Table of Contents =
• Previous SAC
• 1985:Beginnings of dramatic Soviet internal reform, called "Perestroika"
• "1989" = The opening of a "New World Order"?
• 1989:Collapse of Soviet-style governments in eastern Europe
• 1991au18:Unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev
• 1991de31: Dissolution of the USSR
• 1992fe07:Maastrich Treaty created European Union
• 1999mr25:Yugoslavia attacked by NATO airpower
• 2000+: Beginning of the "Putin Era"
• 2001se11:USA suffered terrorist attack
• 2004se10:Russia under mounting terrorist assault after tragedy at the Beslan school
• 2010ap02:The debate on God continues into the 21st century
• 2011wi:: "Arab Spring"
• 2011de10:de12; Moscow street demonstrations against election fraud
• 2013fa+: Ukrainian domestic and international crisis
• 2014ap24:George Soros interview on "The Future of Europe, from Iran to Ukraine"
• Return to earliest SAC
• Guide to SAC

<>1983mr:Mikhail Gorbachev, as Secretary of the Central Committee [TsK] of the Communist Party in charge of agriculture, approved breaking up large kolkhoz enterprises into small autonomous groups [87no3:KIARS (A. Nove) | Boldin:175-86 | Miller:53-74]

<>1983ap:Siberia, Novosibirsk | Tatiana Zaslavskaia issued a report which attacked "hypertrophy" of the Soviet political-economy
*--She stressed the importance of making more room for public initiatives and interests (civil society) in the processes of industrial production and exchange [DSC:35-47]
*1983au03:WPo published Zaslavskaia
*1984:Survey published Zaslavskaia [DSC:35-47]
*--Zaslavskaia's reform writings translated and collected in A Voice of Reform [review]
*--Soviet dissent seemed to come from high places, such as the powerful academic community of Novosibirsk
*1983: SAC editor's personal memoir of public lectures he delivered throughout this year on Soviet dissent, "Thoughts on Dissent" [TXT]
\\
*--[W]
*1986se10:KIARS (Theen says Z's report was written in 1982)

<>1983je:USSR experimented with autonomous teams or brigades in factories; wages in proportion to contribution
*--Foremen were given incentive to weed out goldbricks & drunkards = 7 of 39M workers targeted
*--Also autonomous worker brigades in agriculture, paid per harvest in many kolkhozes; private plots expanded

<>1983se01:Siberia, Sakhalin Isl. SW coast | Soviet interceptor jets shot down [South] Korean Air Lines flight with loss of 269 passengers and crew
*--The Korean airliner had deviated from its scheduled flight path and passed through sensitive Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin territories [W]

<>1983oc25:USA President Ronald Reagan sent the growing but recently inactive military into Grenada, a small Caribbean island just north of the Venezuelan coast (but still Grenada was a British Crown colony now being invaded by its USA ally) [ID]

• Over the next decade USA foreign policy became distinctly militarized
• A new policy and attitude promoted a series of USA aggressions and significant increases in military budgets
• 1986ap29:ERG carried AP report, based on Office of Management and Budget figures, which showed a 4.9% growth in the federal budget over the first five years of the Reagan administration
• The number of full-time permanent federal employees grew 3.5% over these years
• US House of Representatives Civil Service subcommittee characterized the Reagan budget in this way = "Contrary to popular wisdom, the Reagan administration has not reduced the size of the federal government. Rather, the administration has stripped employees from agencies it doesn't like and added employees to agencies it does like".
• Agencies related to the military received greatest increases
• When Reagan said "the government is not the solution, it is the problem", he asked his listeners to forget that the military was a big and increasingly large part of that thing called "government"
• A squad of US military commanders and defense officials became active on the lecture circuit and in the periodical press resisting these trends =
  • Army General John Vessey Jr. (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) [ID]
  • Air Force General David Jones (former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) [ID]
  • Admiral Thomas Hayward (former chief of naval operations) [ID]
  • General Lew Allen (recently retired Air Force chief of staff) [ID]
  • James Schlesinger (former Defense Secretary) [ID]
  • Harold Brown (former Defense Secretary) [ID]
• These experienced hands sought to counter what a pundit of the era called "Reagan's addiction to fabrication", a practice of threat inflation designed to alarm the public and promote expanding military-industrial procurement budgets

<>1984:French extremist nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen (leader of reactionary National Front) published Les Français d'abord, which expressed the severe anti-communism at the heart of European reactionary politics: The First Horseman of the Apocalypse: International Communism [P20:401]

<>1984fe:USSR | Konstantin Chernenko became First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party [TsK] upon the death of Yuri Andropov
*--Mikhail Gorbachev became Secretary in charge of cadres and the real actor [Kerblay,Grb | Boldin:ch2] [LOOP on "cadres"]
*--In this year, enterprises within 7 ministries were decentralized; model for 1987:law
*1984:USSR government Planning Committee approved "Sibaral" [acronym SIB(eria)+ARAL Sea], a plan for the diversion of Siberian rivers to the Aral and Caspian sea basins, a bold environmental/engineering project

<>1984jy24:Soviet officials moved to impose censorship on pop-arts or commercial-culture music (even listing the rock groups whose music cannot be played in the USSR) [PS&C:143-5]

• 1985:Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin published Ochered [translated as The Queue] which generalized on the characteristic Soviet phenomenon of long lines for service or for purchase of goods
  • The novel explores the psychology of "totalitarian" political culture
  • The full bibliography of Sorokin fiction could be said to represent a literary exploration of enduring managerial-statist qualities of Soviet and post-Soviet life
• 1988:Sergei Solov'ev directed "counterculture" film ASSA, starring Sergei Bugaev as "boy Bananan", part hippie, part dissenter
• Viktor Tsoi provided the rocking sound-track, "We wait for Changes"
• Alla Pugacheva [ID] rose to great fame as theatrical pop-arts figure [FLM "Arlekino" with scenes from the Moscow Circus
• Full appreciation of Pugacheva's strange awkwardness here requires familiarity with the fictional European character "Harlequin" (ID)
• Familiarity with the Harlequin also brings us into closer contact with the great love Russians feel for their circus]
• Censorship of public expression was an institutional feature of Soviet life from the earliest days to the end, but in the opening era of "Perestroika" institutionalized censorship weakened
• Pop-arts were coming of age in some kind of chronological harmony with the introduction of Gorbachev's Perestroika [ID]
  \\
  *--Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (IE=the 25 years before Perestroika)| ((SMT| ID Dnepropetrovsk)
  *--LOOP on Censorship

<>1985:Poland, Gdansk | Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays [excerpts, SFS:236-9]

<>1985mr10:USSR First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party [TsK] of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Chernenko, died [D&F:1-11]

• Mikhail Gorbachev replaced him [Walker:1-37]
• Beginning of Perestroika [Transformation, Reconstruction, Reform]
• Soviet political joke, a play on words, predicted disastrous results from perestroika, namely the complete collapse of the USSR
• And that is what eventually happened [ID]
• Long before that happened, these jokesters insisted that "Perestroika" was "Catastroika"
• Here were the goals of Perestroika, as they eventually became clear [with hypertext LOOP on each of the six components] =
  1. Glasnost [openness, öffentlichkeit, public scrutiny of officials, freedom of expression]
  2. Governmental reform (legislature, courts, executive)
  3. Rejuvenation of Communist Party while restricting its political/administrative monopoly
  4. Decentralization ("marketization" or "privatization") of the Soviet economy
  5. Termination of "Cold War"
  6. Restructuring the federal system of the USSR with a new Union Treaty
• 1985:Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet state officials exchanged congratulations [PS&C:315-17]
• Leon Aron, Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2006 [eyewitness reflections on an era of great changes]
• 1978:1990s; Sputnik, a publication of translated excerpts from the Soviet Press, gave clear indications of what Soviet authorities wanted the world to know about these critical years
• Another anthology of translated press publications = CDP
• 2010mr:Gorbachev reflected on the 25th anniversary of Perestroika [TXT]
  \\
  *--TGG:267-75
  *--Archie Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective
  *--GORBACHEV AND THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION [videorecording] 1 videocassette (58 min.) This program profiles Gorbachev's life, from his rise within the Communist Party to his role in the fall of the Soviet Union. Includes Glasnost and Perestroika, the effects of reforms in eastern Europe and German reunification, and regional unrest within the Soviet Union
  *--Films for the Humanities tapes on The Soviets

<>1985ap23:USSR Central Committee plenum set whole series of events in motion =

• Nikolai Ryzhkov became chairman of the Council of Ministers (Tikhonov out)
• Viktor Chebrikov became chairman of the KGB
• Yegor Ligachev became Secretary for Ideology (moving from Secretary for Cadres, giving that to Razumovskii) [LOOP on "cadres"]
• 1985je:MGW describes Gorbachev's "hectic 100 days" [Miller:75-108]

<>1985my08:German Federal Republic President Richard von Weizsäcker addressed the problems of the Nazi past, A German Plea for Remembrance and Reconciliation [P20:427]

<>1985:USA Philadelphia police bombed restless neighborhood, expressing a distinctly modern amalgamation of police/militarism [The Guardian [ E-TXT]

<>1985de:Kazakhstan felt intensification of anti-corruption campaign initiated earlier by Andropov. Kunaev removed from post
*--Other Central-Asian republics took up the campaign, G. Aliev in Azerbaijan and Eduard Sheverdnadze in Georgia, both of whom rose out of Andropov KGB "patronage network" [Derluguian, "Rouge":19]

<>1986fe25:USSR Communist Party Congress #27 considered the bold plans laid out over the previous half year [Boldin:119-22 D&F:29-31 Medvedev, Time:1-37 Walker:38-101!]

• 1986:1990; Five-Year Plan #12 approved
• "Western" observers said Gorbachev was building impossible hopes [1988oc20:KIARS, Remington]
• Andropov had earlier laid the groundwork for these changes
  • Andropov forced changes in Communist Party membership and Soviet governmental leadership
  • He replaced 70% of ministers and 50% of provincial party first-secretaries
• This Congress continued that Andropov trend when it brought in 41% new party members
• Compare with 13% renewal at the 1981 Congress and 11% replacement at the 1976 Congress [Kerblay,Grb:25-6]

<>1986mr09:MGW reported on Gorbachev speech about the "petty tutelage" officials exercised over the Soviet economy

• He said, "Allow industrial management to get on with the job"
• He closely linked political change with economic change = "Our socialist system can develop successfully only when the people really run their own affairs, when millions of people are involved in political life -- in workers' self-government, as Lenin saw it"
• The speech, as delivered, had more reference to changes in Communist Party rules than found in the original draft

<>1986mr01: Gorbachev policy of glasnost formally introduced [D&F:50-2, 133-4 | Melville:27-72 | Boldin:ch5 | Steele:1-7]
*--On Soviet everyday life in these months [Walker:154-205]
*--On rise of civil society [Steele:1-17]
*--On search for historical identity [Walker:202-22]

<>1986ap26:Chernobyl nuclear disaster focused world opinion on the dangers of nuclear power and environmental degradation in the USSR and elsewhere [CVG:157-73 D&F:32-38 Medvedev, Time:37-57 Walker:223-45]
*--More about nuclear power and environmental concerns [Eisen:273-80]
\\
*--Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR
*--Donald Kelley on Environmental protection and conservation in Russia and USA, Jamgotch, Sectors

<>1986my:Moscow meeting of Soviet Filmakers' Union elected Elem Klimov (1933-2003) president in a tumultuous session

• Perestroika was bursting out in spontaneous mobilization of young filmmakers determined to overthrow the old guard and break free of state control [CVG:230-46 87my6:KIARS, Dunlop]
• Klimov's given name "Elem" was devised by his staunch communist-party parents
  • The name sounds out two letters of the alphabet, "L" and "M", and those stood for Lenin and Marx
  • But Elem became a leading figure in creative dissent during the glasnost era (an era of open public deliberation on important issues, "transparency")
• In the previous year, two of Klimov's films were released to wide acclaim =
  • AGONIIA [Analytic TXT] (about the doings and death of the infamous Grigorii Rasputin)
  • IDI I SMOTRI [COME AND SEE] was a horrifying portrait of how World War Two transformed a feckless youth into a hardened guerrilla
  [YouTube]
  • The film was described as “an epic of derangement”
  • By film's end, the teenage hero was an obscenity spouting relic, wrinkled and grey
  • Klimov had direct experience of this sort of trauma
  • He once described how he and his mother and baby brother were evacuated on a raft across the Volga river during the battle of Stalingrad (his hometown) =

  The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. The river was also burning. It was night, bombs were exploding, and mothers were covering their children with whatever bedding they had, and then they would lie on top of them. Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it. [Reported in 2003no04:Guardian obituary]

• 1987:Tanguz Abuladze released his film "Pokaianie" [Repentance], an expose of a Stalin-type ruler
• From 1986 forward, officials deliberated on the introduction of new national laws on glasnost [PS&C:149-55]

<>1986je19:Moscow Kremlin | Gorbachev met with 20 or so writers
*--He asked their support of Perestroika, but he cautioned them against vengeful attacks on past policies and personalities
*--Gorbachev hoped the USSR might peacefully just leave all that behind and greet a bright new day

<>1986jy27:MGW reported that a 17-page manifesto circulated, "To the Citizens of the USSR", issued in the name of a "Movement for Socialist Renewal" [1986au03:MGW published full English text of manifesto]

• That same issue interviewed nationalist "village-school" author Valentin Rasputin)
• 1986au:Yegor Yakovlev became editor of MNo, and it quickly became "the flagship of glasnost"
• Interview with Yegor Yakovlev [CVG:197-212]
• At this time Sergei Zalygin became editor of Novyi mir [New world], another reform-minded publication
• Glasnost freedom brought a lot of anger "out of the closet", and a lot of the open discussion was unwelcome to Gorbachev and associates
• They tried to channel public deliberations in a direction beneficial to Perestroika

<>1986au:USSR government dropped Northern Rivers Project, perhaps averting environmental disaster, and perhaps responding to a growing environmental movement among Soviet intelligentsia and citizenry [1987je10:KIARS (Darrell Hammer)]

<>1986oc:ICELAND Reykjavik Summit held on short notice

• USA President Reagan and USSR President Gorbachev made a stunning agreement in the early part of their face-to-face meeting to set about abolishing all nuclear weapons over the following ten years
  • The devil, however, is always in the details
  • As the summit came to a close, the two leaders (one of them reportedly befuddled) were again at loggerheads
• Nonetheless, Start I and the INF Treaty did come out of this curious summit
• The beginning of the end of the Cold War was at hand
• US Secretary of State George Shultz was the only high administration official to support Reagan's shocking proposals at Reykjavik
  \\
  *2016oc09:Gorbachev wrote about Reykjavik 30 years later, Nuclear weapon-free world is not a utopia, but a necessity [E-TXT]
  *--Richard Rhodes [ID] subjected this Summit to close analysis and concluded that Shultz was maneuvered to the side by other national security specialists around Reagan = “No one [except Shultz] could cope with the thought of a world moving toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.” Richard Perle declared the president's dream of a world without nuclear weapons “a disaster, a total delusion”. Perle arranged to block a meeting of the National Security Council to discuss the disarmament proposal in order to prevent any sort of action in that direction. Key figures in the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with Perle. “They feared the institutionalization and acceptance of the idea as our policy”
  *--In USSR and USA, the Cold War was winding down, but the "winding down" met resistance on both sides
  *--There would be found other pretexts for inflated threats to national security to steer national policy again in the direction of fear-driven militarism

<>1986de10:Komsomolskaia Pravda published letter-to-the-editor about religion, written by world-famous poet Evgenyi Yevtushenko
*--The editors attached an official rebuttal [Melville:123-6]
*--Novels on religious themes published by Viktor Astaf'ev, Vasilii Bykov, Chingiz Aitmatov, etc [Melville:121-48]
*--This was a year of religious revival, opening era of glasnost in religion

<>1987:UNO World Commission on Environment and Development issued its first report, Our Common Future [excerpts = PWT2:426-34]
*--UNO was entering the global environmental movement

<>1987ja27:Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev speech to TsK Plenum. The meeting was delayed three times before Gorbachev got Communist Party Politbiuro support for his declaration of institutional or political reform [Medvedev,Time:77-108 IR9]

• This was the beginning of Soviet institutional democratization, scrapping the old "mechanisms" & created new "mechanisms"
• MGW correspondent in Moscow Martin Walker wrote, "That was the moment when Gorbachev changed the nature of Soviet politics"
• It now was clear that Gorbachev thought there could be "no real economic change without a political transformation" [88my22:MGW]
• Political institutional reform was very near the center of Gorbachev's boldest plans
• Gorbachev intensified his reformist program that went under the name Perestroika [P20:439]
• Document collection = Party, State, and Citizen in the Soviet Union: A Collection of Documents (1989)
• From the "grass roots", political action and social mobilization signaled a stirring of civil society such as Russia had not experienced since 1905
• Russians were clearly "ready" for governmental reform
  \\
  *--Giulietto Chiesa with Douglas Taylor Northrop, Transition to democracy : political change in the Soviet Union, 1987-1991
  *--Yury L. Abramov and Alexander N. Darchiyev, Political Parties and Movements in Russia, 1985-1992 (MVA:Synovia i docheri, 1992)
  *--Peter Lentini, Political parties and movements in the Commonwealth of Independent States (former USSR) (1992)

<>1987my07:Moscow meeting of Russian patriotic society Pamiat' [memory] [D&F:63-5 IR9:302]
*--In this year, Pamiat' attracted nearly 1000 to a rally in Dynamo Stadium [Hosking:10] GO 88fe26

<>1987:Russian émigré author, Vasilii Aksenov [Vassily Aksyonov] published his account of how he made his own adjustment or reconciliation to life in USA, In search of melancholy baby

<>1987je:Soviet TsK plenum took decision to embark on economic reforms, as a component of political/institutional reforms [DSC:69-82 | D&F:69-73 | IR9]

• TsK appointed new Secretaries =
  • Aleksandr Yakovlev (Ideology)
  • V. Nikonov (Agriculture)
  • N. Sliunkov (Industry)
• The Communist Party seemed ready to make some adjustments to a new era
• Gorbachev had to postpone his proposal to make multiple-candidate elections of Communist Party members
• Novyi mir. Nikolai Shmelev article about economic reforms and the tragic rejection of NEP sixty years earlier [TGG:77-86 | Melville:196-9] 1987jy17:SoR carried reply by I. Abalkin
• Interview with Shmelev [CVG:140-56]
• 1987oc17:Sovetskaia kul'tura and other journals exercised glasnost in the discussion of economic reforms =
  • G. Arbatov
  • Otto Latsis
  • Valerii Nosov
  • Vladimir Kostakov
  • Valerii Rutgaizer
  • P. Osipov
  • A.Z.Seleznev (esp.re.NEP)
  • etc [Melville:189-227]
• Economic reform faced strong resistance. GO 87jy:Ogonek & 88my:Novyi mir
• Interview with Georgii Arbatov [CVG:307-27]
• As a component of a larger set of changes implied in the program Perestroika, economic reform generated a lot of public interest and support, make possible by the policy of glasnost

<>1987je:Roundtable discussion on rock music and counterculture [TGG:154-68]
*--Re. Yurii Shevchuk [162-6. See bibliography p168 = E. Kanev Losoto, Aleksandr Milovskii, E. Panov, Vasilii Pustov, I. Sidorov, M. Timasheva, A. Sokolianskii]
\\
*1987:NYT article on heavy metal rock in the USSR [TXT]
*2004:Michael Urban and Andrei Evdokimov explored the Russian pop-arts scene and found deep cultural meanings and an intense popularity of "the Blues" imported from USA [TXT]
*--Documentary films on the great US blues musician Robert Johnson =
FLM#1
FLM#2| Part two at 30 minutes plus, meet Son House and Rbt Johnson| Then at 45 minutes plus, meeet Paul Butterfield Blues Band
FLM#3, CAN'T YOU HEAR THE WIND HOWL: THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF ROBERT JOHNSON

<>1987je:Tajikistan First Secretary revealed the Kurgan-Tiube disturbance at the trial of a popular Islamic preacher, Sheikh Abdullah Saidov, who sought to create an Islamic state along the lines of Iran [Kerblay,Grb:63-4]
*--Zalygin announced that Glavlit will censor only international and security issues in the periodic press [See Eisen:82-93 for examples of the new censorship]
*--Novyi mir published poems by émigré Joseph Brodsky | Glasnost allowed a new openness, but also a new freedom of expression, within limits.....
\\
*--LOOP on Censorship

<>1987je02:Izvestiia ran article about the nationalist voluntary society Pamiat' and other Russian organizations of that type [Melville:250-4]
*--Russian nationalism stirred earlier in the Siberian newspaper Literaturnyi Irkutsk [Melville:250-3]

<>1987jy:au; Ogonek interviewed Abel Aganbegyan [TGG:87-94]

<>1987jy15:Pravda ran Gorbachev article which stated, "Society is made up of concrete forces: the working class, the peasants, the intellectuals, each of which has its respective interests. One cannot infuse dynamism into society or make it viable if one ignores the interests of these social groups, and if these interests do not influence our policy in return." [Kerblay,Grb:38]
*--Th. Remington called this "socialist pluralism" [1988oc20:KIARS]

<>1987no:Gorbachev criticized the crimes of Stalin [D&F:74-5]

<>1987no:Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel delivered address in the German Reichstag, Reflections of a Survivor [P20:429]

<>1987no11:Moscow City Committee of the KPS dropped Boris Yeltsin, after a month of high controversy in which Yeltsin was accused of "adventurism"
*--Lev Zaikov, a member of the Politbiuro, replaced him [D&F:75-9]

<>1987de:USA, Washington DC Summit | USSR/USA negotiations, with presidents Gorbachev and Reagan playing the central summit-style role in these negotiations, led to INF treaty, an agreement to dismantle a whole category of nuclear missiles. The Cold War was winding down

<>1988ja08:Gorbachev said, "A magazine, a publishing house, or a newspaper is not a personal affair; it is the affair of the Party." [Kerblay,Grb:57]
*--At the same time, Gorbachev admitted that there were factions in the Communist Party. "Today more than ever before, it is clear that the battle of ideas, the diversity of opinion, projects, experiences, and plans in every sphere of life without exception, is the prerequisite of efficiency, vitality, and dynamism. Wherever this pluralism is excluded artificially, by directives, stagnation is the inevitable outcome." [Kerblay,Grb:99]

<>1988fe01:Pravda article on Pamiat' and the journal Glasnost', edited by Grigoriants [TGG:143-53] Yes, glasnost had its limits

<>1988fe04:USSR Supreme Court overturned the 1938:purge trial of Nikolai Bukharin. He and 19 fellow victims were "rehabilitated" [Eisen:78 | 1988fe14:MGW]

<>1988fe14:MGW reported removal of Gosplan chief and candidate-member of the Politbiuro Nikolai Talyzin, as a result of the many economic failures = 6B rubles worth of goods rejected as substandard;13% of all manufacturing enterprises effectively bankrupt

<>1988fe17:Literaturnaia gazeta article by Aleksandr Nikitin expressed growing resentment with "the Gosplan and Gossnab bureaucrats [State Planning and State Procurement agencies], who live untouchable in their comfortable apartments, concerned only with holding on to their empires." [Kerblay, Grb:106]
*--Examples of bureaucracy [Eisen:79-82] Economic reform threatened the interests of an ensconced elite

<>1988fe18:MNe article by Anatolii Butenko [Eisen:243-5] described Lenin's death [ID] and the transition to bureaucratic Stalinism
*--On this same day, Gorbachev speech warned about unrestrained and panicked search for historical truth =
"The quest for truth is no grounds for hasty judgments, which can only lead to superficial conclusions." [Kerblay,Grb:85]

<>1988fe26:Pamiat' society leader Dmitrii Vasil'ev interviewed [Eisen:34-37]

<> 1988mr:Moscow | M. Antonov criticized Aganbegyan [TGG:95-101]
*--In this year, Aganbegian published Economic Challenge [DSC:82-95]

<>1988mr13:Sovetskaia Rossiia article by Nina Andreeva, "I Cannot Go Against My Principles" [TGG:277-90 | Eisen:23-31 | DCE:29-2 | DSC:121-128 | IR9:302 | 88oc20:KIARS]

• Andreeva's letter to the editor gave voice to those who opposed Perestroika
• It was widely felt that Ligachev inspired expressions of opposition like this [D&F:1022-4]
• Andreeva's letter inspired a flood of letters to the editor [DCE:22-5]
• 1988mr27:Moskovkie novosti published critique of Andreeva [Eisen:31]
• 1988ap05:Pravda critique of Andreeva [TGG:291-302 | IR9:302] GO 89ap28
• Glasnost inspired debate even within the Communist Party

