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To: GodGunsGuts
Russia is run by the KGB.

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


76 posted on 01/26/2016 2:45:42 PM PST by ETL (Ted Cruz 2016!! -- For a better, safer America)
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To: ETL
Russia is run by the KGB.

Probably because everyone else in Russia was incompetent or drunk. It wast he only competent and professional branch of the USSR remaining when it collapsed. I mean look at Yeltsin.....

77 posted on 01/26/2016 2:46:57 PM PST by Trumpinator ("Are you Batman?" the boy asked. "I am Batman," Trump said.)
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To: ETL; All

“...Litvinenko was a former FSB (Federal Security Service) agent who broke from the group when he accused his superiors of ordering the assassination of Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky in 1998. Berezovsky later died under suspicious circumstances in Britain in 2013. While in exile in London, Litvinenko wrote two books about the inner workings of the FSB and their efforts to bring Putin to power. But what probably sealed his fate was his allegation in October 2006 that Putin ordered the assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. A month later, Litvinenko would be dead.

But as Donald Trump says of Putin, “At least he’s a leader.”

http://spectator.org/blog/65259/putin-very-likely-ordered-assassination-alexander-litvinenko-trump-says-least-hes-leader


92 posted on 01/26/2016 2:54:54 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: ETL

Exactly right. New boss same as the old boss.


106 posted on 01/26/2016 3:14:17 PM PST by GodGunsGuts
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To: ETL

You quote thenewamerican.com. This site is known to be infested with Russian hating neocons living in the cold war.


138 posted on 01/26/2016 9:14:56 PM PST by Carnac the Magnificent
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