right? Is the West being skilfully lured into accepting a carefully-planned Soviet strategic deception and disarming itself, believing that Soviet Russia has now "democratized" and presents no future threat?
Consider this interesting critique:
The Chechyan war is a mere glimpse of the future that awaits us. The intensity and atrocities which mark it are likely to be repeated many times in the near future as the resurgent Soviet Union begins to re-establish its former borders and to further extend its sphere of influence. We, lulled by five years of reassuring, smiling Russian reformers, will be ill-prepared to adapt to the sudden change and ill-equipped to deal with or confront it. Intervention., even when our own vital interests are threatened, will be out of the question.RUSSIA'S ARMY - A BEAR WITH BLUNTED CLAWS
Analysis by John Keegan, Defence Editor,
Daily Telegraph (UK),
20 February, 1995.WHY did the Russian army perform so poorly in the battle to seize Grozny, the capital of the secessionist republic of Chechnya?
One explanation is that the Chechens are the warriors of their own national myth, brave, hardy, contemptuous of all outsiders and fanatical in their hatred of the Russian oppressor. There is a great deal in that. Chechens hate Russians, who fear them in turn. Another explanation is that the Russian units sent to quell rebellion in Chechnya were not up to the task.
Gen Lev Rokhlin, the commander of the northern group of Russian units fighting in Grozny and a much respected senior officer, made a public statement last Tuesday which revealed serious deficiencies. The setbacks, he said, "were caused by a lack of material resources and outdated weapons and equipment". Tanks assigned to the operation, for example, had been used for training and could not be driven because of a lack of fuel or cash to buy it.
The desperate material state of the Russian army is well documented. Mr Charles Dick, the director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst, is an expert on the old Soviet army and its much humbled successor. Only six years ago the Soviet army posed a threat which required Nato to maintain a fleet of 12,000 tanks in Central Europe to oppose the Warsaw Pact's 18,000. Now, according to a Russian general he quotes, only 20 per cent of the Russian tank fleet is usable. One third of all artillery systems and infantry armoured vehicles are in need of renovation. Overall, three-quarters of the armed forces' equipment is outdated and the supply of spare parts is chaotic.
One problem is that repair centres for the Federal Forces, as they are now called, lie largely outside Russia proper, having been located close to the Warsaw Pact's operational area in Belorus and Ukraine. Eighty per cent of tank and other armoured vehicle maintenance centres are outside Russia. A second, and worse problem, is money. Under the Soviets the military-industrial complex was a favoured body. Whichever other sector of production lacked resources, the arms factories and military workshops got the best, financed out of the state budget.
Poor troop quality contributed to the debacle in Chechenya.
Now, as the state attempts to run a budget which would stand up to objective audit, the money simply cannot be found. Mr Dick cites a recent incident where the commander of the air defence forces, humiliated by lack of fuel to sustain normal missions, gave his personal pledge that purchase costs would be met and now faces a debt of 11 million roubles. Gen Lev Rokhlin himself specified lack of funds as a cause of his troops' failure. Cash starvation goes back at least to 1993, when the new Russian Defence Ministry got only half the budget it requested. It provided for no more than salaries, housing and everyday running costs.
That set back plans made by the ministry's "new broom" team of parachutists and Afghan veterans to form a high-quality Mobile Force for warlike operations, leaving the rest of the army for peacekeeping duty in such areas as Tadjikstan and Kazakhstan.
Because this re-organisation is incomplete, poor troop quality also contributed to the debacle in Chechenya. The Russian army is in the throes of a manpower crisis. More than 80 per cent of Russian males have legitimate reason for exemption from, or deferment of, call-up, usually further education. Of the 16 per cent remaining, half go to the border and internal security forces, leaving only an annual 75,000 conscripts for all the armed forces - if they will turn up. At least 30 per cent do not, and these draft dodgers have a good chance of escaping prosecution. So do the high number who desert after enlistment.
The result is that the so-called fighting units are filled not merely with the country's educational rejects but with the least enterprising among them. A quarter have not finished high school. A fifth have criminal records. Moreover, they are not properly trained. Units are so undermanned that junior officers cannot teach their men platoon tactics - supposing they even want to.
