Paul Goble
Staunton,
October 25 – The Trust, as a Chekist operation directed at and designed to
disorder the anti-Bolshevik White emigration at the dawn of Soviet power, is
today the model and prototype for Vladimir Putin’s approach to the Russian
Orthodox Church and Russian nationalism at home and abroad, Sergey Khazanov-Pashkovsky
says.
On
the Riga-based Harbin portal, the émigré historian argues that in order to
understand Putin’s strategy and tactics one must recognize that he isn’t doing
anything new but rather reviving the well-forgotten old, in this case, the
methods Feliks Dzherzhinsky used to penetrate and then use opponents of the
Soviet regime (harbin.lv/dvuglavyy-orel-na-fone-krasnoy-zvezdy).
Following the Machiavellian
principle that if you can’t defeat an opponent by a frontal attack, you should
seek to confuse him by appearing in a guise that looks like part of his side,
the Cheka launched the Trust which purposed to be an organization of “the
anti-Bolshevik Monarchist Union of Central Russia” but in fact was run by the Soviet
secret police.
This operation had two goals, the historian
says. It was intended to smoke out genuine monarchists inside the country; and it
was designed to “control and restrain the activity of émigré militant groups.” The Trust lasted only five years in the 1920s;
but the approach it embodied is used by the Putin regime against those who
might otherwise be its opponents.
The main example of the application of
the principles of the Trust operation now is the Moscow Patriarchate of the
Russian Orthodox Church, an institution “which was legalized on the basis of
the personal order of Stalin” and which for many years was even directed by the
Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church entirely staffed by
Soviet KGB officers.
Under Putin, as is widely
recognized, nominally “former” KGB officers have taken under their control “the
levers of power in the state apparatus of the Russian Federation” and over
academic institutions, the media, banking, major business concerns, and
institutions like the Russian Orthodox Church.
Their role in the ROC MP is both
especially noxious and especially obvious, Khazanov-Pashkovsky continues. “Two of the largest organizations closely
connected with the church’s activity, the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society
and the Foundation of Andrey the First Called, are now controlled by the FSB
and the SVR.
The first, which has existed more
than a century, is an example of the FSB’s proclivity to raid and take over
institutions and run them for its own purposes, just as some still suspect the
Cheka did by using some real monarchists as a cover for its creation of the
cover story for the Trust in the 1920s.
Both institutions engage in espionage
and as agents of influence abroad, confusing their targets about what is really
going on.
What is less widely recognized is
that the Putin regime runs Trust-like operations against its own people,
especially those who identify as nationalists and/or monarchists,
Khazanov-Pashkovsky says. One of these
is the Two-Headed Eagle Society, which claims to be monarchist but in fact is
simply pro-Putin in all regards.
The Society is well-funded by
oligarchs close to the Kremlin, and its leaders are people with backgrounds in
the security services who purport on some occasions to be otherwise but who in
fact on all occasions are working for the Russian security services as materials
on their website demonstrate (rusorel.info/vestnik7/).
Unfortunately, the émigré historian
says, the ROC MP and groups like the Two-Headed Eagle Society are able to deceive
the ignorant and the gullible just as the Trust did almost a century ago.
Exposing the Chekist roots of institutions in both periods is thus an important
task if Russia and Russians are to escape from control by the organs.
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