<>1988mr22:Izvestiia article on national independence movements [TGG:177-86]

<>1988ap06:Komsomolskaia Pravda article about the struggle to protect the environment  in Nizhnyi Tagil [TGG:135-42]

<>1988ap14:USSR entered into a 4-power agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan on a 9-month schedule [D&F:101-2, 156-7 | Steele:163-74]

• Soviet journalist Artem Borovik interviewed military ideologist Major General Kim Tsagolov about the tragic Soviet miscalculation as to the possibility of a "national democratic revolution" in Afghanistan [TGG:238-47]
• USSR honored its commitment and kept to its schedule for Afghanistan withdrawal, further contributing to the close of the Cold War

<>1988ap14:Pravda article by Aleksandr Yakovlev on the Stalinist purge trials [ID]
*--Exposed weaknesses of Soviet law [Melville:151]
*--Opened era of glasnost in law [Melville:149-87] cf.87ja04

<>1988my09:Political group, Demokraticheskii soiuz [Democratic Union; DeS] met to organize a second party to participate in Soviet elections

• The group dispersed, however, before the organization was complete
• DeS Platform [Eisen:134-5]
• Independent political reform actions were taken by the public, anxious to create altogether independent political parties
• Then followed the big 88je20 institutional projects

<>1988my18:Russian journal Glasnost' [Openness or Transparency] suppressed by official censorship [D&F:106-8]

<>1988my:Moscow summit, "featuring the unusual sight of a Soviet general secretary [Gorbachev] and an American president [Reagan] strolling amiably through Red Square, greeting tourists and bouncing babies in front of Lenin's tomb, while the respective military aides -- each carrying the codes needed to launch nuclear missiles at each other's territory -- stood discreetly in the background" [Gaddis (1990:2nd ed.):336]
*--Cold War seemed increasingly senseless

<>1988je04:Zaslavskaia interview [TGG:313-20] Another [CVG:115-39]

<>1988je17:Andrei Sakharov explained the need for Perestroika, but acknowledged the obstacles put up by the bureaucratic class inside the Communist Party [TGG:321-]

<>1988je20:Politbiuro approved Gorbachev's combative, bold plan for a new constitution of the USSR and significant institutional reforms =

• Creation of a People's Congress [Narodnyi kongress (NCng)]
  • 2250 deputies (1500 district deputies elected for 5yr-terms on a national basis, plus 750 deputies appointed by the Communist Party, workers unions, creative unions, etc.)
  • NCng would elect 400-450 members of a new Supreme Soviet [Verkhovnyi sovet (VSOV)]
  • NCng would meet for designated terms, while VSOV would be a permanent legislative body
• Elections would be secret and involve multiple parties and candidates
• One year was set to put this fundamental governmental reform into place
• The Communist Party began to resist more openly =

<>1988je28:jy01; Soviet Communist Party held its 19th Conference [KPS.Cnf#19], the first since 1941 [D&F:118-29! | Miller:109-113 | Medvedev,Time:181-253! | IR9]

• Greatest and well-known reformers were not elected as members, e.g., T. Zaslavskaia, Nikolai Shmelev, Gavril Popov, Mikhail Shatrov, A. Gullman
• Proposals to limit the power of the Communist Party met resistance within the Party and from the provinces [D&F:109-10, 114, 6]
• Gorbachev wanted clearer distinction between Communist Party and the Soviet Government
• He wanted elected Soviet government officials in central and provincial positions to wield more political/institutional control over budgets [88my22:MGW, Walker 8x11]
• Yeltsin spoke in support of these reforms and against reluctant fellow Communists. He was rebuked by the Party "establishment" [YAG:166-86]
• Despite obvious reactionary sentiments among Communist Party members, the Congress accepted Gorbachev's critique of the military budget and largely approved his report on institutional reform

<>1988su:USA historian Alfred Erich Senn witnessed growing anti-Soviet dissent movement and reported in Lithuania Awakening [P20:450]

<>1988jy05:Soviet resolution on glasnost, a central component of Gorbachev's perestroika [PS&C:156-9]

<>1988au31:Soviet Judge Valerii D. Zor'kin [Wki] and others discussed rule of law [Eisen:238-43]

<>1988se30:"September Revolution", a surprising defeat of Communist Party conservatives [D&F:137-40]

• An unscheduled meeting of the TsK reorganized the Secretariat and trimmed the Central Committee bureaucracy in half
• TsK departments were reduced from 20 to 6, with new Directors
  • Gromyko was retired, and Gorbachev replaced him
  • Others left the Politbiuro (Gromyko, Solomentsev, Demichev, and Dolgikh)
  • Vadim Medvedev replaced Ligachev (who became Secretary for Agriculture)
  • General Vladimir Kriuchkov replaced Viktor Chebrikov as head of the KGB
  • Agitprop would be run by Aleksandr Yakovlev [CVG:33+]
  • Anatolii Lukianov appointed
• These were mixed victories for Gorbachev in his struggle to reform the Communist Party [TGG:271 sketchy account] GO 89ap25

<>1988oc01:Gorbachev became president of the Supreme Soviet and announced that the new constitution would be democratic
*1988oc03:WPo graphic on the institutional structure of new legislative body, the People's Congress [NCng]

<>1988no14:KIARS, Andrei Sakharov expressed fear of fraud and deception in the People's Congress [NCng]

<>1988no23:Pravda interviewed B. Nazarov (head of the human rights department of VsS Juridical Institute) [Eisen:205-210, with more on human rights]

<> 1988no27:MNe#46 reported that the government disallowed 644 rallies or public demonstrations between 1988ja and 1988no

<>1988de07:New York City meeting of UNO, Gorbachev speech announced unilateral cuts of 500,000 from the Soviet army and broad pull-back of troops in Europe [TGG:329-52]

• Gorbachev was challenging the USA, but he equally challenged the Soviet "military-industrial complex" which had become so dependent on Cold War procurement privilege, wealth and power [Medvedev,Time:164-78 | Walker:124-38 | Lapidus,New:193-222]
• The unanticipated spin-off was the rapid and uncoordinated disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and rising challenges to the rule of Communist Parties along the western borders of the USSR, and possibly in China as well [ID]
• Within three years, this process swept over the USSR and washed it away [ID]
• Another unanticipated spin off, caused in part by the absence of a Soviet balance of power factor, was an acceleration of USA deployment of its now less restrained military strength [EG]
• The USA military-industrial complex was just as reluctant as its Soviet counterpart to demobilize in recognition of the Cold War's end
• Still, it must be said that the Cold War (seen simply as a confrontation of the USSR with other world powers) was over, pending Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan [ID], and also pending hesitant acknowledgment of the Cold War's end in Moscow [ID], but also in Washington and London [ID]
• The end of the Cold War was the one clearest achievement of Gorbachev's Perestroika [ID]

<>1988de17: Aleksandr Yakovlev on Perestroika and democracy [Eisen:131-3]

<>1988de31:Komsomolskaia Pravda interviewed Boris Yeltsin [Eisen:411-16]

• Yeltsin proposed cuts in space programs and the military. "In short, I am in favor of tilting the economy sharply in the direction of people" [145]
• This was not so much an affirmation of capitalism or laissez-faire, as it was a move against the Soviet military-industrial complex and an affirmation of democratic national economic policy
• He concluded by giving this advice to readers = "Get rid of the innate fear of fighting for your convictions. Do not lose faith in restructuring [Perestroika], despite all the difficulties we encounter in putting it into practice. Without that faith, without a staunch, daily struggle for social justice, we could once again find ourselves hostages to bureaucracy" [415-6]
• 1989fe19:Sovetskaia Estoniia published Yeltsin restatement of proposal to cut space and military budgets [Eisen:421-2]

<>1989:German Federation government official and political leader (founder of the German Green Party) Joschka Fischer described his party's environmental and social ideals, The Alteration of Industrial Society [P20:386]
*--Environmental politics on the rise, expressing themselves with more vigor than at any time since Harrison Brown's pioneering work

<>1989ja:Russian economist Aleksei Arbatov criticized the Soviet military-industrial complex [TPP:221-32] Yurii Liubimov replied [233-40]

• In this same year Ettinger Crump wrote a critique of US military-industrial firms [MIFs] [TXT]
• The generic problem of military-industrial complex might seem the most important example of "negative" convergence of the two "super-powers" in the Cold War era

<>1989ja07:Russian President Boris Yeltsin interviewed [Eisen:416-20] More on Yeltsin [D&F:157?]

<>1989fe:USSR ended Afghanistan War, the origins of which had deep historical, imperialist roots

• Soviets left the nation Afghanistan gripped in a desperate civil war
• Fundamentalist Islamic guerilla fighters, the Mujahedeen, armed by USA with sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry, vied for power with other groups
• Out of this process the Taliban arose as rulers of Afghanistan, and the story moved into a tragic new chapter
• Traditions of European imperialism were modified to meet needs of Cold War Competition

<>1989fe05:MNe interviewed Andrei Sakharov [Eisen:325-46, etc]

<>1989fe08:Soviet economist L. Abalkin interviewed [Eisen:146-54]

<>1989fe19:Yeltsin interview [Eisen:420-25]

<>1989fe20:Kiev street scene = Gorbachev meets and greets the people [Eisen:191-4]

<>1989mr09:Izvestviia debate on Perestroika intensified [Eisen:281-8]

<>1989mr21:Izvestiia article by Albert Plutnik stated, "The military super-department has for too long lived a life that is isolated, so to speak, from society"

• Plutnik praised USA glasnost on matters of military expenditure, but he noted the growth of "Black" military procurement programs in USA
• Indeed, USA "Black" programs had expanded significantly in the Reagan years
  • "Black" programs -- ostensibly for security reasons -- did not allow any outside scrutiny or even knowledge of how spent, no accounting oversight even
  • In 1985 the public got wind of them via Ralph Vartabedian's reporting in the Los Angeles Times =
    • The Pentagon expended (largely in California) about $30B a year, with no public accounting whatsoever, on military programs encompassing tens of thousands of employees
    • 1980:1986; Seven years of military budgets saw "Black" contracts increase six-fold, from 10% to 20% of the total military budget [1985ap21:ERG]
• Plutnik's Izvestiia article continued on the Soviet military-industrial complex
  • Secret Soviet ministries, e.g., Ministry of Medium Machine Building and Ministry of General Machine Building, stood at the top of "vast complexes" all shielded from public scrutiny
  • The WW2 slogan was "all for the front" but the end of WW2 brought no de-militarization
  • Instead, there has been a general militarization of political life
  • The military no longer represents the people
  • We need to make the civilian economy a new front line in time of peace, and the new slogan must be "all for the civilian economy"
  • How many generals are there? he asked. Do we really need them? [Eisen:265-71]
• Economic reform was closely related to other needed reforms, especially the drag and distortion of the national economy caused by the Cold-War military-industrial complex

<>1989mr26:Soviet elections sent delegates to the new People's Congress (NCng) [D&F:166-9 | Hosking:68-75 | Miller:114-26] GO my25 for first meeting

<>1989ap:Boris Yeltsin (w/John Morrison) completed text of his autobiography, Against the Grain =

• Emboldened by EEUR events, Yeltsin was willing now to disavow "obsolte [sic] nineteenth-century ideology" (204)
• Compare this with bold 88je:speech at Cng19 = "Yes, we are proud of socialism and proud of what has been achieved, but we must not rest on our laurels" (180)
• Compare also with statements on his favorite topic of social justice: "I now turn to matters of social justice. In broad outline, of course, we have dealt with these questions on socialist principles" (182)
• A final paragraph then follows, in which Yeltsin's own lack of resolution in his own mind shows through again
• Is he a blunt & resolute opponent of the Communist Party, or is he, like Gorbachev, opposed only to its failings?
• Is he not also in favor of its renewal, along with the renewal of the Soviet Union? =

  The latest news is that rumors are going around Moscow that a coup is being planned for the next plenum [of the TsK], with the aim of dismissing Gorbachev from his post of General Secretary of the TsK of the CPSU, but leaving him as Chairman of the Congress of People's Deputies. I do not believe these rumors, but even if it actually happens, I shall fight for Gorbachev at the plenum. Yes, I shall fight for him--my perpetual opponent, the lover of half measures and half-steps. These, his preferred tactics, will also eventually be his downfall, unless of course he himself realizes his chief failing in time. But for the present, at least until the next [party] congress, at which new leaders may perhaps emerge, he is the only man who can stop the ultimate collapse of the party. Our right-wingers, unfortunately, don't understand that. They believe that by the old mechanical method of voting by a show of hands they will succeed in turning back the clock of history. The fact that these rumors circulate is, of course, symptomatic. Our huge country is balanced on a razor's edge, and nobody knows what will happen to it tomorrow. It is slightly easier for the readers of this book than for me. They will already know what is happening tomorrow, will know where I am and what has become of me. They will already know what has happened to the Soviet Union. And to all of us. (204) [DSC:171-193, excerpts]

• Struggle within the Communist Party intensified

<>1989ap01:Pravda criticized Yeltsin [Eisen:425-31]

<>1989ap25:Further purges of anti-reform Communist Party members [D&F:172-5]

• Still, there were speeches delivered against glasnost [Eisen:248-50]
• NYT reported on Gorbachev's desire to purge the Communist Party, top to bottom [D&F:192-3]
• On struggle within the Communist Party [Steele:83-114]

<>1989my25:je09; Moscow the site of the first meeting of the new Soviet representative government, the People's Congress (NCng), which was the central institutional accomplishment of the Perestroika era

• The sessions were televised [IR9]
• Among delegates, dissenters were notably absent [D&F:181-88]
• On NCng [Boldin:219-38 | Steele:251-66]
• NCng described by Guilietto Chiesa, [DSC:157-171 cites Chiesa,Transition]
• See also Zaslavskaia,Second:217-18 and Eisen:154-69;174-6
• On March coalition [D&F:172-5]
• On "feuding" [D&F:179-80]
• Andrei Sakharov interview [TPP:336-45]
• As a cornerstone of a sound governmental reform, "Perestroika" gave the USSR a feisty and contentious democratic, representative assembly, the People's Congress (NCng), an essential political/institutional foundation for solid, democratic economic modernization
• Many "Western" capitals were as alarmed as Soviet conservatives to see the democratic vitality expressed in this new parliament
• In an astonishing move, USA withheld "most-favored-nation" import-export status from Russia, a vital and lucrative financial privilege which government bestows on certain nations, often linking that status to the recipient nation's adoption of certain profitable "Western" political, social and economic values
• Once again, we detect a great contradiction between, on the one hand, widely proclaimed domestic economic free-market, "laissez faire" principles and, on the other, massive and mounting nation-state governmental involvement in the globalized marketplace
• Russia desperately needed a financial boost, and Gorbachev's administration understood the need for political/institutional reform to underpin it [EG]
• But Washington DC decided that Russia was yet not quite "deserving of it" [LOOP on "finance"]
• China was thought by these same USA "hands-on" officials to be deserving of it, despite some disturbing developments in China =

<>1989je03:je04; Beijing | Chinese People's Republic authorities sent tanks and infantry with automatic weapons against demonstrators gathered on Tiananmen Square

• The event was well documented = [W#1 | W#2 (bad sound best muted) | W#3 | W#4 | W#5 | W#6 | W#7 | W#8 | W#9 ]
• Chinese democratic dissident Han Minzhu spoke out against the managerial elitism of the reigning Chinese Communist Party [SWH:464-7]
• 1989:1991; Three years of wide-spread global dissent and resistance to big-power oppression, concentrated in -- but not limited to -- "the Soviet bloc"
• 1988:The Palestine Liberation Organization issued a proclamation [SWH:470-3]
• 1989:South Africa | The Organization of African Unity issued its Harare Declaration against the racist South African regime [SWH:467-70]
• SAC entries that follow provide interesting comparisons and contrasts in the actions of leading nation-states and those under their authority =

<>1989je04:Polish labor union Solidarność [Solidarity] (nine years after it was formed) victorious in parliamentary elections
*--With Polish wage-laborers taking the lead, Warsaw Pact and Mutual Economic Union [SEV] disintegration accelerated

<>1989jy11:+; Siberian miners went on strike [D&F:190-1 | TPP:151-62]
*--Leningrad Izhora factory wage-laborers heard Gorbachev speech [TPP:293-312]

<>1989au:Stanislav Kondrashov criticized the Soviet military-industrial complex [TPP:241-50]
*--Yurii Liubimov expressed official view [TPP:233-40]

<>1989au19:Poland | Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarność member, became Premier
*1989au24:Mazowiecki addressed parliament [SFS:240-2]

<>1989se09:German Democratic Republic Ministry for State Security [Stasi] took alarm at growing number fleeing East Germany and issued Stasi Report on Motives for Emigration [P20:447]
*--Warsaw Pact nations were feeling the sharp backlash of Gorbachev's perestroika

<>1989se19:20; TsK plenum witnessed Gorbachev's successful political struggle to gain control of central organs of the Communist Party. Five recalcitrant members were dismissed [D&F:200-1, 216]
*--The Communist Party however was splintered and weakened by this act, rather than mobilized for new political life in the way Gorbachev's Perestroika required [TPP:69-76]

<>1989oc:Bulgaria, Sofia | Voluntary political movement, Ekoglasnost zelena alternativa [Eco-glasnost Green Alternative] sponsored an international conference on the environment
*--This movement contributed to the collapse of the Bulgarian Communist Party and state
*--Crystal Park demonstration led by Dimitrina Petrova, among others
*--Disorder among Warsaw Pact nations intensified, to the applause of "The West", even when Western elites grew alarmed at intensifying "New-World-Order" environmentalism

<>1989no:Novyi mir article by Boris Pinsker and Larisa Piiasheva measured success of economic reforms after 2 years [TPP:163-75]

<>1989no09:German Democratic Republic ordered opening of Berlin Wall [SFS:255-9]
*--USSR reaction [D&F:205-8 | On USSR & E.Europe in general, see Steele:174-88]
*--English journalist Timothy Garton Ash witnessed fall of the Berlin Wall [P20:453] Garton Ash bibliography

<>1989no09:Bulgarian Interior Minister Petar Mladenov used the power of the Bulgarian Politbiuro, with USSR support, to remove Todor Zhivkov from power (held since 1954) and to initiate a Bulgarian Perestroika

<>1989no17:Czech protests boiled over and became a national demonstration against Soviet-style power

• 1989no19:Czech opposition movement "Civic Forum" united opposition groups
• 1989de28:Parliament greeted return of Czech leader Alexander Dubcek as chairman, more than 20 years after his effort to introduce "Socialism with a human face" [ID]
• Next day, Czech playwright Václav Havel was elected president of a new Czech Republic, now separate from the Slovak Republic
  • Havel was a founder of "Civic Forum" and author of Farce, Reformability, and the Future of the World [P20:443]
  • 1990ja01:Prague | Václav Havel delivered New Year's Day speech [SFS:260-4]
• USA international journalist Thomas Omestad witnessed and reported on "The Velvet Revolution" [P20:458]
• Yet further Warsaw Pact disorder

<>1989de:Malta Summit | USA President Bush and USSR President Gorbachev ended the Cold War?

<>1989de17:USA invasion of Panama
The Cold War was over, but international chicanery did not, as a result, come to an end
\\
*--Eytan Gilboa on the invasion of Panama [TXT]

<>1990fe04:USSR-wide street demonstrations for democracy
*--Moscow experiences 100K citizens rallying on the streets [D&F:232-3]

<>1990fe05:Soviet TsK meeting heard Gorbachev proposal to abandon Communist Party monopoly on power
*1990fe07:Done [D&F:233-5]
*1990fe:Molodaia gvardiia article by Communist Party conservative Nina Andreeva, "The Striving for Truth Has Not Yet Been Suppressed" [TPP:111-120]
*--Again, glasnost allowed everyone some chance to express themselves

<>1990mr:USSR-wide elections of provincial parliaments. Popular Front victories [Hosking:86-91]

<>1990mr02:Russian-nationalistic, "conservative" anti-reform manifesto signed by 74, then soon 300 [TPP:54-64]

<>1990mr11:Soviet President Gorbachev urged passage of new law requiring democratic election of Supreme Soviet members and officers, and it passed [D&F:244, 249-50]
*--On this same day, the Soviet Republic Lithuania declared itself an independent nation [Afdr,2:241-78]
*--President Vitautas Landsbergis was interviewed [TPP:34-40 | D&F:217, 220-1, 241-3, 247-8, 252-5, 260-2, 263-4 | IR9:304]
*--Baltic republics neighboring on Lithuania followed the Lithuanian lead
*--Independence suffered from weak civil society [TPP:41-7]
*--Prospects for new Soviet Union Treaty darkened
\\
*--LOOP on "Eastern Baltic states"

<>1990mr15:Supreme Soviet elected Gorbachev President of the USSR [D&F:251-2 | Boldin:248-56 | IR9]

• Making himself vulnerable to charges of personal power mongering, Gorbachev moved ahead to enhance his executive authority, independent of the sluggish Communist Party, and in the name of more broadly representational government
• Political institutional reform oscillated through a complex range of centralized, decentralized and recentralized options
• But the larger structure of the USSR was crumbling

<>1990mr31:Russian pundit Aleksandr Shchel'kin described how the Soviet system pulverized civil society [TPP:11-7]

<>1990ap22:Izvestiia interviewed Stanislav Shatalin on the need for significant economic reform [TPP:203-10]

<>1990my16:je22; The Russian Federation's People's Congress declared Russia an independent republic, breaking from the USSR [D&F:264-6 IR9]

• Ryzhkov's economic reform was out
• 1990my29:Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet [D&F:267-70]
• Yeltsin suggested that Russian institutions combine with Gorbachev and the Soviet Supreme Soviet [Hosking:91-5 | IR9:305]
• Yeltsin's off-the-wall proposal was soon followed by a desperate governmental proposal from Gorbachev
• What chances for a new Soviet Union Treaty if Russia has broken away from the USSR?

<>1990my27:USA Professor Maurice Friedberg began account of his visit to Poland in the aftermath of marketization and "Westernization" [P20:481]
*--Along with the remarkable "progressive" changes in Europe [for examples, review previous year], once again "rightist" or "reactionary politics" emerged, a new variation on an older nation-statism with distinct police/military characteristics
\\
*--Luciano Cheles, et al., eds., The far right in western and eastern Europe (1995)

<>1990my31:Izvestiia featured Aleksandr Yakovlev's appraisal of Perestroika accomplishments [TPP:320-5]

<>1990je08:Yeltsin declared Russian law took precedence in Russia over USSR law [D&F:274-6]

<>1990je12:USSR People's Congress [NCng] decided to re-write the Soviet Constitution. A Constitutional Commission formed
*--At the same time, a Supreme Soviet Constitutional Commission formed, with O. Rumiantsev the secretary and composer
*--Dueling constitution projects?

