Putin the Terrible, we love you

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1844508.ece ^ | May 27, 2007 | Mark Franchetti

[RusIvan]

Two days after the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent, should be charged with the murder of his old colleague Alexan-der Litvinenko and demanded that Russia extradite him to face trial in Britain, I bumped into a Russian friend: worldly, pro-western and a fluent English speaker who has travelled dozens of times abroad.

I asked him who he thought had ordered the murder of Litvinenko, a fierce Kremlin critic who died of a massive polonium210 dose in London six months ago. My friend had no doubts. “Boris Berezovsky of course,” he said forcefully. It was the exiled oligarch and foe of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who had smuggled polonium into Britain and ordered his protégé’s death. Why? To sully Russia’s image in the West.

However absurd that seems, many Russians would agree. Even in exile Berezovsky, once one of Moscow’s most powerful political players, is regarded as a Machiavellian figure whose influence, they believe, knows no boundaries. Those who do not share that view, including Litvinenko’s first wife, believe he was instead killed by the CIA or MI5, enemies of Russia bent on weakening it just as it is becoming strong again. Few here suspect the FSB, as the KGB is now known, or the Kremlin. Too small a fish for them to get involved, they argue.

[DanielLongo]

It wasn’t Putin, believe me. I had him in my pickup truck eating ice cream. I looked in his eyes and saw a man I could trust. He would never do anything like this.

[Roy Tucker]

Yes, but why didn’t the West intervene? Moving NATO troops across the border would not have been difficult. Why was this not done?

Not difficult? There was the matter of superior Soviet ground forces in Eastern Europe that would have overrun Western Europe and the need to avoid direct conflict between the US and the Soviets that would escalate to nuclear exchanges.

Potsdam called for free elections in Eastern Europe. The Communists held two in 1945, one in Austria and one in Hungary and were massively defeated. End of free democratic elections in Eastern Europe.

[Roy Tucker]

My point was that your dates were wrong. You likely don't understand the roots of the Holodomor either. It was not about collectivization.

So Robert Conquest's seminal book on the subject, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine is all wrong? Collectivization takes away the incentive of farmers to maximize production so grain harvests continued to plummet throughout that period throughout the Soviet Union.

From Richard Pipes:

Following the disastrous famine of 1921 and similar failures of central planning, the New Economic Policy liberalized agricultural policy in the Soviet Union and the country experienced a recovery. That all changed in 1928 when uncertainty caused by Soviet central planning schemes created disequilibrium in agricultural products (farmers had grain which they held in reserve due to artificially low prices created by the Soviet regime)

Rather than rectify those problems, the Bolsheviks exacerbated the problem by ordering the seizing of grain from peasants. This soon gave way to dekulakizaton -- the liquidating of "rich" peasants -- and collectivization of agriculture. Combined with agricultural quotas that left peasants with almost nothing to eat, the results were predictably tragic. So predictable in fact that historians such as Robert Conquest believe Stalin intentionally inflicted the 1932-3 famine as part of a general assault on the Ukraine.

Conquest notes, for example, that in an unprecedented move in the autumn of 1932, seed grain was removed from the Ukraine and put in storage in cities -- a move which Conquest suggests shows authorities were concerned at protecting seed grain from hungry peasants who surely would have eaten it had they access to it at the height of the famine (9). More ominously, Conquest reports that beyond merely withholding food aid from the Ukraine, the Soviets stationed troops on the Ukrainian-Russian border to ensure neither food nor people went in or out of the Ukraine during the famine (Russia was spared the worst of the famine). As Conquest writes,

The essential point is that, in fact, clear orders existed to stop Ukrainian peasants entering Russia where food was available and, when they had succeeded in evading these blocks, to confiscate any food they were carrying when intercepted on their return. This can only have been a decree from the highest level and it can only have had one motive (10).

Regardless of the motives, the death toll was staggering. Conquest estimated 7 million people died from famine in 1932-3, with 5 million of those being Ukrainian victims. An additional 7.5 million died from dekulakization and other state violence from 1930-7 (11).

