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- Here is the promise of positive change.
- Perhaps even a fatal blow.
- No red-dawn – KGB is dead Nyquist, 12
AT: Red DawnEven if they didn’t collapse in the 90s, Soviets are collapsing now Nyquist, your author, 11 JR, President of the Strategic Crisis Center and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Political Science at the Inter-American Institute(“Russia Transformed,” Financial Sense Online, 12/12/11, http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/jr-nquist/2011/12/12/russia-transformed)RK Tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets last Saturday, protesting the previous Saturday’s fraudulent parliamentary elections. Speaking on the Caucasus International TV Channel (broadcast from Georgia), Russian economist and dissident Andrei Illarionov said, “A lot of things have drastically changed since the Dec. 4 elections. The scale of [election] falsification is unprecedented, even for Russian history.” Instead of a free and fair election on Dec. 4, Illarionov said it was a “special operation” intended to strengthen Russia’s ruling party. This special operation, however, has backfired. The whole country knows that the elections were a sham. There have been irregularities in previous Russian elections. But this time is different. As Illarionov explained, “there were a lot of independent observers at the election stations, who actually managed to block falsification and secured a more or less fair count of the vote.” Where falsification was forestalled, Putin’s party won a rough quarter of the popular vote. Where falsification went forward, Putin’s party was given more than half. “Also,” Illarionov noted, “there are specialists in Russia who can apply mathematical modeling who can figure out how people actually voted. At minimum, we are talking about 17 million stolen votes.” Public statements by the Russian president and prime minister, claiming a fair vote, have only served to discredit the government. “Now people have proof that these leaders are liars,” said Illarionov. “They lie to people, and there is going to be no trust for these two. This is a new situation.” What we are seeing in Russia is a mass reaction, involving hundreds of thousands of Russians. In Moscow somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people came out into the streets and joined the protest. Security police were standing by, and some arrests were made. But overall, the Kremlin didn’t want a showdown. A reader in Moscow, known to me through a friend, reported that Saturdays’ protest “went well beyond expectations….” The authorities had originally agreed to allow 300 people to gather on Ploschad Revolutsii (which literally means “Riot Square”). But those who followed Facebook in Russian knew that the number might be a hundred times larger. “It became clear that [the authorities] should expect dozens of thousands,” he wrote, “so they changed the meeting place to Bolotnaya Ploschad [literally meaning “Swamp Square”] and now permission [was extended] to 30,000 people [when] in fact, there came at least 60,000, some say 80,000 or even 100,000.” Our Moscow correspondent’s first impression was, “Lots … of really nice people everywhere – peaceful, intelligent, all cheered up and having fun, yet, remembering the goal, which is: Honest elections in honest government.” During the protest events, a number of opposition figures addressed the crowds: Leonid Parfynov, the Russian news anchor; Grigori Yavlinsky, Russian politician and free market advocate; and Dmitri Bykov, a poet. As if to acknowledge the decisive role played by Internet social media, Russian President Medvedev responded to several thousand negative comments on his Facebook page by promising an investigation into election fraud. Russian protestors interviewed by Western media said that Medvedev had no choice. Something would have to be done. All shades of opinion were in agreement throughout Russia. As my correspondent in Moscow explained, “[This] is something new for us: left wing, right wing, liberals, nationalists, communists – all stopped arguing and fighting to stand side by side. This actually happened, and, ironically, we should thank our hated government for that.” The Kremlin’s old “divide-and-conquer” strategy has no traction for the moment. “I was standing there with my mom,” he wrote, “we haven’t seen any violence…. We haven’t seen anyone looking drunk or drugged. There were a lot of troops on the perimeter of course, a real lot. They were ready to suppress a riot, but it was no riot….” “Tens of millions of Russians were offended, and believe the leadership lied to them. This has shaken Russian society to its foundations,” noted Andrei Illarionov during his interview with Caucasus International TV. “This is a massive reaction of millions of people…. We are approaching a turning point at which it becomes publicly indecent to support the regime. It will not be tolerable in society to support them. And people who make public statements in support of the regime will be outcasts.” The criminality and indecency of the Russian government is comprehended and acknowledged by the Russian people. The moral force behind this awakening cannot be measured, though it is widely felt. An inward transformation of the country has occurred. The old Soviet structures represented by the FSB/KGB have been rebuked. The method of the lie is no longer acceptable. Here is the promise of positive change. Here is a moral current at work within a society, threatening otherwise powerful and secure rulers. Predictably, the Russian government will retreat and temporize for the moment. Those who understand crowd psychology know that mass protests typically run out of steam. Public outrage cannot last forever. Yet something has changed in Russia. The totalitarian structures that remained after 1991 have suffered a blow. Perhaps even a fatal blow. The year 2011 has been remarkable in terms of revolutionary changes affecting a number of countries within the old totalitarian bloc, especially