economic-undertow | Many
of the places that are suffering unrest and war were components of- or
client states of the USSR during its heyday: Libya (client), Egypt (a
Soviet client before becoming an American client), Somalia (client),
Eritrea (client), Afghanistan (client) Yemen (client), Syria (long-term
client), Iraq (client); Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine,
Dagestan, Nagorno-Karabakh (all components of USSR); also Vietnam,
Laos, Angola and North Korea (all Soviet clients but wars have ended in
these countries) … also Russia itself. Seen from a long-term
perspective, the end of the Soviet Union government turns out not to be
the bloodless event as was advertised, the rotting empire still has some
collapse left in it.
One of the duties of the Economic Undertow is to turn conventional
historic narratives on their heads, to where they begin make sense. What
Americans have been fed about the demise of the Soviet Union is a
self-serving, political/ideological fairy tale: that the United States
under the direction of Ronald Reagan’s brilliant conservative leadership
outspent the USSR in an arms race that eventually — along with
collapsing oil prices caused by new oil on the markets from Prudhoe Bay
and the North Sea — bankrupted the Communist government. Once the
economic and ideological fault lines were revealed, the various
client/satellite states that made up the Soviet empire peaceably went
their own way without interference from Moscow. All of this ‘revealing’
and ‘peaceable-ness’ took place over a remarkably short period of time
in the early 1990s: here today, gone the next.
The more realistic narrative has Soviet intelligence agencies —
perhaps collaborating with those of the West along with Western
interests (banks) — gaining control over Russian assets, shifting them
to well-connected insiders, with the decrepit- and ossified Communist
government powerless to do anything about it. This process began before-
or during the Brezhnev period with matters well underway by the time of
Gorbachev … Perestroika being a (feeble) attempt on the part of the
Communist establishment to regain both credibility and some measure of
control. What happened in Russia was not reform and the end of communism
was an accident: what actually took place was the greatest crime of the
modern era, the theft of an empire by the country’s intelligence
services and criminal associates.
This outcome was a natural consequence of the Soviet Union as a
regimented national security state with outsized spy agencies … as well
as the slow commercial opening with the West beginning during the
Khrushchev era. Within the immense ganglia of the Soviet intelligence-
and internal security apparatus there was a kind of singularity or
dawning self-awareness … the managers grasped in an instant they had
access to the levers of control outside the reach of the Party, the
Politburo and the Red Army. The rise of the agencies’ power was a
consequence of Stalin’s paranoia; the Stalinist Russia was built on a
foundation of intrusive spying and control/liquidation of potential
internal enemies. Stalin held the agencies in check by way of periodic purges,
no group of operatives could become too comfortable or entrenched, they
had to constantly look over their own shoulders. Once ‘Uncle Joe’ was
gone there were no further checks on spy agency power, they could act
with impunity and did: what occurred was a silent coup d’etat with the
KGB state first emerging publicly under Yuri Andropov.
Once the looting and undermining was well-established in the center it
spread out and took hold among the clients with consequences that can be
seen clearly today.
At the same time, contact with the West, as tentative as it was,
informed the Russian intelligence elite what was possible … that the
Western standards for wealth and success were both qualitatively- and
qualitatively superior to what was available under egalitarian
communism. In 1975, to be wealthy and successful as a Swiss or Londoner
far exceeded what was possible in Leningrad or Kiev.
Under this scenario, ‘Nemtsov the reformer’ was either a co-conspirator — or, more likely a tool of intelligence
services and/or Western business interests; an operative within the
looting scheme along with Gaidar, Chubais and others. Instead of being
the heir to Stalin’s strongman legacy, Putin recedes to become the
technocratic figurehead who serves to distract public attention as the
Russian Mario Monti or Antonis Samaras … meanwhile, the stealing takes
place in the background.