[Roy Tucker]

From Professor Thomas E. Woods:

As with all totalitarian regimes, Bolshevik Russia looked fearfully upon any expression of national feeling among its captive peoples. Bolshevik propaganda concerning the rights of the various nationalities within the Russian orbit masked the regime’s fear of the power of nationalism.

In early 1918 Russian leader V.I. Lenin attempted to force a Soviet government on the people of the Ukraine, who just one month earlier had declared their independence. The short-lived Soviet government in the Ukraine attempted to suppress Ukrainian educational and social institutions; we even hear cases of the Cheka, an early forerunner of the KGB, shooting people for the crime of speaking Ukrainian in the streets.

Although the Ukrainian people eventually re-established their republic later in 1918, their victory was fleeting. Lenin would doubtless have wanted to incorporate the Ukraine into the Soviet system in any case, but he was particularly adamant about securing control of the Ukraine because of its great resources. In particular, the Ukraine boasted some of the most fertile soil in Europe – hence its nickname, “the breadbasket of Europe.”

By early 1919, a Soviet government had once again been established in the Ukraine. But this new Soviet government was another failure. These events were occurring during the Russian Civil War, and the help of rival factions contributed to a second victory for Ukrainian independence.

Lenin’s regime learned a valuable lesson from these two failures. According to Robert Conquest, “The conclusion was reached that the Ukraine nationality and language was indeed a major factor, and that a regime which ignored this too ostentatiously was doomed to be considered by the population as a mere imposition.” When the Soviets gained control over the Ukraine for a third and final time in 1920 they realized that they would be faced with ceaseless uprisings and resistance unless they made major concessions to Ukrainian cultural autonomy. And so for the next decade the Ukrainians were essentially left alone in their language and culture. But a faction of Russian communists could always be found who believed that Ukrainian nationalism was a source of intolerable division within Soviet ranks, and that sooner or later the situation would have to be confronted somehow.

Fast forward eight years. In 1928, with Joseph Stalin securely in power, the Soviet Union decided upon a policy of massive grain requisition – a sanitized way of saying that they planned to seize grain from the peasants by force. The Soviet leadership, as a result both of poor information and of their characteristic ignorance of market principles, had become convinced that the country was in the grip of a grain crisis. Requisitioning worked, in the limited sense that it provided the regime with the grain it believed it needed. But it fatally undermined the peasants’ future confidence in the system. From now on, the potential revival of requisitioning, which the peasants had hoped was a barbaric aberration of the Russian Civil War (when Lenin had called for massive grain confiscations), would forever loom in the background. The peasants, naturally, now had much less incentive to produce, knowing full well that the fruits of their toil could easily be seized by a lawless regime – the same regime that seized, in 1928, the very grain it had promised the peasants they could freely produce and sell.

It was only a matter of time before the regime decided to embark upon farm collectivization, since the abolition of private property in land was an important aspect of the Marxist program. The peasants would be herded onto enormous state-owned farms. These farms would not only satisfy the demands of Marxist ideology, but they would also solve the regime’s practical problem of ensuring that an adequate amount of grain would be supplied to the cities, where the Soviet proletariat was hard at work carrying forward rapid industrialization. State-owned collective farms meant state-owned grain.

Some experts tried to warn that Stalin’s goals, both industrial and agricultural, were entirely too ambitious, and ludicrously at odds with reality. Stalin would have none of it. One of his economists simply explained, “Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws. There are no fortresses which Bolsheviks cannot storm.”

Hand in hand with Stalin’s collectivization policy was a brutal campaign against the large landowners or “kulaks,” who could be expected to lead any resistance to collectivization. It was a Stalinist fantasy that only the kulaks, as originally defined, opposed collectivization; the entire countryside was united against it. (Even Pravda reported an incident in which Ukrainian women had attempted to block the passage of tractors arriving to begin work in collectivized farming; the women shouted, “The Soviet government is bringing back serfdom!”) Stalin spoke of his policy of “liquidating the kulaks as a class”; they were the class enemy of the countryside. As time went on, the standard for what constituted a kulak became quite expansive indeed, to the point at which the term – and the terrible penalties that applied to all those to whom it was applied – could be applied to practically any peasant at all.

