I have noted before that while the West is excellent at lying, the Slavic nations are excellent at bluffing but NOT lying. One can see this in the Russian approach to politics, especially during the Soviet years when allusions to prosperity were suggested but not confirmed, yet attempts to define lies as facts were often exposed quickly and easily.
I do not like dishonest propaganda from the Americans, and I do not like it from the Russians either regardless of form. Social problems are often times created for the purposes of attempting to control people, and this is a bad thing. Because it is critical to care for the good will of all as best as one can, knowing that people make their own decisions, and while the world is far from a perfect place, there are enough problems and one does not need to add to them, and attempts to do this very thing for political reasons need to be exposed for the good of all. The truth will always come out, so one might as well expose the truth now when it is hard but easier by comparison to deal with rather than wait until it is later and significantly harder to do the same thing.
A recent article from Zerohedge discussed, in what was a very obvious way, how Putin’s attempt at rebuilding the Soviet Politburo was a good thing, and how he was “saving” Russia from “the West”.
You can read the entire article here. I have chosen to highlight a few select points from it because its claims are some of the most ridiculous things- and I do not use hyperbole here, they are that extreme -that I have seen about Russia since arguably Soviet propaganda.
The first phase was rescuing Russia from economic, societal and demographic collapse. It was in serious danger of this when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin.
…
Once birth rates improved and demographic collapse was averted, the next thing to do was to reform an economy rightly criticized for being too heavily dependent on oil and gas revenues.
Again, I do not used hyberbole to describe this, but one would have to be on drugs to believe these words.
I have been writing for years on the problems with Russia. While I have said many times and I still hope (because I want the objective good for all people, Americans and Russians alike) that Russia will improve and for a while showed potential that she could, the reality is that Russia is not choosing to make herself better, but is attempting to return to her self-destructive Soviet ways.
Russia has not been “rescued” from any economic, social, or demographic collapse. All of those things have significantly worsened in the nation as a whole, with the major exceptions being certain areas of Russia such as Tartarstan or Bashkortostan, which are not even “Russian”, but veritable Turco-Muslim republics within Russia. The German, non-Russian Slav Siberian diaspora, and the Turkic peoples are doing the best, and of course the wealthy Jews close to Putin and who own all of the major state-run corporations and some of their Russian Slav comrades are OK, but the average Russian in most of Russia is suffering severely. The average Russian income is about $8600 USD per year. To put this into perspective, the average annual Polish salary is $11,000, and Poland is not only geographically smaller, but resource-poor in comparison to Russia and trapped between Germany and Russia.
There is no reason for Russians to be as poor as they are, but it is because they have no economy save for the harvesting and basic processing of raw industrial goods, or the exportation of cheap weapons to poor countries.
Russia has no economy because people will not invest in Russia since no one’s money is safe there. This is not because of “western propaganda”, but because Russian society functions as essentially Putin’s personal oligarchy that overtaxes the people, takes them for all that they have, and if somebody creates something productive, one of these oligarchs through a “state-owned company” moves in and steals the fruits of all his labors.
What is the point of building something that just is stolen and given to somebody else?
This is the reason why not only is there such an ongoing economic crisis, but why over two million Russians- mostly young people -have left Russia for good for Western lands. Problems though there may be, the Western lands have at least a degree of legal protections against outright financial theft, while there are NONE in Russia, and complaints do not work because the court system is bought and paid for by the same oligarchs doing the robberies, and so are the assassins who help people to throw themselves off of buildings if they say too much.
Demographically speaking, Russia’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is well below the US at 1.55 and continues to drop even with migration, as right now she is having her own migration crisis since the Central Asian nations (their equivalent to Central American migrants to the US) not only usually have about 2 or more children, but they are fleeing their nations due to political insteability and economic impoverishment. While Russian may earn $8600 USD a year, it is a lot better than the average Tajik, who earn about $1800 USD per year, or the Uzbek at $3000 a year, or Kazakh at $5544 a year. In addition, nations like Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan are not only poor, but they also have serious political violence and instability, such as that at least one quarter and approaching one-third of Turkmenistan has fled to Russia and is not gong to return.