<>1990je16:Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Aleksei II, Patriarch wrote political/religious tract, "Faith without Action is Dead" [TPP:48-53]

<>1990je18:Pravda article indicated that Yegor Ligachev supported the newly formed peasant union and opposed private ownership of agricultural land. He doubted the economic effectiveness of market reforms [TPP:326-31]

<>1990je20:je23; Moscow | Congress #1 of the Russian Communist Party heard Yegor Ligachev address [TPP:332-5]

<>1990je27:+; Soviet Communist Party Congress#28 witnessed "hard-liner" attack on Perestroika [D&F:280-1, 285-7] [EG: Vladimir Kriuchkov (KGB) and Viktor Alksnis (applauded when he claimed the Baltic states [Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania] were being "lost")] [Boldin:238-47 | Steele:115-31 | Brumberg,RAP:56 | IR9:304]
*--Ligachev forced out of the Communist Party leadership
*1990jy:Aleksei Kiva and R.Safarov expressed their views [TPP:77-88]
*1990jy12:Yeltsin resigned from the Communist Party [D&F:288-91]
\\
*--LOOP on "Eastern Baltic states"

<>1990jy06:NATO declared the Cold War over, but engaged in vigorous planning for NATO expansion [D&F:281-3]
*--Igor Malashenko explained why it might be better for the USSR to pull back strategically from Warsaw Pact posts in eastern Europe [TPP:251-61]
*--The 35-year-old Warsaw Pact was at an end, while the 41-year-old NATO seemed to swell in pride, self-confidence and ambition

<>1990jy11:Houston G-7 meeting discussed economic aid to the USSR [D&F:284]
*--Sergei Novikov on "Western" money, G-7, European investment in the Soviet economy [TPP:197-202]

<>1990au02:Iraq invaded and held Kuwait
\\
*--Bowker:39-49

<>1990se04:Soviet economist Stanislav Shatalin, "Man, Freedom, and the Market (Outline of the Program for Changing over to the Market)"
[DSC:206-216]

• Shatalin and Grigorii Yavlinskii composed their "Five-Hundred Day Plan"
• 1990se11:Gorbachev at first endorsed 500dp [D&F:299-301] but finally "flatly rejected it" [Brumberg, RAP:54]
• Perestroika seemed finished. Gorbachev zigzagged. He endorsed "radical" economic reform, then rejected it
• Five years of economic reform were at an end as a component of Perestroika

<>1990se12:Soviet-German treaty ended WW2 on the European front finally [D&F:301-3]
*1990se23:MGW. Nikolai Portugalov (Gorbachev's adviser on German affairs) announced that USSR supported Germany as 6th permanent member of the UNO Security Council

<>1990se23:MGW, Frankel on Iraq invasion of Kuwait emphasized how everyone had rushed to arm Saddam Hussein =

The bleak irony is that much of the technology and expertise that created [Iraq's huge arms industry] was bought by Iraq in the West, sometimes by deception but often with the silent acquiescence of Western governments. Sales continued even after Saddam's regime was accused of using chemical weapons against Iran & Iraq's own Kurdish citizens. Everyone, it seems, took a slice of the Iraqi arms pie. The Soviet Union, France, China, and Chile sold Baghdad much of its off-the-shelf weaponry. West Germany, France, Britain, the United States, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland & Brazil all sold the components, machines and tools -- much of the material with civilian as well as military application -- that are the building blocks of the modern Iraqi war machine

<>1990se24:Supreme Soviet granted Gorbachev power to manage the Soviet economy by decree [D&F:304-7]

<>1990no07:Gorbachev announced new plan for government by decree

• Gorbachev and the fifteen leaders of the Soviet republics would rule
  • There would be no Prime Minister
  • A Federal Council (Fdr.sov) would be made up of the heads of the 15 republics, now acting in a purely advisory capacity
  • This body, plus Gorbachev, would become the chief executive institution, and Gorbachev would have the final word, plus control over police, KGB military and "a network of Presidential Representatives" [!] distributed throughout the republics to enforce executive orders from the center
  • Gorbachev called this "a fundamental reorganization of executive power in the center...". The plan tended toward centering power on police/military institutions
  • Gorbachev's new power also included responsibility for distributing emergency food supplies
• Yeltsin opposed this statist move [D&F:314-19]
• This was no longer Perestroika but desperate maneuvering in an effort to prevent political disintegration
• Governmental reform, as a central component of Perestroika the past five years, was over
• Only Gorbachev's effort to construct a new Union Treaty moved ahead, for the time being

<>1990no13:Gorbachev faced 1100 disgruntled military officers and defense officials [Brumberg,RAP:56. For some speeches, see 1990:CDP#42, #47:7-14]
*--Anatolyi Butenko defended the Soviet Cold War pullback, but those whose position and power depended on Cold War military-industrial traditions opposed the pullback [TPP:262-70]

<>1990no24:Pravda published draft of the new Union Treaty [D&F:321-5 | Hazard, Beyond]

<>1990de17:Gorbachev announced a tightening of central governmental controls. This seemed to all to be a concession to Party conservative opponents of Perestroika
*--The following day, another kind of opponent, Boris Yeltsin, then the chairman of the Russian republic's parliament, attacked Gorbachev's initiative as a "restoration of the Kremlin dictate" [2001au14:MNe:15]

<>1990de20:Soviet government experienced big shakeup = Bessmertnykh in MID; Boris Pugo (KGB Major Gen) and Boris Gromov (Colonel Gen army) in MVD
*--Sakharov died
*--Was Gorbachev turning toward his erstwhile conservative opponents? GO 91mr24
*--Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, one of Gorbachev's closest allies, resigned in protest. "Dictatorship is coming. … No one knows what kind of dictatorship this will be and who will come -- what kind of dictator," Shevardnadze warned in remarks to parliament [D&F:327-30 | 2001au14:MNe:15]

<>1990de22:Yugoslavia | Croatian republican constitution introduced [SFS2:285-6]
*--Documents relating to origins of Yugoslav crisis [SFS2:273-88]
\\
*2017fe10:Reuters| "Croatian leaders tread softly in face of World War Two revisionism" [E-TXT]

<>1991ja02:Lithuania, Vilnius | Communist Party headquarters and Latvian printing facilities and major editorial offices seized by Soviet Interior Ministry troops

• In the following days, paratroopers also occupied a major Lithuanian printing plant
• Lithuania was the most secessionist-minded of the Baltic republics
• In November 1989 its Communist Party declared independence from Moscow and, in March 1990, the republic declared its own independence
• The declaration was suspended in June after Gorbachev imposed an embargo, including cutting off supplies of oil and gas [2001au14:MNe:15]

<>1991ja11:Lithuania, Vilnius | Military attack on TV center [D&F:336-45!]
*--Baltic independence movement in these weeks [Steele:189-213]

<>1991ja13:Lithuania, Vilnius | Soviet paratroopers stormed a regional television broadcast tower, despite protests by a few hundred people

• The troops opened fire, killing 15 and wounding about 100 people
• The tragedy was dubbed "Bloody Sunday", in memory of Russian events 86 years earlier [ID] [2001au14:MNe:15]
• When glasnost spread to Lithuania and other Soviet peripheries, and when it gave voice to separatist opinion and advocacy, many Perestroika officials as well as journalists were ready to restrict it
• An earlier free-wheeling Leningrad journalist, Aleksandr Nevzorov, now supported suppression of national-independence media
• As a journalist with automatic weapon in hand, he joined the troops in Vilnius
• Nevzorov was one of the more curious public figures who appeared on the scene in the Perestroika and post-Soviet years
  • Невзоров о своей молодости (Nevzorov on his youth) [YouTube]
• Nevzorov sustained his notoriety or celebrity into the 21st century =
• 2016fe11:Эхо Москвы :: Персонально ваш: Александр Невзоров [E-TXT]
• Nevzorov's blog assaulted standard Russian notions of religiosity "Lessons of Atheism"
• And he criticized the reborn and increasingly powerful Russian Orthodox Church = Невзоров уделал православных попов [YouTube]
• 2016ja19:In an interview, he rejected Russian policy with respect to Ukraine [ E-TXT]
• (Nevzorov) Провал проекта "Новоросия". Failure of the project "Novorosiya" [YouTube]
• Nevzorov rejected Aleksandr Dugin's neo-nationalist "Russianism" [ID#1 | ID#2] = Невзоров и Дугин о русских [YouTube]
• More hops about Nevzorov = [W#1 | W#2 | W#3 | W#4 | W#5 | W#6 | W#7]
• Glasnost in the late-Soviet period was entering a phase of splintering factions and bolder public conflict with power and within power. Highly flammable sparks spread from the collapsing USSR =

<>1991ja16:ja17; Latvia, Riga | Soviet paratroopers stormed Interior Ministry. Five people were shot dead. In Moscow, thousands of demonstrators protested the violence, but Gorbachev was unrepentant
*--The man behind the command to shoot was Interior Minister Boris Pugo, a future member of the State Committee for an Emergency Situation that would try to overthrow Gorbachev in August [2001au14:MNe:15]

<>1991ja16:Moscow Supreme Soviet, "Ob organizatsii i merakh po obespecheniiu provedeniia referenduma SSSR po voprosu o sokhranenii Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskih Respublik" [about this, Afdr,2:395]
*--Soviet authorities sought to halt rapid disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in anticipation of a new Union Treaty
\\
*--LOOP on "Eastern Baltic states"

<>1991ja17:USA, British and other allied forces began the bombardment of Iraq in preparation for an invasion of Kuwait, occupied recently by Iraq

• Gulf War was under way
• Many Russians protested [TPP:271-80]
• 1991mr31:MGW| Reprinted USA protest written for the WPo by Marcus Raskin, cofounder and fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies [ID]
  • Raskin questioned the wide-spread presumption that USA was a peaceful nation, chastised by the uncharacteristic adventure in Vietnam, restrained thus by what was called "the Vietnam syndrome"
  • Raskin said there was no "Vietnam syndrome", rather there was a "Vietnam paradigm" that guided USA in its relationships with the wider world
  • In fact, he argued, "the United States had been actively involved in war, Cold War, proxy war and preparation for war pretty steadily since 1940"
  • Citing only recent events, Raskin listed supply of materials, military assistance, CIA and military advisers for wars in Afghanistan [ID], Cambodia [ID], Chad, Iran [EG], Central America [EG] and Lebanon [EG]
  • In Raskin's view, the Gulf War raised the dominant paradigm to a whole new level =

    the president [George Bush I] showed that he could fight large-scale wars by committing hundreds of thousands of troops on his own say-so, that he could call up 200,000 reservists under authority granted him by various national security and mobilization acts, and if he so chose he could make the economy subservient to his and the military's will under the National Security Responsiveness executive order [ID]

  • Raskin's explanation of how this happened was this = The disintegration of the Soviet Union threatened to remove the justification for vast military-industrial budgets. Raskin was most distressed to observe that "Democratic Party leaders backing away from fundamental reevaluation of the war paradigm for fear that the national security state party -- that is, pundits, military officers, defense contractors and Republican politicians -- will call them pusillanimous and unfit to govern"

<>1991fe03:MGW | USA Gulf War in Iraq forced postponement of USA-USSR Summit
*--Gorbachev signed decree giving KGB & Foreign Ministry operatives the right to break into premises & seize property
*--He also strengthened police power on city streets in an effort to bring an end to rowdy demonstrations
*--Latvian protests for national independence grew in size and intensity
*--Shades of European imperialist past and the more modern police/militarism

<>1991fe06:After the bloodshed in Latvia and Lithuania, six republics -- Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and Moldavia, now called Moldova -- said they would not participate in Gorbachev's referendum on preserving the Soviet Union
*--The referendum was immensely significant for Gorbachev as a public legitimization of his attempts to preserve the union and forge a new Union Treaty
*--The increasingly popular Yeltsin supported the dissenters' position [2001au14:MNe:15]

<>1991fe17:MGW listed the "Influential hard-liners" in Gorbachev's USSR =

• Yegor Ligachev (former Politbiuro member) wrote in the newspaper Kuranty, "the events of 1989 in eastern Europe were a defeat for socialism..., a victory of imperialism and a benefit for NATO"
• Sergei Akhromeev (Marshall, top Politbiuro military adviser) featured in the newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia
• Viktor Alksnis (Colonel, head of Soiuz [Union] group in The People's Congress) argued that Gorbachev's "new thinking", etc., have
• "seriously undermined the prestige and security of the Soviet Union"
• Alksnis preferred a Soviet-style Monroe Doctrine, "our own isolationism" rather than Gorbachev's concept of "our common European home"
• Alksnis disliked USSR joining the coalition against Iraq
• Nikolai Petrushenko (Colonel) argued that "The West" was trying to hasten the collapse of USSR by providing secret financial support to independence groups in the Baltics and to anti-Communist Party political organizations, e.g., Inter-governmental group of radicals in The People's Congress

<>1991fe27:Belarus, Minsk | Gorbachev campaign speech at the beginning of a critical election tour, on the eve of nation-wide referendum on the new Union Treaty. Was Gorbachev ready for democracy? Did he know how to handle himself on the campaign trail? [TXT]

<>1991fe28:Gorbachev campaign speech said economic changes were essential for the future of the USSR, and that the military-industrial complex holds the USSR back. He warned that the rush for national-minority independence could be dangerous [TXT]

<>1991mr01:Gorbachev campaign speech dealt with dangers of extreme movement toward national independence. He stated outright that the past eighteen months have been a struggle for power. He touched also on the new Union Treaty and the threat posed by the Soviet military-industrial complex [voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks], left over from the Cold War [TXT]

<>1991mr02:Mogilev | Gorbachev campaign speech dealt with Chernobyl accident, which gave opening for a more general pairing of economic and political goals of Perestroika and the new Union Treaty [TXT]

<>1991mr09:Pravda and Izvestiia published draft of new Union Treaty [Dogovor o soiuze suverennykh respublik (proekt)]  [Afdr,2:230-8 | appendix contains many formal responses from USSR republics]
*--Yeltsin assaulted the new Union Treaty [D&F:346]
*--On nationalities in a federated republic [Steele:147-63]

<>1991mr17:Gorbachev's referendum on preserving the Soviet Union took place in the nine republics willing to participate [six republics -- Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova -- opted out]

• The question was: "Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?"
• The emphasis here was on the need for union, but under a new Union Treaty more suitable to the contemporary needs of the several republics that made up the USSR
• More than 80% of eligible voters cast their ballots and 76.4% supported the union [not all sources put the vote this high]
• Some republics added their own questions
  • In Russia, for example, 70% of voters supported Yeltsin's idea of an elected president for the Russian Republic
  • Seventy percent of Russians voted yes on this matter, while 53% voted yes throughout the USSR [D&F:348-50 | Hosking:105-6]
• None of the 15 Soviet Republics ran ahead of Russia in the race toward disintegration of the USSR
• Yeltsin so irritated Communist conservatives that, in late March, his opponents in the Russian parliament began gathering signatures to oust him from his post as chairman [2001au14:MNe:15]
• Yeltsin did not speak out widely on the new Union Treaty, but he seemed to provoke national independence at the top level, at the USSR level, for example, in the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and Georgia
• At the same time, as Russian President, he suppressed independence hopes in his republic, for example, in Tatar and Osetian territories [Brumberg, RAP:60]
  \\
  *--LOOP on "Eastern Baltic states"

<>1991mr16:mr23; Yeltsin campaigning [TPP:313-19]

<>1991mr24:mr31; MNo reports by Liudmilla Saraskina, "Comforted by Lies", stated that some were losing faith in Gorbachev, but others (e.g., Anatolii Sobchak, Yegor Yakovlev, and Stanislav Shatalin) interpreted the previous three months as only a tactical shift

• Shatalin scoffed at the thought "that Gorbachev has suddenly turned into a rightist, or that he had always been a rightist in disguise, is absurd -- as absurd as the tendency, prevalent in the West, to lump all army officers into one huge monolithic right-wing camp. I know the army, and I can assure you this is simply not so. And I know the KGB, too--even there, plenty of people want to turn the KGB into a normal and decent organization, and who support democratic reforms in general" [Brumberg, RAP:55]
• Despite his forthright protest, Shatalin's one year at the center of the economic reform stage was at its end

<>1991mr28:Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov ordered a three-week ban on public gatherings in Moscow, trying to prevent a rally in support of Yeltsin

• The rally took place in spite of the ban, with some 100,000 Yeltsin supporters showing up on Manezh Square
• Also in March, plagued by economic and political problems, a group of top Soviet leaders began drafting a special plan to introduce a nationwide state of emergency in the event of further deterioration of government control [2001au14:MNe:15]

<>1991ap23:Gorbachev, who reportedly supported the initial emergency plan, saw that the six recalcitrant republics were still restless = three of these in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), two in Transcaucasia (Georgia and Armenia), plus Moldavia

• Gorbachev shifted back toward the democrats
• He held a meeting at his dacha in Novo-Ogarevo [pronounced OgarYOva], attended by leaders of the nine cooperative republics
• They sought agreement on a draft of the Union Treaty that would (1) maintain a sovereign Soviet Union, while (2) enhancing the "federal" political and economic independence of its signatories

<>1991ap24:Novo-Ogareva Agreement (9+1) [new Union Treaty] signed [D&F:358-60 | DSC:235-43 | Miller:183-200]

• Signed by Gorbachev (for the central goverenment USSR) and nine republics = Yeltsin (for the much largest component of the USSR, the Russian Republic), Belarus, Ukraine, and the six "Central Asian" republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan
• The treaty was dubbed "Nine Plus One" [2001au14:MNe:15]
• These represented 98.6% of the territory of the USSR and 92.7% of the population
• The three Eastern Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the two southern Caucasus republics (Georgia and Armenia), and Moldova were absent
• The new Union Treaty replaced the 1922de:Treaty (1924ja13:Approved) [SSR.trt] [DSC:231-35 | Brumberg,RAP:53]
  \\
  *--LOOP on "Eastern Baltic states"

• Pavlov demanded that he be put in charge of part of Gorbachev's powers, especially in the economic sphere
• Two more future coup plotters, KGB head Vladimir Kriuchkov and Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov, attacked Gorbachev for neglecting the dangers posed by the capitalist "West"
• Kriuchkov spoke of a "Western" conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union from within by introducing liberal reforms and filling the Kremlin with "sleeper agents" planted in the 1970s
• [In general, do modern citizens recognize rabble-rousing demagoguery?]
• The parliament rejected Pavlov's initiative by a crushing 262 to 24 vote [2001au14:MNe:15]
• 1991je25:In a closed meeting of the Supreme Soviet [VSOV], Yazov, Kriuchkov and Boris Pugo spoke in favor of stripping Gorbachev of the presidency and transferring the office to Valentin Pavlov, a weak central cog
• Gorbachev fought back, causing gasps of amazement in the assembly when he named two leaders of Soiuz, Yurii Blokhin and Alksnis, as enemies of "social accord and constructive co-operation"
• 1991jy03:Gorbachev accused "hard-liners" of destroying the Communist Party from within [D&F:369]
• Immediate issue = what sort of economic plan to take to Brussels meeting of G-7
• Gorbachev hoped to blend the plans of Pavlov, Yavlinskii, Yeltsin and others [Boldin:256-78 | 91je30:MGW]

<>1991jy11:Soviet Congress of People's Deputies approved the general framework of the new Union Treaty
*--Throughout the month, Gorbachev was busy preparing for the first G-7 meeting to which a Soviet leader was invited
*--At the same time he worked on the details of the new Union Treaty
*--Russian leader Yeltsin and Ukrainian leader Leonid Kravchuk called for the agreement to give republics more independence [2001au14:MNe:15]

<>1991jy24:new Union Treaty [D&F:376-7]
*--VSOV created a Constitutional Court to struggle against organized crime [Steele:342-58] Yurii Boldyrev had positive view [353-8]
*--However, the power crisis mounted. Ministers within the VSOV were arrayed against Soviet President Gorbachev [265-6]

<>1991jy25:Last Soviet TsK Plenum approved new Communist Party Charter, backed by Gorbachev
*--The Principle of Marxism-Leninism as state ideology, etc., was dropped in favor of becoming "a party of social progress and democratic reforms, a party of social justice and human values, a party of economic, political, and spiritual freedom" [D&F:377-9 | DSC:243-53]
*--For the past six years, Gorbachev nurtured the fine hope that the Communist Party could renew itself and become the vanguard of Perestroika
*--Quite the opposite thing happened

<>1991au:USSR Siberia | A small group of scientists and environmental lawyers from Oregon traveled to southern Siberia to share ideas about conserving resources through scientific research and grassroots environmental work
*--They made a video tape to show some of the interactions of the exchange and describe some of the environmental concerns in the area around Baikal Lake, the largest freshwater lake in the world=
*--Logging Siberia [videorecording]. Producer/director, Sharon Genasci [Portland, Or.] : Rainbow Film & Video Productions, c1992 [UO Library VIDEOTAPE 01684]
*--Up-to-date information on Russian environmental issues can be found in the web-journal Russian Environmental Digest: To subscribe, GO-TO majordomo@teia.org. Elena Vassilieva [Vasil'eva] of the Trans-boundary Environmental Information Agency (TEIA) welcomes your comments at editor@teia.org
*--As so often over the preceding three centuries, science was called upon to inform and guide human action

<>1991au04:Gorbachev set a signing date of Aug. 20 for the first two signatories to the new Union Treaty, Russia and Kazakhstan
*--He then left for a vacation at his luxurious dacha in the Crimean Black Sea resort town of Foros
*--The details of the Union Treaty were kept secret
*--However, about five days before the planned signing date, its text was leaked to the press, causing outrage among hard-liners
*--Military-industrialists saw the Treaty as the definitive end to the Soviet Union and especially to their immense powers at the levers of the massive central government's military-industrial establishment [2001au14:MNe:15]
*--The new Union Treaty was, with the transformation of legislative institutions and electoral processes, a central component of Perestroika

<>1991au11:MGW| Vasilii Seliunin said the economic situation in Russia was "the sort of financial situation that causes military overthrows in South America"
*--Russia must slash its military budget
*--Yavlinskii commented that to let Pavlov run the ministries was like allowing a medic to run a hospital where all the patients have died
*--Yazov was making appearances at discussions of the new Union Treaty in order to protect the interests of the military managerial elite
*--Yurii Ryzhov (VSOV delegate) said 80% of all machine building in Russia was part of the military-industrial complex
\\
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>1991au17:KGB head Kriuchkov convened a secret meeting in Moscow of those who would soon form the State Committee for an Emergency Situation [2001au14:MNe:15]

<>1991au18:Representatives of the State Committee for an Emergency Situation, or GKChP, went to Gorbachev's vacation spa in Foros in an attempt to persuade him to abandon the new Union Treaty and agree to impose a state of emergency
*--Gorbachev refused and the next day the coup plotters implement their plan [2001au14:MNe:15]
*--The nearly one-year effort to institute a new Union Treaty had failed
*--The unsuccessful coup came to be called "The Fools' Coup" [W]
*--Boris Yeltsin played a leading and visible role in rallying opposition in Moscow
*--BBC correspondent Martin Sixsmith reported on the Moscow Coup [E-TXT]
*--Владимир Познер: «Я уехал, потому что больше не было сил разочаровываться» (1991au:Coup remembered years later) [E-TXT]
*2016au19 = 25 years on: Failed coup that ended the Soviet Union (PART 1) — RT News [E-TXT]
*2016au = USA WDC Kennan Institute, Wilson Center views on the 91 Coup attempt [ E-TXT]
\\
*2016au19:Новая Газета| Загадки августа 91-го [E-TXT]

<>1991de08:Minsk Agreement. "Belovezhskoe soglashenie" re. liquidation of the USSR [D&F:467-70 IR9]
*--Yeltsin (Russia), Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine), Vladislav Shushkevich (Belarus) signed
*--In the place of the USSR, the Minsk Agreement created The Confederation of Independent States [CIS]
*--91de13:Five Asian republics joined CIS [D&F:471-2]
*--91de21:Alma-Ata Accords approved by Russia with VSOV confirmation
*--CIS was now Russia +10 republics | 25 million Russians, ex-citizens of the USSR, now lived outside the borders of the Russian nation [D&F:473-6]
*--On concept of "Near abroad" [Lapidus.NEW:143-91]
*2016de13| Fifteen years after the event, Mikhail Gorbachev asserted that treachery killed the USSR| BBC News [E-TXT]
\\
*--LOOP on Gorbachev

<>1991de31:USSR dissolved into fifteen independent or semi-independent republics, seventy years after its official creation

• The resulting independent republics correspond to the fifteen republics within the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR, Soiuz sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh respublik (CCCP)] =
  • Russia
    Ukraine
    Belarus
    Estonia
    Latvia
    Lithuania
    Moldova
    Georgia
    Armenia
    Azerbaijan
    Kazakhstan
    Turkmenistan
    Uzbekistan
    Kyrgyzstan
    Tajikistan
• Mikhail Gorbachev's Union Treaty, under formulation for almost two years, was in shambles
• Gorbachev's first steps toward creation of vital, independent legislative and judicial institutions might otherwise have fed into the Yeltsin Constitution that followed two years later
• However, there is reason to think Yeltsin himself nipped those major governmental changes in the bud in favor of economic "privatization"
• Could this be compared with the pernicious post-1980 USA anti-institutional political doctrine which stated that "government is not the solution; government is the problem"?
• Accomplishments over the previous six years of glasnost survived, at least for a while....
• Some emphasized that the last great old-fashioned European imperialist power, the USSR -- as inheritor of Russian imperial territories -- had at last fallen, though imperialist-style problems persisted
  \\
  *2016:NCD:DUP|>Louis Sell|_From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR| ((UO ndr.gnr from late-1960s+))
  *2016ja:Новая Газета| «1991 год. Распад Советского Союза — американский фактор и судьба России» [E-TXT]

<>1992fe07:Belgium, Maastricht Treaty signed by 12 European Foreign Affairs Ministers, creating the European Union [EU]
*--Official EU [W]
*--Western European Union [W] was a military treaty organization closely integrated with the EU, but it languished in the face of USA dominated NATO expansion
*1930:1997; Website of documents on the history of general European integration
*--EU eastern expansion [W]
*--Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies [W]
*--The European Union [EU] was on the verge of creating a transnational constitutional structure
\\
*2017fe07:erotopics| "How the Maastricht Treaty has changed Europe" [E-TXT]
*--LOOP on EU