A history of the Communist Party authorized by the regime recorded that “the peasants chased the kulaks from the land, dekulakized them, took away their livestock and machinery, and requested the Soviet power to arrest and deport the kulaks.” As a description of the reign of terror carried out against the kulaks, that sentence does not even qualify as a bad joke. The regime, not the peasants, directed the process. Eventually, according to one eyewitness, it was enough to doom a man if he “had paid people to work for him as hired hands, or [if] he had owned three cows.”

The roughly 20 million family farms that could be found in Russia in 1929 would, five years later, be concentrated in 240,000 collective farms. Throughout much of Soviet history, it was not unheard of for people to be permitted to own, here and there, a few acres of land for private use. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985, the two percent of privately owned Soviet farmland was producing fully 30 percent of the country’s grain – a humiliating rebuke to those who had so boorishly claimed that socialized agriculture would be more efficient than capitalist agriculture, or that they could change human nature or rewrite the laws of economics.

At the same time that Stalin turned toward forced collectivization, he also revived the campaign against Ukrainian national culture that had been dormant since the early 1920s. It was in the Ukraine that Stalin’s collectivization policy met its fiercest resistance, though the process was nevertheless largely complete even there by 1932. But Stalin considered the continuing presence of Ukrainian national feeling an ongoing threat to the regime, and decided to deal once and for all with what he saw as the problem of divided loyalty in the Ukraine.

The first stage of his policy was directed at Ukrainian intellectuals and cultural personages, thousands of whom were arrested and given a mockery of a trial. Having deprived Ukrainians of people who might have been natural leaders of any resistance movement, Stalin then moved against the peasantry itself, where the real locus of Ukrainian traditions could be found.

Even though the collectivization process was largely complete in the Ukraine, Stalin announced that the battle against the wicked kulak was not yet over – he had been “defeated but not yet exterminated.” Stalin would now wage a war, supposedly against the kulak, among the few remaining individual farmers and within the collective farms themselves. Since by this point anyone who by any reasonable definition could have qualified as a kulak had long since been driven away, killed, or sent into slave labor camps, the coming campaign in the Ukraine would be directed at terrorizing ordinary peasants. They would be broken, physically and spiritually, and their identity as a people would be drained from them by force.

Stalin now began issuing delivery targets for grain that the Ukrainians could not meet without themselves dying of starvation. Failure to meet the requirements was chalked up as deliberate sabotage. Eventually Stalin authorized seizure of the peasants’ grain in order to meet the targets. A historian tells us of a woman who, for attempting to cut some of her own rye, was arrested with one of her children; after managing to escape from jail, she gathered together a few items along with her other son and lived in the woods for a month and a half. People were being given ten-year sentences for gathering potatoes, or even for gathering ears of corn from the private plots they were permitted to own.

Communist activists claimed that saboteurs were everywhere, systematically withholding food from Soviet cities and defying Stalin’s orders. They made sweeps through private homes, the kinder agents leaving a modicum of food behind for the family’s use but the more ruthless ones taking everything.

The result was predictable enough: the people began to starve, and in greater and greater numbers. A peasant who did not appear to be starving was considered suspect by Soviet authorities. As one historian recounts, “One activist, after searching the house of a peasant who had failed to swell up, finally found a small bag of flour mixed with ground bark and leaves, which he then poured into the village pond.”

Conquest quotes the later testimony of an activist:

I heard the children…choking, coughing with screams. It was excruciating to see and hear all this. And even worse to take part in it…. And I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity…. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland….

Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal anything was permissible – to lie, to cheat, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people….

This was how I had reasoned, and everyone like me, even when…I saw what “total collectivization” meant – how they “kulakized” and “dekulakized,” how they mercilessly stripped the peasants in the winter of 1932–3. I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain…. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for it….

In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes…. I [did not] lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe.

In 1933 Stalin issued another procurement levy, to be carried out in a Ukraine that was now on the verge of mass starvation, which began around March of that year. I shall spare the reader graphic descriptions of what happened now. But corpses were everywhere, and the stench of death weighed heavily in the air. Cases of insanity, even cannibalism, are well documented. Different peasant families reacted in different ways as they slowly starved to death:

In one hut there would be something like a war. Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else. People would take crumbs from each other. The wife turned against her husband and the husband against his wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut love would be inviolable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly the strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived on within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people died off more swiftly. Yet love, for that matter, saved no one. The whole village perished, one and all. No life remained in it.

