The Great Russian Restoration

Si sois capaces de leer entre lineas a pesar de la fulastre ****obsesión y otras majaderías, el artículo ofrece información interesante de lo que se cuece dentro de Rusia.

The Great Russian Restoration by Rolo Slavski

1. The Purge of the Liberal Media and Rumblings of Economic Nationalization

There have been multiple overviews of the situation in Ukraine from former government officials, former military officers and veteran Russia watchers over the last month. Most of them present a fairly accurate macro-picture of the situation and include the proper basics with which to form an accurate analysis of the current conflict. NATO expansion, broken promises, pipelines with Germany, Neocon animus and so on are all certainly necessary to understand the larger political “context” in which the events are occurring.

Others have focused on the actual day-to-day analysis of the conflict, doing their best to piece together the speed and direction of the Russian advance and the tactics being employed by both sides. Unfortunately, the people trying to provide sober macro and micro analyses of the conflict are a distinct minority, completely dwarfed by those promoting the political narrative of NATO, and to a lesser extent, the official line of the Russian Federation. There is enough material out there for people to make up their own minds about which political narrative to get invested in, and I don’t believe that I can add anything of value to the conversation by rehashing what has already been said in the attempt to convince those who have already made up their minds on the topic.

But few have mentioned or analyzed the rapid changes that are occurring within Russian society on the administrative, ideological and social levels. Who can blame them? Perhaps this is because these changes are occurring so quickly and the Grad showers ***owed by the red-orange hues of the after-blast have captivated the attention of the internet. War is an incredible thing to witness and we can now see it unfold from the safety of our internet devices as its uploaded to Twitter and Telegram faster than we can keep up with it. At this point, even though I personally have an intimate knowledge of the territory on which the war is being waged, it has become difficult to keep track of who captured what, advanced where and hit what target. I can only imagine the informational overload for the average Westerner trying to keep track and keep score.

But just as impressive as the smoking ruins of a Ukrainian jet or a BTR column is the stunning news that “Echo Moscow” has been shot down as well. To those that do not know, Echo Moscow is the NPR or perhaps even New York Times equivalent in Russia. In other words, it is the leading liberal opposition media outlet that has promoted the neoliberal political line in Russia since its inception in 1990 and its vocal support for the neoliberal President Boris Yeltsin. At the time, the political situation was in flux, with USSR hard-liners staging a half-hearted, poorly-planned coup to attempt to salvage the USSR against the “liberal reformers” who had decided to detonate the project. From that point onwards, Echo Moscow supported the work of the reformers, whose names are probably well-known to most Russia-watchers (Chubais, Gaidar, Yeltsin, etc.) who famously sold off state assets for pennies on the dollar to Jewish gangsters and Western companies, creating a system of oligarchic control and a massive, country-wide looting operation that has still, to this day, not fully been shut down.

When, on March 1st, Echo Moscow was shut down by Roskomnadzor (the Russian media watch body), this should have sent shockwaves around the world. It would, perhaps, almost be the equivalent of the Democratic Party shutting down Fox News in the United States. Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief (Jewish) of the organization since its inception, is a veritable icon of the Liberal idea in Russia. But the shutdowns didn’t stop there. Dozhd (Rain), which was a media project aimed at indoctrinating the millennial crowd with SJW ideas, was closed down as well. Tikhon Dzyadko (Jewish), the chief editor, fled the country. The Village, a similar self-described “hipster” project, was closed down as well. Meduza, a media project that mostly tras*cribed Vice op-eds word for word, had to flee to Riga last year. The Radio Free Europe affiliate in Russia also had to relocate from Moscow to Kiev last year—a poor choice in retrospect. Finally, the Novaya Gazeta (New Gazette), run by none other than Gorbachev himself (nominally), is almost certainly next on the chopping block.

Naturally, most of these media projects are run by Jews and promote the same neoliberal agenda that their cousins in the West promote. And, as victims of the Liberal Occupation Government, we should all understand that Liberal Democracy cannot function without Liberal institutions, of which the media is certainly one of the most important. The media’s role, after all, is to shape political narratives and to outline the acceptable parameters of political discourse. It is the Liberal media that decides what is reasonable, desirable and jovenlandesal and, of course, what is extremist, hateful and unethical. The Liberal media’s self-appointed job is to decide what should be shut out of civil discourse either through soft or hard methods of censorship.

