Gang’s links to people in power may have been a factor in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who was poisoned with a radioactive element in London in 2006. Before his poisoning, Litvinenko tried to uncover possible links between Putin and the Tambov Gang, and had contacted a gang member who had moved to Spain.

An almost 500-page criminal complaint filed in a Spanish court last May alleged that some Putin political allies assisted members of the Tambov Gang, operating in Spain, in laundering money, according to Western news reports. Among the individuals identified in the Spanish court documents is Vladislav Reznik, who is a deputy chair of the Duma’s Finance Committee and serves as a top official in Putin’s ruling United Russia party. The Spanish criminal complaint was reportedly based on a decade-long investigation that included thousands of wiretaps and detailed examinations of property records and wire transactions.

Putin, via his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed the allegations contained in the Spanish complaint as “total nonsense,” Bloomberg News reported.

In 2007, Vladimir Kumarin, who at the time was reputedly the head of the Tambov Gang, was suddenly arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Spanish authorities monitored Tambov Gang members’ phone conversations in Spain. And, according to the Spanish court documents, several reputed gang members indicated that Kumarin was jailed on the order of an unnamed individual who was referred to only as “the Tsar.”

Three days after the “Companions in the Fight” article appeared, a popular journalist Viktor Shenderovich retold the story during a talk-show broadcast by the radio station Ekho Moskvy, which is the only major opposition media outlet still available in Russia. Almost immediately after it appeared, the show was taken down from the radio’s website and its listing was removed from the schedule of past programs. The program’s sudden disappearance merely heightened interest in the show and the original blog item.

Meanwhile, on December 29, a Russian film director, Valery Balayan, presented in Kyiv his documentary “Xуизмистерпутин,” a play on words that transliterated from the Cyrillic means, “Who is Mr. Putin.”

The documentary focuses on Putin’s time in St. Petersburg’s city government, working under then-mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. It covers an episode in which Putin, acting in his capacity as chair of the city’s Foreign Relations Committee, allegedly engineered a deal in 1991 to swap raw materials, including timber, oil and rare earth elements, for food. At the time of the deal, the Soviet Union had just imploded, and the city faced food shortages due to the collapsing economy and dysfunctional distribution system.

Citing Marina Salie, a former chairwoman of the St. Petersburg food committee (1990-1993), the documentary alleges the St. Petersburg government entered into contracts with dubious companies and fly-by-night firms. According to Salie, Putin signed export licenses, despite lacking the proper authority to do so. Various businesses received a total of $122 million for their exports, but the city never received any foreign food imports, Salie asserted in the documentary.

In his biography, Putin denied the existence of these licenses. Salie in the film exhibits copies of what she asserts are the licenses signed by Putin.

Much of the information contained in the “Companions” piece is impossible to independently verify. But the article creates an intriguing framework in which to evaluate Putin’s governing style.

[PGR88]

The Soviets destroyed civil society completely in the name of Marxist politics. In such extreme cases, all that remain are power (the KGB and the party) and money (the bureaucracy and the mafia).

In effect, anyone who came to the fore in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union had to come from either the KGB or the mafia.

[goldstategop]

Every one in the elite turned in their party cards and became post-Communist politicians and bureaucrats.

[Regulator]

What’s shocking?

Communism is nothing more then a pure form of gangsterism. The concept of individual ownership is obliterated in favor of total ownership by The Gang....i.e., The State.

And The State is self selecting, and a small group at that.

No one is allowed to question The State and obedience is absolute.

If that isn’t a straight out Mafia, what is?

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks nickcarraway.

[ETL]

Putin, once critical of Stalin, now embraces Soviet dictator's tactics

Carol J. Williams, reporting from Moscow
June 11, 2015

Only six years ago, President Vladimir Putin visited the Polish port of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that threw off Soviet domination, and reassured his Eastern European neighbors that Russia had only friendly intentions.

Putin spoke harshly that day of the notorious World War II-era pact that former Soviet leader Josef Stalin had signed with Adolf Hitler -- an agreement that cleared the way for the Nazi occupation of Poland and Soviet domination of the Baltics -- calling it a "collusion to solve one's problems at others' expense."

