http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Mihai_Pacepa
The Blaze ran a piece written by Mr. Pacepa, who risked all to leave an extremely powerful position in the Romanian version of the KGB, provides details on why he believes that Russia is a state that is run by a clique of former KGB agents. Of particular note is his assertion (which to me makes sense), that the move by Boris Yelstin to step down was forced on the former Russian president by what was in effect a coup by high-ranking members of the KGB.
This assertion makes even more sense if one takes into account the arguments made by worldwide Marxism expert Trevor Loudon (*at bottom) that the collapse of the USSR was only a planned pullback of sorts to enable Socialists to focus their energies on bringing the West under the yoke of Marxism. Once the oft-cited "foreign threat" of Communism/Socialism was gone, the people of Western nations would be less likely to fear the step-by-step progress of Leftist elements in their own countries.
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/the-kremlins-new-glasnost-campaign-to-fool-the-west/
"Russia’s gradual conquest of Ukraine has become the most dangerous challenge to peace and stability in the world since the end of World War II.
I have reason to believe that only a miracle might prevent President Vladimir Putin from rebuilding a new Soviet Union, whose dismantling he once called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
The reason we might be unable to stop Putin is the immense, but unseen, power of disinformation. Our political leaders, influenced by the Kremlin’s intense onslaught of disinformation, have been unable—or unwilling—to see that behind its façade of democracy, Russia has become the first intelligence dictatorship in history.
This is a completely new form of government, run by former KGB officers who now own Russia and have billions of dollars in their pockets with which to attract foreign politicians over to their side. According to London’s Guardian newspaper, Putin himself has secretly accumulated more then $40 billion, becoming Europe’s richest man. It is also noteworthy that former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder heads the shareholders’ committee of North Stream AG, a branch of the Russian giant Gazprom, currently in the hands of Dmitry Medvedev, who has been alternating with Putin as Russian president..........
In the meantime, here is how I see it.
The transformation of Russia into an intelligence dictatorship began on Dec. 31, 1999, when Putin—formerly the head of the political police and a senior reflection of my old Romanian self—self enthroned in the Kremlin. Thereupon, Russia’s first freely elected president, Boris Yeltsin, ceded the field and on national TV announced his resignation [emphasis added]:
“I understand that I must do it, and Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians,with new faces, with new intelligent, strong, energetic people.”
Yeltsin then signed a decree transferring his power to Putin. For his part, Putin signed a decree pardoning Yeltsin—who was said to be involved in huge bribery scandals—“for any possible misdeeds” and granting him “total immunity” from being prosecuted (or even searched and questioned) for “any and all” actions committed while in office. Putin also gave Yeltsin a lifetime pension and a state dacha.
To me, this quid pro quo had all the elements of a behind-the-scenes KGB putsch.
Indeed, three years later, some 6,000 former officers of the KGB—the organization that had slaughtered over 20 million people in the Soviet Union alone—were running Russia’s federal and local governments. Nearly half of all other top governmental positions were held by former officers of the KGB. During the Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. Under Putin, the KGB, rechristened the FSB, is the state.
Having seen to that, Putin brought back Stalin’s national anthem, which had been prohibited since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
My old KGB colleagues must have been cackling in their graves.........................
The Soviet symbols of hammer and sickle were prominently featured at the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, during a show highlighting the country’s history. That show featured performers, clad in the Soviet colors of red and white, flying airplanes and driving cars, while the hammer and sickle hovered over the scene.
Only days after the closing of the Sochi Olympics, Russia invaded the Crimea, which lies within the independent country of Ukraine. Far and away the most important part of the former Soviet Union that Putin needs to recover is Ukraine, if he wants to reconstitute Russia as a 21st century intelligence empire...................................
So far, no one in the West has called the new Russia a KGB dictatorship, because the Kremlin has been able to divert public attention away from the KGB’s own coup by focusing on the new Russian leader himself. Capitalizing on the fact that Putin spent several years in Germany (actually in Communist East Germany), the Kremlin’s disinformation machinery has portrayed him as a delightfully Europeanized man, a Peter the Great for our times.
Putin has been considerably aided in this image by a doting international press. Even President George W. Bush fell in love with the new Peter the Great.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” the U.S. president said at the end of his first meeting with Putin, in Slovenia.