As such, the implications of Russia shutting down a powerful Liberal institution like the media should be clear to anyone paying attention, but I will elaborate so that there is no confusion about what this means. In simple words: Russia is moving away from the political model of Liberal Democracy and moving back to the traditional Russian political model of Nationalism/Authoritarianism.

But the media is not the only key pillar supporting Liberal Democrat political system— the Oligarchs who finance the media are certainly no less important. Generally, as a rule, the business class of any country since the time of the ancient Greeks supports liberal policies. Granted, there have historically been economically nationalist business elites in places like Germany and even individual titans of industry like Ford in America who have promoted nationalist politics and economic protectionism. But these appear to be the exception, not the rule. Business oligarchs tend to support migrant labor, less government oversight, and political parties who support political measures that will enable these companies to pay less taxes, access international financial markets and to stash their own money in overseas banks. They then invest in skilled ideologists who propagandize the business interests of this caste and cloak it in jovenlandesal rhetoric. No doubt we have all by now heard quite a bit about the sanctity of the free market, we’ve been jovenlandesally assuaged by businesses flying BLM and LGBTQRCODE flags, and we accept that the routine buying and selling of politicians by lobbyists in Washington is just part and parcel of the democratic process.

The best example of the tight alliance between the oligarchs and the liberal media in Russia is the aforementioned “Echo Moscow,” which was supported by Gazprom, a quasi-government monopoly company run by Alexey Miller (German/Jewish), who also supported many other liberal political and cultural projects with Russian gas money. This has now come to an end. Gazprom’s media arm has cut funding to Venidiktov’s operation, which has led to much kvetching and the threat of a lawsuit on the part of the Echo Moscow team. Remember: the Echo Moscow media project was majority owned and financed by Gazprom. Meanwhile, Venediktov has openly declared that he is the victim of political repression and that the screws were tightened on Gazprom by pilinguin himself. There is no reason to believe that he is particularly off-base with his assessment.

Now, the Deep State in the West understands this political situation very well and they have always placed their bets on the Russian oligarchs being able to overthrow pilinguin and his “siloviki” (military/security people) in the long-run. The formula was simple: support the interests of the big business liberal elite and their media projects to rile the Russian people up and to eventually effect a Maidan-type coup to overthrow the government and install a pro-Western regime. If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because the plan for Russia sounds a lot like the plan for Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan and many other states that have had tonalidad revolutions in the recent past.

Here, it is worth mentioning another key component of the plan: the nationalists.

In Russia and most of the FSU, the nationalists aligned themselves with the liberals and worked to provide the muscle to form a “taran” (a ram—their words) against which to batter down the gates of the Kremlin. If this is starting to sound familiar… well, frankly, it should all be starting to become quite clear at this point. Once you know the playbook of the Western Deep State, it’s quite easy to see through the ideological smokescreen and the high-minded rhetoric to see what’s really happening behind closed doors. Many prominent nationalists in Russia declared themselves the sworn enemies of pilinguin and promoted a form of “National-Liberalism” or “National-Democracy” that allowed them to ideologically justify their alliance (and salaries) from oligarchs like the Ukrainian Kholomoisky and marching together with the Liberal opposition against pilinguin. I plan to come back to the Russian nationalists and the positive recent changes that have occurred in their camp in another article in the near future. It was simply necessary to briefly touch on them and their role to provide an overview of the political situation in Russia.

All in all though, the Deep State’s plan still very much remains in force.

However, recent events have proven that pilinguin, who seemed content to allow the situation to fester in a state of political stalemate for the last 20 years, has decided to move against this Liberal faction. He has been helped along by the recent economic attacks of the West. The sanctions targeting Russia’s oligarchs seemed intended to poke and prod them into action—to force them to organize politically to demand that pilinguin accede to the West’s demands so that their hidden stashes of money and their lines to Western credit wouldn’t be seized. And as we can see now, the business class in Russia is clearly feeling the pressure as a result of Western sanctions and pilinguin has decided to apply his own pressure on these oligarchs, effectively serving as the anvil to the west’s hammer. We now have Dmitry Medvedev, the former President and Prime Minister, testing the political waters and openly talking about a sweeping economic nationalization program. To even utter such words would have been unheard of a month ago, as it would be a violation of the detente that the pilinguin and the Liberal Oligarch faction had maintained for the better part of the last two decades. In contrast, patriots of all stripes and colors in Russia, whether they be communists, centrists, pilinguinists or even many un-bought nationalists, have been calling for this measure since the disastrous fallout from the privatization campaign of the 90s under the Yeltsin administration became readily apparent.