But Putin's view of history appears to have undergone a startling transformation. Last month, the Russian leader praised the 1939 nonaggression accord with Hitler as a clever maneuver that forestalled war with Germany. Stalin's 29-year reign, generally seen by Russians in recent years as a dark and bloody chapter in the nation's history, has lately been applauded by Putin and his supporters as the foundation on which the great Soviet superpower was built.

Across a resurgent Russia, Stalin lives again, at least in the minds and hearts of Russian nationalists who see Putin as heir to the former dictator's model of iron-fisted rule.

Recent tributes celebrate Stalin's military command acumen and geopolitical prowess. His ruthless repression of enemies, real and imagined, has been brushed aside by today's Kremlin leader as the cost to be paid for defeating the Nazis.

As Putin has sought to recover territory lost in the 1991 Soviet breakup, his Stalinesque claim to a right to a "sphere of influence" has allowed him to legitimize the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and declare an obligation to defend Russians and Russian speakers beyond his nation's borders.

On May 9, the 70th anniversary of the Allied war victory was marked and Stalin's image was put on display with glorifying war films, T-shirts, billboards and posters. Framed portraits of the mustachioed generalissimo were carried by marchers in Red Square's Victory Day parade and in the million-strong civic procession that followed to honor all who fell in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.

Putin's embrace of Stalin's power-play tactics is applauded by many Russians and other former Soviet citizens as the sort of decisive leadership they longed for while watching communism collapse around them. To the proponents of a reinvigorated Russia, reformist Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, are seen as having submitted Russia to Western domination.

Over the last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented dictator Josef Stalin's bloody 29-year reign as the foundation on which the Soviet superpower was built.

Stalin lives again, at least in minds and hearts.

Stalin "kept us all together, there was a friendship of nations, and without him everything fell apart," said Suliko Megrelidze, a 79-year-old native of Stalin's Georgian birthplace who sells dried fruit and spices at a farmers market. "We need someone like him if we want peace and freedom from those fascists in Europe and America."

Such sentiments are no longer confined to those with actual memories of the Stalin era. A poll this spring by the independent Levada Center found 39% of respondents had a positive opinion of Stalin. As to the millions killed, 45% of those surveyed agreed that the deaths could be justified for the greater accomplishments of winning the war, building modern industries and growing to eventually give their U.S. nemesis a battle for supremacy in the arms race and conquering outer space.

The share of Russians who look back approvingly has been increasing steadily in recent years, and the segment of those who tell pollsters they have no opinion on his place in their history has shot up even more sharply, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center.

He points to this year's massive Victory Day events as the Kremlin's message to ungrateful neighbors that they owe their peace and prosperity to the wartime deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens.

"The figure of Stalin is being justified through the war," Volkov said. "There is an attitude now that, yes, there were repressions and, yes, there were huge losses, but we won the war after all."

Victory exonerated Stalin's excesses, just as it does Putin's "strongman" posture toward neighbors and former Soviet subjects now outside the Russian Federation's borders, Volkov said.

Stalin's standing among his countrymen has waxed and waned with the political upheavals that have wracked the Soviet Union and Russia. He was so dominant a figure in Soviet citizens' lives by the time of his death on March 5, 1953, that hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Moscow in a chaotic outbreak of mourning when word of his passing reached a public taught to believe that life was impossible without Stalin -- the Bolshevik nom de guerre he adopted, signifying "man of steel."

Nikita Khrushchev, who finally prevailed in attaining the leadership after five years of Kremlin infighting, began a campaign of de-Stalinization in 1961, moving Stalin's embalmed remains from public display next to Vladimir Lenin's to a less prominent grave near the Kremlin wall. Stalingrad, the hero city that symbolized the Soviets' watershed battle to turn back the Nazis, was renamed Volgograd, and statues and busts were removed, and streets, institutes and schools were renamed.

But the erasure of Stalin's name and likeness served also to stifle discussion of his vast crimes: Siberian exile or death sentences for political opponents, collectivization of agriculture during which millions starved, deportation of minorities and property seizures that impoverished generations. It wasn't until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that a candid recounting of his era was attempted.

Even Putin, earlier in his presidency, fell in line with the collective spirit of criticism of Stalin’s errors. During the visit to Poland in 2009, a year after he had sent troops to seize territory in sovereign Georgia, Putin appeared to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the nonaggression pact that paved the way for war and division 70 years earlier was to be remembered as immoral.