Officer morale is abysmal
Officer morale is abysmal, for many of them are living with their families in makeshift accommodation without access to schools, shops or hospitals. This is a terrible comedown for a privileged group which, when the Soviet army garrisoned Germany, was accustomed to live better than citizens at home. It is not surprising that the units which went to Grozny proved so inept in action. Untrained, underequipped, unmotivated, they were simply not up the business of street-fighting in a densely built-up area, one of the most difficult of all military operations. Little wonder that all the enlightened and patriotic senior officers who remain in service want to abandon conscription and re-organise the army as a regular or "contract" force, similar to the American or British. The bar to that, again, is money."
All smart commanders," Gen Rokhlin said last week, "stand for a professional army, but if the servicemen are paid 200,000 roubles (about 30 pounds) a month, nobody but drunkards would serve." The problem is circular. Until the reformers in the Defence Ministry can create the Mobile Force they want, the army is almost useless for serious operations. Until the government will allocate the tax money to pay properly for career soldiers, the Mobile Force remains a paper dream. The government, fighting to stabilise the rouble, modernise industry and maintain minimum public services, wants to fund the military budget but cannot.
Events may force things to a crisis. The Soviet officer corps was a national elite, not only in social standing but in quality also. Like the army of the Habsburgs, it was the one truly imperial institution. Its best officers, beset by crisis after crisis in internal security, may show they have a sticking point.
Rather than watch the army suffer progressive humiliation and the country they are sworn to preserve crumble at the edges, they may tire of giving loyalty to a civilian government which will not produce the resources necessary to preserve both. No one yet speaks of a coup, for which there is no precedent in Russian history. Yet, as Mr Dick says: "The insatiable demands of the military did much to bring about the collapse of the USSR. They may yet do the same for Russia."
In a horrifying report headlined SCARRED INNOCENCE, in the TORONTO STAR, April 21st, 1996, Moscow bureau chief Olivia Ward wrote of a three year-old Chechyan girl, Fatima, in Grozny, who howled in terror when she addressed a few words of Russian to her. She went on to say:RUSSIAN TACTICS IN CHECHNYA "MOST CRUEL"
by Olivia Ward,
Toronto Star Moscow Bureau,
April 19th, 1996.MOSCOW - On the eve of a world leaders' summit, a major international aid agency has condemned the Russian military campaign in Chechnya as a "massive and systematic violation of human rights.''
"We are working in 70 countries,'' the head of Medecins sans frontieres, Dr. Eric Goemaere, said yesterday on the eve of the Group of Seven industrialized nations' summit in Moscow. "And we believe the Chechen war is the most cruel one we are now involved in ...Villages are being flattened one by one in a strategy of reconquest.''
Most aid organizations working in war zones refuse to speak out for fear of reprisals or expulsion. But the international medical charity said in a report issued yesterday that governments must be urged to apply pressure on Russia to end the bloody conflict, which has killed more than 30,000 people.
"Civilians continue to be targeted and villages flattened,'' it said. "International humanitarian law is blatantly and systematically being flouted. . .Doctors and bandages are not enough, now it is up to the politicians.''
The war in Chechnya, it said, "has gone beyond the framework of internal affairs . . . and now constitutes an international crisis.''
Medecins sans frontieres (Doctors without Borders) last spoke out in 1994 during the massacres in Rwanda.
Officials yesterday issued an urgent appeal that world leaders insist Russia end systematic attacks on civilians, stop the use of disproportionate force, end pillaging and destruction of civilian property, respect emergency relief operations, and strengthen the observer mission of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe.
The agency has been visiting diplomats gathering in Moscow before this weekend's G-7 summit on nuclear safety. But, staffers said, they were advised not to make their protests public and given to understand the Chechnya issue will be kept under wraps.
Today Prime Minister Jean Chretien is to meet with President Boris Yeltsin, as well as British Prime Minister John Major, Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and German President Helmut Kohl. The leaders of Italy, France and the United States will also take part. But the focus of the summit is increasing the safety of aging Soviet-designed nuclear reactors in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Since Yeltsin began his presidential campaign this spring, criticism from Western countries has been low-key, and most world leaders have backed him against his Communist rival Gennady Zyuganov.
A peace plan announced by Yeltsin, including gradual withdrawal of troops and indirect negotiations with Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, has been endorsed by the West in spite of reports of continued fighting and bombing.
But, said the Medecins sans frontieres report, "the peace plans for Chechnya are based on intimidation and attacks on the population.'
The report, documented with accounts from refugees, outlined what it called a systematic targeting of civilians in many villages.
"A peace ultimatum is issued by troops asking villagers to give up the fighters and weapons or else. Even if the villagers sign a local peace agreement, it is often not respected. That night or the following morning the villages are bombed and villagers are indiscriminately shot at.''
