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The image of the Russian Orthodox Church as the “handmaiden” of the state long prevailed in Tsarist Russia. After decades of Soviet persecution, this perception of the church has reemerged. Some in Russia have leveled similar criticism, as in a public declaration by three provincial Orthodox priests: “We urgently ask you to cease the shameful practice of blind collaboration with the authorities and every kind of dalliance with the wealthy in our country.” While church and state do collaborate in many areas, they have diverging perspectives and interests. The church’s adamant defense of autonomy stems from the calamitous Soviet experience....

The Bishop of Rome’s support is being called upon by two sides of Eastern Orthodoxy over the creation of a new independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church.VATICAN CITY — Within the span of a week, Pope Francis met with the spiritual head of Eastern Orthodoxy, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, and the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow. Both Constantinople and Moscow are locked in a battle over the creation of a new and independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which could shift the balance of power in Eastern Orthodoxy and impact the course of Orthodox-Catholic ecumenical dialogue. Pope Francis’ May...

Russian officials are reportedly destroying the records of gulag prisoners under a secret order passed in 2014, Russian media have reported. An estimated 3-12 million victims of Soviet repression were imprisoned in the gulag network of prisons and forced labor camps in the former Soviet Union. Registration records kept by the Museum of the History of the Gulag, now threatened with destruction, include the permanent records of those killed, as well as archival files detailing those who survived the gulag and when they were released. A 2014 inter-agency order labeled “for internal use” instructs files to be destroyed once the...

“There’s no politics here ….In fact, there's no clear no evidence that Hemingway was a Castro enthusiast, or critic, says Sandra Spanier, an English professor at Penn State University who is the editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. "He felt that it was important, as a guest living in another country, that he be apolitical," Spanier said in an interview.” (Los Angeles Times story on the restoration of Ernest Hemingway’s mansion Finca Vigia near Havana, Cuba, May 30.)  Got it, amigos? According to the Los Angeles Times a former KGB agent living in a KBG-founded and mentored Soviet satrapy while...

<...> To date, the criminal case of Hillary Clinton is closed. But most of America understands perfectly well that Special Prosecutor Mueller's investigation of the Trump campaign is not a means to an end, but a well-conceived cover-up operation aimed at shielding Obama, Clinton, and their closest associates. So far, there is not a bit of proof of collusion between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Instead, everything points to cover up the criminal collusion between Obama and his intelligence services, which began in London. In addition to American and British intelligence services, Australian, Estonian, Russian, and Ukrainian intelligence services participated in...

Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko has died after being shot at his home in Kiev, according to police. Mr Babchenko, 41, was reportedly found bleeding in their apartment block by his wife and died in an ambulance. After writing about a crashed Russian military plane in 2016, Mr Babchenko said he received death threats and left his home country. He previously worked as a presenter on Ukrainian channel ATR TV, and has written about his military service. Ukrainian law enforcement confirmed his death in a Facebook post, written in Ukrainian. Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko also told the media they suspected...

As Donald Trump shakes up the global order, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is being pushed closer toward a more predictable partner in Moscow. Now they're in the same corner trying to shield businesses from U.S. sanctions, defend the Iran nuclear accord ditched by Trump and rebuffing American objections to a new gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany. Rapprochement with Russia is now a core policy objective in Berlin. Even as the German leader seeks out Russia, Trump's spurning of global conventions on climate, trade and the Middle East is spooking her. "Putin likes the irritation that Trump has created with...

It was a typical December night in Moscow. The cold was biting, the snow thick and dry. In the Federal Security Service's headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, hundreds of intelligence officers met as they did every year to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Champagne glasses tinkled as the officers spoke in jubilant tones. Classical music played softly in the background. The hall grew quiet as Vladimir Putin -- the former FSB director who had been appointed prime minister a few months earlier -- stood to speak. "Dear comrades," Putin said. "I would like to announce to...

Shortened title. Full title: ANOTHER MUELLER GAFFE: Lawyers Defending Russian Firm Tell Court Named Employees DON’T WORK FOR THEM – Mueller MADE IT UP What a Sideshow — The Mueller Case Is Falling Apart Lawyers defending the Russian company Concord Management indicted by the corrupt Mueller team again called out Mueller’s liberal hacks and labeled their allegations as “made up” nonsense. As reported on Wednesday, Concord Management’s lawyers revealed that Mueller’s team of ignored over 70 discovery requests they had made for information before the case. In response Mueller’s team offered to give Concord Management’s lawyers a massive amount of...

