Window on Eurasia: Ukraine isn’t Fighting with Russia but with Putin’s Lubyanka Republic, Moscow Historian Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 18 – As the horrific events of the last 24 hours confirm, “Ukraine is not fighting with Russia but with a much worse enemy, the Lubyanka Peoples Republic headed by a collective Putin,” an entity that is prepared to ignore all rules of decent and civilized behavior, according to Moscow historian Elena Galkina.

                 In a comment to NVUA.net yesterday even before the Malaysia aircraft shootdown, the professor at Moscow State Pedagogical University, says that it is “time to call things by their own names” because “the correct description of the problem is half of its solution” (nvua.net/opinion/galkina.html).

            Aggression against Ukraine, she says, is “being carried out not by Russia but by another state or more precisely another international organization.” That organization, “by customary modesty,” isn’t named and “does not have an official title.”  Consequently, Galkina suggests that it should be called the Lubyanka Peoples Republic, after the headquarters of the KGB and FSB.

             The Luhansk Peoples Republic and the Donetsk Peoples Republics “do not in fact exist.” They are “only structural subdivisions” of the Lubyanka Pepoles Republic, the real author of the “hybrid war” which has already created full-fledged branches of itself in other former Soviet republics, like Transdniestria in Moldova.

             The actions of the Lubyanka Peoples Republic’s fronts in Donetsk and Luhansk sometimes seem brutal and unprofessional, “but an underestimation of the might of this organization can lead to tragic consequences both for Ukraine and for Russia and for the world as a whole.”

             “For the Lyubyanka Peoples Republic, a Ukraine not under its control is mortally dangerous as a country capable of becoming an alternative center of force in Eastern Europe,” Galkina says. Consequently, it has to be destabilized, undermined and ultimately destroyed as an independent actor.

            Galkina recalls that in Soviet times, there were created “two uniquely effective, dialectically interconnected but in the end antagonistic systems: the all-penetrating network of the special services and higher education in the area of the exact sciences.  The first pulled the country” toward “dictatorship and slavery;” the second “toward progress and freedom.”

            Because the second largely went into private business in the 1990s, the first won the victory and formed “the Lubyanka Peoples Republic as the ruling strata and organization” on the territory designated as the Russian Federation. But the aspirations of that “republic” were much broader.

            The denizens of the Lubyanka Peoples Republic already had “enormous experience in suppressing and also inspiring and supporting revolts throughout the entire world.” Now, they are “attempting to establish total control over all forms of social organizations (including criminal ones) and carry out a ‘reconquista’ of the post-Soviet space.”

            The Lubyanka Peoples Republic sees as its only competitors “the great powers.”  As for the governments of the former union republics, it thinks they are something to be pushed around and ultimately pushed off the historical stage.

            In contrast to the Soviet Union and the CPSU, Galkina says, “the Lubyanka Peoples Republic does not have any goal except self-preservation and reproducing itself as a ruling class.” It is quite content to exist as a “rentier state” living off the sale of oil and gas. Consequently, “for its survival, it needs expansion and control over transit and markets.”

            Over the last 15 years, the Moscow professor continues, the Lubyanka Peoples Republic has gained influence and power, “using all resources and not constrained as to its methods,” both within the current borders of the Russian Federation and in Georgia and Moldova.  But that isn’t enough to satisfy this entity.

             “On the path to the revival of the corpse of the Soviet Union has arisen an impassable obstacle, Ukraine,” and despite the interference all along of the Lubyanka Peoples Republic, the Ukrainian people have been able to carry out “a real revolution of a kind as yet unknown on the post-Soviet space.”

            If Ukraine succeeds, “the authority of the Lyubyanka Peoples Republic over the territory of Russia will collapse,” Galkina argues. “Thus, the ‘collective Putin” will pursue its goal of destroying it, changing its methods on occasion but not ever its final goal. 

            “Negotiations with such an organization can have only a tactical and situational effect,” the historian says. “Strategic victory will come with the deprivation of its chief forces – the agents of influence in politics and economics. In other words, with lustration and nationalization.”

            The shooting down of the Malaysian airline yesterday and the Putin propaganda machine’s efforts to shift responsibility for this horrific crime from the Lubyanka Peoples Republic onto others underlines both what its leaders see as being at stake for themselves and just how far they are prepared to go.

            It is long past time for the people of Russia, for the people and government of Ukraine, and for the peoples and governments of the West to recognize just what they are up against, to call things as Galkina has by their own names, and to be willing to act to ensure the defeat of the Lubyanka Peoples Republic.