Refugees also report bribery, corruption and looting are rife in the combat zones, the agency said.
"The population has to pay the military for a so-called humanitarian corridor. Prices seem to vary between 50 and 60 million rubles ($10,000 to $13,000) for two to three hours of passage. The corridor is often not respected and villagers leaving with their few belongings are shot at.'
Arrests of boys as young as 12 are reported, the agency said, as well as disappearances of males of all ages. Villagers are not allowed to take the dead with them when they evacuate their homes.
The agency said there are reports of "men, women and children put on (Russian) tanks as human shields. Women and children are pushed in front of soldiers as they enter houses to loot, shoot and pillage . . .''
"I'm so sorry," her grandmother apologized. "Ever since the events, she screams when she hears Russian. I only speak Chechen when she's near me."On Fiday, February 28th, 1996, TV Ontario broadcast an amazing an unforgettable British-made documentary on the Russian assault on independent Chechnya. Shot under fire, and under the eyes of the unsuspecting Russians [who had no inkling at that time of where the British crews sympathies lay], THE BETRAYED gives a searingly vivid picture of how little has changed in Russian techniques or the Communist military mindset.The "events" were an April, 1995, assault on Samashki, a farm village in southwest Chechnya, where survivors say Russian forces imposed a two-day reign of terror that included rape, torture, kidnapping, and death by fire and explosives.
It was an operation that set a new low standard for savagery in a war that had already claimed 30,000 civilian lives. Now, doctors and aid workers say, it is only one of dozens of assaults that have traumatized the children of Chechnya, shattering their physical and mental health.
According to a report prepared for the United Nations Children's Fund [UNICEF], 40 per cent of those who have died are children. More than 8,000 children are victims of land mines, unidentified chemical substances or shrapnel-packed bombs, and another 2,000 have been mutilated or lost limbs since the war began.
But the psychological effects are unaccounted and, experts say, far-reaching."
The Russians first demonize the Chechen militia as "terrorists", then commit atrocities against them. One Chechen says to the camera, "Don't send us humanitarian aid: send us weapons!" Does the script sound familiar? First disarm the people [the Russians demand that all weapons be turned over in one village, or they'll attack] then attack them anyway. 240 men, women and children were slaughtered, burned alive or grenaded in that village alone. And all this after the Russian general who's been threatening them has pronounced them "just farmers...good Soviet people", and apparently accepted their assurances that there are no weapons or fighters there.
When a Russian Parliamentary deputy arrives to investigate the Army's actions, the colonel on the spot first lies through his teeth to him, to the evident disbelief of another Russian officer standing nearby ["You didn't shell this village? Do we have machine guns that can destroy houses? Lift their roofs off, 25 feet into the air? The world should be told that Russia has such weapons!"] Stung, the cynically-grinning colonel suddenly turns nasty and tells the deputy that: "One day the Army will clean out you politicians with a steel fist!"
The Russian Army throughout is callous, barbaric, indifferent. The ordinary soldiers swig vodka, shoot down hostages, grenade children and deny medical aid to the wounded. Men and women are shot, then buried - many still alive and bleeding - in a mass grave. Their officers lie, and lead them in their brutality. It's an eye-opening picture of "peacekeeping" on the streets of North America in the not-to-distant future if North Americans are ever forced to give up their right to bear arms and troops like these become a major component of the projected UN New World Army of "peacekeepers"!
But it is very likely that the Western democracies, and the UN/NWO elite who control them, have been skilfully set up for the greatest double-cross of all time. Already, some senior Western military officers are beginning to sense that all might not in fact be as it appears. In the fascinating book RAGING INTO APOCALYPSE
"When I had an opportunity to serve on a board of directors with Dr. Edward Teller, scientific advisor to President Reagan at the time; with General David C. Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former General of the Air Force; and with Admiral Tom Hayward, chief of Naval Operations, we got into some interesting discussions. I discovered, much to my concern, that Gen. Jones, Adm. Hayward and Dr. Teller all lived in fear of a pre-emptive strike from the Soviet Union. I just thought that must be an occupational hazard for operating in the Pentagon.Perhaps now you can begin to understand why, far too late, occasional reports like this one are beginning to appear in the U.S. press:They gave me a number of reasons why they felt that way, the most disturbing of which is their knowledge that all of the training materials for the war colleges and for their most senior officers in the Soviet Union are built on the premise that they will have the advantage of surprise. Think about that. There were no other training materials that assumed anything other than that they would have the pre-emptive initiative. That's pretty scary stuff."