To take a close look at the new Putin, my wife (an American intelligence analyst) and I set off for Germany, to check out where he had spent his “Europeanizing” years.
In the city of Dresden in formerly communist East Germany—not in democratic West Germany—we learned that the Soviet-German House of Friendship, which Putin had headed for six years, had in fact served as a standard KGB front, according to a briefing we were given by local representatives of the Gauck Commission. (The Gauck Commission was a special post-reunification German group conducting research into the files of the former East German security service, the Stasi.)
We found out that Putin’s office had been located in the bleak Stasi headquarters building in Dresden. We spent some time in his depressing-looking office, studying the Stasi documents while seated at Putin’s old desk—now a museum piece. His office was inside the prison-like Stasibuilding, cut off from even the grubby life of normal East Germans by guards with machine guns, flanked by police dogs. Yet the Kremlin’s disinformation breathlessly implied that Putin’s experience in Germany had allowed him to absorb the best of European culture.
The whole story looked to my wife and me just like a glasnost operation aimed at fostering a Westernized façade for an inveterate communist.
Yes, “glasnost.” You probably believe that Gorbachev invented the word glasnost, in order to describe his effort to lead the Soviet Union “out of its totalitarian state and to democracy, to freedom, to openness.” If so, you’re not alone. All of the Western media and most of the Western “experts,” even in intelligence and defense establishments, believed that too—as did the committee that gave Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Prize.
Even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica defines glasnost as “Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues. It was instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and began the democratization of the Soviet Union.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary agrees. And American Heritage Dictionary presents glasnost as “an official policy of the former Soviet government emphasizing candor with regard to discussion of social problems and shortcomings.
But glasnost was not invented by Gorbachev, did not emphasize candor, and it did not mean openness or transparency. Glasnost is an old Russian term for polishing the ruler’s image. Originally it meant, literally, publicizing, self-promotion.
In the mid 1930s—half a century before Gorbachev’s glasnost—the official Soviet Encyclopedia defined the word glasnost as a spin on news released to the public: “Dostupnost obshchestvennomy obsuzhdeniyu, kontrolyu; publichnost,” meaning, the quality of being made available for public discussion or control. Glasnost implied no idea of frankness or integrity.
All dictatorial powers use the tools, however humble, that are available to them............
In 1956, the KGB leaked Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the West, and I got involved in my first glasnost aimed at embellishing a tyrant.
Our task was to spread the lie that Khrushchev had reinvented communism. We were to persuade the West, bit by bit, that the Soviet Union was being reborn—economically self-sufficient, friendlier to its people, and able to co-exist peacefully with capitalism. Khrushchev was to be promoted as a new breed whom the West could trust more than the one before. In this way, we could achieve the hiatus in the Cold War that we needed to ensure our survival against our much more powerful foe.
This was Khrushchev’s take on glasnost.
Does that sound familiar? China, too, has permitted managed openness about the atrocities of former leader Mao Zedong and his Chinese Cultural Revolution, to persuade the West that the country is in the process of self-rehabilitation and to entice others into trade, détente and normalized relations. Yes, there has been some loosening of the chains on the Chinese people. But that has been at the expense of entrenching and enriching the same clique of Communist Party bosses who prospered under Mao. Meanwhile, much of China’s new wealth has been plowed into a dangerous military build-up that now is threatening the U.S..........................................
Almost all Western governments viewed Gorbachev as a political visionary and truly believed that his theory about combining “communist values” with “Western democracy introduced from the top” and with a “centralized free market economy” would modernize the Soviet Union and make its economy self-sufficient. Gorbachev’s “Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World,” which replaced Ceausescu’s books in the windows of Western bookstores, was now seen as the key to détente and stability in the world."
[Note that Gorbachev - even after the end of the USSR continued to advocate for worldwide Socialism**)
**http://catholicism.org/stealth-globalism-un-agenda-21.html (Agenda 21 is treated in several posts in this blog. Typing "Agenda 21" will yield a number of posts on the merger of worldwide Socialism with radical environmentalism)
Another character in the mix is Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet Communist leader, who presented his Earth Charter to the 1997 Rio-Plus-Five summit. You can bet that Gorby sees Agenda 21 as a way to spread his former Communism under its new face of “Communitarianism.”......."
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