To reiterate: we now see active measures being taken by pilinguin’s administration to shut down the Liberal media and to strip the enemy oligarchs of their assets. In practice, this will miccionan the government taking greater control of key industries and pilinguin putting his people in charge of them. The end result should look quite similar to the Chinese model, which pilinguin has often praised before in the past for its ability to defend national interests and promote economic projects that are in line with the government’s own stated goals. This synthesis between the state and big business has been defined by Marxists in the 70s as the agreed upon textbook definition of Fascism even though it was practiced by Monarchies, Communist states, National Socialist states and literally every single nation state in history during times of war or economic crisis. We will have more to discuss on this front as the days go by, but there is little reason to believe that Medvedev is bluffing on this front. With Russia squarely facing down NATO, the country will be forced into adopting a war economy, and that necessarily means a greater integration of the state and big business, with disloyal elements in the business class almost certainly put on a purge shortlist.

But there is certainly more in the works that will become readily apparent in the days and weeks that ***ow.

In just one week, Russian civil society has been shaken to its core:

Lines are being drawn between traitors and loyalists within workplaces, universities, and at the bazaar.

The Duma may not survive in its current state for long.

Martial law is being openly discussed.

Talk of QR codes and implementing the 2030 agenda in place like Moscow and St. Petersburg has all but been abandoned.

Liberals are boarding planes and heading for Georgia, Armenia, Turkey and Riga (another poor choice, perhaps).

Central Asian migrants are being deported in droves and many are fleeing of their own volition.

If the 90s saw a new, Liberal Democratic Oligarchy emerge from the chaos of the last days of the Soviet Union, then the 2020s are shaping up to be the death knell of that old political order. Russia is going through yet another political metamorphosis right before our very eyes.

3. Draining the Ukrainian Political Swamp

There appears to be a breather in the offensive campaign two weeks in. Every talking head with a Telegram channel, a LiveJournal or a radio broadcast has weighed in on what this means. Some accept the statements from Russian officials at face value—that it is a genuine effort to provide humanitarian relief to the civilian population and to save lives through evacuations. Others, that it is a chance for the Russians to resupply and mass up even more troops. Some patriot voices in Russia are furious that pilinguin refused to give the order to engage the enemy head-on, choosing the velvet glove approach instead. Others say that this stratagem to win over hearts and minds is the correct one. Most intelligent commentators have already pointed out just how intense and overwhelming the NATO/Ukrainian propaganda barrage was and just how ill-equipped the Russian side was to deal with it. In our previous article, we explained why that may have been the case— the government never really took combatting Western disinformation too seriously until it was almost too late. If there is one clear and objective failing of pilinguin’s long rule that can be squarely pinned on his decision-making, this would be it. However, pilinguin did have a media strategy and it was quite clear for many years what it was: he focused on controlling the main TV channels and left the rest of the enemy’s propaganda untouched. In Russia, the “boomers” are the main voting block and they turn out in strength for whoever the TV tells them to… or the Communists, if they’re feeling particularly peeved at the government during that cycle. So it wasn’t a bad plan on pilinguin’s part by any means and it was better than anything that Trump or any other modern populist leader was able to pull off, by far. It was however, a half-measure, and while the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the off-ramp was certainly built with half-measures.

Back on the warfront, rumors are circulating that Dniepopetrovsk might surrender by the time that the Russian forces reach it. Apparently, the Jewish oligarch Igor Kholomoisky, the kingpin of the city, may have sued for a separate peace with the Russians. I don’t want to make any hard predictions about the course that this war will take, but this isn’t really as absurd a proposition as it may seem at first glance. Rumor or not, mentioning it does cross us over neatly into the main topic of today’s post: the political power factions that control the Ukraine.