In March of this year the Russian State Duma, the leader of the upper house of which is the also the head of the reviving Communist Party whilst the speaker of the lower house is an anti-reform Communist, passed a resolution condemning the breakup of the U.S.S.R. and calling for a "closer reintegration" of the nations which once formed it. This sent nervous shockwaves throughout eastern Europe, prompting the U.S.S.R.'s erstwhile communist allies to renew their urgent petitions for admission to NATO, which in turn caused Russia to vehemently protest the resulting expansion of NATO right up to its borders.BURIED "MILITARY" COMPLEX IN URALS PERPLEXES U.S.
WASHINGTON [REUTERS, April 16th] - The United States believes Russia is building a military complex in the Ural Mountains, but Moscow won't say why it is being constructed, U.S. officials said yesterday.State Department and Pentagon officials acknowledged the administration had discussed with the Russians the new complex reported on yesterday by the NEW YORK TIMES.
"We've discussed this issue with the Russians [and] they have denied that this is a military installation, but...we believe it is a military installation, State Department deputy spokesperson Glyn Davies said.
At the Pentagon, Navy Capt. Mike Doubleday told reporters: "The Russians at this point have not disclosed the purposes. But we're continuing to watch it closely.
They were responding to questions raised by the TIMES report that Russia is building a giant underground complex in the south served by a railroad, a highway and thousands of workers.
The newspaper said, for years, American specialists were mystified by the complex and had speculated it could be anything from an underground nuclear command post to a secret arms-production plant.
Doubleday said Washington has been aware of the project for "more than 10" years and is unsure what it is. "But I am not sure that I would attach the word concern to it at this point."
"It is unclear, except to say that it is defence-related," he added.
"We know that the Russians, like we, are engaged in some military modernization programs," Doubleday said.
Davies defended the Russian right to modernize, citing two reasons: First, its modernization effort is "a fraction of what it was in Soviet days"; and, second, its commitments and actions "in dismantling nuclear weapons are so notable and forthcoming and important to us in security terms."
The TIMES report said the complex could become a major point of contention between Moscow and Washington, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help Russia dismantle its nuclear weapons.
Davies rejected that idea.
In the Ukraine, which has been observing these developments with equal concern, British Prime Minister John Major, on April 19th, privately assured the Prime Minister and Leonid Kuchma, the Ukrainian President, that "any move toward the expansion of NATO would be undertaken with caution." The London DAILY TELEGRAPH's reporter, Joy Copley, noted that "The Ukraine fears that it would be squeezed between an enlarged NATO, including countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which are seeking membership, and Russia, which is opposed to the NATO enlargement." A newly-nationalist Russia, soon perhaps to be led by chauvinistic nationalists or Communists, bent on regaining its former glory and territories, and feeling threatened by the westward expansion of military power - no clearer recipe could be contrived for a near-future war!
Which was followed a week later by this aptly-headlined story:BELARUS LINK WITH RUSSIA REVIVES THE SOVIET IDEAL
by Alan Philps in Moscow,
Daily Telegraph (UK).
Monday, 25 March, 1996.PLANS to merge Russia with its western neighbour, the former Soviet republic of Belarus, were greeted yesterday by communists and nationalists as heralding their dream of reviving the Soviet Union.
The hastily arranged merger was announced on Saturday after two days of talks in the Kremlin between President Yeltsin and the Belarussian leader, Alexander Lukashenko.
According to Mr Lukashenko, a dictatorial former collective farm chairman who has imposed tight censorship on all media in his republic, the merger will be signed on April 2.
The two states, he said, would be led by a supreme council comprising the presidents, prime ministers and parliamentary speakers of both countries. He said the union should be called the Union of Sovereign States - an attempt to recall the Soviet Union - and be open to all 15 former Soviet republics.
The Kremlin was more circumspect, with its spokesman insisting that there was no question of creating a single state from the two countries. Russia and Belarus would form a two-state community, a European Union-style body with an anthem, flag and parliament, linking two separate states.
The move was welcomed by Gennady Zyuganov, the Russian Communist Party leader, whose platform for the June 16 presidential elections - where he is the front runner - calls for the restoration of the Soviet Union by "voluntary means".
The Kremlin was pursuing this goal "rather energetically", he said. But Grigory Yavlinsky, the liberal economist and also a presidential hopeful, said the merger plan was an attempt to fool the Russian voters.
