Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 8 – Russia, the
nineteenth century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev reminded the world, cannot be
measured by “an ordinary yardstick.” The same thing is true of its current
leader, Vladimir Putin, he isn’t a politician in the sense most understand the
word. Rather he is a KGB officer given to spying and provocations, according to
a Ukrainian blogger.
In a post yesterday which several
portals have reposted, the blogger, who uses the screen name G. Monro, argues
that it is critically important to understand this difference lest anyone
“dangerously underestimate the Kremlin Chekists” and what they are quite
prepared to do (bramaby.com/ls/blog/analytics/1851.html).
The blogger says that he doesn’t
believe the recent terrorist acts in Odessa were accidental. Instead, he
argues, they reflect the fact that the Russian state “by means of the hands of
its marionettes or diversionary units sent in from abroad, its spies and
agents” is engaged in a war against Ukraine and acting in the only way its
leaders know how to act.
“Why does Russia need these
terrorist actions?” he asks rhetorically. “In all probability,” he says, the
Kremlin needs them to destabilize the situation in the south of Ukraine in
order to achieve a land corridor to Crimea and also to punish Ukraine as a
whole for its having blocked Moscow’s Novorossiya project.
“Now let us imagine what will happen
if such terrorist acts will continue in Ukraine, if Russia via the hands of its
spies, diversionists, special services and the like will increase tension and
fear in Ukraine. Toward what will that lead the Ukrainian side in response?”
the blogger asks.
In the blogger’s view, “security and
the defense of the state are too important tasks to entirely entrust them not
to politicians but to intelligence officers, spies, or military officers
because a professional politician thinks globally while a professional spy
thinks [only] locally.”
That is, the spy carries out a
specific task or order from above, but a politician “above everything else will
calculate all the consequences for himself and the state if he were to give an
order to destabilize a city or state beyond the borders of his own.”
“It is time to dispel the myth that
Putin is a politician. Putin is not a politician,” the blogger says. He “is a
spy, a diversionist and a provocateur.” That is how he was trained, and that is
how he acts. He “never participated in a political struggle as did Yeltsin,
Gorbachev, Thatcher, Kohl, Mitterand, Bush or Obama.”
Putin “received power in Russia not
as a result of elections but as a result of a complex espionage-political
special operation,” as the Kremlin leader has himself acknowledged. And he and
the KGB officers who came to power with him reflected their experiences which
were very different than those of politicians, even Soviet politicians.
Unlike those who went into Komsomol
or Communist Party work, KGB officers “were not trained to be politicians or
major government managers.” They were trained to be intelligence officers, in
their own separate schools, and with their own separate system of values and
rewards. All that set them apart from the others.
What did Putin and his fellow
officers learn in the KGB? “To find sources of information, to steal documents,
to hand over money to agents abroad … to deceive, to persuade, to use
hypocrisy, to kill, and to employ” all the other black arts of their profession
within the terms of its rules rather
than those of anyone else. And that is what they brought with them to power.
“Even in the USSR,” the blogger
continues, “politicians of the level of Premier Kosygin understood very well
what Putin and his creatures in the Kremlin do not: ‘politics is the concentrated
expression of economics.’” That led those like Kosygin to be careful and
cautious; the lack of such understanding has unhinged Putin to engage in “stupidity
and adventurism.”
Returning to the situation in
Ukraine, the blogger notes that “politicians there were not taught in the
Ukrainian SSR to be politicians, and as a result they have made approximately
the same mistakes as their colleagues in Russia.” But in Ukraine, those in
power are not Chekists but “former Komsomol secretaries” who understand more
about politics.
If Moscow continues its terrorist
attacks on Ukraine, that situation could change, and Ukrainian special services
could assume a larger role. If that happens, then it is entirely possible that
they would want to organize “just such terrorist actions in Russia, for
example, in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Rostov, Belgorod and Voronezh.”
In that event, there would likely arise
“a years-long terrorist war,” one very much like that which has taken place in
Northern Ireland. Indeed, the Russian-Ukrainian situation would make that pale
into insignificance
“Comrade Putin!” the blogger ends
his post with an appeal. “Stop engaging in terrorism in Ukraine.” Ukrainians
will eventually respond in kind. “Think
about the possible consequences of that for Russia.” Or is it the case, the blogger concludes,
that the comrade in the Kremlin doesn’t care about that at all?
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