Thus while the population of Russia dropped by over a million people in a year, this happened with massive emigration, natural deaths, and migration from Central Asia while also Central Asians continuing to reproduce normally as before. This is not just a demographic collapse, but the slow disappearance of Russian society itself if this continues, and there are no signs of it stopping, but only speeding up, and is the reason why Putin put Sergei Shoigu, a half-Tuvan half-Russian man in charge of the Russian military- because the future of Russia, at least for a lot of people, is basically the migrants.
Hostile analysts, both domestic and foreign, criticized Putin constantly for his tactics. Russia’s reliance on its base commodities sectors to revive its economy was seen as a structural weakness. But, an honest assessment of the situation begs the question, “How else was Putin going to back Russia away from the edge of that abyss?”
These same experts never seem to have an answer.
And when those critics were able to answer, since they were people connected to monied interests in the West who Putin stymied from continuing to loot Russia’s natural wealth, their answer was usually to keep doing that.
Don’t kid yourself, most of the so-called Russia experts out there are deeply back to Wall St. through one William Browder and his partner-in-crime Mikhail Khordokovsky.
Nearly all of them in the U.S. Senate are severely compromised or just garden variety neocons still hell-bent on subjugating Russia to their hegemonic plans.
This is typical of Russian attempts to lie that just fail. Yes, the west does lie, but at the same time, Russia uses this to try to lie about her own situation, which she fails at.
As I noted above, Russia has NO economy save for exporting raw or minimally processed natural goods. People in the West have no need to “loot Russia” because Russia herself does the looting. In fact, if there is a nation that is actually looting in Russia, it is the Chinese in Siberia, who are going over the border illegally, stealing Russian trees and destroying the taiga for their own needs, and Russia will not say anything because she knows that China could march in and just take Siberia without a fight because Russia has not enough people in her country to settle those lands.
It is ironic that Mikhail Khordokovsky is still mentioned because his scandal happened back in 2003, and seems to have been tied to political infighting in Putin’s personal circles for power between oligarchs. Neither Khordokovsky nor anybody else is attempting to rob the Russian people any less than what Putin or others have already done or continue to do, except his support of Western policies are just an attempt for black pots to point out the color of a single kettle they are no longer friends with.
Russia is not “rescued” from any abyss, but fell into it a long time ago and continues to fall. This is the entire basis of the Decline of Russia project put out by the Jamestown Institute, which notes that US policy towards Russia is not to actively destroy her, but rather to have Russia destroy herself by helping the current self-inflicted, naturally-reached problems that exist within Russia to stay at they are because they will destroy her in themselves. This is not to say that they are not doing anything at all, but that Russia has destroyed herself, and if she is cutting her own throat, the US just is helping keep the knife cutting as normal.
In the West these events were spun to suggest Putin is consolidating power. The initial reports were that he would remove the restraint on Presidential service of two consecutive terms. And that this would pave the way to his staying in office after his current term expires in 2024.
That, as always when regarding Russia, is the opposite of the truth. Putin’s recommendation is to remove the word “consecutive” from the Constitution making it clear that a President can only ever serve two terms. Moreover, that president will have had to have lived in Russia for the previous 25 years.
No one will be allowed to rule Russia like he has after he departs the office. Because Putin understands that the Russian presidency under the current constitution is far too powerful and leaves the country vulnerable to a man who isn’t a patriot being corrupted by that power.
The “you don’t understand” phrase is like that used by people who have psychopathic tendencies who say, when asked a direct question by an interviewer, that “you are not asking the right questions.”
Putin is not going anywhere. As others and I have noted, he sees himself as a new Stalin, he models his ideas after Stalin, he believes that Stalin is a spiritual guide to him, and that to make Russia ‘great’ again, he wants to revive the USSR. Putin’s new “commission” that he is setting up appears to function the same as the Soviet Politburo, which was basically a super-board that controlled all politics in the USSR going back to the first one established by the Jews Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), Hirsch Brilliant (Grigori Sokolnikov), Hirsch Apfelbaum (Grigory Zinovyev), Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Leon Trotsky), the Georgian Iosep Jugashvili (Stalin), and the Russian Andrei Bubnov.
The very idea of people who are not ‘patriotic’ would ‘corrupt’ the Russian ‘presidency’ is a joke because all Russian presidents are corrupt as are all of the businessmen tied to them, and is why people want to flee Russia save for very poor people from Central Asia who have nothing and live under even worse dictatorships. And it is true that no president will be able to rule Russia like Putin has, because the President will be subject to the new Politburo that Putin is establishing and will be a part of.