In Belarus, a country of 10 million on the western fringes of the old Soviet Union, about 30,000 people took to the streets to protest at the proposed merger. Shouting "Independence" and "Long Live Belarus" they demanded air time on state television and radio.
The leader of the nationalist Belarussian Popular Front, Zenon Poznyak, told the Kremlin on Saturday: "You will choke on Belarus. You will sink up to your neck in blood."
However, most Belarussians seem to look with nostalgia on the days when the Kremlin took the decisions and paid the bills.
Belarus had independence forced upon it in 1991 and has failed to find any sense of national identity or place in the world. Under Mr Lukashenko's eccentric leadership, the republic can find nothing to do but to run back to Mother Russia, and he has been pressing the Kremlin for a merger for more than a year.
Moscow has always rejected these overtures on the grounds that Belarus would just be a financial drain.
Liberals have argued that the last thing Russia needs is yet more bankrupt collective farms and rusting arms industries to subsidise.
But the political climate in Moscow has changed with the start of the presidential election campaign and Mr Yeltsin appears to be trying to cash in on the wave of nostalgia for the Soviet Union on which the Communist party is riding.
He is trying to cast himself as the man who is rebuilding bridges between the fragments of the Soviet empire.
The PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER had this to say about the sudden surge of support for the Communists:RUSSIA TAKES A SMALL STEP BACK TO EMPIRE
by Alan Philps in Moscow,
Daily Telegraph (UK).
3rd April, 1996.THE Communist dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union took a step forward yesterday when Russia formed a "Community of Sovereign States" with its western neighbour, the former Soviet republic of Belarus.
The agreement, signed with great pomp in the Kremlin and blessed by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II, will extend Russia's strategic sphere to the borders of Poland for the first time since the USSR's collapse in 1991.
The name of "the Community", with the Russian initials SSR, was chosen to recall the defunct superpower. It is open to the other 13 members of the former Soviet Union, though none so far has shown the enthusiasm of Belarus, which has neither the wealth nor the sense of national identity to exist as an independent state.
President Yeltsin and the Belarussian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, who was accompanied by a 300-strong delegation, signed the agreement in St George's Hall in the Kremlin. Mr Yeltsin said it was a new stage in the history of two fraternal peoples.
Talk of a single currency at this stage is just meaningless
"This document ushers in a qualitatively new stage in the history of the fraternal peoples of two sovereign states," Mr Yeltsin said.
A seven-page agreement calls for the formation of a common market by the end of 1997 and for preparations for a single currency. The document speaks of deep political and economic integration, but says that the two countries will remain separate and sovereign.
A Supreme Council, comprising the heads of state and government of both countries, will co-ordinate integration.
Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is a hot political property in Russia ahead of the June presidential elections. The Russian Communist party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, who is promising to rebuild the USSR, is the front runner, and Mr Yeltsin now seems to be trying to get ahead of them.
Russian analysts said the agreement was prompted more by electoral considerations than any clear plans for economic integration. Roland Nash of the Russian-European Centre for Economic Policy said: "Talk of a single currency at this stage is just meaningless."
In June of this year the most significant election of this year will be held, dwarfing in its implications and consequences that of the American Presidential campaign. The front runners are the resurgent, newly-popular and newly-fashionable Communists; the neck and neck second and third place candidates are a nationalistic Army general, Lebed, and an erratic populist firebrand, Zhirinovsky.
The well-spring of nostalgia for the power, stability and prestige of the old Soviet Union, first tapped by Zhirinovsky, and the longing for a restoration of economic hope and public order fuel the campaigns of all of the major contenders in this election, and they are capitalizing on, if not creating, a an xenophobic and fiercely-nationalistic attitude in increasing numbers of Russians which will largely come as a shock and surprise to the Western public when the resulting Moscow regime is installed. As the CHICAGO TRIBUNE recently reported:CLAD IN RHETORIC OF OLD, RUSSIAN EYES THE FUTURE
ZYUGANOV, A COMMUNIST, LEADS IN POLLSMany Fear A Return To Authoritarian Rule. Others See Stability.
By Inga Saffron,
Inquirer Staff Writer.In the Soviet Union that Russian presidential hopeful Gennady Zyuganov remembers, the press always wrote the truth, its citizens travelled freely, and there were no political prisoners. That Orwellian revision comes not from some long-shot fringe candidate but from the front-runner, the man favoured to defeat President Boris N. Yeltsin. With just 10 weeks to go before the election, the Communist Party leader has dropped any pretense of being a social democrat.