The number of Ukrainian dead in the famine of 1932–33 has generally been given as five million. According to Conquest, other peasant catastrophes from 1930 through 1937, including enormous numbers of deportations of alleged “kulaks,” bring the grand total of deaths to a mind-numbing 14.5 million.

[Justa]

"Because of Yalta and Potsdam. Europe was divided into spheres of influence."

What a pile of crap. Stalin abrogated the agreements by placing communists in control of east european countries whereupon democracy and liberties were replaced with Soviet-dominated dictatorships. Millions were killed and millions more imprisioned particularly in former Axis nations (<<<< yeuh, that's a BIG CLUE about your political values). Any populations which resisted were brutalized such as in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Czhechoslovakia. The killings, imprisonment and Soviet invasions showed the nations of eastern Europe were nothing more than Soviet-run prison states just as many republics of the Soviet union were! This state of affairs was finally ended by the Polish in the 1980s when the Soviets failed to invade in response to mass strikes by workers' unions. Following the Soviet capitulation to Polish workers the rest of eastern europe and then even the Soviet republics rejected Soviet domination, all led by striking state unions following the Polish example.

So who hates the Russians most now? Their former benefactors of Eastern europe. They won the war and lost the peace. By installing their own brand of tyranny and oppression they sqandered the life-ending efforts of millions of Soviet soldiers who accomplished the destruction of 75% of all German Army divisions during WWII, securing the world's salvation from that scourge. Now for what, to be hated by europe 60 years on? What a waste! What incompetance!

What the Soviets did to eastern europe in the late 1940s is similar to the scheme Putin is supporting in Venezuela. I think the Venezuelans have figured this out by now and are eager for liberation from their new Soviet styled leadership. And who will save Chavez now? Will Cuba and Russia supply him more arms to kill his own people since they are not willing to send troops to defend him? So who will do Chavez's killing for him, his military? Lol, they will likely kill him instead.

You might be more convincing if you studied the history of nations and people rather than the politics of totalitarianism.

[M. Espinola]

That photo, although it looks like a gag it is not. Those robot looking dorks are members of the Putin youth cult called the Nashi (Ours).

Trained Russian Nashi 'rioters' were sent into Estonia by the Kremlin with instructions to instigate riots, which the Nashi street thugs did. A number of Russian Nashi instigators, rioters & looters were arrested by the Estonians. Other Nashi 'comrades' were captured while attempting to sneak into Estonia. Nashi hackers also brought down the Estonian Internet infrastructure, in addition to breaking into the Estonian embassy as Moscow cops stood by.

The Kremlin's new commissars

[RusIvan]

In early 1918 Russian leader V.I. Lenin ==

Lenin was never Russian leader. He was the Bolshevick leader. Bolshevicks included every ethincity of the world. Accually in the goverment of Lenin was 6 Ukranians.

[RusIvan]

Trained Russian Nashi ‘rioters’ were sent into Estonia by the Kremlin with instructions to instigate riots, ==

Lie. Nashi who ever they are didn’t cross the border. Estonians simply didn’t give them visas.

[M. Espinola]

Not a 'lie' Mr. Radio Moscow, your favourite Kremlin trained Neo-Soviet pack of Russian hooligans & street punks instigated the riots Nashi thugs went on their wild rampage in Tallinn , burning cars, breaking shop windows, looting whatever they could carry and attacking Estonian policemen, but did manage arrest scores of these Russian troublemakers.

Putin's storm troopers

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:440C72B2P769qM:http://adamsavenueherald.com/images/man-on-phone.png>

Putin's Nashi riot organizers were in Tallinn’s Grand Meriton Hotel long before any rioting actually took place, with a birds eye view from their Tallinn hotel rooms (paid by the Kremlin of course) pre-planning the best locations for their future riot.

One again Putin and his KGB facist régime showed the world what the Nashi savages are capable of when the media lights are shining on them.