It is worth getting into the details here just so that we can come to an understanding of just what exactly Ukrainian politics was since independence. Ukrainian politics has been almost entirely dominated by the Eastern Mafias since the days of Presidents Kravchuk and Kuchma. There are two factions within the mafia that are worthy of particular mention: the Donbass and the Dniepropetrovsk groups. Both gained power when they took over the factories and the energy resources and the gas pipelines in their respective regions. Analysts who endlessly draw maps detailing ethnic compositions and language differences among the regions of Ukraine show themselves to be woefully uninformed and completely lost when it comes to understanding just what was happening in Ukraine over the last three decades. Dniepopetrovsk—–a Russian-speaking region (which shows how much that matters) has been the senior political power in the country since 2014. And the only shake-up that Ukrainian politics experienced over the last three decades, however minor, was the election and short-lived reign of Orange Revolution firebrand and then President (2005–2010), Victor Yushenko. Yushenko rose in on a wave of support from Western Ukraine, and crucially, he got many centrists in central regions to vote for him who were simply fed up with the corruption and criminal domination of Ukrainian politics. Nonetheless, Yushenko had to make a deal with Yulia Timoshenko (a Jewish gas baroness turned politician from Donbass) to form a powerful opposition block that became the ruling coalition once twice president (2002–2005 and 2010–2014) Victor Yanukovitch was ousted for the first time. Almost immediately, Yushenko ended up getting backstabbed by Yulia and her people. Or, to be fair, perhaps one could make the case that he betrayed her first and worse and got what he had coming. It doesn’t really matter in the grander scheme of things because the political elite of Ukraine always kept themselves busy tricking, arresting and stealing from one another. Yushenko’s ineffectual stint in power led to Yanukovitch’s (also a Donbass Mafia member) return to power and the events leading up to Euromaidan 2014.

That being said, the events that led to the current situation in Ukraine can be traced back to any point in history, really. One event leads to another so long as we are bound by the chain of cause and effect. It all depends on the skill of the writer to connect the dots and construct a narrative, really. So, my decision to pin the start of the sequence of events that led to this conflict on the events that occurred during the Yushenko era is arbitrary— we could just as easily go back to Kuchma and Kravchuk or to the events all the way back to the Khmelnitsky uprising in the seventeenth century if we wanted to. My goal is not to lay the blame on one corrupt politician or gangster to whitewash the others— only to shed light on a part of the story that Western readers might not be aware of and to push back against simplistic explanations offered for the conflict by ideologists with their own personal agendas informing their framing of events in a certain way.

As a direct result of Yushenko’s ascent to the presidency, a new faction began to rise in Ukraine that had hitherto not exercised power on the national level. We will pick up the story with the Orange Revolution president making the historic decision to start legitimizing and integrating the Galician right-wing radicals (often labeled “neo-Nazis”) into his government, but the lore behind the Galician faction stretches back to the bedlam of the Russian Revolution and is certainly worth delving into another time.

Once Yushenko began injecting die-hard Galician faction members into the security apparatus of Ukraine, they quickly carved out a niche for themselves in the secret police (SBU) and began taking up key positions in the military and defense offices. Assassinations, intimidations and power-grabs became the order of the day (not that they ever really stopped). Yanukovitch, who retook office soon after, did nothing to undo what was initiated by his predecessor and continued funding this operation up to the day that he was chased out of the country by many of these very same people working against him in the security services and in the mob that had gathered in the Maidan Square beneath his presidential residence. Why did he do this? Well, after the controlled demolition of the USSR, the political class of literally every single FSU country adopted something that has been derisively dubbed in Russia as the “sitting on two stools” approach to foreign policy. Put simply: they try to play the West and Russia off each other to extract more concessions from Russia. This was indeed a lucrative grift while it lasted, but eventually the stools toppled over and the whole thing came crashing down. Relative to Yanukovich, Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, got quite lucky. But that’s another story for another time.