<>1992au:USA Idaho | Federal agencies, including the FBI, opened fire on the homestead of recluse, Randy Weaver and his family, with deadly results
*--Weaver's wife and son, plus a Federal Agent, lost their lives
*--The episode has been taken up as a major cause by many organizations. Search the WWW on the phrase "Ruby Ridge", to discover many, often flamboyant and "extremist", sites, EG=[W], also =
[W with USA Department of Justice investigation report]
[W with vulgar introduction to 1995je30:WSJ article by James Bovard on the investigation report]
[W with angry chronology of events]

<>1992se06:North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] [TXT]

<>1992 Fall:Chechnya,northern slope of the Caucasus| Russian army moved into Chechnya against rebel separatists
\\
*--Bowker:67-83
*--Johanna Nichols, "Who are the Chechen?" [E-TXT]

<>1992de:USA, through the UNO, invaded Somalia (eastern Africa), a historical first for the UNO, a pre-emptive or preventative "humanitarian" invasion of a sovereign nation

• The invasion was not coordinated with any Somalia authorities, but global TV cameramen were tipped off and carefully positioned prior to the dramatic night-time amphibious landing
• Before a year had gone by, hostility to the USA-led occupation grew among local "war-lords"
• Many were well armed as a result of earlier militarization of the country, funded and supplied by the both USA and USSR as part of their Cold War competition in the "Third World".
• 1993su:Armed hostilities led to the death of 18 USA soldiers
• The body of one USA solider was dragged through the streets and filmed for more global TV viewing
• There were events, and there were media events
• By the fall, USA was forced to pull out

<>1993:USA | Harvard University Professor Samuel P. Huntington joined the "new world order" discussion with The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate =

• Huntington asserts that "People have levels of identity: A resident of Rome may define himself as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner" [24; compare this short list with "Dozen Categories"]
• Huntington considers "Western civilization" to be the only "universal civilization"
• "Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures" [40]
• He does not explore the extent to which his list of "Western ideas" would please Italian contemporaries who live just outside Naples, to say nothing of those Italians there in the time of Mussolini
• The ubiquitous concept, "The West", was becoming more than ordinarily ossified and narrow
• Two women of the so-called Third World -- Ifi Amadiume of Nigeria and Madhu Kishwar of India -- offered their views on the relationship of their worlds with "The West" [SWH:439-46]
• The European imperialist legacy was still alive
• Consider Mike Bowker's views on the "Clash of Civilizations" [Bowker:11-27] and on the comparative promotion of "democracy" in USA and Russia [Bowker:155-167]
• Russia, friend or foe? [videorecording, 29m]. Host, Admiral John Shanahan / produced by Center for Defense Information ; segment producer, Stephen Sapienza ; principal analyst and scriptwriter, David Johnson. Washington, D.C. : Center for Defense Information, c1995 = "Russia is a nation with an emerging democracy, 20,000 nuclear weapons, a large military, and a shattered economy. Is this a recipe for disaster or an opportunity for the U.S. to forge a new relationship with our former adversary?"--Video label [VIDEOTAPE 03153]
• Era of "triumphalism" or "New World Order" also was era of Freedom of Information Act
• For example, a website, "The National Security Archives" began to publish remarkable tales about the actual conduct of US policy in the time of the Cold War
• A sound predictive essay by two seasoned writers = Thane Gustafson and Daniel Yergin, Russia 2010 -- And What It Means for the World
• Almost as if in direct response to the arch "Western Civ" perspective of Professor Huntington, Russian political cultural figures revived the notion of Russia as a "Eurasian" civilization, distinct from "The West" and "The East", and on track for a great future, especially in the lost regions of the old Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and in vital non-European border regions
  \\
  *2009:Marlene Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire| Eurasianism is defined as rejection of "The West" (northwestern Europe and its derivative cultures, those pillars of "Atlanticist" ascendancy in the modern world), rejection of the globalistic claims of capitalist market economics, and affirmation of a geo-political and (far more important) cultural heritage of the various peoples of Eurasia, the "heartland" of the world. The argument is a mirror image of Huntington's argument in so far as it adheres to a simplistic notion that world events are shaped by distinct and vastly different "civilizations" rather than by more uniform and discrete political, social or economic forces. Laruelle is bothered to think that the stark simplicities of "Eurasianism" flourish in Russia in the absence of various competitive ideologies and interpretations of the modern world. By implication, she is heartened to think that Huntington's stark simplicities are checked in the richer and freer world of intellectual exchange in "The West"

<>1993:Austrian Freedom Party leader and government official Jörg Haider published his right-wing political creed, Die Freiheit, die ich meine [Freedom as I See It] in which he addressed the issue of Multi-Culturalism and Love of One's Country [P20:404]
*--The powerful 20th-century innovation, statist radicalism, right-wing and left-wing, proved an enduring legacy, despite the widely condemned excesses of the earlier part of the century [ID] and the remarkable contemporary progress against it in eastern Europe

<>1993fe26:NYC World Trade Center the target of a terrorist bomb attack. Six died and one tower suffered significant damage, but the attack failed
\\
[W]

<>1993ap19:USA Attorney General ordered military attack on "Branch Davidian compound" in Waco TX

<>1993oc01:USA TV stations carried commercial ad selling to Americans video cassettes of Russian children's literature in cartoon form
*--Donald O'Connor was “host” of the infomercial and also supplied the voice-over for the extravagant Russian folk-tale character, Baba Yaga [ID]
*--O'Connor's pitch to American customers, American families, made four points =

1. USA is tired of violence and unhealthy role models in USA electronic media. O'Connor made specific negative reference to the dominance in USA children's media of cartoons with anti-educational values
2. In the USSR, from the 1930s on, Stalinist Socialist Realism [ID] crushed creativity and suppressed religion in the adult media, so all that creative energy went into children's media, relatively free of censorship [LOOP on "Stalin" ends 80 years later with an indication of how his legacy could be turned to the benefit of Russian commercial culture]
3. Thus, the grand Russian tradition of fantasy literature was kept alive in the Soviet period [but, by implication, has been destroyed by commercial pop-art culture in the USA]
4. So now American families, tired of the junk funneled through the networks to children, can tap into a marvelous survival of quality Soviet children's entertainment, available at $9.99 [or so]  Just dial this number..... [etc.]
   *--Pop-arts exploded onto the Russian scene
   *--Institutionally based censorship was everywhere being augmented or even replaced by elitist management of mass media where success could be had by "positive censorship" rather than "negative censorship" [ID]
   \\
   *--LOOP on Censorship

<>1993oc03:oc04; Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered military attack on Parliament after he issued an executive decree dissolving all Russian elected legislatures, including the Moscow City Council
*--Website devoted to the two-day "civil war" (Most of the links to sub-sites [EG=pictures] are broken)

Russian Whitehouse after Yeltsin attack
[Websource broken]

*--Boris Kagarlitsky was an elected deputy to the City Council and kept a day-to-day account of events leading up to this drastic attack, Square Wheels: How Russian Democracy Got Derailed. He was then a member of the executive committee of the Russian Party of Labor, a socialist political party that opposed both the Communist and Yeltsin camps. Kagarlitsky is the author of several articles in Socialist Review (1991ap and je) and New Statesman (1989no10, 1991se06, 1993ap02, 1993de03). See also Nation (1889je05, 1993de06) and New Left Review (1993mr & ap). His most famous work is The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State, from 1917 to the Present (1988) about the role of the "intelligentsia" in Russian political culture

<>1993de12:Russia, Moscow | New Constitution ratified
*--The Russian constituion reminded many specialists of French tradition, with even heavier emphasis on the executive/presidential branch of government, leaving legislative and judicial branches in relatively weak relationship to the executive
*--President [chief justice] of the new Russian Supreme Court, Valerii Zor'kin, opposed Yeltsin's policies and, as a consequence, was demoted to status of judge, not to be restored to his leadership post until 2003, during the time of President Vladimir Putin
*--The new "Yeltsin" Constitution divided Russia into 89 administrative divisions, running in size and "weight" from the 21 republics, through 6 Territories, 49 regions, 2 "Federal Cities" (Moscow and St. Petersburg), 1 Autonomous Region, down to 10 autonomous areas [LIST]
\\
*--[W]

<>1994wi:Near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, Taliban [Talib=student] movement arose against outrageous behavior of various Mujahedeen warlords, recently armed by USA

• The Taliban leader was Mullah Mohammad Omar, an ethnic Pashtun teacher in a village madrasa, part of a more than one-century-long anti-imperialist tradition of self-organization and resistance among oppressed southern Asian Muslims
• 1995:Taliban took Herat in western Afghanistan, not far from the eastern border of Iran
• 1996:Taliban then took traditional administrative center ("capital") Kabul
• Thus the Taliban completing their control over all but the northern frontiers of Afghanistan where "the northern alliance" held out, led by Ahmed Shah Masoud and other ethnic Uzbeks and Tadjiks
• Masoud was assassinated in 2001 on the very eve of the 9/11 attacks on the USA
• Taliban introduced extraordinary and harsh "Muslim fundamentalist" policies
• With artillery they destroyed ancient statues of Buddha carved in high stone cliffs
• Taliban received support from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto
• Bhutto wanted to resist the power of the CIA supported security forces in her Pakistan [the ISI] and bring order to neighboring Afghanistan
• As it approached its 50th anniversary, CIA continued covert operations around the globe, frequently putting itself into close association with secret local police/military organizations like ISI and SAVAK [ID]
• Among other things, Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto sought to increase the chances of the big petroleum pipeline dream in these years =
• USA and transnational oil companies sought to win favor with the Taliban in order to promote possibility their projected colossal pipelines might eventually run from the Caspian Sea region into Asia via fundamentalist Afghanistan and Pakistan
• The fate of Afghanistan would be shaped by largest possible AfroAsian and international power politics with control of oil at its center
  \\
  *2001no15:NYR:18-21| Pankaj Mishra, "The Making of Afghanistan"
  *--LOOP on "AfroAsia"

<>1994ja11:Russian Federal Assembly met [IR9] Two houses =
*--Federal Council [FSOV] [speaker=Ivan Petrovich Rybkin (Agricultural Party)]
*--Duma [speaker=Vladimir Shumeiko]

<>1994se05:se13; International Conference on Population and Development deliberated on global environmental issues, with emphasis on population explosion [Excerpts from Conference report, with various "national" [nation-state] reactions = SWH:446-60]

<>1994se19:1995mr31; Haiti invaded and occupied by USA-led force
*--USA State Department Analysis of the whole operation included lessons on "peace-keeping" [E-TXT]
*1990s USA military budget equaled the combined total of the next 10 largest military budgets in the world
*1992:2000; Over an 8-year period, the USA military budget grew from $260B/year to 300B/year, by 2004, the military and homeland security budgets equaled $407B/year
*--The Cold-War era Soviet military-industrial complex failed miserably to sustain itself in the post-Cold-War era [ID], but its USA cousin was doing very well under conditions of the "New World Order"
*--All signs were that the traces of more than two centuries of European imperialism could still be sensed in the era of New World Order

<>1994no19:English Labour Party leader Tony Blair [ID] began to reshape his party in preparation for election victory in 1997. He softened the left-liberal and strong European-style social-democratic tone of the old party platform in order to remove reference to collective ownership of means of production and to expand the constituency of the party beyond wage-labor organizations (unions) [P20:397]. His party deposed the Conservatives of the Thatcher era, but bore the traces of a certain push to the right during the era of Thatcher and USA President Reagan
*1995no02:NYR:34 summarized the role of Labour and socialist parties in European politics over the previous 30 or so years =

Socialist parties came to power -- the British Labour Party from 1964 to 1979 (except for four years in the early 1970s) and the Social Democratic Party of [West] Germany in 1969. Sweden had had forty-four years of Socialist governments until 1976. Portugal's Socialist leader, Mario Soares, became Prime Minister in 1976, and his party went in and out of government coalitions for almost twenty years. Since 1974, the Italian Socialists have taken part in coalition governments or have headed the government. The French Socialists took over the government in 1981 and the Spanish Socialists in 1982

<>1995ja01:Switzerland, Geneva | World Trade Organization [WTO] established. Membership = 134 countries (as of 10 February 1999). Budget: 122 million Swiss francs for 1999. Secretariat staff: 500. Head: Renato Ruggiero (director general)
\\
*--[W]
*--LOOP on "finance"

A telling graphic from the 1998 WTO website

<>1995ap19:USA OK.City in front of the Murrah Federal Building | Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck with explosives. At 9:02 am Central Daylight Time (14:02 UTC), a massive explosion sheared away the entire north side of the building, killing 168 people

• Timothy McVeigh later composed a letter in which he sought to explain why he carried out this terrorist attack [W]
• McVeigh described the following as background to his terrorist attack =
• Waco (McVeigh's attack was on the 2nd anniversary of that event [ID])
• Chinese use of tanks against its own citizens [ID]
• USA air attacks on Serbia (which actually occurred after McVeigh's own attack [ID])
• USA invasion of Iraq [ID]
• FBI use of violence at Ruby Ridge [ID]
\\
[W]

<>1995oc17:GKI (GOSKOMIMMUSHESTVO - the state committee for the management of state property) PUBLISHED IN ROSSISKAIA GAZETA THE RULES FOR IMPLEMENTING ITS SHARE MORTGAGE OR "LOANS FOR SHARES" PROGRAM

• OF 29 MAJOR COMPANIES INCLUDED IN THE PROGRAM, THE ANNOUNCEMENT COVERED 16 FIRMS
• FOREIGN INVESTORS (INCLUDING RUSSIAN FIRMS WITH MORE THAN 25 PERCENT FOREIGN OWNERSHIP) WERE EXCLUDED FROM PARTICIPATING IN BIDDING FOR EIGHT OF THESE COMPANIES
• WITHOUT FOREIGN PARTICIPATION TO ADD TO DEMAND, THE MORTGAGE AUCTION OF THESE SHARES PACKETS WILL LIKELY YIELD LOWER PRICES
• SURGUTNEFTEGAZ'S STARTING PRICE AT THE AUCTION IS AS LITTLE AS ONE-TENTH OF SOME ESTIMATES OF THE COMPANY'S VALUE
• THE COMBINED STARTING PRICE FOR STAKES IN 16 COMPANIES IS LESS THAN $500 MILLION
• [This as reported in Bisnis. Much more on this website]
• 2003no28:Chistian Science Monitor | Report on how "oligarch Vladimir Potanin acquired the world's biggest nickel producer, Norilsk, in a 1995 auction organized on behalf of the state by his own bank, Oneksimbank [W]
• He won with a bid just $170 million - which was $140 million short of the government's minimum asking price
• Several higher competing bids were mysteriously 'disqualified'
• Similarly, Khodorkovskii's Menatep Bank ran the auction that handed him control of Yukos - and the former Soviet Union's third-largest oil reserves - for just $308 million
• The market value of Yukos eventually jumped to more than $30 billion"
• Boris Berezovskii "acquired major stakes in automobile, oil, airline, and media companies during those years
• Berezovskii said that the illicit means were necessary to quickly establish a class of capitalists capable of staving off a communist comeback in Russia, which was widely feared
• 'Privatization was very positive for Russia in the sense that property became diversified', he says. 'It did not just belong to the state, but to a lot of owners who competed with each other. For sure, it was a revolution, and every revolution happens with a lot of mistakes. We had a lot of mistakes, but the final result is better.' "
• Debate on "loans for shares" [TXT], including some of the leading figures = Yegor Gaidar, Anatolii Chubais, Joseph Stiglitz (World Bank)
• Grigorii Yavlinskii's contribution might be the most interesting [TXT]
• Yavlinskii appears to confuse Karl Popper [ID] with Karl Polanyi [ID]. Possibly he had both in mind = Popper for his relentless critique of all threats to open society (from government to business to organized groups of zealots, theoretical, ideological or theological) and Polanyi for his specific critique of how capitalism can descend upon a community and tear it to pieces
  \\
  *--Website describes Russian privatization
  *--An English Socialist Party website, "From bureaucrat to billionaire", described the origins of Mikhail Khodorkovskii and the great world petroleum giant YUKOS =
  AT THE end of the 1980s [Mikhail] Khodorkovskii was a Komsomol (Communist Youth) leader who used his position to accumulate starting capital. He then established one of the earliest of the pyramid schemes by which the new rich fraudulently conned the mass of the population to risk their earnings and savings in funds which promised high returns but never delivered. He was then in an ideal position to benefit from the notorious "loans for shares" privatisation pushed by the World Bank [founded in 1946] under which the best industries were speedily privatised by selling them at dumping prices sometimes ten times below their real value. Khodordovskii became the lucky owner of the Yukos oil company, now the fourth largest in the world with a personal fortune approaching $8 billion
  *--LOOP on "finance"

<>1995:Bosnia the site of USA led military attack
*--Reporter David Rieff published Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West which was a harsh criticism of Serbian (Yugoslav) and "Western" political leaders, based on first-hand observation [ E-TXT excerpts | P20:474]
\\
*--Bowker:49-67

<>1995de17:Russian Federation elections to Duma

Leading Candidates

Name	Party
Abdulatipov,Ramazan G	00
Aksiuchits, Viktor V	26
Aleksei II, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church	00
Aliev,Geidar A	00
Alksnis	00
Anpilov,Viktor I	36
Astaf'ev,Mikhail G	00
Baburin, Sergei N	30
Baturin, Yurii M	00
Borovoi, Konstantin N	39
Burbulis, Gennadii E	00
Chernomyrdin, Viktor S	17
Chubais, Anatolii B	00
Dudaev,Dzhokhar M	00
Fedorov,Boris G	20
Fedorov,Sviatoslav N	35
Fedulova, Alevtina V	01
Filatov,Sergei A	00
Gaidar, Egor T	23
Gorbachev,Mikhail S	00
Govorukhin, Stanislav S	26
Grachev,Pavel S	00
Gromov,Boris V	13
Kalachev,Konstantin E	37
Khasbulatov,Ruslan I	00
Klimantova, Galina I	01 ZhR
Kobelev,Viktor V	02
Kovalev,Sergei A	23 DVy
Kriuchkov,Anatolii V	36
Lakhova, Ekaterina F	01 ZhR
Lapshin, Mikhail I	41
Lebed', Aleksandr I	31
Ligachev,Egor K	00
Lipitskii, Vasilii S	29
Luk'ianov,Vladimir N	40
Lukin, Vladimir P	19
Luzhkov,Yurii M	00
Lysenko, Nikolai N	28
Medvedev,Roi A	00
Mikhalkov,Nikita S	17 NDR
Nazarbaev,Nursultan N	00
Nemtsov,Boris E	00
Ovchinnikov,Konstantin N	28
Panfilov,Anatolii A	22
Pavlov,Nikolai A	28
Popov,Gavriil K	29
Primakov,Evgenii M	00
Rumiantsev,Oleg G	26
Rutskoi, Aleksandr V	02
Rybkin, Ivan P	38
Ryzhkov,Nikolai I	30
Savitskii, Vitalii V	42
Shakhrai, Sergei M	24
Shatalin, Stanislav S	13 MOt
Shcherbakov,Vladimir I	32
Sheinis, Viktor L	00
Shevardnadze, Eduard A	00
Shumeiko, Vladimir F	00
Skokov,Yurii V	31 KRO
Sobchak, Anatolii A	00
Stankevich, Sergei B	00
Sterligov,Aleksandr N	00
Tiul'kin, Viktor A	36
Travkin, Nikolai I	00
Vol'skii, Arkadii I	32
Yakovlev,Aleksandr N	00
Yakunin, Gleb P	00
Yavlinskii, Grigorii A	19 YBL
Yeltsin, Boris	00
Zatulin, Konstantin	00
Zhirinovskii, Vladimir V	33
Ziuganov,Gennadii A	25
Zor'kin, Valerii D	00

1995de17:Russia's Leading Political Parties

01	Zhenshchiny Rossii	Women of Russian	ZhR
02	Sotsial-patrioticheskoe dvizhenie "Derzhava"	Social-Patriotic Movement "Great Power"	Derzhava
13	Moe Otechestvo	My Fatherland	MOt
17	Nash dom Rossiia	Our Home is Russia	NDR
19	YaBLoka	Apple	YBL
20	Vpered, Rossiia!	Forward Russia	VR!
22	Ekologicheskaia partiia Rossii "Kedr"	Ecological Party of Russia "Cedar"	Kedr
23	Demokraticheskii vybor Rossii & Ob"edinennye demokraty	Democratic Choice of Russia & United Democrats	DVy
24	Partiia Rossiiskogo Edinstva i Soglasiia	Party of Russian Unity and Accord	EiS
25	Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Rossiiskoi Federatsii	Communist Party of the Russian Federation	KPR
26	BLOK STANISLAVA GOVORUKHINA	Bloc of Stanislav Govorukhin	BSG
28	Natsional'no-respublikanskaia partiia Rossii	National-Republican Party of Russia	NRP
29	Sotsial-demokraty	Social-Democrats	SDs
30	Vlast'-Narodu	Power to the People	V-N
31	Kongress russkikh obshchin	Congress of Russian Communities	KRO
32	Profsoiuzy i promyshlenniki Rossii--Soiuz Truda	Trades-union and Industrialists of Russia--Union of Labor	PiP
33	Liberal'no-demokraticheskaia partiia Rossii	Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia	LDP
35	Partiia samoupravleniia trudiashchikhsia	Party of Labor Self-government	PST
36	Kommunisty--Trudovaia Rossiia--Za Sovetskii Soiuz	Communists--Labor Russia--For Soviet Union
37	Partiia liubitelei piva	Party of Beer Lovers
38	Blok Ivana Rybkina	Bloc of Ivan Rybkin
39	Partiia ekonomicheskoi svobody	Party of Economic Freedom	PES
40	Partiia "Narodnyi Soiuz"	Party "Popular Union"	NaS
41	Agrarnaia partiia Rossii	Agrarian Party of Russia	AgP
42	Khristiansko-Demokraticheskii Soiuz--Khristiane Rossii	Christian-Democratic Union--Christians of Russia	XDS

<>1996:German right-wing Neo-Nazi turned moderate youth welfare advocate, Ingo Hasselbach, published English-language Ex Fuhrer: Memories of a Former Neo-Nazi with a look Inside the Neo-Nazi Scene [P20:409]
*--The first decade of movement toward and consolidation of German reunification had not been trouble free

<>1996:USA "neo-con" think-tank -- The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies -- subjected Israel foreign policy to serious evaluation and made significant supportive recommendations for change = "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" [TXT]
*2000:2008; The authors of this study and their views came to have great influence on US foreign policy toward Israel and the wider world
\\
*2006se13:Ronald Bruce St.John posted on the website of the "liberal" Institute for Policy Studies a description and critique of "A Clean Break" [TXT]
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"

<>1996:USA news reporter Eleanor Randolph published her first-hand account Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia in which she described the results of capitalist "marketization" and "privatization" of the old Soviet command economy [Excerpts = P20:467]
*1999fe:GO

<>1996jy01:Johnson's Russia List (JRL, an email newsletter with wide-ranging and informative news and commentary on Russian politics and society) began to appear

<>1997my02:RTV | Tens of thousands of Russians marked the May Day holiday by marching outside the Kremlin calling for Boris Yeltsin's resignation

• Police estimate about 25,000 communist supporters gathered Thursday, but organizers put the figure at 100,000
• The marchers approved a resolution demanding that Yeltsin be fired for "monstrous crimes" against the country
• In a radio address Yeltsin said he expected May Day protests. "They have the right to do so," said Yeltsin, "and this is what we have fought for"
• USA Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov celebrated May Day with talks on a NATO-Russia charter
• On her way to Moscow, Albright vowed to make no concessions, saying the alliance had reached its bottom line
• NATO and Russia hoped to sign the charter on May 27
• The pact would have given Moscow the right to close consultations on European security
• USA will provide $47 million dollars to Ukraine for the destruction of former Soviet strategic missiles and replacement of Soviet with non-nuclear USA weaponry
• The funding will be supplied under the Nunn-Lugar Amendment. The deal added to the $404 million dollars the U.S. already gave Ukraine
• That money was used to complete the removal of all Soviet-era nuclear warheads from long range missiles
• USA Defense Secretary William Cohen praised Kiev's decision to become a nuclear-free state and pledged to help Ukraine modernize its military with USA weapons
• Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais said he will personally oversee Russia's bid for membership in the World Trade Organization [WTO]
• Chubais made the promise during a meeting in Washington with the head of the organization
• By this time negotiations for Russia's membership in the 131-member group had been underway for two years
• Russian negotiators gave their Chechen counterparts a number of draft agreements on cooperation in the natural gas and oil industries
• The documents dealt with joint projects to extract, refine and transport oil, petroleum and gas
• The oil industry was considered the key to rebuilding Chechnya's devastated economy

