I don’t know what fantasies of breaking up Russia under “liberal” leadership “David W Lincoln” is peddling (talk about an endorsement – vote Kasparov Joe Ivan, and they’ll sell away your national sovereignty) but everyone who reads Pajamas Media should know who – or what – La Russophobe aka Kim Zigfeld is.
Kim Zigfeld most likely is a sock puppet for the Jamestown Foundation, a paper think tank set up in Washington D.C. by several CIA alumnus in the 1980s to host Soviet defectors and give them a job and a platform for fighting the Evil Empire with propaganda. That’s all well and good – I don’t make any excuses for the Soviets, I’m glad they’re history – but the problem is this think tank, zombie like, carries on, as if nothing has changed in the world since 1984, and that we still want to break up the Russian Federation in the same way that the USSR broke up. Because no matter how much they pose as liberals and democrats, that’s really the objective, to seize control over Russia’s natural resources and put them into presumably more competent hands, and to find ways to bypass Russia for access to oil and gas resources from Central Asia, even if it means doing business with Iran and an increasingly Islamist Turkey. Avoid Russia at all costs, even if it means getting in bed with the Islamist devil – that’s Z. Bzerzinski’s strategy outlined in The Grand Chessboard and highlighted when the old Pole takes credit for arming the Afghan mujahadeen beginning in 1979.
During the mid 1990s, for a time some in the West succeeded in these goals, in the sense that the oligarchs had Western partners like George Soros in acquiring the former Soviet industrial complexes for pennies on the dollar (or you guys think that money just dropped from the sky?). In return, these partners were rewarded handsomely with Russian oil, gas and metals sold to them by Khodorkovsky and others at WELL BELOW WORLD MARKET PRICES. Maybe you guys think it was a coincidence that global commodity prices collapsed in 1998, and then the ruble and Russian banking system (and nearly the Yeltsin government), but it wasn’t. All of these events were connected. The Russian government was too weak because it could not pay salaries and it could not do so because of massive tax evasion and capital flight, led by the same oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky who ruled the Kremlin roost and now in exile passionately proclaim their attachment to democracy (even as Berezovsky probably had Alexander Litvinenko poisoned to scupper the extradition case the Russians were building against him in London). However, the oligarchs miscalculated when they brought in Putin in 1998, thinking that he would be as easily manipulated as Yeltsin. They bet wrong, because Putin and his fellow KGB alumnis had been observing all of the oligarch rule with nationalist disgust waiting for their time to reassert Russia as a great power. In 2000 Putin immediately began a reassertion of state power even as he was blamed for the concentration of power in the presidency which Yeltsin himself, with the endorsement of Western advisors like Anders Aslund, assumed during the 90s when he shelled the Communist dominated parliament, passed emergency legislation, and in general kept the Duma as weak as possible. The idea that Putin destroyed Russian democracy by abolishing regional rigged elections for governorships that were bought and sold for vastly more money than Blagojevich ever dreamed about scamming is a joke.
Just ask yourself: why did the U.S. have hundreds of Marines, advisors, defense contractors and NGO bureaucrats in Georgia on the eve of the August 2008 war? Why did Congressman Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) publically say that he saw intelligence showing that Georgia was preparing an offensive to retake South Ossetia months in advance? Why did Soros and others connected to various Western governments funnel so much money to NGOs during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine? Why do we insist on free markets except when it comes to Ukraine actually paying the same price Germans pay for the same Russian gas (in that case, poor Orange government is always a victim of Kremlin “energy imperialism”).
Anyway, get a clue people. The Cold War didn’t end in 1991, it just changed into a different sort of game. And this game can be dangerous, if you happen to be a civilian in South Ossetia who is getting shelled by Georgian forces trained by American Marines, or a Ukrainian who would prefer union with Russia to having your country dominated by a Western backed clique of oligarchs who represent a tiny minority of the Ukrainian population.