Travelling to this shabby city on Russia's western border last week on his second foray of the campaign, Zyuganov gave a stump speech that might well have been titled "The Soviet Union wasn't all bad'' - which, in fact, is one of his favourite lines. He offered a mix of Soviet nostalgia and Russian nationalism, along with veiled tributes to Lenin and Stalin, that cast doubt on his commitment to democratic pluralism.
Wherever he went here, he was greeted by standing-room-only crowds eager to hear his air-brushed appraisal of the Communist past. He drew hearty applause by claiming that five years of Yeltsin's economic reforms had damaged Russia more than all the horrors of World War II - a war that left 27 million Russians dead.
Despite a rising fear in Moscow that a Communist victory would mean a return to authoritarian rule, many of Zyuganov's supporters long for tougher social controls, especially to combat crime.
"We're not afraid of some kind of repression'' under a Zyuganov administration, said Alexander Tyushkin, 59, a fire-truck driver at the local Zil auto factory. "We're more afraid of losing our jobs.''
Just two months ago, at an international conference in Switzerland, Zyuganov (pronounced zoo-GAWN-ov) wowed Western leaders by presenting himself as a pragmatic socialist who would tolerate private property and encourage small business. He told a different story in Smolensk, where he addressed a egg-factory workers with a giant portrait of Lenin as a backdrop.
Private property, he said, should be limited to garden plots, just as it was in Soviet times. He advocated a return to strong state control of the economy and indicated he would limit the availability of foreign goods, which dominate the shelves of Russian stores.
The audience loved it. In Smolensk, where almost 39 percent voted for the Communists in the December legislative election, he was speaking to the converted. Unlike Moscow, the city can claim few benefits from the economic transformation that would offset the factory closures, job losses and dramatic price rises. There are almost no new businesses, shops or kiosks on its dowdy streets.
What people here want most - besides an end to economic hardship - is stability.
"We lived under the Communists. We know what they will do,'' said Olga Voskovich, 37, an agricultural expert who attended the speech at the egg factory.
Largely to appease party hard-liners, Zyuganov has rejected the social-democratic ideas - a mixed state-private economy and tolerance for free speech and for plural political views - embraced in much of Eastern Europe. Last week, he went out of his way to dissociate himself from such new-style communists as Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
"The social democracy of the Western European style has no chance of success in Russia,'' Zyuganov said. His willingness to rewrite history may also be an attempt to placate the hard-liners. In a recent interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel, he disputes well-documented evidence that Joseph Stalin killed millions during a reign of terror in the 1930s and calls the regime of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev "a liberal state without repression.''
Even for a former propagandist like Zyuganov, who worked in the ideology department of the Soviet Union's Central Committee, the assertions seem outlandish. After all, Russian historians have free access to former Soviet archives.
Still, he blithely denies that a network of prison camps existed during Brezhnev's rule in the '60s and '70s.
"A couple of dissidents were expelled,'' Zyuganov is quoted as saying. "That was it. Today there are more victims of repression in the camps than under Stalin. In my hometown, only two people were arrested at that time, and they were both criminals.''
It is such statements that cause people to worry about what would happen in Russia if Zyuganov were elected - particularly, given his criticism of the media, in the area of free speech. When asked in Smolensk whether he would respect a free press, he skirted the question, instead attacking Russian television stations for showing anti-Soviet demonstrators tearing up a red Communist flag.
"Television,'' he told the factory workers, "which lives off your last money, your taxes, shows you how the red flag that hovered over each Russian military unit is desecrated. It's hard to imagine anything more horrible than that.''
In fact, Zyuganov could fairly make the point that he is the victim of unofficial censorship. Both the official state networks and the independent channel ignored his two campaign trips while giving extensive coverage to Yeltsin's recent foray into the countryside. Although Zyuganov is the front-runner - leading Yeltsin in the polls by eight points - only two national newspapers bothered to cover his one-day trip to Smolensk.
Russian journalists make no secret of the fact that they would rather see Yeltsin remain in the Kremlin. Two prominent journalists - the news editor of Independent Television and the host of a top-rated political show - have signed on as Yeltsin's unpaid media consultants. Rather than take the high road and denounce such practices, Zyuganov has indicated that he would play by the same rules.