<>1997my05:RTV | A radical Chechen guerrilla leader claimed to have masterminded two deadly bombings that rocked southern Russia. Salman Raduev threatened to carry out terrorist attacks before. He now claimed that the railway station bombings in Armavir and Piatigorsk marked "a new phase of the Russian-Chechen war." He asserted that the two Chechen women who were arrested in connection with the second bombing were acting on his personal orders. Chechen leaders say they doubt whether the rebel commander was behind the explosions
*--A demographic crisis loomed in Russia, according to a presidential advisory commission. The death rate was on the rise, while the birth rate was dropping, and the country's demographic indicators resembled those found in third world countries. In 1995 Russia's death rate not only topped that of other European countries and the United States, but was also higher than many Asian and African countries. Experts said the roots of the problem can be found in the decline in living standards and the collapse of Russia's health care system
*--Moscow reaffirmed its commitment to friendly ties with Tehran. Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov sent a message to his Iranian counterpart, saying bilateral relations will not be hampered by the West's criticism of Iran. Iranian leaders said they would cease negotiations with the European Union [EU], after a German court verdict blamed Iran's leadership for the 1992 murders of four Kurds in Berlin
*--Former security chief and presidential hopeful Aleksander Lebed said he will only have one person to beat in the next elections -- Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov. Lebed rejected talk that his chief opponent could be young reformer Boris Nemtsov, but public opinion polls showed the opposite. While Lebed topped the list for strength of character, Nemtsov was number one when it came to presidential qualities -- namely honesty and decency. Nemtsov had recently joined the Yeltsin cabinet as first deputy prime minister and fuel and energy chief
*--Russia began reform of its natural gas industry with a presidential reform decree designed to control monopolies. Next steps will involve incorporation of transport costs into the gas pricing system. Transport rates for both gas giant Gazprom and independent suppliers were to be unified, and the rights to develop gas fields will be opened through tenders. The government will also create guidelines allowing gas suppliers access to Gazprom's transport network
\\
*--LOOP on EU

<>1997my06:RTV | The long-awaited Russia-NATO draft charter was to be completed on this day. Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, held talks with NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana in Luxembourg. Primakov was hopeful that the last differences would be smoothed out and the document ready for signing on May 27. He insisted Moscow still opposes NATO plans to include eastern European members but still expects the charter to ease some of Russia's security fears. NATO officials however were obdurate in their refusal to make any further concessions
*--Radical rebel leader Salman Raduev had reason to regret his boasts of ordering deadly bomb blasts in southern Russia [ID]. A Chechen presidential aide said that leaders in Grozny are fed up with Raduev's declarations and had a warrant out for his arrest. However, he stressed that Chechen leaders believe Russian special forces -- and not Raduev -- were behind the attacks in Armavir and Piatigorsk. Raduev threatened terrorist attacks on Russian targets several times in the past

<>1997fa:Russian President Yeltsin met with Japan Prime Minister Hashimoto to consolidate massive international agreements on natural gas and related energy issues

<>1997oc01:Russian Federation adopted new law "On Freedom of Conscience and on Religious Associations", which required official registration of all religious associations, including the Russian Orthodox Church, which was eventually registered as number one [E-TXT]

• The law imposed different degrees of restriction on faiths other than Orthodox, though the Russian Patriarch denied that was so
• 1979:When the Shiah spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran from 26-year exile [ID], he had himself elevated to Supreme Leader, above even the national President of the new Islamic Republic of Iran [ID]. A global trend toward close church/state relations announced itself clearly Russia and in Iran
  • Russia was the first among the world's great powers to join this New-World-Order or post-Cold-War trend = Administration of public policy shifted toward what right-wing politicos in the USA were soon to label faith-based initiatives
  • Without going to the Ayatollah's extremes, Russia could revive and build on an ancient Byzantine tradition of symphonia in the relationship of church and state [ID]
  • It could also borrow a page from the Imperial Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev [ID]
• In the post-Soviet years, the Russian Orthodox Church became increasingly active in government and in the public sphere

<>1998mr:Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, We Remember: A Reflection on the "Shoah" [P20:431]

<>1998sp:French Commission for the Abolishment of Sexual Mutilations among African Immigrants in France: The Controversy over Female Circumcision [P20:425] 

<>1998my02:NYT | Column by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, "Now a Word From X" [This is an opinion column based on a personal interview of George Frost Kennan whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed "X" [ID], defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years

• Kennan joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952
• He was an active participant in the design of the Marshall Plan [ID] and close to the discussions that created NATO [ID]
• 1982:He published his recommendations on disarmament, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age
• Friedman interview excerpted below =

His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I [Thomas Friedman] reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate's ratification of NATO expansion it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America's successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer. [SAC editor has put Kennan's words in boldface.] "I think it is the beginning of a new cold war," said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. [...]

I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.

What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was.

I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia....

It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.

[Friedman continues in his own words = ]


One only wonders what future historians will say. If we are lucky they will say that NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply didn't matter, because the vacuum it was supposed to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn't see it. They will say that the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky, they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia's border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.

But there is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990's. They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992 -- the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world. Thanks to Western resolve and the courage of Russian democrats, that Soviet Empire collapsed without a shot, spawning a democratic Russia, setting free the former Soviet republics and leading to unprecedented arms control agreements with the U.S.

And what was America's response? It was to expand the NATO cold-war alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia's borders.

Yes, tell your children, and your children's children, that you lived in the age of Bill Clinton and William Cohen, the age of Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, the age of Trent Lott and Joe Lieberman, and you too were present at the creation of the post-cold-war order, when these foreign policy Titans put their heads together and produced . . . a mouse.

[We could suggest here that Friedman needed a stronger and more precise metaphor when he wrote "mouse" above. How about "pestilent rat"?]

We are in the age of midgets. The only good news is that we got here in one piece because there was another age -- one of great statesmen who had both imagination and courage.

As he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just one more thing: "This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end."

• With these last harsh words, Friedman was thinking of the role of Kennan and Marshall in the first post-WW2 years
• But Friedman idealized these earlier times
• He did not want to remember at this point the very rise of NATO in this "age of great statesmen"
• Furthermore, Friedman needed the broader and sobering perspective given by an even earlier time, the post-WW1 epoch, an epoch significantly documented in the scholarly work of Kennan himself =
  • 1956:1958; Kennan published two weighty volumes that are still the very best historical account of the diplomatic origins of USA-Soviet hostilities at the end of WW1
• Since the final months of WW2, Kennan was a major figure in deliberations on Soviet/US relations, and he continued to speak out authoritatively through the Reagan presidency, the collapse of the USSR and the rise of a new and, to him, disappointing Russia at the end of the 20th century
  \\
  
• 1997ja:Alan Kimball, "The March of Democracy in East Europe" [TXT]
• 2000mr06:WPo:5| Jim Hoagland wrote an editorial column which raised questions about USA President Bill Clinton's unexpected support for NATO. It seemed an effort "to preempt a staple of Republican national security orthodoxy before it can be used against the Democrats". With these words, here on the eve of the chaotic national presidential election of 2000 and the USA invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, this influential USA journalist suggested something very seriously wrong with the two-party system, perhaps reflecting some of the same trends that prompted his words below about "elite-driven" military and foreign policy
  • Support of NATO expansion was but one example of Clinton's trend toward militarism. Shortly after Clinton announced his support for NATO expansion, he came out in support for a scaled-down version of President Ronald Reagan's expensive but impractical space-based "Star Wars" system to intercept and destroy enemy missiles in flight before they re-entered the earth's atmosphere
  • Hoagland asserted,

    The policy elite has thrashed it out in blue-ribbon panel reports, departmental memoranda and congressional hearings sufficiently arcane to discourage public scrutiny of the gap between the system's substantial costs and its uncertain benefits. Like NATO expansion in 1996, national missile defense is an elite-driven idea that will be "sold" rather than openly debated and explained to the public

  • We could suggest here that Hoagland would have been more precise if he had written "a military-industrial idea" rather than "an elite driven idea"

<>1998my08:Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Aleksei II met with Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin in a joint commemoration of Easter and the anniversary of victory in WW2 [E-TXT]

<>1998my15:my17; England, Birmingham summit of G7 officially became G8 with addition of Russia as member (although the G7 continues to function along side the formal summits)
*--GO 1975no:France

<>1998jy12:jy17; Russian city Belgorod was the site of a huge combined ecclesiastical and secular conference on Mission of the Church = "Freedom of Conscience and Civil Society" [E-TXT]

<>1998jy20:Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Aleksei II commemorated the 80th anniversary of the murder of the tsarist family [E-TXT]

<>1998au27: Vienna| Eurozine founded as pan-European internet journal devoted to problems of political culture
*--Table of contents and chronology of main moments in the history of the journal

<>1998se29:Russian Orthodox Church sponsored wide-ranging meeting of Christian religious and secular social organizations [E-TXT]

<>1998no20:Russian space module Zaria [Zarya, "dawn"] put in place as the core component of the most expensive construction project ever attempted by humankind = The International Space Station (ISS)[W]

<>1999mr25:Yugoslavia attacked by USA-led NATO air power

• USA columnist for the New York Times Thomas L. Friedman tried to relate Kosovo crisis to world events [E-TXT]
• The long-term problems of Yugoslav nationalism, nation-statism, and self-determination continued into the 21st century
• Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Aleksei II sent message to the Secretary General of the UNO and to USA President Bill Clinton protesting USA aggression in Yugoslavia [E-TXT]
• Russian Church joined international Christian delegation to Belgrade [E-TXT]
• NATO grew bolder, even aggressive, in the post-Soviet years
• 1999mr:Three nation-states, ex-members of the long-dismantled Soviet-era Warsaw Pact [ID] -- Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary [ID] -- were brought into NATO
• Russian objections were essentially ignored as post-Cold-War NATO expansion continued apace [Continue LOOPs on Poland and the Czech Republic]
• Viktor Orban moved to the center of post-Soviet, post-Cold War Hungarian politics [Wki]
\\
*--WPo feature on 1940s:1999; Half-century chronology of Balkans politics [E-TXT]
*--[W#2]
*--Charles Ingrao, "Ten Untaught Lessons about Central Europe" [E-TXT]
*2016oc31:Независимая газета| Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Лавров, "Бомбардировки Югославии (1999) стали первым актом агрессии в Европе с 1945 года" [E-TXT]
*JoSEB (Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans) [E-JRN]
• 2002my:JoSEB#4(1)=5-13| "Oil, war and geopolitics from Kosovo to Afghanistan" By: Gokay,Bulent [E-TXT]
• 2002my:JoSEB#4(1)=15-27| "Actors of the new 'Great Game', Caspian oil politics" By: Karasac,Hasene [ E-TXT]
• 2002my:JoSEB#4(1):=29-35| "The political role of oil in Azerbaijan, 1989-1994". By: Spatharou,Angeliki [ E-TXT]
• 2002my:JoSEB#4(1)=37-45| "The transportation of Caspian oil and regional stability" By: Kasim,Kamer [ E-TXT]
• 2002my:JoSEB#4(1):=47-55| "Turkey's energy market—issues in reform" By Toksoz,Mina [ E-TXT]
• 2002my:JoSEB#4(1)=57-74| "From pipelines to oil Straits: the Caspian pipeline politics and environmental protection of the Istanbul and the Canakkale Straits" By: Ozturk,Ahmet [ E-TXT]
• 2002my:JoSEB#4(1)=75-89| "A meeting of blood and oil: the Balkan factor in Western energy security" By Fisher,Keith [ E-TXT]
• 2002my:JoSEB#4(1)=91-94| "Kosovo: unanswered questions" By Gowan,Peter [ E-TXT]

<>1999my26:Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church endorsed priestly views on liberalism, traditionalism and moral values in the contemporary world [E-TXT]

<>1999au:USA Bank of New York exposed as the site of massive laundering of billions of dollars from Russia

• USA bankers and Russian mafiya worked together
  • Over 18 months, 8000 transactions moved $4.5 billion through a suspicious account, handled by a small company named Benex
  • Benex was a front for an officer at the bank and her husband, Lucy Edwards and Peter Berlin
  • Subsequent investigations exposed an elaborate network linking US banking interests, Israel, Russia, and the large Jewish-Russian immigrant community newly arrived in the USA and centered in Brighton Beach, south of Brooklyn
• 1997:Russian film-maker Aleksei Balabanov released "BRAT" [Brother] exploring the question of organized crime in St.Petersburg [FLM]
  • BRAT featured a very popular pop-arts bard-singer Viacheslav Butusov and his hit "Kryl'ia" [Wings] [video]
  • 2000:Sequel to Brat ("BRAT 2" of course) [FLM] shifted the action to USA (NYC & Chicago) to explore the world in which operations like the Bank of New York (above) operated
  • Alla Pugacheva had for a quarter century enjoyed wide acclaim as a pop-arts vocalist and actress [FLM "Khochetsia"]
  \\
  *1999au26:CNNMoney| Russian Scandal Widens [E-TXT]
  *2000no11:NYR:52-4
  *--Robert Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America (2000) [Mafiya in USA; GO SUMMIT] ((Question = Was the Bank of New York really "invaded" by the Russian mafiya? Wasn't it a willing ally, a full participant?))
  *--Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mafiya [Mafiya in Russia]
  *--James O. Finckenauer, Russian mafia in America : immigration, culture, and crime [Mafiya in USA]

<>1999no:Prague CZC the eastern European site of a most significant meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] in years
Seven new members from the old USSR sphere of influence became members of this military alliance = Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia
*--NATO now counted 26 member nation-states

<>1999no23:de03; Seattle public demonstrations protested WTO policies during international "Third Ministerial Conference" [W] [W] [W]
\\
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>1999de31:Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin resigned, ending turbulent 12 years near the center of Soviet/Russian politics
*--Yeltsin appointing Vladimir Putin as President pro temp and set a national presidential election for 2000mr24
*1999de30:Nezavisimaia gazeta:4| Putin published his platform statement [TXT]
\\
*--Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia's Choice (2004) argued that Putin must resolve four crucial problems = (1) reform federal-regional relations (most dramatically represented by the situation in Chechnya), (2) develop the economy and carry out further economic reforms, (3) patch up foreign relations, (4) strengthen an independent judiciary. Putin is popular because he appears to be the people's champion against oligarchs, corrupt bureaucrats and provincial bureaucratic "bosses". Centralization, followed by some form of "re-federalization" seems in the offing
*--Putin faced his greatest challenge in the year 2004

<>2000mr28:Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Aleksei II urged citizens of the Russian Federation to vote
*--It makes no difference, he said, which candidate a citizen chooses to support
*--The important thing is that citizens should get out and vote
*--The Church insisted that it had urged active citizenship since before the Soviet Revolution, during the time of Soviet power, and in the contemporary era [E-TXT]
*--The leading figure on the ballot was Vladimir Putin, recently appointed President of the Russian Federation and now running for that office for the first time

<>2000ap04:Moscow State University heard lecture by Russian Orthodox Church Metropolitan [Bishop] Kirill of Smolensk on the need for European unification [E-TXT]

<>2000my16:Japanese Premier and then the Japanese Emperor received an official Russian Orthodox Church delegation, led by Patriarch Aleksei II [E-TXT]

<>2000je14:Russian Orthodox Church sponsored symposium on church/state relations [E-TXT]

<>2000je21:Russian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk published in the independent secular newspaper Argumenty i fakty a protest against an article there which exposed the excessive wealth and vigorous economic enterprise of the Russian Church [E-TXT]

<>2000jy17:Russian Orthodox Church sought to refute an article in Izvestiia which claimed that the Patriarch had taken steps to interfere in a matter of great ecological significance, the governments abolition of the 2-century-old central agency, now designated the Federal Forest Service [Rosleskhoz] [E-TXT]

<>2000au19:Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Aleksei II consecrated the huge and lavish new Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow [E-TXT]

<>2000oc:2005au; Official Church pronouncements [E-TXT in reverse chronological order]

<>2000no:The prominent journal Foreign Affairs ran a review article by Daniel Treisman with the following opening observations =

Pity the unpopular Russians. In July, Mexico elects its first president from outside the country's ruling party; The Economist magazine labels it a "real democracy." Russia elects a president from the political opposition in 1991, then holds no fewer than five competitive, generally free, national elections in the following years; The Economist calls it a "phony democracy." Colombia has a problem with organized crime, and Washington gives its government $1.3 billion to help fight the drug lords. Russia also has a problem with organized crime, and American politicians sternly lecture Moscow not to expect any more aid until it cleans up its act. An undercover U.S. operation finds several Mexican banks laundering drug money in the United States, and Washington apologizes to the Mexicans for conducting sting operations on their territory. An American bank allegedly launders money [ID] for Russian organized criminals, and a leading senator accuses the Russian government of being "the world's most virulent kleptocracy." When the Asian crisis scares investors away from the Brazilian market and the real collapses, commentators declare it a bump in the road. When the Asian crisis scares foreign investors away from the Russian market and the ruble collapses, commentators declare the crash proof of the failure of liberal economic reform in Russia. || That many Russians these days see a double standard in Western opinion toward their country is perhaps not altogether surprising

<>2000no15:NYC| UNO Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, including a Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children [TXT], often called "The Palermo Protocol"

<>2001:San Diego CA | Jimmy Wales [ID] and associates created internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia

• Wikipedia founders invited the whole world to be not only readers but writers as well
• Eight years later, Wikipedia contained 3 million articles and surprised all skeptics by maintaining high standards of verifiable and well-written narrative based on solid source citations
• Wikipedia editors acknowledge points of controversy in certain articles [EG=Is the Polish port city "Gdańsk" [sic] or "Danzig"? (according to SAC editor, a no-brainer)]
• Wikipedia editors also warn readers of various soft spots in some texts. Thus even the weak moments in Wikipedia can be instructive
• One of the founders and current member of the managerial editorial board, Andrew Lih, published a detailed account of this success, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
• In the broadest cultural historical setting, Wikipedia has probably demonstrated something as fundamental about the early 21st century as the great Encyclopédie [ID] did about the era of Enlightenment =

<>2001fe05=The Nation| "Florida’s ‘Disappeared Voters': Disfranchised by the GOP" [E-TXT]
*--2001fe23:USA Department of State released its report on human rights in Russia for the year 2000

<>2001se11:USA attacked by four groups of suicidal hijackers of commercial airliners

• Three airliners reached their targets: two into each of two towers of the World Trade Center, destroying both and killing over 2500 people, one into the Pentagon outside Washington DC
• The fourth airliner was brought down in a Pennsylvania field by an uprising of passengers on board before it could reach its intended target. No one survived the crash
• USA President Bush declared by executive order a broad and general "war on terrorism"
• Thus the significant post-cold-war (1980s+) re-militarization of USA life quickened noticeably
• EG#1 = Law (unprecedented expansion of officially sanctioned torture [W.TXT !! | CF=W.TXT on world-wide torture since 1948; F/Soviet Union/ on that page])
• EG#2 = Law enforcement trend toward police/militarization (domestic "swat teams" in cities and police in schools [ E-TXT])
• EG#3 = NATO expansion, rather than contraction [LOOP on post-cold-war NATO expansion]
• Bush targeted Al-Qaeda, presented as a coherent and world-wide organization under the direction of the Saudi Arabian rebel leader Osama bin Laden
• Soon USA invaded Afghanistan
• The "war on terrorism" did temporarily defeat the Taliban, but the Taliban soon bounced back with greater force and barbarism
• The Taliban were a 150-year-old anti-imperialist and nativist Islamic cultural movement
• The Taliban had been hoisted to power and equiped as warriors in the aftermath of US distribution of military weaponry for use against Soviet invaders of Afghanistan a third of a century earlier)
• USA failed to apprehend Bin Laden. USA simply "cut and ran" from the messy and unfinished Afghanistan mission when a more ambitious and oil-based military opportunity arose in Iraq
• USA installed a "pro-Western" government in Herat, on the western side of Afghanistan, miles from the traditional administrative center, Kabul. USA abruptly shifted its world-class globe-striding military establishment's attention to Iraq
• The long historical agony of Afghanistan continued
• And so did the long historical agony of Iraq continue under conditions of the war against an "ism", an ill-defined, timeless and limitless "war on terrorism"
  \\
  *--Bowker:83-95
  *2015jy:Afghanistan: Living Beneath the Drones - Al Jazeera [E-TXT]
  *2016se09:Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA's 'failed coverup' of torture report | The Guardian [E-TXT]
  *2016se10:'A constitutional crisis': the CIA turns on the Senate | The Guardian [E-TXT]
  *2016se11:No looking back: the CIA torture report's aftermath | The Guardian [E-TXT]
  *--"Guess Who Else Tortured People Like the CIA Did -- Soviets and Nazis" [E-TXT]
  *2017ja12:BBC News| World powers jostle in Afghanistan's new 'Great Game' [LOOP on "Great Game"] [E-TXT]

<>2002mr25:Pravda reported on efforts to consolidate the eighty-nine regions [W] that made up the Russian Federation [W]

<>2002ap06:ap07; USA TX Crawford ranch | President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair “summit” meeting arrived at a conditional agreement to invade Iraq, according to Los Angeles Times reporter John Daniszewski [2005my13:ERG]

• 2002jy23:Three months later, at a London meeting of Blair and his intelligence and military chiefs, These April agreements were discussed
• The minutes of that meeting and two documents prepared earlier -- a briefing paper and a Foreign Office legal opinion -- were obtained by Michael Smith, a defense specialist writing in the 2002my01:Sunday Times of London =
  • The documents reveal a British government convinced that Bush wanting to go to war against Saddam and a Prime Minister who agreed with him, subject to several specific conditions
  • The leaked minutes described how Blair, his top security advisers and his attorney general discussed Britain's role in Washington's plan to oust Saddam
  • The minutes written by foreign policy aide Matthew Rycroft indicated general thoughts among participants about how to create a political and a legal pretext for a war
  • The case for military action at the time was "thin", Foreign Minister Jack Straw was characterized as saying, and Saddam's government was posing little threat
  • Labeled "secret and strictly personal - UK eyes only", the minutes began with the head of British intelligence, MI6, identified as "C", telling meeting participants that he had returned from Washington, where he observed a

    perceptible shift in attitude. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy [boldface added by SAC editor].

  • Straw agreed that Bush seemed determined on military action, though the timing was not certain
  • "But the case was thin", the minutes read. "Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capacity was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran"
  • Straw then proposed to "work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam" to permit weapons inspectors back into the country
  • "This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force", he said, according to the minutes
  • Blair himself weighed in, saying, according to the document, "that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the U.N. inspectors"
  • He went on to say =

    If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

• In addition to the minutes, the Sunday Times account referred to a Cabinet briefing paper that was given participants prior to the July 2002 meeting, which stated that Blair had already promised Bush cooperation earlier, at the April summit in Texas
• Sometime over the next few months, toward the end of 2002, NYT reporter Jeff Gerth began a quest for a 500-page document prepared by the transnational corporation Halliburton [TXT] for USA Department of Defense (The Pentagon) “several months before the invasion of Iraq” [2005de29:ERG:A9, Maureen Dowd column]
  • This document contained a plan for the disposition of the Iraq petroleum industry should the USA be able to seize it
  • After the USA invasion, the Bush/Cheney administration granted Halliburton a no-bid contract to administer Iraqi oil
• 2005my:Discovery and publication of the documents which revealed these early plans by England and USA to invade Iraq, caused little scandal in Britain
  • Blair's Downing Street office did not dispute the authenticity of the documents
  • A Blair spokesman brushed off the matter, saying the memo published by Michael Smith added nothing of significance to the much-investigated record of the lead-up to the war
• In the United States, where the reports at first received scant attention, a groundswell of indignation finally arose
  • Many publicly concluded that "the documents help prove the leaders made a secret decision to oust Saddam Hussein nearly a year before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to that aim, and never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy"
  • Eighty-nine House Democrats addressed a letter to Bush in which they “expressed shock at the documents”
  • They asked if the documents were true and if so, did they not prove that the White House had already agreed on an invasion months before seeking authorization from Congress
  • If the documents are true, it is "a huge problem" and an abuse of power, said the letter's chief author, Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich
• Both Blair and Bush denied a war decision was made in early 2002
• The White House and Downing Street maintained that they were preparing for military operations as one option, but the option to not attack Iraq also remained open until the start of the war on March 20, 2003
• Inflated and manipulated threats to national security once again began to drive policy, but "The West" was not vulnerable to this tactic in the way it had been in earlier decades [EG]
  \\
  *2010jy15:NYR:56| Thomas Powers, whose review of Robert Jervis's book Why Intelligence Fails, contended that manipulative political pressure from the White House, rather than mistakes among the intelligence professionals, encouraged fabrication of false intelligence which could be used by Bush militarists to justify attacking Iraq. Powers summarized his position this way =

  In my view the CIA was not merely wrong in claiming that Saddam Hussein was “actively seeking” nuclear weapons. The evidence was sparse, fragmentary, thinly supported, inconclusive, and in crucial instances flatly contradicted; but Jervis avoids the implications of what is most obvious about this error -- its nature and its magnitude. The administration needed a scary intelligence estimate that would stand up long enough to persuade Congress to authorize war. This one did the job for three reasons: because the administration had created an atmosphere of crisis that Congress was too timid to challenge or resist; because the CIA put its authority on the line by claiming it had “high confidence” in its findings; and above all because the evidence was secret. To read the CIA's estimate now is shocking; nothing in the grab bag called for the haste to act insisted on by the President at the time.
  