The Aug. 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's secret protocols doomed Poland to Nazi occupation a week later and gave the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania to the Soviet Union. Millions of citizens of those betrayed territories died at Stalin's hand, in political purges, summary executions and slave labor camps.

The scope of Stalin's brutality remains a topic of heated debate. Late Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn once claimed in an interview that as many as 110 million died from the dictator's vast array of repressions between 1921 and 1959, including prisoners who succumbed long after Stalin's reign. Historian Viktor Zemkov, at the other extreme, puts the number of deaths attributable to Stalin at 1.4 million.

"The estimates of 110 million to 1.4 million speak for themselves -- a hundredfold disagreement," said Dmitry Lyskov, a state television talk-show host who mounted a failed campaign four years ago to put Stalin's visage on city buses to commemorate Victory Day.

The Russian Military-Historical Society, established by Putin in 2012, announced this year that a new Stalin museum was to open in May in the village of Khoroshevo, 140 miles northeast of Moscow. Stalin spent the night of Aug. 4, 1943, in a small wooden home there, the closest he came to visiting frontline Soviet troops during the four-year fight to defeat Germany.

The sanitized exhibits recounting Stalin's contributions to the war effort and postwar recovery were ready by the planned May 9 holiday. But the opening was postponed amid local opposition led by the Tver regional leader of Memorial, a group dedicated to shedding light on Russia's totalitarian era.

Yan Rachinsky, a leader of Memorial's Moscow chapter, calls the museum "ridiculous," and Stalin's single night there irrelevant to the war victory two years later.

The stillborn museum was one of several official efforts to honor Stalin this year: A statue was erected in the southern city of Lipetsk, and splashed with red paint the night it was unveiled. A bronze likeness of the dictator was put up to mark the February anniversary of his 1945 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta, a Black Sea resort now inaccessible to most of the world as only Russian aviation serves the contested Crimean peninsula.

Stalin has weathered more than six decades of historical revisions to maintain his standing as a rival to the West, "which is the context in which he interests Putin," said Nikolai Svanidze, a writer and historian whose grandfathers died in Stalin’s political purges.

"Just as Stalin defeated the West 70 years ago by capturing half of Europe," Svanidze said, "we are defeating the West again today. Crimea is our Berlin, our Reichstag, and there is no way it will be restored to Ukraine in the foreseeable future."

Svanidze also predicts there will be no more credible elections as long as Putin chooses to stay in power. That, he said, is another parallel with Stalin's lifetime sinecure as Soviet leader.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-stalin-model-20150611-story.html

[ETL]

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts - in Russia and the West - have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..."

(continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

***********************************************************

"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[ETL]

How Russia arms America's southern neighbors

Ioan Grillo
May 9, 2014

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- Russia's push into Ukraine has put many on edge. But less known is that Russia is also strengthening its military links south of the Rio Grande and re-establishing itself as a power in the region.

Vladimir Putin has been strengthening military links here, and Russia is now the largest arms dealer to governments in Latin America, surpassing the United States.

Russia has even floated the possibility of building new military bases in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, and putting its warships permanently in the Caribbean.

In the midst of the Ukraine crisis, Russia's top diplomat Sergei Lavrov recently visited Cuba, Peru, Chile, and Nicaragua, where he announced that Russia would also pour money into the new Central American canal project. ..."

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/140508/russian-arms-military-trade-latin-america
_______________________________________________________________________

Russia Boosts Arms, Training for Leftist Latin Militaries

Moscow defense minister inks deals with Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua for joint exercises

BY: Bill Gertz
February 20, 2015

Russia agreed to provide military training for three leftist regimes in Latin America and increase military visits and exercises following a visit last week to the region by Moscow's Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu, Pentagon officials said.

Shoygu met with defense and military leaders in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and signed several agreements on warship visits and military training during the visit, which ran from Feb. 11 to 14. It is not clear whether any new arms deals were completed during the visit.

Defense officials said the Russian leader is seeking bases in the region for strategic bomber flights that Shoygu recently promised would include flights over the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-boosts-arms-training-for-leftist-latin-militaries/

[ETL]

"Vladimir Putin's praise is 'a great honor'...

It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond," Trump said in a statement