May 2007
Russia
THE EDITOR
"I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the communion of reparation on the first Saturdays. If my wishes are fulfilled, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world, promoting wars and persecution of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, and various nations will be annihilated." |
| Our Lady of the Rosary, |
| Fatima, 13 July 1917 |
It is ninety years since The Blessed Virgin Mary told us what to expect if sinful men did not return to God and the Church did not fulfil her request to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart. Having failed on both counts, therefore, it is no surprise that Christian blood-letting in particular has reached unprecedented levels in the post-1917 world.
At the time of the apparitions, of course, the idea of impoverished, Christian Russia fomenting global death and destruction was ridiculed by local sceptics. Nor would news of Lenin's Bolshevik revolution three months later have changed their view. Without the eyes of faith they required the hindsight of history. And so the years rolled on and the martyrs multiplied until the doubters finally looked back at Our Lady's warning from the vantage point of 1984, by which time the yoke of Communism and all the godless "errors" disseminated by Russia oppressed one-third of the world population.
Surely, by that stage, with her prophesies beyond dispute and the Pope himself having barely survived an assassination attempt ordered and planned by the KGB, Our Lady could have expected the Holy Father to finally heed her Fatima request to the letter. After all, regardless of any political considerations, pronouncing the correct name - "Russia" - in an innocuous ceremony is simple enough. Yet in that same year of 1984 Pope John Paul II carried out instead, for whatever well-intentioned reasons, a public "consecration and entrustment" aimed merely at "individuals and nations."
In this matter Our Lord must have felt as exasperated as He often did with His bone-headed Apostles. In the mid-1930's He Himself had told Sr Lucy why Russia in particular must be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: "Because I want My whole Church to acknowledge that consecration as a triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary," He explained, "so that it may extend its cult later on, and put devotion to this Immaculate Heart beside the devotion to my Sacred Heart."
In the event, the 1984 act was not wholly rejected. It seemingly earned a "C grade" pass from a merciful God Who surveys not just technicalities but hearts and souls. Accordingly, this passable effort probably assisted in some inscrutable and positive way the contrived "collapse" of the Soviet facade only five years later. It could not be said to have caused that dramatic turn of events, however, because in New Lies for Old, written in 1980 and published in 1984, the Soviet defector and former KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn had already forecast and detailed with uncanny 94% accuracy the false liberalisation of the whole of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that came to pass in 1989 and beyond.
A member of the super-secret strategic planning department of the "inner KGB" and thus uniquely qualified to inform the West about Soviet strategy, Golitsyn predicted the removal of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the restructuring (if not abolition) of NATO and even specified that a "Break with the Past" process would start in East Germany, with the opening of its borders - as it turned out, to neighbouring Communist countries. Of his 148 predictions, 139 had been verified by 1993. An astonishing and unprecedented achievement. (1
We all remember farcical aspects of the supposed unravelling of the Communist Party in the early 90's that just didn't ring true. Some theatrics, as when Boris Yeltsin berated Mikhail Gorbachev like a naughty schoolboy in front of the assembled Party comrades, could have graced the Benny Hill Show. A similar pantomime accompanied the 1991 August Coup that sought to remove Gorbachev as Soviet President. Indeed, extra weight was added to Golitsyn's credibility by the later discovery that the sinister Gorbachev Foundation, a cover for the ongoing work of the International Department of the supposedly defunct Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had already been set up for the allegedly "disgraced" President.
Editor of the London-based intelligence commentary Soviet Analyst and also the editor of Golitsyn's sequel The Perestroika Deception, Christopher Story stated during an August 1995 interview with The New American:
I have discovered that the Gorbachev Foundation/USA was registered initially with the California authorities as the Tamalpais Institute on April 10, 1991 - that is to say, over four months prior to the "August coup." This has been established from an examination of the entity's founding documents. Precisely one year later - on April 10, 1992 - the organization changed its name to the Gorbachev Foundation/USA. I believe that the establishment, over four months ahead of the fake coup, of the shell which later became the Gorbachev Foundation/USA provides convincing evidence of forward planning - revealing that the coup was indeed false, and that Gorbachev had received his instructions from the strategists well in advance.