  But Jervis treats the CIA's “intelligence failure” as an honest mistake of the garden variety, an accumulation of shaky assumptions, small errors, and misreadings that led the agency astray. I cannot see why Jervis fails to connect the dots. Parsing the case does not require bales of subpoenaed evidence. The nature of the error (fluffing up the casus belli demanded by the White House) as well as the magnitude of the error (wrong in every particular) tell us what we need to know.

  *2010au19:NYbooks, "CIA and WMD: Damning Evidence" [TXT], an effort to expose deception underlying the run up to the war in Iraq

<>2002sp:BOMBmagazin#79. "Post-Soviet" writer Victor Pelevin interviewed. Notice the weave of post-Soviet Russian literature with global cultural influences

• 2002fa:LINKS#22 | Boris Kagarlitsky offered his views on 20th century "revolutionary" culture = "What Remains of Soviet Culture" [W]
• 2002:Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin published Ice [See Ice Trilogy]
• That year, a pro-Kremlin youth group, "Moving Together" tried to sue Sorokin for distributing pornography
• "Moving Together" has been described [2009my21:TLS:19] as a "group of blue-eyed blond Slavs acting with the tacit support of Russian Orthodox circles and other patriotic groups"
• Sorokin's Ice in fact explored the rise of "crypto-Fascists and bizarre mystic movements" in post-Soviet political culture, breaking new ground on the popular apocalyptic science-fiction theme of alien global conspiracy against ordinary decent earthling folk
  *--LOOP on "fascist" and "fascism"
• More on pop-arts SciFi [E-TXT] =

  To look again at [H.G. Wells'] The War of the Worlds (1898, made into a USA movie in 1956, and frequently reproduced in the 1938oc20 radio version [ID]) is to be confronted with still bleaker truths: the eternal primacy of man’s will to power and the capacity throughout history for absolute inhumanity. In these pages there are to be found in abundance furious parallels between Wells’ reality, the domination, as he saw it, of half the globe by the British Empire. At moments, he exhibits a strange sympathy towards the extraterrestrial invaders:

  before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.

  The bloody excesses of Empire –- literally, for the Martians are, like their near-contem­porary Count Dracula, sanguinary predators hungry for Englishmen -– are visited upon the nation itself, as first Surrey and then London are laid waste by the [Martian] tripods of destruction.
  [...]
  [A]lien-invasion narrative had become a cultural trope of considerable fluidity. That the aliens of the 1950s often stand for a fear of what was believed to be the insidious spread of communism has frequently been suggested [...]. [T]he extraterrestrials in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or Invaders from Mars (1953) may just as well have been intended to represent those McCarthyite forces that were manipulating the public into hysterical anti-communism....

  SAC would also add that the 1996 movie INDEPENDENCE DAY [Wki] portrayed an alien invasion of earth which could be an evasive effort to exorcise the bad conscience of USA, or simply to express sympathetic commiseration, in connection with the Euro-American invvasion of Native-Americans in the New World. The goal of the technically superior fictional aliens, like that of the historical Euro-Americans, was genocidal destruction of the targeted less-"advanced" earthlings. In the movie, however, the earthlings' native will to survive was sufficient defense against the superior invader. And an Afro-American is given an important role in that victory
• 2017ja05:BBC explored how, in 1987, a USA science fiction movie offered a prescient pop-arts vision of the US in 2017 = "Why we may be living in the future of The Running Man" [E-TXT]

<>2002oc16:WDC| Joint Congressional resolution = Authorization for use of force against Iraq [TXT], a resolution taken under the influence of evidence carefully prepared by Executive Branch (White House) [ID]
\\
*--Thomas Powers critique of this act [TXT], in a review of Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

<>2003mr19:USA invaded and occupied Iraq

• Tensions grew within NATO and within the UNO when USA decided more or less to "go it alone"
• The 150-year concept of "The West" seemed to be unraveling, but not really| To view subsequent references, F/West/
• UNO documents on Iraq crisis [W#2]
• The English BBC version of the origins of the Iraq war [SOURCE] =

  In November 2002, after weeks of wrangling, the UN Security Council passed resolution 1441. It was designed to force Iraq to give up all weapons of mass destruction and threatening "serious consequences" if it did not comply. Iraq accepted the terms of the resolution and weapons inspections resumed.
  
  In early February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN that inspections were not achieving the disarmament of Iraq. The US and UK pressed for a new resolution authorizing military action against Iraq. France and Russia opposed this resolution, and threatened to veto it.
  
  The resolution never came to a vote and early on 20 March, the US-led campaign to topple Iraqi Saddam Hussein began.
  
  President George W Bush addressed the American nation and vowed to "disarm Iraq and to free its people".
  
  The beginning of the campaign drew a barrage of criticism from world leaders, including those of France, Russia and China. There were also massive public demonstrations against the war in major cities across the globe.
  
  The first aerial attack on Baghdad was on a much smaller scale than had been expected for the opening of the conflict. It was thought to have been mounted at short notice when US military planners spotted an opportunity to target five members of the Iraqi regime, including Saddam Hussein and his sons, Uday and Qusay.
  
  Ground forces invaded from Kuwait, with UK troops moving to secure key southern towns and US forces moving on towards Baghdad. They did, though, meet pockets of resistance from Iraqi troops

  \\
  *--Bowker:85-109

<>2003oc01:Eugene Register Guard Guest Viewpoint: Corporations need to put American interests first, by David Pokvitis [TXT]
*--Pokvitis is a Springfield, Oregon, business owner and director of a Chicago-based company, director of two other companies in Oregon and on the board of advisers for the Small Business Development Center. To put this opinion piece into a historical context even longer than the author intended, consider the legacy of Adolf Berle's 1932 book and the even longer trends identified as the "managerial revolution"]
*--In just these months, Russian business interests considered the lessons of the US "progressive era" one century earlier [ID]
\\
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>2003oc25:Mikhail Khodorkovskii, CEO of the greatest Russian petroleum corporation, YUKOS, was arrested
\\
*--Richard Sakwa, The Quality of Freedom: Khodorkovsky, Putin, and the Yukos Affair
*--Harvey Balzer [W] described meaning of this event

<>2003no28:Christian Science Monitor column [TXT] assessed Mikhail Khodorkovskii

<>2003de17:Russia elections to the Russian Parliament returned representatives to the Russian Parliament from only four parties =

• United Russia
• Liberal Democrats
• Motherland
• Communist Party

The Communist Party is the only distinctly oppositional party with any Parliamentary power, and it is increasingly marginalized and disorganized

Two other opposition parties failed to win any seats =

• Yabloko
• Union of Right Forces

The American press was alarmed at having "only four parties", even in a USA electoral season when many in the press express alarm that the USA national election might have three rather than just two parties at work.

CIA Fact book provided this more detailed account of elections to the two houses of the bicameral legislative branch, the Federal Assembly [Federal'noe sobranie] =
*--Upper Chamber = Federation Council [Sovet Federatsii] (178 seats; as of July 2000, members appointed by the top executive and legislative officials in each of the eighty-nine regions [W]. Members serve four-year terms)
*--Lower Chamber = State Duma [Gosudarstvennaia Duma] (450 seats; 225 seats elected by proportional representation from party lists winning at least 5% of the vote, and 225 seats from single-member constituencies; members are elected by direct, democratic vote to serve four-year terms)
*--Election results = State Duma - percent of vote received by parties clearing the 5% threshold entitling them to a proportional share of the 225 party list seats

 --Column 1 = party; Column 2 = seats; Column 3 = percentage of vote

United Russia	222	37.1
CPRF [Communist Party of the Russian Federation]	53	12.7
LDPR	38	11.6
Motherland	37	9.1
People's Party	19
Yabloko	4
Union of Rightist Forces	2
Other	7
Independents	65
Repeat election required	3

<>2004ja30:USA National Budged, by category, with President Bush's recommendation and final bill,
in billions of dollars =

Fifteen-year growth of military budget (since end of Cold War)

<>2004mr29:Mikhail Khodorkovskii authored an article titled "Crisis of Russia's Liberalism" [TXT]

<>2004je11:Moscow the site of huge labor rally, with Mikhail Shmakov, President of FNPR, in a leading role. The protest showed the increasing importance of labor unions in post-Soviet Russia, and indicated the importance of non-payment and under-payment of workers in the current struggle between Putin and the "oligarchs" [W]
*--As the most explosive component of European "civil society" [ID], wage-labor continued to influence events, as it had for a century and a half
*--Wage-labor was a critical consideration in the years after the end of WW2
*--In the mobilization of east European civil society, wage labor was a central element over the previous half century

<>2004au:USA | 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Official Government Edition [W]
*--Iraq Camp Bucca detention center gathered future leaders of ISIS [theguardian]

<>2004se10:NYT (Seth Mydans) reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin was taking action to strengthen counter-terrorist forces in the Caucasus in the aftermath of the occupation of Middle School No. 1 in Beslan (North Ossetia)

• The "standoff" ended tragically with the massacre of about 340 people, half of them children
• The city Beslan is just a few miles west along main highways, rail lines and petroleum pipe lines from the major Chechnya administrative center, Grozny
• A foiled suicide bomb attack on a Moscow subway station and the downing of two Russian airliners [W-ID] preceded events in Beslan
• Ten of the approximately 30 terrorists were identified, six from Chechnya and four from Ingushetia
• Special "search groups" have been organized
• Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and the military chief of staff have taken the position that Russia was ready to make preemptive strikes against terrorists outside its borders
• Putin met with interior minister, Rashid Nuraliyev, who told him, "Working executive groups have been formed that will coordinate the activities of the security forces to avert the threat of terrorism and also to prevent attacks by [other] illegal armed groups."
• Creation of special counterterrorism units was being considered
• Parliament was preparing counter-terrorism legislation
• Local human rights groups urged a broader approach, arguing that military and law enforcement were not able alone to solve the problem of terror
• This season, Muscovites remembered the fifth anniversary of a bomb explosion in Moscow which killed nearly 100 people. That earlier attack provoked Putin's renewed war in Chechnya
• NYT gathered from the Interfax news agency that "authorities said three cafes run by people from the Caucasus were attacked in Yekaterinburg (eastern Urals slopes). Groups of young men broke furniture, set fires and caused the death of one employee"
• A cache of weapons and explosives were recently found in an abandoned Petersburg theatre. These might more likely be related to activities of "criminal syndicates" there, rather than preparations for another Beslan-style terrorist attack
• Aslanbek Aslakhanov, the president's chief adviser for Chechnya, claimed that the whereabouts of the most important Chechen terrorist leader, Shamil Basayev, was known but no action taken against him. Officials have offered a $10 million reward for Basayev and another leader, Aslan Maskhadov, dead or alive
• In response, a Chechen Web site offered a $20 million reward for the capture of President Putin
  \\
  *--Chechen War, a Russian-language documentary video
  *2013my31:Mark Ames, in a series of website articles [TXT], linked certain US groups with Chechen terrorism, and with global energy politics, and finally with "9/11" and the bombing of the Boston Marathon

<>2004se14:NYT (Steven Lee Myers) reported on Putin's extensive plan for restructuring Russian governing institutions in order to deal with mounting terrorism. Putin met in special session with cabinet ministers and regional government leaders to share his plan, "the most sweeping political overhaul - and his most striking single step to consolidate power in Russia in more than a decade". [Here, NYT referred to the  1993de12:plebiscite that approved the current Russian constitution, the "Yeltsin Constitution"]
*--Putin's plan =

• The Russian president would nominate candidates for top executive posts in eighty-nine regions [W]. No local nomination
• Local legislatures, rather than democratic vote, would now elect these regional executives
• Seats in the lower house of the federal Parliament, the Duma, would no longer be elected in district races across the country
• These seats would be elected entirely on national party slates, eliminating district races. (Last December, district races produced "all of the independents and liberals now serving in the Duma").

• Regions were denied the power to appoint deputies or representatives to the upper house of Parliament
• Seven federal districts were superimposed over the vast country, each administered by Putin appointees
• Governmental control imposed on television in order to promote Putin's policies and image
• Government resources consolidated in president's hands in order to reward loyal governors and punish or push aside disloyal ones

<>2004oc11:NYC, Columbia University hosted a wide-reaching series of policy-oriented scholarly papers about "Randolph Bourne's America" [W], three panels (unfortunatelly no longer online) =

1. Panel One = "Bourne: The Historical View" [21pp]
2. Panel Two = "The Many Influences of Bourne" [24pp]
3. Panel Three = "Bourne Today [In the first year of the Iraq War; 18pp]

\\
*--Brief Columbia University tribute to Bourne
*--LOOP on "Bourne"

<>2004oc12:Russian "presidential" political party Edinaia Rossiia signed a partnership agreement with "The Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia" [Federatsiia nezavisimykh profsoiuzov Rossii (FNPR)] for cooperation in the State Duma
*--Party head (and speaker of house in the Duma) Boris Gryzlov [W] and Federation President Mikhail Shmakov announced the agreement
*--The leading concept was political unity and economic development without forgetting the everyday life of the Russian working people [TXT of 2000au10:Shmakov letter to Putin]
*--Putin's accomplishments were mixed after five years as President of the Russian Federation
*--But Putin had plans for the future

<>2004de26:Indian Ocean earthquake sent towering tsunami wave over thousands of miles of Asian coastline, causing thousands of deaths and wide-spread destruction
*--Five indigenous tribes of the Indian archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar islands apparently escaped major catastrophe. Large numbers of them were saved because they read nature's sights, sounds and smells, paid heed to the movement of wind, sea and birds, then fled the shores well before the waves hit. "They can smell the wind. They can gauge the depth of the sea with the sound of their oars." [Neelesh Misra, 2005ja05:AP dispatch]

<>2005ja13:NYR | Jonathan Raban article, "The Truth about Terrorism", [TXT] on recent trends in USA foreign policy, with reference to emerging new concepts of war in the time of this "New World Order", now darkened over by terrorism

<>2005mr13:NYT published special Sunday section on official US government practice of "pre-packaged news"

• Hundreds of fake news segments were produced by the Bush Administration and distributed to major networks and news agencies
• "The government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration"
• The Government Accountability Office (GAO), an investigative arm of Congress, suggested that these "news" pieces appeared to be "covert propaganda", what SAC calls "positive censorship"
• The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Justice Department, however, advised the Executive Branch that it need not accept the findings of GAO

\\
*--LOOP on Censorship

<>2005ap24:Kim Murphy review of Oksana Robski's fictional but fact-based account of how Russia's "new rich" or "new Russians", the super-capitalist or savage-capitalists [dikie kapitalisty] live [TXT]
*--Convergence?

<>2005my09:USA| The Huntington Post, which was founded by Arianna Huffington [ID], now began internet publication, adding a powerful and informative voice to growing USA journalistic dissent

<>2005my29:je01; European Union website described two national votes against ratification of the EU "Constitutional Treaty" in the following way = "The people of France [and...the Netherlands...] choose to say no to the ratification of the Constitutional Treaty"
*--EU decided to observe a year (or two) of deliberation or reflection before the move toward ratification was resumed
\\
*--Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union, argues that the EU has been an immense foreign policy success, creating an order to do things in a manner that, to some degree, resembles the old Holy Roman Empire, or Hapsburg Monarchy, especially as it evolved into the Austro-Hungarian Empire [ID]. Many would find that prospect alarming rather than reassuring, but the possibilities of multilateralism among various regions embraced loosely in a union of some sort must be explored, said Zielonka
*--An assessment of EU [TXT]
*--LOOP on EU

<>2006mr:John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" [Original TXT]
*--A revised text was published in the next month in the London Review of Books. That text opened =

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Mideast policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread "democracy" throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the "Israel Lobby". Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country -- in this case, Israel -- are essentially identical.

• [SAC suggestion = 1942 US military strategy in AfroAsia in WW2 bears some comparison (EG) ]
• Six-part YouTube presentation features Mearsheimer and Walt
• Many other YouTube presentations cluster on your screen around this six-part presentation
• In order to complete the six-part presentation before you get electronically side-tracked by some of diversionary "look-alikes", select the second through the sixth parts at the lower left of the small YouTube screen
• This Walt-Mearsheimer YouTube presentation includes many of their most important critics (EG=Richard Perle, John Hagee), but also some of their defenders (EG=Lawrence Wilkerson, Tony Judt)
• After finishing the six-part presentation, you might want to sample some of the competing YouTube presentations on this issue
• Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer interviewed [FLM]
• UNO documents on Palestine (with rich historical archives)
• Two-thirds of a century earlier, the League of Nations failed, but the UNO replaced it in the midst of WW2
• Now the UNO showed some of the same weaknesses as its predecessor
• The geographic location of some of the greatest failures of both League and UNO was what SAC calls "AfroAsia" [ID]
  
\\
*--Mearsheimer's approach to the analysis of international relations is termed "offensive realism" [ID]
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"

<>2006je21:The Guardian | English conservative Peregrine Worsthorne [ID] said =

Of course it made sense in John Stuart Mill's day [ID] to replace hereditary aristocracy, of which there was too much, with a system of careers open to talent, of which there was too little. But surely anybody looking at the subject with an open mind should be able to see that today, 200 years later, there is something quite other to worry about; and the new problem, which is getting worse all the time, is the deeply unattractive and unimpressive nature of an exclusively self-made meritocratic ruling class: a ruling class made up of men and women exceptionally gifted only in the horrible rat-race arts of elbowing their way to the top. Aristocracy may have its faults but meritocracy, which is what in practice a meritocratic system produces, is proving even worse -- which is possibly why the public seems so eager to welcome the return of the English gentleman in the shape of David Cameron [ID]. [Boldface added by SAC editor to suggest Worsthone's rhetorical emphasis and coloration of argument]

<>2006oc07:Moscow | Anna Politkovskaia, journalist with Novaia gazeta, was gunned down in front of her apartment building
*--She was a widely-regarded critic of the Putin administration's anti-liberal policies
*--Her diary has been translated and published as A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia
\\
*2016oc07:Novaia gazeta| "This Week Marks the 10th Anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya’s Murder" [E-TXT]
*2016oc05[The Guardian| "The murder that killed free media in Russia" [E-TXT]
*--LOOP on Censorship

<>2006oc17:USA WDC | President George W. Bush signed the "Military Commissions Act" [ID]. The act suspended habeas corpus in connection with the "war on terror"
*--Terrorism was now a feature of international and domestic politics, a feature of reciprocal international military relationships between states and domestic police relationships within states, a new accent on military/police interface at home and abroad
*--Terrorism LOOP since 1993
*--But terrorism has a far longer pedigree. Over the previous century and a half, terrorism had became a common feature of war and revolution
\\
*2016mr23:RT Op-Edge| "Blow up Brussels; you are a ‘terrorist.’ Blow up Moscow; you are an ‘insurgent.’" [E-TXT]

<>2006de15:USA Department of Defense issued its Counterinsurgency Manual FM-3-24 [W TXT]
*--In this year the US Army issued Lawrence Yates' study "The US Military's Experience in Stability Operations, 1789-2005" [W TXT]
*--These two publications indicated explicit redefinition of the military's mission or role, more clearly expanding it from the traditional battlefield to the day-by-day occupation and management of troubled political/social environments, for example, in Iran, but by no means explicitly restricted to troubled political/social environments abroad

<>2007fe02:USA,Eugene OR| Viacheslav Nikonov spoke on "Russia and Russian Foreign Policy after Putin: an Insider's Look at 2007-2008 Elections in Russia"

• Nikonov was at that time Chairman of the Russian Foreign Relations Committee of the Public Chamber of Russia
• Earlier Nikonov was Deputy Chief of Staff to Mikhail Gorbachev, Chairman of Arms Services Committee in the Russian State Duma, adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian political leader Viktor Yanukovich

<>2007:NYC | Richard Rhodes published his Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race which concluded = "Threat inflation was crucial to maintaining the defense budgets of the Cold War"

• Rhodes offered the following recent examples to illustrate his point =
• 1998:Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which fabricated a threat from Iran and North Korea
• All this was, at the time, willfully wrong, but the "anti-missile" budget grew =
• 1998:  $3 billion
• 2007:$11 billion
• Iran continued to play its century-long role near the center of world politics
• North and South Korea was the most enduring geo-political scar left over from the unfinished settlement of WW2 and subsequent Cold War competition
• These divided halves of old Korea moved toward a central position among global "hot spots"
• 2002:National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq made incorrect and hysteria-mongering estimates of Saddam's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs
• 2004ja:David Kay, leader of the Iraq Survey Group, showed how Iraq had been for a while in serious decline
• Iraq continued to play its century-long role near the center of world politics
• Threat inflation, and the hysteria it provoked, had, since the 1950s, become a habitual part of US defense politics [follow LOOP on "national security threat"]
• It worked for more than a half century
• It "delivered reliable votes"
• It siphoned huge volumes of money from the US treasury
• Carl Sagan estimated that the $5.5 trillion spent by USA on the Cold War nuclear arms race was "enough to buy everything in the United States except for the land"
• Quoting Rhodes again = "Far from victory in the Cold War, the superpower nuclear-arms race and the corresponding militarization of the American economy gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national-security state"
• Compare Rhodes' historical arguments with those made two years later by CIA analyst Marc Sageman [W] and syndicated columnist David Sirota [W]
• Rhodes was in no position to treat the defense and nuclear arms policies of the USSR
• If he had the time and possessed the language tools to do that, his judgments on USSR policies could not have varied much from those he offered here on US policies
• Consider the disabling events in the USSR in August, 1991 [ID] =
• As Gorbachev moved ahead to promote disarmament and terminate the Cold War, he roused a treasonous uprising among his own hard-liners within the Soviet military-industrial complex
• Still, one might derive a touch of satisfaction from the following statistics offered by Rhodes to describe the decline in the number of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the two great nuclear super-powers, USA and USSR (Russia) =
• 1980s:65,000
• 2008: 25,000
• However, by 2008 the rest of the world held something in the neighborhood of 1000 nuclear weapons
• That number is an educated guess since many new nuclear powers over the previous quarter century did not divulge information on their stockpiles
• For example, Israel (another enduring geo-political scar left over from post WW2 international settlements) and South Africa did not admit to their stockpiles
• And who really knew outside of the People's Republic of China about that nuclear arsenal?
• When it came to military-industrialism, the old cold-war optimist notion of "convergence" showed its dark side [ID]
• Over the previous century, military-industrialism had become a major globalized feature of "The Western" legacy
• 2008+: Debates over military-industrialism intensified
  \\
  *2007mr15:Robert Higgs attempted a full accounting of the US military budget [W TXT]

<>2007mr15:my11; Polish right-wing and pro-NATO government of President Lech Kaczyński and Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński (twin brothers) pushed through a law of "lustration" which would purge from public life those who refused to sign a declaration that they never served as secret police agents during the years of Communist rule