Let's hope Nashi's riot 'coordinator' Mark Sirõk, was encouraged to reveal Moscow's plot to insight street violence in a nation no longer controlled by the Russians.

[RusIvan]

Putin’s Nashi riot organizers were in Tallinn’s Grand Meriton Hotel long before any rioting actually took place, with a birds eye view from their Tallinn hotel rooms (paid by the Kremlin of course) pre-planning the best locations for their future riot.==

The propaganda lie again. I repeat you that Estonia doesn’t give visas to NASHI members.

Let’s hope Nashi’s riot ‘coordinator’ Mark Sirõk, was encouraged to reveal Moscow’s plot ==

Mark Sirok? Who is he? His name sounds very foreign to Russian names.

One again Putin and his KGB facist régime showed the world what the Nashi savages are capable of when the media lights are shining on them.==

Seems like you quite “angry” with Putin:). So much exclamation words but of the lost sense.

[M. Espinola]

"The propaganda lie again. I repeat you that Estonia doesn’t give visas to NASHI members."

Do you really believe Putin's little Nashi clones showed up at the Estonian border wearing their Nashi merit badges saying. "We are Russian Nashi vermin coming to your country for the sole purpose of rioting, looting and drinking vodka by the gallon!.

LOL!

The Nashi were crying about their comrade Mark Sirõk because he was arrested by the Estonians while rioting. Maybe Nashi boy Mark Sirõk will learn his lesson.

Comrade, have attended a Nashi training camp yet? You could win a free condo as long as you excel at Nashi indoctrination of Russian youth.

[M. Espinola]

Of course the Russians did it. They’re the experts

[RusIvan]

“We are Russian Nashi vermin coming to your country for the sole purpose of rioting, looting and drinking vodka by the gallon!. ==

Seems like you very angry with Nashi:)). Accually this your exprssion shows kind of racism. If it is Russian Nashi then always rioting and drinking vodka? Do you know that In United States people drinks vodka too and even rioting time to time. Will you call them vermins?

The Nashi were crying about their comrade Mark Sirõk because he was arrested by the Estonians while rioting. Maybe Nashi boy Mark Sirõk will learn his lesson==

OK let Mark Sirok be Russian. So if he is Russian then no one should defend him? Is it because he is Russian make him undefendable? Anyways if Estonians arrested guy then they will take the obligation to prove his guilt. “Innocent until proven guilty in the just court”.

Comrade, have attended a Nashi training camp yet? You could win a free condo as long as you excel at Nashi indoctrination of Russian youth.==

So according to you everyone who disagree with you attending “Nashi training camp”? I’m just curious why so love the word “Comrade” calling me? This word is so uncustomary for me. Call me “Sir” if you want to pay respect.

[M. Espinola]

"Seems like you very angry with Nashi:)). Accually this your exprssion shows kind of racism. If it is Russian Nashi then always rioting and drinking vodka? Do you know that In United States people drinks vodka too and even rioting time to time. Will you call them vermins?

If people in the United States are drinking too much vodka and rioting (as you say) they would be classified as drunken out of control hooligans who should be locked up until the cool off.

However in the case of Putin youth cult instigated by the Kremlin whatever I stated goes double :)

In the case of Mark Sirõk, he got arrested in Estonia for instigating riots, and got what he deserved. Now the Nashi (best translated "we Slavic Russians") cult has turned this punk into a Russian martyr. Very typical for the Kremlin's propaganda machine.

Do you approve of the Nashi propaganda below relating to capture of Nashi 'commissar' and riot instigator in Estonia , the one and only ..........Mark Sirok:

Sir, I was under the impression Russians supporting the Kremlin's policies enjoyed being referred to as 'Comrade'.

3,000 Nashi Commissars Go to Camp

Putin's Nashi Commissars in training:

[instantgratification]

blah blah blah. Your post does not negate the accurate, historical fact I referred to. Churchill, Roosevelt, and later Truman knew they were dealing with the devil, and knew Eastern Europe would be sacrificed. I never asserted that the USSR was a benevolent world force, nor that it was competent.

You might be more convincing if you took off the ideological blinders and looked at the historical truth. Which is that Eastern Europe was sacrificed on the alter of defeating the Nazis.