Still, notwithstanding Golitysn's expert insistence that perestroika and post-perestroika are totally manufactured and part of a Leninist "Grand Strategy" in a deadly long-term war against the West, some countries were freed from the oppressive close control of the Communist apparatus in the process. In that limited respect, John Paul II's consecration might be said to have facilitated a measure of freedom and peace. (Just as World War II was shortened despite Pius XII's deficient 1942 consecration, where Russia was mentioned but the bishops of the world did not participate as required.)
Yet if a flawed consecration produces a second class outcome, one would naturally expect Our Lady's "A grade" consecration to elicit a first class result: to wit, the wholesale "conversion and peace" she promised. In which case, had John Paul or one of his predecessors faithfully carried out her wishes, unimaginable suffering by individuals and nations would surely have been avoided. As it stands, however, Russia continues to haunt us all.
Corrosive Legacy
Certainly, Islam has succeeded Russia and its satellites as the dominant persecutor and killer of Christians worldwide. According to Aid to the Church in Need, the bulk of the hundreds of millions of Christians suffering for their faith today and the hundreds of thousands put to death in any given year are now found in countries like Indonesia, East Timor, Egypt and Sudan. But if Islam and its terrorist sons hog the headlines and while China is the dominant face of Communism, Russian influence remains omnipresent: a menacing, destabilising global presence, overt and covert, poisoning and turning everything it touches to Marxist advantage.
Its pre-1989 legacy alone continues to corrode the life of the Church, individuals and nations. Catholic Poland, for one, cannot shake off its Communist past. Allegations of clergy collaboration with the former Marxist government and its dreaded secret police continue to undermine the faith and confidence of the Polish flock. The resignation of Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus as Archbishop of Warsaw on 7 January 2007, after admitting co-operation with the regime in exchange for scholarly trips outside the Communist bloc in the mid-70's, shattered the faithful. That he denied the accusations until a few days after his appointment by Pope Benedict only heightened the sense of betrayal. (This affair was doubly tragic for the traditionalist cause, since Wielgus, a Thomistic scholar, is a keen advocate of the Old Mass and was expected to promote its wide celebration in Warsaw. His replacement, Bishop Kazimierz Nycz, is a blue-ribbon Modernist.)
Similar charges leading to clerical resignations have become a regular occurrence as researchers with pure and not-so-pure motivations ferret through endless secret police dossiers in the archives of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. In the Wielgus case his intellectual pretensions were exploited, but the three main "weaknesses" through which priests could be blackmailed were sex, money, and alcohol. While the vast majority of clergy refused all cooperation, it is estimated that 2,600 priests were collaborating with the Marxist government by the end of the 1970's - around 15 percent of the clergy in Poland. One clerical researcher from Cracow is about to publish a book exposing dozens of them, including some bishops. Even Michal Jagosz, head of the historical commission for the cause of beatification for John Paul II, has been accused of collaborating with the security services, being recruited during the 1970's before "he broke off all ties at the beginning of the 80's, when he went to Rome," according to historian Marek Lasota.
One hastens to add that the degree of "collaboration" itself varied greatly and often involved supplying dozens of trivial details such as a person's brand of sunglasses or the kind of books he read. However, any co-operation at all compromised the informant and sowed the seeds of discord and fear; each small betrayal spinning out the enslaving Communist web. The elaborate surveillance of Karol Wojtyla throughout his journey from the seminary to the papacy highlights the magnitude of this corrupting network. According to one report, it involved "an unbroken relay, dozens and dozens of agents, moles, priests, journalists, intellectuals, blue and white-collar workers, secretaries, administrators. They included acquaintances, neighbours, and even some friends who came with him to Italy."