• The Constitutional Court struck down the law two months later
• 2007je28:NYR:25-26 | Adam Michnik, a veteran dissenter and pundit who witnessed and contributed to the downfall of Communist rule in Poland, reflected on the larger and very negative implication of recent events =
• Freedoms won in Poland's revolution of 1989 [ID] brought great uncertainty
• Solidarity workers [ID], previously employed in relatively secure jobs at giant enterprises, themselves become victims of the freedoms they won
• In the prison world of communism, a person was the property of the state, but the state took care of one's existence
• In the world of freedom, nobody provides care
• It is in this atmosphere of anxiety that the current Kaczyński coalition rules, employing a peculiar mix of the conservative rhetoric of George W. Bush [ID] and the authoritarian political practice of Vladimir Putin [ID]
• In their attacks on the independent press, curtailment of civil society [ID], centralization of power, and exaggeration of external and internal dangers, the political styles of today's leaders of Poland and Russia [?and USA?] are very similar
• Michnik ended with a contrast of two Polands, the one of "suspicion, fear, and revenge" and the other of "hope, courage, and dialogue"
• He identified himself and "my friends from the underground and from prison" -- as well as Pope John Paul II and Czesław Miłosz [ID] -- with the Poland of hope, courage and dialogue
• Most important perhaps was Michnik's terminal sentence where he acknowledged a more tangible, a purely liberal institutional bastion of hope, courage and dialogue = the Polish Constitutional Court
• Michnik did not consider NATO to be an institutional bastion of hope, courage and dialogue

<>2007ap14:ap15; Petersburg, Russia (Reuters article by Denis Pinchuk) | Riot police wielding batons beat, kicked and chased anti-Kremlin protesters through the heart of St. Petersburg on Sunday, a day after Russian authorities snuffed out a similar rally in Moscow. [The Reuters article continues (SAC editor has bulleted the article's paragraphs) =]

• The use of force by riot police and the detention of hundreds of activists have drawn criticism from the West [sic! from exactly whom?]
• Sunday's violence began when about 500 demonstrators calling for the resignation of President Vladimir Putin moved towards a metro station after an officially permitted protest ended
• Police wearing crash helmets and armed with full-length metal shields and rubber truncheons moved into the crowd, a mixture of people from students to old women
• Police arrested some protesters, pushed others to the ground where they kicked and hit them with their batons and some chased individuals through the streets
• "Stop the beating," demonstrators shouted at the police. "Fascists. How much did Putin pay you?"
• Almost one century after the rise of Italian Facism [Return to initial LOOP on "fascism" and "fascist"] world-wide political culture continued to confront domineering forms of official statist behavior and, however anachronistic, to label them "fascism" or "fascist"
• Now, in St.Petersburg, Russia, 90 years after their Russsian revolutions, the police herded about 150 protesters into police vans, and continued to hit some of them with batons inside. City authorities had allowed protesters to hold a meeting, but had banned the march
• Opponents of Putin, acting under the umbrella organization Other Russia, planned two rallies over the weekend. Authorities banned the main rally on Saturday in Moscow and detained several hundred protesters there, including former world chess champion Garry Kasparov
• Kasparov said the recent heavy-handed policing showed the authorities contempt for democracy
• "The last two days show that Putin's regime doesn't pay any attention to legalities, it relies just upon brute force," he told CNN International
• Other Russia brings together Kremlin opponents from across the political spectrum, from liberals to communists. They say Putin has trampled on democratic freedoms and they demand a free and fair presidential election in 2008

DETENTIONS

• But Other Russia has only marginal influence as the vast majority of Russians support Putin, whose seven years in power have been marked by huge oil and commodity wealth and the return of national pride after the chaotic post-Soviet 1990s
• Sunday's rally in St. Petersburg attracted about 3,000 people. The mobile phone network had been blocked and police trucks mounted with water cannon, a modern expression of police/militarism, were parked in side streets
• "Freedom!" the protesters shouted. "Putin is the enemy of the people"
• The leader of the left-wing National Bolshevik party, Eduard Limonov addressed the crowd: "Our demand is the resignation of the government and the president and free and fair elections this year and next"
• Police later detained him at a St. Petersburg apartment
• Earlier police detained dozens of protesters heading towards the rally, organizers said
• "Police detained me as soon as I left my house this morning," rally organizer Olga Kurnosova, leader of Kasparov's political party in St. Petersburg, told Reuters by telephone from police custody
• In March riot police used batons to break up a march by Putin opponents who blocked one of St. Petersburg's main roads

*--As in the Cold-War decade, 1962-1972 [ID], so also toward the second decade of the 21st century, dissent began to shape global politics

<>2007jy14:Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to USA/NATO plan to deploy a missile shield in eastern Europe (Poland and Czech Republic)

• In response Putin notified NATO authorities that Russia would in 150 days (2007de27) suspend its obligations under the major Cold-War era arms-limitation agreement, the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty [Wki]
• That treaty was signed in the late-Perestroika period [ID] during which Mikhail Gorbachev had done so much to ratchet down Cold-War tensions
• NYT opinion [Source] =

  Critics of the United States' handling of relations with Russia have warned that the Bush administration has been creating an environment in which the Putin government, emboldened by a flood of oil dollars and seeking to re-establish its status in the world, could pick and choose among its treaty obligations. [...] Under Bush, the United States pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty [Wki] so it could pursue the goal of a global anti-missile shield, the exact effort that has so angered Putin and his inner circle.

• Indeed, the Bush administration provoked a significant arms build-up in the Russian Federation
• The Polish and Czech peoples, whatever their wishes in the matter, again, as so often, found themselves at the fulcrum point of east/west conflict in Europe
• LOOP on "Poland" from 1918mr
• LOOP on "Czech" from 1918my
• Fifteen years after the collapse of the USSR's Warsaw Pact, the USA-sponsored Cold War military association NATO continued to influence world events

<>2007:Table = TWO AFFLUENT SOCIETIES: USA and Norway

Table based on 2007oc11:NYR:31 which cites United Nations Statistic Yearbook, CIA World Factbook, OECD Revenue Statistics. Income Distribution

<>2007:European philosopher and political-economist Andre' Gorz [ID] made a distinction between what he called "real economy" and "finance industry" ["The Exit from Capitalism", reprinted in Ecologica] =

• In the real economy, people produced, exchanged and consumed things of
• In the currently all-powerful finance industry, interlaced global stock exchanges and their managerial elites produced artificial and highly manipulated boom-and-bust "bubbles" in which only managers might always boom while the great majority nearly always were busted
• Gorz wrote, "The real economy has become an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry"
• Long before most other economic "experts", Gorz foresaw that the impending [2008] world-wide economic crisis was "leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression"
• In other words, the real economy and the finance industry were being pulled down together
• Gorz went very far with this interpretation. Capitalism, he said, had evolved to its "internal limit". Capitalism was now fully absorbed by a finance industry in which the older real economy was replaced by "the art of making money by buying and selling nothing but various forms of money". Before our very eyes, said Gorz, the two-century-old capitalist system had evolved to natural extinction

<>2007de21:Bill Moyer's Journal [ID] interviewed Benjamin Barber [Wki] about his latest book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children... [W]
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[W]
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>2008fe17:Serbian province of Kosovo declared its independence on basis of agreements reached among a set of west European and North American powers

• A decade of social tragedy and international military intervention led to this striking moment =
• Has a precedence been set in which internal geo-political restructuring within otherwise sovereign states can be engineered by other more well-armed states, without UNO or any other standard world authority? [CF 6 years later=Ukraine and The Crimea]

<>2008je12:USA Supreme court struck down key provision of the Military Commissions Act

<>2008au07:Georgia, a candidate for membership in NATO, attacked South Ossetia [Osetiia], provoking Russian military response
*--Russian Federation troops moved into Georgia from the autonomous regions of South Ossetia and Abkhaziia
*--Russia routed the USA-trained and equipped Georgian military and humiliated the US ally, Georgian President Saakashvili
\\
*--An excellent analysis of the conflict with good maps, putting matters in the essential international context of events over the previous two decades = [W]

<>2008oc09:MOSCOW [Associated Press] Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in a presentation to the Russian Communist Party that the financial crisis has irreparably damaged the image of the USA as the leader of the free world and the global economy

• "Trust in the United States as the leader of the free world and the free economy, and confidence in Wall Street as the center of that trust, has been damaged, I believe, forever," Putin said. "There will be no return to the previous situation"
• Prime Minister Putin and President Dmitrii Medvedev had recently been calling for changes in the world financial system
• This latest statement was made on the eve of a meeting in WDC of the finance ministers of what is a self-designated international organization called "G-7", USA, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan
• These seven nations [...] take themselves to be the great, global financial/industrial powers
• Neither Russia nor China were invited to be members of this high-powered "G-" meeting
• Russia had been allowed in on occasion for political discussions. G-7 in this case was called G-8
• As the global financial crisis deepened, "Western" financial institutions appeared to be doing more harm to "The West" than the Soviet Union had ever managed
• As "The West" wobbled over the previous nine years, G-7 was frequently expanded itself to G-20, G-22 then G-33
• G-20 represented a concession to the fact that G-7 or G-8 was a narrowly Atlantic "G-" which occasionally went to G-8 in grudging acknowledgment of the still significant bulk of the Russian economy [G-20 ID#1 | ID#2]
  \\
  *--LOOP on "finance"

<>2009ja05:Moscow Bureau official of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Lilia Shevtsova, offered her views on recent Russian diplomatic initiatives [TXT NB! the old-fashioned-feeling use of the term "West"]

<>2009my07:Czech Republic, Prague| European Union "Summit" gathering formally initiated its Eastern Partnership Community [EaP] project, designed for certain recently created east European nation-states, all erstwhile Soviet republics

• "EaP Community: Eastern Partnership Community" official webpage explained =

  The Eastern Partnership (EaP) is a European Union [EUn] initiative directed at six countries of Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The EaP was launched by 27 EU member states and the six partner countries [above].... The initiative aims at tightening the relationship between the EU and the Eastern partners by deepening their political co-operation and economic integration [SAC editor has introduced boldface script]

• EaP "partnership" for these six ex-Soviet republics does not promise nor does it preclude the possibility of future EU membership
• What it does offer is "deeper integration with the EU structures by encouraging and supporting them in their political, institutional and economic reforms based on EU standards, as well as facilitating trade and increasing mobility between the EU and the partner states"
  • As the EU approached its 50th anniversary, it moved increasingly towards close institutional association with the still active Cold-War military organization NATO
  • 2014ap15:Associated Press dispatch about growing closeness of NATO and EU
  • After over 60 years of development, the EU initiated aggressive moves into the areas of those fledgling nation states created when the USSR evaporated
  • This despite the fact that the idea of Europe-wide unity was in trouble within its own borders [W#1 | W#2 ]
  \\
  *--LOOP on Ukraine and LOOP on EU

<>2009se14:Russia city Yaroslavl was site of international "Yaroslavl Forum"| Dmitrii Medvedev delivered a major address on the world system emerging out of recent global financial crisis [TXT]

<>2010ap02:TLS| Marc Vernon review of four recent books on atheism, positioning them within the ongoing debate over religion, secularism and atheism that has agitated modern thinking with new force over the previous decade or so =

Despite the recent intensification of debate between atheists and religious believers, the result still seems to be stalemate. Protagonists can readily identify their opponent's weak spots, and so delight their supporters. At the same time, both sides can fall back on their best arguments. [... They have] created, or recovered, a perfect sport. No one can win in the game called 'God': everyone can land blows. [8]

<>2010ap29:NYR:18-19| European historian (?New World Order historian?) Tony Judt, "Ill Fares the Land", presented 6 complex but stunning graphs ("figures") to illustrate the actual position of the USA in the more developed world. NB! In the graphs that follow, none of the huge mainland Asian or Central and South American nations are included (Russia, India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile), nor is Africa =

*--CF=2007:Table

CF= Annually renewed ranking of global "Legatum Financial Prosperity Index" (less sophisticated than graphs above but globally more expansive) [E-TXT]
\\
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>2011wi:Arab-speaking world and beyond swept by waves of unrest. Protests convulsed half a dozen countries across AfroAsia [Based on NYT rpt~]
*--Tunisia | The suicide of a street vendor led to a revolt that ousted that country's autocratic ruler
*--Egypt | Less than a month later, President Mubarak was driven from the office he claimed as his own for three decades, and strikes over long-suppressed grievances continued there
*2011fe16:Bahrain | Tens of thousands of people turned out to challenge the monarchy
*--Yemen | Street battles intensified
*--Iran | Demonstrator's funeral turned into a brief tug of war between the government and its opponents
*--Libya | Pockets of dissent broke out from under heavy police control
Throughout "the Arab Spring" of 2010-2011 readers of commercial-culture journalism in USA noticed emphasis on the wondrous progressive power of "social media" [F/] and on the heroic popular unrest among the people of the Arab world

But attitudes about vigorous political dissent depend so much on "whose ox is gored" =

Some USA readers noticed that the sense of heroism or emphasis on the positive role of anti-establishment "social media" in the story above was altogether absent in the same media outlets' stories about the wave of popular unrest that swept across the USA at the same time, with the rise of the "Tea Party" and "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations [EG#1 | EG#2]
*--In addition, public mass-media in "The West" noticed vigorous international military intervention into these ostensibly domestic AfroAsian uprisings
*--Over the previous century and a half, AfroAsia had become a distinct global hot spot, and as the 21st century unfolded it continued to be so
\\
*2009ap13:NYT| Paul Krugman, "Tea Parties Forever" [E-TXT]
*2016: eurotopics.net| Report lambasts Cameron's Libya intervention [E-TXT]
*2017mr02:theguardian| Mubarak acquitted in final ruling on Egypt's Arab spring deaths [E-TXT]

<>2011oc15:NYT (a USA "newspaper of record" [W-ID]) | NYC the scene of massive public protest against Wall Street corruption. "In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated", by Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash| An article which sought to summarize the way bankers and other financial managers characterized USA public protests after citizens "occupied Wall Street" in September and as these protests spread throughout the USA and seemed to mesh with global citizens' movements against remote, oppressive and indifferent elites =

Publicly, bankers say they understand the anger at Wall Street -- but believe they are misunderstood by the protesters camped on their doorstep. But when they speak privately, it is often a different story.

"Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock'n'roll," said one top hedge fund manager.

"It's not a middle-class uprising", adds another veteran bank executive. "It's fringe groups. It's people who have the time to do this."

As the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have grown and spread to other cities, an open question is: Do the bankers get it? Their different worldview speaks volumes about the wide chasms that have opened over who is to blame for the continuing economic malaise and what is best for the country.

Some on Wall Street viewed the protesters with disdain, and a degree of caution, as hundreds marched through the financial district on Friday. Others say they feel their pain, but are befuddled about what they are supposed to do to ease it. A few even feel personally attacked, and say the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have been in Zuccotti Park for weeks are just bitter about their own economic fate and looking for an easy target. If anything, they say, people should show some gratitude.

"Who do you think pays the taxes?" said one longtime money manager. "Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let's embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people."

He added that he was disappointed that members of Congress from New York, especially Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, had not come out swinging for an industry that donates heavily to their campaigns. "They need to understand who their constituency is", he said. [IE= The "constituency" of the USA Congress was ensconced bankers, not mobilized citizens]

Generally, bankers dismiss the protesters as gullible and unsophisticated. Not many are willing to say this out loud, for fear of drawing public ire -- or the masses to their doorsteps. "Anybody who dismisses them publicly is putting a bull's-eye on their back", the hedge fund manager said.

John Paulson, the hedge fund titan who made billions in the financial crisis by betting against the subprime mortgage market, has been the exception. His Upper East Side home was picketed by demonstrators earlier this week, but Mr. Paulson offered a full-throated defense of the Street, even going so far as to defend the tiny sliver of top earners attacked by the Occupy Wall Street protesters -- whose signs refer to themselves as "the other 99 percent".

RELATED NYT TXT =

"The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes, providing huge benefits to everyone in our city and state", he said in a statement. "Paulson and Company and its employees have paid hundreds of millions in New York City and New York State taxes in recent years and have created over 100 high-paying jobs in New York City since its formation."

The messages coming from the protesters are by no means in accord. They have myriad grievances, though many see Wall Street as the most powerful symbol of the income inequality and "economic injustice" they are railing against. There is ample indignation over banks being bailed out while their customers are being foreclosed upon, and over banks handing out hefty bonus checks and severance packages so soon after the crisis erupted.

Similarly, executives keep getting generous payouts when they leave. Just last week, Bank of America disclosed it was paying a total of $11 million in severance to two executives forced out in a management reshuffle, Sallie Krawcheck and Joe Price, even as the company said it would begin laying off roughly 30,000 employees over the next few years.

"Wall Street continues to underestimate the degree of anger among citizens and voters", said Douglas J. Elliott, a former investment banker who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. For the most part, bankers say that they see the protests as a reaction to the high unemployment and slow growth that has plagued the American economy since the recession and the financial crisis of 2008. Despite all the placards and chants plainly indicating otherwise, some bankers suggest that deep down, the protesters are not really all that mad at them.

"I don't think we see ourselves as the target", said Steve Bartlett, president of the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the nation's biggest banks and insurers in Washington. "I think they're protesting about the economy. What's lost is that the financial services sector has to be well capitalized and well financed for the economy to recover."

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, typifies the conflicting messages coming from Wall Street. In a conference call with reporters after third-quarter earnings were announced Thursday, he struck a sympathetic note. "I do vaguely remember the First Amendment that it is legal to demonstrate and it is completely fine", he said. "You should listen and not just have a knee-jerk reaction."

But in a later conference call with analysts, Mr. Dimon's remarks were more offhand when asked about the protests and the negative perception of his industry. "Most of our clients like us", he said. Besides, changing the industry's image now is a tall order, he told the analysts, before adding, "If you have any great ideas on the phone you guys can write them up and send them to me. We'll take them into consideration". Without a coherent message, the crowds will ultimately thin out, Wall Street types [??"types"] insist -- especially when the weather turns colder. They see the protesters as an entertaining sideshow, little more than flash mobs of slackers, seeking to lock arms with Kanye West or get a whiff of the antiestablishment politics that defined their parents' generation.

"There is a view that it will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing", said one financial industry official.

MORE FROM NYTIMES.COM =

Most bankers were far more concerned this week about the business impact of the new Volcker Rule restrictions on speculative trading than they were about the demonstrations, this official added.

A smaller group of bank executives are taking the protests more seriously. They see them as a sign of the growing economic divide in this country -- and are even monitoring the latest developments on Twitter. While peaceful so far, the demonstrations at Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo branches from San Francisco to Peoria are eerily similar to those routinely seen at Citibank outposts in Athens, Hong Kong, and in other overseas markets. Some believe it could be years before the swarms of protesters end their marches on bank branches.

A few outspoken members of the financial industry have broken ranks with their more skeptical brethren to say they understand a bit of the outrage of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

"When I tell people I went down to research the protests, they're shocked, they literally laugh", said Michael Mayo, a veteran bank analyst at Crédit Agricole Securities. "It's just not a location they frequent."

Citigroup's chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, even said he would be happy to talk with the protesters any time they wanted to drop by. Mr. Pandit, onstage Wednesday at a Fortune magazine conference, said that the protesters' "sentiments were completely understandable".

"I would also corroborate that trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S., and that it's Wall Street's job to reach out to Main Street and rebuild that trust", Mr. Pandit said. The protesters should hold Citi and others "accountable for practicing responsible finance", he said, "and keep asking us about how we're doing".
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*2016se17 = Five Years Later, Occupy Gets Its Moment - POLITICO Magazine [E-TXT]
*2017ja06:The Guardian| "Want to be part of the next wave of activism? Move to rural America" [EG=Occupy organizer moves to rural Oregon] [E-TXT]
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>2011de10:SRAS Newsletter offered excited eye-witness report on Moscow events

<>2011de11:Moscow| Reuters dispatch addressed remarkable public protest against fraudulent elections in Russia, a more vigorous public reaction to fraudulent election practices than experienced in any other European or North American nation (CF=2000:USA election which failed and led to US Supreme Court appointment of George W. Bush)

MOSCOW (Reuters) President Dmitry Medvedev ordered an investigation Sunday into allegations of fraud in Russia's parliamentary election, one day after tens of thousands of protesters demanded it be annulled and rerun.

Medvedev responded on his Facebook site to the protesters' complaints that the December 4 election was slanted to favor of his and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, but did not mention their calls for an end to Putin's rule.

"I do not agree with any slogans or statements made at the rallies. Nevertheless, instructions have been given by me to check all information from polling stations regarding compliance with the legislation on elections," Medvedev said in a post on the social media site.

"Citizens of Russia have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. People have a right to express the position that they did yesterday. It all took place within the framework of the law," he added.

His statement was a sign that the Russian leadership feels under pressure after the biggest opposition protests since Putin rose to power in 1999. The protesters themselves used social media to organize their rallies.

In a further sign of recognition that the people's mood has changed after years of tight political control by Putin, city authorities across Russia allowed Saturday's protests to go ahead and riot police hardly intervened.

State television and other Russian channels also broadcast footage of a huge protest in Moscow, breaking a policy of showing almost no negative coverage of the authorities.

But Medvedev had already indicated before the protests that he would call an inquiry, and a statement from Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, gave no indication that the prime minister was about to make big concessions to the protesters.

"We respect the point of view of the protesters, we are hearing what is being said, and we will continue to listen to them," Peskov said in a statement released late Saturday.

That is unlikely to appease protesters who issued a list of demands at the Moscow rally, which police said was attended by 25,000 people and the organizers said attracted up to 150,000.

PROTESTERS LIST THEIR DEMANDS

The demands included much more than just an investigation in the conduct of the election, which international monitors and the United States said was slanted to help United Russia secure a majority in the State Duma lower house.

The protesters demanded a rerun of the election, the sacking of Central Election Commission chief Vladimir Churov and the release of people they define as political prisoners. The organizers also called for a new day of protests on December 24.

"I am happy. December 10, 2011 will go down in history as the day the country's civic virtue and civil society was revived. After 10 years of hibernation, Moscow and all Russia woke up," Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader, wrote in his blog.

"The main reason why it was such a big success is that a feeling of self-esteem has awakened in us and we have all got so fed up with Putin's and Medvedev's lies, theft and cynicism that we cannot tolerate it any longer ... Together we will win!"

It may not be that simple. The opposition has long been divided, most mainstream parties have little or no role in the rallies and keeping them up across the world's largest country is hard at the best of times but especially in winter.

Most Russian political experts say Putin, the former KGB spy who has dominated the world's largest energy producer [Russia] for 12 years, is in little immediate danger of being toppled, despite anger over widespread corruption and the gap between rich and poor.

But they say the 59-year-old leader's authority has been damaged and may gradually wane after he returns as president in an election next March that he is still expected to win.

Although opinion polls show he is Russia's most popular politician, the protests indicate how deep feelings are over the December 4 election. The biggest were in Moscow and St Petersburg, the two biggest cities and the main centers of Russia's middle class, but smaller rallies took place across the country.

TOUGH TASK AHEAD

"Putin has a formidable task. He has lost Moscow and St Petersburg, crucial cities where everything usually starts," said political analyst and author Liliya Shevtsova. "He looks out of touch."

Putin, as president for eight years until 2008 and as prime minister since then, built up a strongman image by restoring order after the chaos in the decade after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. But he no longer seems invincible.

He could release the state's purse strings to satisfy the financial demands of some critics but many of the protesters in Moscow are middle-class people demanding more fundamental changes, including relaxing the political system he controls.

His charges last week that the United States encouraged the protesters and financed them provoked scorn on the Internet.

Answering calls to protests on social media sites, a huge crowd gathered in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square Saturday, many carrying white carnations as a symbol of protest. Some waved pictures of Putin and Medvedev saying: "Guys, it's time to go."

Felix, 68, a retired military officer who declined to give his surname, said in Moscow he wanted Putin out, but had no hope this could be accomplished through elections. "There is no way to change those in power within the electoral system they have set up, so we need to use other methods," he said.

(Reporting by Timothy Heritage and John Bowker; Editing by David Stamp)
\\
*--Wki
*--These events described as a "Revolutionary Situation",  borrowing a more than 100-year-ild Leninist historiographic concept [ID] [E-TXT]

<>2011de12:Moscow| Reuters dispatch| Steve Gutterman, "Two Putin-era Russians seek liberal mantle"|

Russia's former finance chief and one of its richest tycoons put themselves forward as candidates to unite liberal and middle-class voters who vented frustration with Vladimir Putin's political dominance by taking to the streets in protest.

Alexei Kudrin [W.ID], a longtime Putin ally forced out as finance minister in September [2011], said he wanted to help create a liberal party to fill a void exposed by Russia's December 4 parliamentary vote, which set off mass protests over alleged fraud.

Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov [W.ID], a metals magnate who owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team, separately announced he would run in the March presidential vote which he expected would return Putin to the Kremlin after four years as prime minister.