Libya and Syria. The most important country within the bloc has always been Russia. And now Russia’s people have begun to mass in the streets. Perhaps there is room for optimism. No red-dawn – KGB is dead Nyquist, 12 – JR, President of the Strategic Crisis Center and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Political Science at the Inter-American Institute(“The Battle for Russia,” Financial Sense Online, 1/9/12, http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/jr-nyquist/2012/01/09/the-battle-for-russia)RK The year 2012 is going to be an exciting one. There will be a presidential election in the United States. There may be a military clash in the Strait of Hormuz. But the most important changes may occur in Russia, where the Russian people are preparing to challenge the government of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. During the street protests in Moscow and other cities last month, a new feeling swept the country. This feeling has its roots in the development of an authentic Russian middle class. It is not a wealthy middle class by Western standards, but it nonetheless bears the mark of self-sufficiency and decency. Either this decency will prevail, or it will be checked. Either Putin will be swept from power or the Russian middle class will be smashed. On one side of the struggle is the surviving machinery of old Soviet state: the secret police, the Interior Ministry, the large corporations, and Putin’s controlled media. On the other side we see millions of people who are fed up with arbitrary government power, gangster methods, and who want to see the rule of law. Each side has its own rhetoric, its own philosophy. Exemplifying the rhetoric of the Russian state, consider a recent Pravda.ru opinion piece titled Nuclear War on the horizon. Here is a view sometimes expressed by operatives of the Kremlin. In fact, something akin to this view was put forward by Vladimir Putin when he spoke to the Russian nation following the Beslan massacre of September 2004. At that time he blamed America for conspiring to murder Russian children, claiming that “someone” wanted to break up Russia and finish off what remained of the Soviet state because Moscow still had nuclear weapons. In the Pravda.ru column, America is depicted as threatening the entire world with nuclear annihilation. The United States is accused of leading a bloody “genocidal campaign against Libya” and of threatening the same against Iran. No credit is given to U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta for publicly speaking out against a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In fact, the United States is embarking upon a program of spontaneous disarmament. As Congress has been unable to pass the necessary deficit reduction package, the U.S. Defense Department will face what Panetta says are “devastating, automatic, across-the-board cuts that will tear a seam in the nation’s defense.” The real policy of the United States and the real objectives of the U.S. military are never acknowledged by Putin’s spokesmen. In the Pravda.ru column we read: “The forces of demonic evil now have come nose to nose with the forces of reason.” This was a reference to the Russian fleet stationed near Syria, and the potential for a confrontation with NATO warships. Here the old rhetoric of the Soviet Union appears once more. The war drums are thundering, and the “imperialist aggressor” is called to account. But we cannot take it seriously. For something else has appeared on the horizon, which Putin says was inspired by the CIA: a popular opposition movement against his KGB regime. Exemplifying this opposition we find Danila Galperovich’s interview with Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, translated for Frontpagemag.com by Yelena Glazova. Here we find a frank discussion of Moscow’s police state methods. Here we learn that the KGB has “lost much of their qualitative acumen and sharpness in the last twenty years.” And why wouldn’t they? According to KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, the post-Soviet regime of pretended democracy was not supposed to last twenty years. It was designed to overpower the West in ten years. So the plan didn’t work. So Russia’s hidden totalitarian structures have begun to decay. They have remained under fake bourgeois auspices too long; and besides, there is no Stalin to lead them. In this matter we should remember what Stalin said to his henchmen during his last days: “You are like blind kittens; what will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies.” What Bukovsky goes on to describe is the fate of these blind kittens, caught up in the crisis of Russia’s false democracy. One might say it is the crisis of a deception gone too long, carried too far by structures that can no longer bear the load. A world war might have once saved the current Russian regime, granting it renewed legitimacy in the midst of crisis. But now it is too late. According to Bukovsky, the incompetence of the regime is such that if Stalin were alive today he would have them all shot. “They cannot even blow up the buildings in their capital city without exposing themselves and leaving traces,” Bukovsky added, referring to the 1999 apartment bombings that were used to justify the KGB’s return to power. “Nothing [in the KGB/FSB] works as it should,” says Bukovsky. So how will this Kremlin, with its third generation blind kittens, survive the growing groundswell of popular opposition? Bukovsky says that the KGB understands how to manipulate mass movements with its network of double agents. But in the end, this method will not work. “The social atmosphere in due course becomes ever more politicized, radicalized,” Bukovsky explained. In the end, the KGB cannot join the protests against itself without damaging its own position. And so, Russia faces a serious political crisis in March or April. This crisis will likely grow, and spiral out of control. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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