While he recently pushed through parliament a controversial bill advocating the restoring of the Soviet Union, he is not a carbon copy of a Soviet-style Communist. His stump speeches increasingly appeal to the nationalism awakened by such people as Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, as well as to socialist ideas.
Zyuganov often touts the virtues of the Russian Orthodox Church, something a traditional Soviet Communist would never do. The new Communist logo incorporates both a hammer-and-sickle emblem and the word Russia in traditional Slavonic lettering that evokes the czarist period.
He exploits the growing resentment against Western products and advertising. Noting that many Russians cannot read the Western alphabet, he decried, in his Smolensk speech, the growing use of English on signs and consumer goods.
"You won't see it in any African capital,'' he said. "As if this problem couldn't be solved simply by the Moscow mayor's office imposing a tax on every Latin letter! Those signs would be translated into Russian the next day!''
Such sentiments appeal to people like Vadim Vorobyov, 21, a college student who can barely remember the heyday of the superpower Soviet Union. He recently helped found a Young Communists League at Smolensk's teachers college. So far, there are seven members.
"We're not the old Communists,'' Vorobyov said. "We're the new Communists. Our aim is to make life less cruel than it is now.''
On December 14th, 1995, JANE'S DEFENSE WEEKLY observed that the Russians still regarded preparation for a nuclear war with the United States as a "high priority". JANE'S later reported that Russian submarines had once again begun persistently shadowing U.S. aircraft carrier battle fleets.RETIRED GENERAL, NEOFASCIST VIE TO DEFEAT YELTSIN
Two Russian Nationalists Wooing A Proud Right
by James P. Gallagher,
Tribune Staff Writer.One is a former paratrooper who fought in Afghanistan. The other is the shameless bully of the Russian parliament, where he once punched a priest and roughed up a woman, yanking her by the hair and smacking off her glasses.
Now the pug-faced, gravel-voiced retired general and the golden-tongued, flamboyant neofascist are battling one another for the backing of Russia's angry right-wing, nationalistic voters in key parliamentary elections later this month.
But a lot more is at stake in this bitter political brawl than seats in Russia's often vaudeville-like State Duma, for both Alexander Lebed and Vladimir Zhirinovsky have ambitions to be this country's next president.
Lebed has pledged to rebuild Russia's military might, and Zhirinovsky has boasted that he would pursue a more bellicose foreign policy.
"I will raise Russia from its knees," Zhirinovsky's campaign posters vow, while Lebed insists it would take him just two years to reform the country's demoralized and ill-equipped army, turning it into a modern fighting force.
"The main task is . . . a common effort that will halt the demolition of our army and our nation," Lebed says.
The tough talk and sabre rattling may unnerve foreigners, but it has great appeal to Russians distraught over the diminished role this former superpower is playing in the world.
"Russia needs a very strong leader who can get things under control again," insists Maxim Petrov, 18, while listening to a rousing street-corner spiel on behalf of Zhirinovsky's grossly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party.
Not long ago, Petrov was ready to cast his vote proudly for Zhirinovsky's extreme right-wing group. Now he's having second thoughts and could end up supporting Lebed's somewhat more moderate faction, the Congress of Russian Communities.
"They're both such strong men, it's hard to choose between them," said Petrov, a second-year aviation cadet at a local academy. "Zhirinovsky is an original type. He says very interesting things. But Lebed is a military hero, and he seems to be more stable, more prepared to take charge."
Polls show that Lebed, who believes Russia won't be ready for democracy for decades, now is Russia's the most popular political figure. And his personal charisma is fueling support for the Congress of Russian Communities, one of 43 political parties on the Dec. 17 ballot.
Russia's resurgent Communists are still favored to finish first, but Lebed's faction is steadily picking up steam and is expected to win a substantial bloc of seats in the new Duma.
Meanwhile Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats, who shocked the world by garnering the greatest number of votes in legislative elections two years ago, appear to be less popular this time around--largely because of the party leader's wild rhetoric and outrageous behaviour.
Zhirinovsky, 49, now shies away from the anti-Semitic comments that once made him notorious. But he has threatened to wreak nuclear havoc to resolve even minor disputes with other countries, insisting he would not hesitate to "create new Hiroshimas and Nagasakis."
His hostile comments and weird conduct on trips abroad have whipped up nasty storms of controversy, and Belgium has denied him a visa on the grounds that he is "a danger to public order."
In addition, Zhirinovsky has warned several opponents that he would throw them into prison as soon as he becomes Russia's president. A series of public shouting matches and pushing incidents have raised further concerns about his emotional state.