Both men cast themselves as potential leaders of liberal forces that have struggled to gain political representation, but analysts and opposition politicians raised questions about their motives and their independence from Putin and the Kremlin.

Tens of thousands of Russians protested on Saturday over the December 4 parliamentary election they said was rigged in favour of United Russia, the party Putin has used as an instrument of his rule.

Kudrin said the election, in which voters sharply reduced United Russia's majority in the State Duma lower house of parliament, had shown the "dire" need for a strong liberal alternative.

"Today one can say that the demand for the creation of such a structure is so high that it will certainly begin to be created," Kudrin, 51, said in the interview published by the financial daily Vedomosti.

"The process of the consolidation of liberal and democratic forces will now go forward. I am absolutely certain of this, and I myself am ready to support this," Kudrin said, adding that it was too early to talk about a potential leader.

MIDDLE CLASS

Putin's plan to return to the presidency and make Medvedev prime minister, unveiled in September [2011], deepened feelings of many Russians that the future had been decided without their input. The Duma election increased a feeling of disenfranchisement.

Many protesters in the diverse crowds across Russia on Saturday were drawn from a new middle class of moderately wealthy professionals who are unhappy with a tightly controlled political system dominated by a single man.

Prokhorov, 46, described himself as a "defender of middle-class interests". He told a news conference he was "ready to be an integrator" of Russia's liberal, democratically minded opposition.

Both Prokhorov and Kudrin are relatively new to electoral politics and are fresh from public breaks with the Kremlin.

Kudrin had been finance minister since 2000, the year Putin was first elected president, until he was forced out in September after criticizing President Dmitry Medvedev for lavish military spending plans. [LOOP on "finance"]

Prokhorov, long seen as more of a playboy than a politician, briefly headed Right Cause, widely seen as a pocket party controlled by the Kremlin to win liberal support.

But he quit, also in September, after a spat with Kremlin political strategist Vladislav Surkov, influential deputy head of the presidential administration.

Neither Kudrin nor Prokhorov attended the protests on Saturday, which could scupper their chances of winning the support of opposition leaders who led the demonstrations.

Boris Nemtsov [W.ID], a longtime Putin foe whose political party was denied registration by the Justice Ministry this year, barring it from the parliamentary vote, said he believed Prokhorov's candidacy was engineered by the Kremlin.

"This is a 100 percent Putin-inspired project," he told Reuters.

A liberal party led by Kudrin, who rejected a Kremlin request to lead Right Cause earlier this year, could offer a way for Putin to channel discontent and reduce the threat posed by the biggest opposition protests since he came to power in 1999.

"Of course the Kremlin wants to retain control and channel the energy that spilled out into the street on Saturday into a project that will be not be completely unpredictable," said Maria Lipman, political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

But she said whether or not Kudrin was acting in concert with Putin and the Kremlin, the election and the protests had loosened the government's grip on politics.

"The political monopoly that the Kremlin has got used to will gradually wash away, and even agreements with the Kremlin will not mean unconditional loyalty or Kremlin control over the political process," she said.

KUDRIN CRITICISES UNITED RUSSIA

Kudrin's ties to Putin leave questions about his ability to play a key role in any new political force, particularly after the protests on Saturday featured frequent chants of "Russia without Putin" and "Down with Putin".

Opposition leaders have vowed to hold big new protests on December 24, hoping to increase pressure on Putin as the March 4 presidential vote approaches. Polls show Putin is Russia's most popular politician, but his approval ratings have fallen.

Kudrin avoided strong criticism of Putin in the interview, saying he had done a good job softening the blow from the global financial crisis on Russia, and blaming United Russia for the lack of progress in fighting corruption and other problems.

But he warned that the legitimacy of the presidential election would be undermined if the authorities ignore the allegations of fraud in the parliamentary vote.

Kudrin called for a recount "in certain polling districts and even regions" and said the Kremlin should consider dismissing the head of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov, which is one of the protesters' other demands.

"If this is not done, the next elections will be conducted in a slipshod manner," he said. "Ignoring obvious violations places the objectivity of these elections in doubt."

Medvedev said on his Facebook site on Sunday that he had ordered an investigation into the electoral fraud allegations, but neither he nor Putin has given any indication they will accede to the protesters' demands for a new election.

Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika said on Monday that he saw no grounds for a recount or a new vote. [Remember the same judicial move in USA against recount in the 2000 presidential election.]

Up to 5,000 mostly young pro-Kremlin activists turned out for a rally in a central Moscow square on Monday, Russia's Constitution Day.

Police and state television said the demonstration drew 25,000, the same as the police crowd estimate for Saturday's protest in Moscow.

(Additional reporting by Alexei Anishchuk, Nastassia Astrasehuskaya and Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Alistair Lyon)
\\
*--The Other Russia [E-TXT]
*2016au25:BBC News| Protesting in Putin's Russia [E-TXT]
*2017fe11:BBC News| Russia court questions jailing of peaceful activist Ildar Dadin [E-TXT]

<>2012fe26: Moscow, on the rim of Sparrow Hills, looking down on Moskva River| One of the finest of the increasingly global pop-arts "flashmobs" strutted its stuff [YouTube#1 | YouTube#2]
\\
*--The long century-old (maybe endless) history of dissent continued to rock complacent world-wide "establishments", even with pop-arts public "demonstrations"
*--LOOP on nearly two centuries of pop-arts comes down to this for now

<>2012mr:FoA| NATO "victory" in Libya [E-TXT]

<>2013fe12:The Guardian| An outstanding English visual presentation of what a certain system of textual analysis says about the "educational level" attained by USA Presidential "state of the union" addresses since 1790| "The state of our [USA] union is ... dumber" [E-TXT]

<>2014ap24:NYR:68-9| George Soros [W-ID] interview = "The Future of Europe, from Iran to Ukraine" [SOURCE]

Schmitz (the interviewer): What do you think of Vladimir Putin's recent policies with respect to Ukraine, Crimea, and Europe?

Soros: Now you are coming to the crux of the matter. Russia is emerging as a big geopolitical player, and the European Union needs to realize that it has a resurgent rival on its east. Russia badly needs Europe as a partner, but Putin is positioning it as a rival. There are significant political forces within the Russian regime that are critical of Putin's policy on that score.

Schmitz: Can you be more specific?

Soros: The important thing to remember is that Putin is leading from a position of weakness. He was quite popular in Russia because he restored some order out of the chaos. The new order is not all that different from the old one, but the fact that it is open to the outside world is a definite improvement, an important element in its stability. But then the prearranged switch with Dmitry Medvedev from prime minister to president deeply upset the people. Putin felt existentially threatened by the protest movement. He became repressive at home and aggressive abroad.

That is when Russia started shipping armaments to the Assad regime in Syria on a massive scale and helped turn the tide against the rebels. The gamble paid off because of the preoccupation of the Western powers -- the United States and the EU -- with their internal problems. Barack Obama wanted to retaliate against Syria's use of chemical weapons. He asked for congressional approval and was about to be rebuffed when Putin came to the rescue and persuaded Assad to voluntarily surrender his chemical weapons.

That was a resounding diplomatic victory for him. Yet the spontaneous uprising of the Ukrainian people must have taught Putin that his dream of reconstituting what is left of the Russian Empire is unattainable. He is now facing a choice between persevering or changing course and becoming more cooperative abroad and less repressive at home. His current course has already proved to be self-defeating, but he appears to be persevering.

[After decades abuilding, the EU was experiencing "mission creep" at a time of internal disorder and in close association with a very different organization, NATO
*--For its part NATO continued well into its seventh decade to shape world events, strengthening ever closer institutional ties with the ostensibly civilian/economic federation, the expansive but increasingly dysfunctional EU]

Schmitz: Is Russia a credible threat to Europe if its economy is as weak as you say?

Soros: The oligarchs who control much of the Russian economy don't have any confidence in the regime. They send their children and money abroad. That is what makes the economy so weak. Even with oil over $100 a barrel, which is the minimum Russia needs to balance its budget, it is not growing. Putin turned aggressive out of weakness. He is acting in self-defense. He has no scruples, he can be ruthless, but he is a judo expert, not a sadist -- so the economic weakness and the aggressive behavior are entirely self-consistent.

Schmitz: How should Europe respond to it?

Soros: It needs to be more united, especially in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine. Putin prides himself on being a geopolitical realist. He respects strength and is emboldened by weakness. Yet there is no need to be permanently adversarial. Notwithstanding the current situation in Ukraine, the European Union and Russia are in many ways complementary; they both need each other. There is plenty of room for Russia to play a constructive role in the world, exactly because both Europe and the United States are so preoccupied with their internal problems.

[If you wish, GO to beginning of the nearly 1200-year LOOP on Ukraine]

Schmitz: How does that translate into practice, particularly in the Middle East?

Soros: It has totally transformed the geopolitical situation. I have some specific ideas on this subject, but it is very complicated. I can't possibly explain it in full because there are too many countries involved and they are all interconnected.

Schmitz: Give it a try.

Soros: I should start with a general observation. There are a growing number of unresolved political crises in the world. That is a symptom of a breakdown in global governance. We have a very rudimentary system in place. Basically, there is only one international institution of hard power: the UN Security Council. [Soros might have done better if he said "transnational" above so as to distinguished UNO from NATO which otherwise seems to contradict "only one".] If the five permanent [UNO Security Council] members agree, they can impose their will on any part of the world. But there are many sovereign states with armies; and there are failed states that are unable to protect their monopoly over the use of lethal force or hard power.

The cold war was a stable system. The two superpowers were stalemated by the threat of mutually assured destruction, and they had to restrain their satellites. So wars were fought mainly at the edges. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a brief moment when the United States emerged as the undisputed leader of the world. But it abused its power. Under the influence of the neocons, who argued that the United States should use its power to impose its will on the world, President George W. Bush declared "war on terror" and invaded Iraq under false pretenses.

That was a tragic misinterpretation of the proper role of hegemonic or imperial power. It is the power of attraction -- soft power -- that ensures the stability of empires. Hard power may be needed for conquest and self-protection, but the hegemon must look after the interests of those who depend on it in order to secure their allegiance instead of promoting only its own interests. The United States did that very well after World War II, when it established the United Nations and embarked on the Marshall Plan. But President Bush forgot that lesson and destroyed American supremacy in no time. The neocons' dream of a "new American century" lasted less than ten years. President Obama then brought American policy back to reality. His record in foreign policy is better than generally recognized. He accepted the tremendous loss of power and influence and tried to "lead from behind." In any case, he is more preoccupied with domestic than foreign policy. In that respect America is in the same position as Europe, although for different reasons. People are inward-looking and tired of war. This has created a power vacuum, which has allowed conflicts to fester unresolved all over the world.

Recently, Russia has moved into this power vacuum, trying to reassert itself as a geopolitical player. That was a bold maneuver, inspired by Putin's internal weakness, and it has paid off in Syria because of the weakness of the West. Russia could do what the Western powers couldn't: persuade Assad to "voluntarily" surrender his chemical weapons. That has radically changed the geopolitical landscape. Suddenly, the prospect of a solution has emerged for the three major unresolved conflicts in the Middle East -- Palestine, Iran, and Syria -- when one would have least expected it.

[Start LOOP on "Putin" at beginning]

The Syrian crisis is by far the worst, especially in humanitarian consequences. Russia's entry as a major supplier of arms, coupled with Hezbollah's entry as a supplier of troops, has turned the tables in favor of Assad. The fighting can be brought to an end only by a political settlement imposed and guaranteed by the international community. Without it, the two sides will continue to fight indefinitely with the help of their outside supporters. But a political settlement will take months or years to negotiate. In the meantime, Assad is following a deliberate policy of denying food and destroying the medical system as a way of subduing the civilian population. "Starve or surrender" is his motto
\\
*--LOOP on "Syria" since 1918

• 2014fe-2014mr; «Был план оставить Крым и окопаться в Севастополе». Воспоминания полевых командиров, активистов и ополченцев о событиях февраля-марта 2014-го| [2017mr16:Novaya gazeta E-TXT]
  \\
  *--Go to SAC Narrative Extension on 2013+: Ukraine Crisis

• Piketty instantly positioned himself in a two-century tradition of European political-economic thought
• 2014je:Berlin| Picketty delivered a "TED Talk" [video]
• 2016fe14 (Valentine's Day): Paris newspaper Le Monde published Piketty's explanation of why socialist Bernie Sanders was surprising USA political culture in the early phase of primary elections before the big national election in November [the guardian E-TXT translation]
• CF=Henry George for a distinct precursor to Piketty from among the series of great political-economists
  \\
  *2016:|>Goetzmann,William M|>Goetzmann.MONEY_Money Changes Everything: How finance made civilization possible| Credit, investment, speculation, and other matters of the pocketbook. The study of finance is traditionally the finest layer of dust on the stack of arid tomes devoted to the dismal science economics. Goetzmann is a professor of finance and management/Yale School of Management. He co-edited: The origins of value: the financial innovations that created modern capital markets (2005), etc. With this latest book, he doesn't exactly shift the discussion of finance into pop territory. However, his book is more accessible than many in the field, positing that the instruments of finance have done more than their share to make civilized life possible The author invites us to consider that a principal effect of finance is to travel in time: that is, finance "reallocates economic value through time". Linking present and future while also shifting the burden of risk to allow investors and states to do such things as build infrastructure. Finance also involves an increase in social complexity, requiring alphanumeric language for record-keeping and bureaucrats to keep track of things, so that finance is responsible for state-building. Among the earliest financial documents we have, writes Goetzmann, are clay tablets recording impossible debts denoted by absurdly gigantic numbers: "The ability to imagine and then to express such vast quantities", he writes, "would not have been possible without the leap of mathematical abstraction in the Uruk period" [... supplemented by] record-keeping systems involving great quantities of grain offered in tribute by great numbers of people [ID]. Throughout Goetzmann's narrative, he offers numerous examples of the inequalities wrought by financial systems. Whether the medieval practice of "tax farming" or the speculative schemes floated by a well-known founding father [EG]. Of considerable interest is the author's brief closing look at future possibilities for financial regimes, such as a sovereign wealth fund [EG=Norway] to bolster some version of social security. For the numerate and fiscally wonky, this book does a fine job of linking past, present, and future [Kirkus Review]
  *2005jy23: A review of another, less "scientific" but creative early-20th-century new look at political-economy, Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics [E-TXT]
  *2016ap15:The Guardian| "Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems" [E-TXT]
  *--Hop back 2 1/2 centuries to the beginning of the giant LOOP on "finance"]
  

• “Ever since his clear victory against rival Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, the Europeans are also getting to know Bernie Sanders. … What has impressed many Europeans is that they see a potential US president who thinks and talks like we do - perhaps for the first time ever. Or rather he talks like fewer and fewer European leaders do, but like many of the Old Continent's citizens would like to see them do. Bernie Sanders has the courage to describe himself as 'socialist' in a country where that word is basically a political death certificate. Compared with his program the agenda of the Socialist International in Europe [Wki] seems rather timid and defensive -- despite its supposedly having been inspired by social democratic models”

• Liberal news website 15min (LT), GLOBAL CRITICISM OF POPE ABSURD, by the Christian-oriented columnist Tomas Viluckas, in which he argues that the allegations that the pope allowed himself to be used by the Kremlin by meeting with Patriarch Kirill are utter nonsense =

  “The Vatican is not part of any bloc or international alliance. ... It attaches more importance to the interests of its faithful than to the games of the major powers. Catholicism does not see human rights, nationalism and democracy as a fundamental basis but gives them theological interpretations. This is why the pope is free to meet dictators, to visit isolated states and to take action in politically complex situations. Using its diplomacy the free Vatican can lend a helping hand in international negotiations. ... It is unacceptable to accuse the pope of naivety or of currying favor with Russia for meeting the Patriarch in Havana. The pope knows what he is doing and his actions are not influenced by the tensions between Russia and the West.”

• "RUSSIAN AGGRESSION JUST A USA INVENTION", by Tomislav Jakić in the weekly paper of the Serbian center-left minority, Novosti (HR). The opinion piece takes off from the fact that USA plans to spend more on its military presence in Eastern Europe. According to US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter the budget will be quadrupled to 3.4 billion dollars. USA justifications for increasing its military budget in Eastern Europe are based on the assertion that Russia is an enemy of "The West". Commentators disagree as to whether that is true. Jakić sides with those who are critical of USA militarism =

  “The Russian aggression of which the American Defense Secretary speaks is cheap propaganda on the part of those who want nothing but a new Cold War. They need a bogeyman in the East to unite the US while disciplining the states of Western Europe, as well as some in the East. Because even in the former Soviet satellite states, which are today in the throes of democratic change, not everyone is happy about a stronger American military presence in Europe. That's why Russia must be depicted as the enemy and a danger to the 'Free World' -- and to world peace in general.”

<>2016mr09:Независимая газета| "Патриарх Кирилл предложил создать единый список литературы для российских школ"| [E-TXT]
*2016je02:Независимая газета| "Константинопольский патриархат удовлетворил пожелания РПЦ по поводу Всеправославного собора" [E-TXT]
*2016je13:Guardian| "Russia will not attend historic meeting of world's Orthodox churches" [E-TXT]
*2016oc19:Независимая газета| В состав Общественной палаты вошли представители духовенства [E-TXT]
*--Since the evaporation of the USSR in 1992, the status of the Russian Orthodox Church has made Russia -- when considered from a purely official and institutional point of view -- the most Christian European state. Why might we take such a comparison with a pinch of salt?

<>2016je26: The Guardian| "Russia passes 'Big Brother' anti-terror laws" [E-TXT]
*--"Yaroslava Law (in Russian) [TXT]

<>2016jy04:Новая Газета| "Могут повторить" [re."deplorable" right-wing candidates for election to the State Duma of the Russian Federation] [E-TXT]

<>2016au19:The Insider| Консерватизм, Сталин, православие! Кто стал новым министром образования? [E-TXT]
*2016au19:RT| Russian Communications Ministry mulls total control over Russian sector of the web [E-TXT]
*2016no02:Novaia gazeta| "Крипто-облако для Яровой. Почему попытки цензуры в Сети обречены оставаться на шаг позади прогресса" [E-TXT]
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LOOP on Censorship

<>2016se19: eurotopics.net| "Why is Putin's political party, Russia United, so successful in the current elections to the Russian legislature" [E-TXT]

<>2016oc07:WPo| Masha Gessen| "Five myths about Russia" [ E-TXT]

<>2016de23:NYT| "President Gorbachev’s Last Phone Call" [E-TXT]
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*--LOOP on "Gorbachev"

<>2016de27:Независимая газета| "Явлинский: Россия движется по пути, которого нет" [E-TXT]
*2016de27:Независимая газета| "Лидер 'Яблока' считает, что постепенно кризис отрезвит людей" [E-TXT]
*2016de28:Независимая газета| "Явлинский: Фальсификации это не игры, а государственное преступление с целью узурпации власти" [E-TXT]
*--Yavlinskii and political party Yabloko, official website (in Russian)
\\
*--LOOP on "Yavlinskii"

<>2017fe24:The Guardian| "Multiple news outlets denied access to White House press briefing" [E-TXT]
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*2017fe22|New Republic| "The D.C. Think Tank [ID] Behind Donald Trump" [E-TXT]
*2017fe22:The Nation| "Are We Witnessing a Coup Operation Against the Trump White House?" [E-TXT]
*2017fe22:The Nation| Cohen, Steven. "Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump" [E-TXT]
*2017mr11:The Guardian| "Death, Truth, Propaganda, Alternative-facts gripped world" [ E-TXT]
*2017mr15:rfer..org| Crimean Journalist (Mikola Semena) Risks Jail By Refusing To Follow Kremlin Line [E-TXT]
\\
*--LOOP on Censorship for now hops back to begin the more than three-and-one-half century-long legacy of institutionalized censorship

<>2017mr06:New Yorker on Trump, Putin and the New Cold War [E-TXT]

<>2017mr08:The Nation| Cohen,S, The ‘Fog of Suspicion’ and of Worsening Cold War [E-TXT]

<>2017mr10:RT News| "US hosts anti-ISIS meeting of 68 nations, fails to invite Russia, Iran" [E-TXT]

<>2017mr26:Russia experienced an unexpected nation-wide day of vigorous public demonstrations against "corruption" among national official

*2017mr20 (6 days before demonstrations broke out):Johnson's Russia List| "Moscow authorities believe their rejection of Navalny’s requested anti-corruption rally final" [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Up to 8,000 people taking part in unauthorized rally in central Moscow — police [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Hundreds detained at unsanctioned opposition rally in central Moscow (VIDEOS, PHOTOS) — RT News [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Thousands take to streets in opposition rallies across Russia (VIDEOS, PHOTOS) — RT News [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Акцию протеста во Владивостоке разогнали силовики, задержав около 40 человек / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Митинг сторонников Навального в Красноярске обошелся без провокаций / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Митинг против коррупции собрал в Новосибирске 2 тыс. участников / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = В Омске сторонников Навального глушили джазовой музыкой / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Участникам несанкционированной акции в Москве грозят аресты и штрафы / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = В Москве начали задерживать участников несогласованной акции / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Источник: Число задержанных в Москве участников несогласованной акции превысило 500 человек / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Угроза взрыва в Москве: из бизнес-центра на юге эвакуированы 300 человек / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Навальному грозит штраф или административный арест / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Возбуждено уголовное дело по факту тяжелой травмы полицейского во время оппозиционной акции в Москве / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr26 = Russia protests: Opposition leader Navalny arrested - BBC News [E-TXT]
*2017mr26:Protesters Gather in 99 Cities Across Russia; Top Putin Critic Is Arrested - NYTimes.com [E-TXT]
*2017mr27 = Kremlin airs its views on 'mass protests' in Russia [E-TXT]
*2017mr27 = Kremlin evaluating activism of Russian protests’ participants [E-TXT]
*2017mr27 = Госдеп США осудил задержание участников акций протеста в РФ / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr27 = Кремль не считает нужным реагировать на призывы ЕС и ОБСЕ освободить задержанных / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr27 = Песков: Информирование о протестных акциях по ТВ не ограничивалось / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr27 = Навальный арестован на 15 суток за сопротивление полиции / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr27 = Навальный в суде признал себя организатором акции в Москве, но назвал ее законной / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr27:Навальный и «непоротое поколение» - Фонтанка.Ру [E-TXT]
*2017mr28 = Федотов подверг критике организаторов несогласованных акций / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr28 = СМИ: Росгвардию оснастят комплексами воздушного наблюдения для контроля за массовыми акциями / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr28 = Посольство Великобритании выясняет детали задержания британца в ходе протестных акций в Москве / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr28 = МВД: Полицейским перед акцией 26 марта давали установку свести задержания к минимуму / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr28 = Кремль учитывает и анализирует гражданскую позицию участников акций протеста, сообщил Песков / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr28:Владивосток, Казань, Петербург и еще 10 городов. Как проходили воскресные митинги против коррупции в регионах [E-TXT]
*2017mr29:Новая газета| Parents and offspring tell about official repression after Sunday's meeting [E-TXT]
*2017mr29 = Moscow slams West’s reaction to Russian protests as part of long-planned campaign [E-TXT]
*2017mr29 = Russia's new protest generation | Al Jazeera [E-TXT]
*2017mr30:«Мы фаталисты-практики». Что происходит в ФБК после акции 26 марта — интервью с автором расследования Георгием Албуровым [E-TXT]
*2017mr31 = Прокуратура предостерегла москвичей от участия в несогласованной акции 2 апреля / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr31 = Московская полиция предостерегает от участия в несанкционированной акции 2 апреля / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017mr31 = Russia blocks access to Internet pages promoting new Moscow protest | Reuters [E-TXT]
*2017mr31 = В выходные в Москве закроют вестибюли пяти станций метро / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017ap01 = Investigative Committee opens criminal proceedings on calls for mass disorders in Moscow [E-TXT]
*2017ap01 = Песков: Протесты в Москве были незаконными, это стало причиной арестов / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017ap01 = Следователи возбудили уголовное дело о призывах к массовым беспорядкам в Москве / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017ap01:Кто организовал митинг 2 апреля? С акцией протеста, которую анонимы планируют на Красной площади, все не так [E-TXT]
*2017ap01:Страна не примет команду: «Сидеть!» Будет ли сценарий ответа власти на мобилизацию оппозиции умеренным — или «ястребы» победят? [E-TXT]
*2017ap01 = Следователи возбудили уголовное дело о призывах к массовым беспорядкам в Москве / Независимая газета [E-TXT]
*2017ap01 = Песков: Протесты в Москве были незаконными, это стало причиной арестов / Независимая газета [E-TXT]

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