There are a number of issues that most commentators and analysts in the West do not understand about Putin. Their insistence on presenting Putin only in the worst possible terms is tired and nonsensical to anyone who spends even a cursory amount of time studying him.
For all those who study Putin and will talk about how much “better” he has made Russia, in spite of the nation getting poorer, more people fleeing, and more problems, almost nobody ever discusses how his mother, Maria Shelomova, is a Jew, thus making Putin a Jew, and how major Jewish leaders, including Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress as recently as 2016 have praise Putin for making Russia a ‘safe place for Jews.’
Now one may recall, as many have noted, that the October Revolution was a Jewish-led revolution that turned Russia into the USSR. The entire GULAG death camp system as well as the first Zionist state in the world, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, was done by Jews controlling Russia for Jews. The Holodomor genocide of Ukraine was created by the Soviet Jews Gengrikh Yagoda and Lazar Kaganovich, and while hungry Ukrainian people starved to death, the food that they grew went to the Jewish areas of Ukraine and Russia and was so abundant that it helped usher in the Yiddish Revival of the 1930s. Literally, many Soviet Jews and their government leaders set policy up so that they feasted in order that and while Ukrainian people starved to death in mass.
I don’t say any of these things because I ‘hate Jews’, but because there are certain patterns of Russian history here that are very serious, and seems as though the conditions are returning so they might repeat again, and yet nobody will talk about them. The first and last time Russia had a serious concentration of Jews into government- the USSR -it resulted in an annihilation of Russian culture, massacres of the Russian people, horrendous financial abuses, the persecution of Christians, and major problems that have pushed Russia today to the edge of collapse. Does one want to potentially risk a repeat of the horrors of the USSR, especially at a time when the current leader of Russia is a half-Jew who is deeply tied to major Jewish interests in business and world politics and speaks very positively, going so far as to model himself and aspire politically to potentially revive the USSR?
Putin understands that a Russia flush with too much oil money is a Russia ruled by that money and becomes lazy because of that money. Contrary to popular opinion, Putin doesn’t want to see oil prices back near $100 per barrel.
Because Russia’s comparative advantage in oil and gas is so high relative to everyone else on the world stage and to other domestic industries that money retards innovation and investment in new technologies and a broadening of the Russian domestic economy.
This is an illogical statement. Oil prices have been suppressed by US foreign policy manipulation because it hurts Russia because as I noted, raw materials- like oil -are all that Russia has for her economic engine outside of making cheap weapons.
If oil prices are low, Russia loses money. If oil prices are high, Russia makes money. Keep oil prices low, it causes an economic depression. This is not ‘popular opinion’, but basic math and economics. Saying that Russia doesn’t want ‘too much money’ is also insane, for who has ever heard of a government or businessman who does not want more money, regardless of who it is?
And the slow privatization of those industries is happening, with companies like Gazprom and Rosneft selling off excess treasury shares to raise capital and put a larger share of them into public hands.
Russian industries do not privatize. This is a bald faced lie. If privatization were happening, companies would want to move into Russia, but they will not, because the opposite is happening, as investors are fleeing Russia for fear of losing their money. As I have noted, Russia may be resource-rich and have a lot of potential, but if there is no guarantee of being able to protect something of one’s investment, and it can be stolen at any time with no recourse, what is the point of it?
Sometimes the most important changes occur right under our noses, right out in the open. Contrast that with the skullduggery and open hostility of the political circus in D.C. and you can which direction the two countries are headed.
Obviously the corruption in the West is there, but at least the corruption doesn’t hide itself, and usually gets reported on. Try that in Russia, or else one will end up like Aleksandr Litvinenko, or Maria Politkovskaya.
The reality of Russia is that it seems she is making her choice, and that is to return to Soviet ways. But at least in the Soviet Union, Russia had a population of 200 million plus, and a birth rate until 1950 that was between 4 and 7 children per woman. With a population now of 142 million and a fertility rate of 1.55 with natural deaths, migration, and emigration, another USSR may be the death of Russia and he break up into a series of independent warring nations in the future.