Last summer, when a prominent democrat suggested in a televised debate that Zhirinovsky's judgment was impaired by syphilis, he splashed a glass of orange juice in the critic's face.
But for many Russians, the final straw was Zhirinovsky's gleeful pummelling of a priest and a woman deputy on the parliament floor in September.
When another far-right deputy hurled himself at Rev. Gleb Yakunin, a fighter for religious rights in the Soviet era, then ripped a heavy silver cross off the 61-year-old priest's neck, Zhirinovsky quickly joined the fray and punched Yakunin from behind.
"Beat him! Strangle him! Rip off his cassock!" a Russian news agency quoted Zhirinovsky as shouting to the other attacker.
When Yevgenia Tishkovskaya, 47, rushed to Yakunin's assistance, Zhirinovsky struck her, grabbed her in a headlock and held on to her hair as she sought to escape.
"There was a lot of furore here for the next few days," said Andrei Paukov, 26, a campaign worker for the Liberal Democrats in Ulyanovsk. "A lot of women threatened to quit our party, but I think we convinced most of them that Zhirinovsky was just trying to defend himself."
Even if the incident did hurt Zhirinovsky's image with women voters, other supporters suggest that it might have won him new backing among working men. Said on grinning activist: "A lot of these guys beat their wives and think women should be kept in their place."
In 1993, Ulyanovsk was the most pro-Zhirinovsky city in the country. About 70 percent of the voters in this depressed Volga River port cast their ballots for the Liberal Democrats.
Zhirinovsky had a big advantage in the last elections. Because most other top nationalists were banned from the ballot after failing to overthrow Yeltsin with street violence, Zhirinovsky became a lightning rod for discontent.
This time, with the Communists dominating the political Left, Zhirinovsky is being elbowed on the Right by Lebed and several other nationalist figures, including Yeltsin's turncoat vice president, Alexander Rutskoi.
Zhirinovsky is fighting back in a new TV commercial, accusing Lebed of being an old lying Communist posing as a Russian nationalist. He derides Lebed as "our new Gorbachev."
But compared to the erratic, fulminating Zhirinovsky, Lebed, 45, strikes many Russians as more sober, more worthy of their trust. At the same time, his nationalistic credentials are impeccable.
In 1991, Lebed helped defend Yeltsin and Russia's fledgling democracy against a hard-line Communist coup. The following year, where ethnic-Russian minorities were being harassed in and driven out of several former Soviet states, Lebed became a national hero by using force to defend the Russian population of Moldova.
He broadened his appeal last winter when he condemned Yeltsin and top military leaders for the fumbled assault against rebellious Muslims in Chechnya.
On his recent campaign swing through Tomsk and other West Siberian cities, Lebed drew big crowds and enjoyed warm rapport with audiences.
He may lack Zhirinovsky's oratorical pizzazz, and he steers clear of the double entendres and sexual innuendoes that routinely spice up his rival's peeches. But Lebed has a message that many Russians find compelling.
"We have one land, one fate," he said to a crowd at a Tomsk match factory. "We are one people with a single motherland. All who cherish her, come join us."
PHOTO: Lebed: Russia needs "a common effort (to) halt the demolition of our army and our nation.' AP photo.
We conclude this introduction to the resurgent Soviet Union by recommending this amazing, prophetic and alarming analysis by one of the foremost "Soviet watchers" of our time. Read it, reflect on its implications, remember that critical Russian election in June, and be prepared for what might soon follow.
'Back To The USSR - With A Vengeance!'
'How Canada Lost Its Rights And Liberties - And Few Cared!'
'How Britain Legislated Away 2,000 Years Of Rights And Freedom'
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, Travel DVDs, Atlases and Maps and Guidebooks invaluable!
You'll Find These Related Books On Russia Intriguing, Too...
[Books On Red China Follow The List Below]
"The Perestroika Deception : Memoranda to the Central Intelligence Agency" - Anatoliy Golitsyn, edited by Christopher Story
"New Lies for Old" - Anatoliy Golitsyn
"DARK SUN: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" - Richard Rhodes
"Tragedy And Hope: A History of the World in Our Time" - Carroll Quigley
"New World Order: Ancient Plan Of Secret Societies" - William Still
"The Unseen Hand" - Ralph Epperson
"The New World Order" - Ralph Epperson
"The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization" - Patrick J. Buchanan
"Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash" - Edward Timperlake, et al