Suffice it to say, in the FSU, the anti-Russian separatists/nationalists/Westernists have always enjoyed the secret support of even “pro-Russian” politicians and “pro-Russian” governments. This is because their job was to scare and intimidate the majority of voters, and shore up the power of the “moderate” government, which would prop up the radicals as scarecrows come election time. Now, I’m not a jovenlandesal purist when it comes to politics by any means, and I can even appreciate a dastardly political stratagem pulled off by my enemies so long as it demonstrates acumen in the same way that a military man can appreciate and study a foreign army’s tactics while on campaign. But Yanukovitch was no Sun Tzu, and he ended up outfoxing himself. To be fair, perhaps he was too busy looting the country and settling old scores with his mafia rivals to notice the new pack of hyenas circling in on him. Regardless, after he was gone, the Galician faction got to finish their takeover of the entire security apparatus of Ukraine, helped along by the rebellion in Donbass and the annexation of Crimea, which gave them carte blanche to purge the ranks of unsympathetic officers, spooks and bureaucrats.

The bloggers who have been bellowing about UkroFascists!!! and the “nazification” of Ukraine on the internet for the last 10 years are probably talking about these people and their takeover of the security structures. But because of their use of the same hysterical buzzwords used by the beloved and trustworthy Western media and their thinly veiled USSR nostalgia, they have turned many sympathetic Westerners with conservative, nationalistic leanings away from them and their writings. The tone-deafness and poor persuasion skills of pro-Russian internet boomers aside, they are quite correct in stating that the Galicians or the Banderanazis(!!!) if you prefer, run Kiev now. However, this is only half the picture. The other half is the Eastern Mafia, which is very much still in the picture and hasn’t been sitting idly by. Kholomoisky of Dniepopetrovsk has successfully raised his own private army (the infamous Azov battalion) and he has defeated the Donbass mafia with targeted assassinations and because of his strategic alliance with the Galician faction, which runs the government. This is the power coalition running Ukraine now. The Galician faction runs the security apparatus/military with their gang and Kholomoisky controls the economy and media of the country with his gang. Needless to say, both groups have the support of Western spook agencies. And both groups believe that Ukraine is their turf and are willing to kill a lot of people to keep it that way.

But the largest antiestéticather in Kholomoisky’s cap is no doubt President Zelensky himself. Kholomoisky’s channel created and ran the “Servant of the People” show that antiestéticatured Zelensky as an honest and intrepid President of Ukraine dedicated to fighting corruption and defending the Ukrainian people. When the elections came around, Kholomoisky’s people and his media resources went all out in campaigning for their man. My personal favorite play was when they bribed Facebook fortune-tellers to spin prophecies about the coming of the president-that-was-promised and thereby secured the superstitious peasant granny vote. If any Western politicians are reading this, put down Sun Tzu and try some of this Kholomoisky fellow’s stratagems during the next election cycle instead.

Now, Russia has declared that they are planning to do a thorough “denazification” campaign, which almost certainly means a thorough purge of the Galician faction from the positions that they have taken since Yushenko let them into the government. As for what will happen to the oligarchs who bankrolled this whole operation, well, that’s still somewhat up in the air. It’s worth point out that Russia used to have dealings with them right up until the events of Euromaidan. The arrangement was simple: Russia paid them to behave and not ally against Russia with the West. As we can see looking back, this was clearly a catastrophic strategy, and what’s worse, I can only shake my head at how uncreative and uninspired it was—a cardinal sin in my book. The worst possible outcome for Ukraine at this point is if Russia comes to a compromise with some element of the existing power structure in Ukraine once they wrap up the military operation. We now know that no negotiations with the Galician faction are possible, so we can cross them off the list. That leaves the Eastern Mafia. Rumors of Kholomoisky’s imminent surrender aside, I can’t help but hope that his chutzpah has finally crossed the line and that he will be forced to spend the rest of his days exiled in Israel along with his puppet Zelensky. As for the rest of the oligarchs, well, both Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Timoshenko held photo-ops in Kiev with Kalashnikovs in their hands, so we can cross them off the list as well. Further than that and we enter the realm of pure speculation.

Clearly, the best outcome would be for a military man from Russia with no history of doing politics or business in Ukraine to come in and take the reins as a vizier or military governor of sorts for a time. This solution may offend committed ideologists and apologists for Liberal Democracy (read: Oligarchy), but the hard truth of the situation that Ukraine finds itself in is one in which literally no one who was anywhere near the reins of power in that country for the last three decades has his hands clean. These people all looted, collaborated and murdered with near impunity for 30 years. With Russia now performing a political prison break from Liberal Oligarchic Occupation Government right before our very eyes, we can only hope that Ukraine will be able to ***ow suit and break free from the shackles as well.