The "Russian dossier" on Trump is as fake as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like the Protocols, the "Russian dossier" was the product of Russian intelligence services.It appears that the most exciting pieces of the dossier were included with the direct help of the SVR/KGB disinformation operation. Unfortunately, like the Protocols – concocted by the Russian intelligence service known as Okhranka more than a hundred years ago – Trump's "Russian dossier" will live for a long time and poison the lives and worldviews of many of his supporters. There may be as many people who believe every...

The further back you go in history, the more you learn. Take the case of “collusion” or the interference by one nation in another nation’s electoral process. There are a lot of examples: Barack Obama urging Brits to reject Brexit; Harry Truman’s propping up anti-Communist parties in post-war Italy, the Communist Party USA’s control of Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party presidential bid (in 1944, the Communists had formally endorsed FDR), British Ambassador Sir Lionel Sackville-West being accused of favoring Democrat Grover Cleveland (“For Canada and for England, No Doubt But What He’ll Do/But America Wants for President an American Through...

The highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Eastern Bloc says the Soviet Union orchestrated an anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda campaign in the Middle East four decades ago -- and the effects of the effort still reverberate. The Middle East was a key battlefield in the Cold War, and Moscow spent considerable resources courting Arab states in the region and vocally backing the Palestinian cause. Humiliated by the defeat of the Soviet-backed Arab states in their 1967 war against Israel, Yuri Andropov devised the operation to discredit the Jewish state and present Zionism as "Nazi-style racism" while at the...

Moscow commentator Ivan Davydov provides what may be an even more useful approach in his post “the genealogy of morality of contemporary Russia” which focuses on “how the current rulers are distinguished from the criminal world of the 1990s." The recent scandal involving Russian diplomats and cocaine shipments from Argentina renewed talks in Russia that the current Russian leadership are just like the criminals of the 1990s, Davydov says. There is some truth in this but it is not the whole truth – and recognizing the difference between the two related species is important. Critics often point to Putin’s use...

Trump=Stalin. Well, it does make for a nice change of pace from Trump=Hitler . . . On Joy Reid’s show today, MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance accused President Trump of using KGB tactics in the firing of Andrew McCabe and related moves. Said Nance: “[Trump’s move] comes out of an older playbook, the KGB’s playbook. . . . Donald Trump is literally playing by the Russian playbook on this.” Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Russia is now experiencing its own “end of history,” but it has turned out to be “not liberal democracy but a new turn back to the enslavement of Russian society, the consequences of which will be its further degradation with prospects that are dangerous both for the country itself and for the entire world.” The West generally and the US in particular need to display both wisdom and political will to effectively oppose the political challenge the Kremlin now presents. It has been an unwelcome surprise for Western publics how well the Kremlin and its ‘information forces’ have studied the...

Yuri N. Afanasyev, a Russian historian and former Communist loyalist who became a leading democratic politician in the late Soviet era ...died Sept. 14. He was 81. In 1989, Mr. Afanasyev helped found Memorial, an organization dedicated to exposing Stalin’s atrocities and commemorating the victims. That year he also joined the Soviet Union’s first freely elected parliamentary body, the Congress of People’s Deputies, which was created under Mr. Gorbachev’s reforms. But he grew disenchanted, doubting that its unwieldy mix of Stalinists, democrats and Communist Party functionaries could bring about change, and denouncing both its “aggressively obedient majority” and Mr. Gorbachev....

An FBI informant told three congressional committees in a written statement that Moscow routed millions to America with the expectation it would benefit Bill Clinton’s charitable efforts as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed through a “reset” in U.S.-Russia relations, the Hill reported. The informant, Douglas Campbell, said in the statement, which was obtained by the Hill, that Russian nuclear executives told him Moscow hired American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide because it would influence the Obama administration and specifically Hillary Clinton.

On a reporting trip to Gaza, Amman, and Damascus in 1994, I made a habit of asking Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leaders whom I met the following question: Did they think the Jews had a plan to dominate the world? I’ll never forget the enthusiastic answer of a pediatrician named Abdelaziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader, whom I met in his doctor’s office in Gaza. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “I have a copy right here.” And he pulled down from a shelf an Arabic-language copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was a response I heard again and...

Former CIA counterterrorism official Phil Mudd: The FBI people "are ticked" and they'll be saying of Trump, “You’ve been around for 13 months. We've been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played. We're going to win" (link: http://cnn.it/2GEPZD3) cnn.it/2GEPZD3

“There is no political opposition in Russia. Parties like the Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party are, in effect, sub-departments of United Russia, the ruling party. There is only one power vertical and everyone in politics is in it: some as a back-up plan, just in case, some because they expect preferential treatment. I don’t call myself an opposition. I am just a person of common sense. No one appointed me to my post, I was chosen by the majority in competitive elections. That is why I have more scope to act than government-backed officials. But where I can’t...