Russia darkening into a tragic phase?

By J.R. Nyquist

Yesterday Vladimir Putin officially began his term as Russia’s second
elected president. Officially Putin is not a Communist, but unofficially
he admires Lenin and has a good opinion of the KGB. What have we
learned about Putin since Boris Yeltsin appointed him as acting Russian
president?

According to Putin’s inauguration speech, Russian history has light
phases and tragic phases. The heavy-drinking Yeltsin provided Russia
with a light phase after the long and humorless Soviet era. Yeltsin was
a man who wrote in his memoirs of breast-feeding his own daughter while
riding on a train. There was no milk in Yeltsin’s breast, but the baby
girl felt comforted anyway — and it kept her quiet.

Now things in Russia are different. The empty comfort of a liberalism
without milk, without substance, is no longer offered. The new Russian
president wants to strengthen the security services and the Army. He is
tough and serious. The facade of phony liberalism has been torn away. A
stiff and humorless little man from the bowels of the KGB now takes
power. There is nothing funny about Mr. Putin. In fact, he was once
nicknamed the “little Andropov” (after the late KGB chief and one-time
Soviet dictator).

Putin came from Leningrad, which is now called St. Petersburg. After
graduating college Putin joined the KGB. Then he was sent as a spy to
West Germany in 1975. Before the 1970s ended, Putin fell under suspicion
of espionage and was booted from West Germany. A few years later, in
1984, Putin was sent to East Germany. For several years prior to the
tearing down of the Berlin Wall, Putin worked on a secret project called
Operation Sunbeam.

According to Horst Jemlich, a thirty year veteran of the East German
secret police, Operation Sunbeam anticipated the collapse of the Warsaw
Pact — Russia’s East European military alliance. Last January Jemlich
told the London Sunday Times (Jan. 16) that the plan was “to prepare one
day to let us fall and have new guys supply them [the KGB] with
information.”

According to Jemlich, the Russian Communists planned to abandon their
German comrades. The overt Communist structures in East Germany would be
replaced with covert KGB structures. Once the secret structures were in
place, the Kremlin’s German pawn would be offered to the West.

It was not a happy fate for the pawn. Coincidentally, in the same
year that Vladimir Putin joined Operation Sunbeam, KGB defector Anatoliy
Golitsyn predicted the future liberalization of the Soviet bloc.
Golitsyn said that the liberalization “would be spectacular and
impressive.” But, he warned, it “would be calculated and deceptive in
that it would be introduced from above.”
Jemlich’s testimony indirectly supports Golitsyn’s testimony. The
collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe was conceived beforehand by
planners in Moscow. It was part of a grand strategy. And Putin had a
leading role in preparing that strategy.

In 1982 another defector, named Jan Sejna, wrote about a long range
Russian strategy that involved the fake collapse of the Warsaw Pact
alliance. He wrote of Russia’s plan to erode NATO. He wrote of
“progressive” or left wing governments coming to power in Europe. “To
this end,” wrote Sejna, “we envisaged that it might be necessary to
dissolve the Warsaw Pact, in which event we had already prepared a web
of bilateral defense arrangements, to be supervised by secret committees
of Comecon.”

The leaders of the West have yet to understand the significance of
Sejna’s statement about the fake dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.
Americans and West Europeans are far from grasping the truth in
Golitsyn’s 1984 statement that the Kremlin was contemplating the
demolition of the Berlin Wall. As Horst Jemlich suggested in his
statement to the Times, Operation Sunbeam was initiated with the
collapse of East Germany in mind. The KGB, however, was not giving up.
It was creating an alternate channel to continue operations against the
West under cover of a supposed Cold War defeat.

In all probability Vladimir Putin is still an agent of the KGB — and
still following a secret plan that will culminate in the defeat of the
United States.

Putin’s rise to power is no accident. His elevation to Russia’s
presidency was accomplished by intrigue. His popularity was created
through a war crisis called into existence by Moscow’s double agents in
Chechnya and Dagestan. Yeltsin’s sudden resignation at the end of last
year meant that an early presidential election would be held, before the
Russian people could catch their breath. Opposing candidates were not
given time to prepare their campaigns. The votes were not counted
properly. The entire process was fraudulent, but the West never
protested. Putin’s legitimacy has been accepted in Washington, London,
Paris and Berlin.

Putin was chosen by somebody, and elevated by somebody — for a
reason. And it is significant that he comes from Leningrad, which is
known as Russia’s most “reactionary city.” According to Vladimir
Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, writing in their biography of Yuri
Andropov, Leningrad was “the proving ground of the KGB, where all its
undertakings and experiments are pioneered — under the complete control
of the Soviet police.”

It is also significant that Putin has been called the “little
Andropov.” It is noteworthy that Andropov’s publicized traits coincided
with Lenin’s canonical traits: efficiency, personal modesty,
simplicity, seriousness and a knowledge of foreign languages. These are
traits that have been assigned to Putin.

The current grand strategy of Russia now comes into full view. It is
a program of sly restoration and re-strengthening. The West has sold
Russia the rope, so to speak. And the rope will be used to hang the
world’s bourgeoisie (i.e., the American middle class). To facilitate
this process Putin’s first major act as president of Russia was to name
Mikhail Kasyanov as prime minister. Kasyanov is the Kremlin’s chief
economic strategist. He has been responsible for negotiating with
Russia’s creditors in the West.

Perhaps the best way to understand what is happening, is to realize
that
there are two primary forces at work in the world. One force is the
world’s financial and industrial elite, which wants to make money. The
other force is revolutionary socialism, which has been playing possum
for the last decade.

The Kremlin game, in this respect, has been a very simple one:
namely, use the greed of Western business men to destroy the West’s
defenses. Use this greed to move auto factories from America to Poland
— to move missile and bomber plants to Communist China. As Pat Buchanan
said in his recent book, “The Great Betrayal,” China treats America
“like a colony, a source of raw materials and a dumping ground for
manufacturers.”

This has all been manipulated for a reason. And Russia’s alliance
with China, in this respect, is no accident.

The business of America is business. Latter-day trade theory sees the
weakening of nationalism and the erasing of borders as a positive
development, which accelerates economic growth. Business people see
“win-win” equations everywhere. They often see themselves as eradicating
poverty, disease, backwardness and war. But they are mainly eradicating
America’s heavy industry. Soon we will not be able to build the tanks
and ships and aircraft we need to wage war. Soon we will be totally
dependent on foreign suppliers — perhaps on Communist suppliers.

President Putin smiles at the prospects. His war machine is building
its strength. His heavy industry is involved in a rapid modernization
and expansion. Last Dec. 7 Putin spoke of bringing the former Soviet
states together. But he was careful in his statement. He would not alarm
the West with the overt return of the Soviet Union. That would be
counterproductive.

The Soviet Union will be put back together only after a crisis, when
America has offended Russia’s honor. As Vladimir Putin said during a
Feb. 7 interview on Russian television: “Whoever offends us will last
not longer than three days.”

After this fashion, a light phase of Russian history darkens into a
tragic phase.

J.R. Nyquist

J.R. Nyquist, a WorldNetDaily contributing editor and a renowned expert in geopolitics and international relations, is the author of "Origins of the Fourth World War." Visit his news-analysis and opinion site, JRNyquist.com. Read more of J.R. Nyquist's articles here.