The following extract from the statement released by the Polish bishops' conference in the wake of the Wielgus resignation, and read in all Polish parishes on Sunday, 14 January, sums up the kind of corrosive legacy bequeathed by Satan to all the tragic nations blighted by his political apparatus:
We state once again that a gloomy past from the period of a totalitarian system dominating our country for decades continues to mark its presence. As we have written in the Polish Episcopate Memorandum Concerning The Collaboration of Some Clergy with The Secret Service in Poland in The Years 1944-1989, "The records kept in the Institute of National Remembrance archives uncover a part of the vast areas of enslaving and neutralizing the Polish society by the security services of a totalitarian state. It is not, however, a complete and singular record of past times." Only a critical and solid analysis of all the available sources can allow us to approach the truth. One-sided reading of documents created by officers of the repression apparatus of a Communist state, hostile toward the Church, can seriously harm people, destroy the links of social trust and as a consequence prove to be a posthumous victory of an inhuman system, in which we were fated to live.
Strategic Repositioning
The whole of Eastern Europe is cursed with similar spiritual, social, moral, political, economic and ecological devastation wrought by the Soviets. While globally, too, the satanic imprints of Russian "errors" and "affiliates" are never far from the headlines: whether the recent belated conviction of Ethiopian Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam for genocide during his 1974-91 reign; or the rising bloodlust of proud Marxist Robert Mugabe; or the nasty Venezuelan people's republic taking shape under Castro's ally Hugo Chavez; or the ongoing Cuban soap opera involving Fidel's health which recalls the suppression of political freedom and human rights in his chic but brutal Gulag.
Yet these Soviet reminders and aftershocks are not nearly as disturbing as the daily headlines currently adding weight to Anatoli Golitsyn's thesis. The realisation of a controlled '89 "collapse" as part of long term Leninist strategy to seduce and destroy the West is playing out in front of our very eyes. Even the BBC's Guardianistas must be starting to question their naïve 'Communism is dead: we're all mates now' refrain.
As always, blackmail is the leitmotif of the latest phase of the Soviet "Grand Strategy" detailed by Golitsyn. It could not be otherwise under the leadership of a former KGB officer trained in target acquisition - gaining an enemy's co-operation through bribes, flattery or threats, and then bending them to your will. "The truth," states Edward Lucas of The Economist, "is that, under Putin, Russia's lust for imperial expansion is stronger than it has ever been since the Cold War. But he wants to rebuild Stalin's empire using banks, pipelines and financial threats rather than tanks and barbed wire." [Daily Mail, 10/7/06]
Indeed, moving the strategy into its next phase, Putin has made no secret of using his country's vast oil and gas reserves to become an energy superpower with huge political and financial clout. (Russia currently provides 25 per cent of Europe's natural gas and is aiming for 33 per cent by 2010.) Ominously, he warned in April 2006 that he might cut gas supplies to Europe if the Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom is prevented from buying Continental energy firms.
Gazprom has already signalled its intention to buy Centrica, the parent company of British Gas which controls 58 per cent of British household and business energy supply. This has rung alarm bells with many, who foresee Russia using its control over energy to hold British governments and families to ransom. "You would have to be very foolish indeed to pretend this was just another investment company and just another investment," said Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond. Naturally, Mr Blair and his New Labour comrades see it otherwise, clearing the way for Gazprom's intended take-over by decrying such commonsense as "economic patriotism" which would limit the operation of a free energy market.
Fortunately, the estimated £12 billion purchase (peanuts for the cashed-up Russians) would still have to be examined by the Competition Commission, which could reject the move on the grounds of national security. Perhaps they should take evidence from former Soviet republics? They have already felt the devastating force of Putin's economic arsenal. The price of their gas, delivered by Russia's monopoly pipelines, has soared, and they have been forced to hand over their energy supply companies: "Countries that toe the Kremlin line get access to cheap energy," confirms Edward Lucas. "Those that lean towards democracy and the West, like Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, are punished with swingeing five-fold price hikes." [Daily Mail, 30/12/05] Turkey has also been warned off helping the Georgians. According to an industrial source in Moscow, "Turkey has been told it would not get additional gas and could face price increases if it decided to help Tbilisi." [Daily Mail, 23/12/06]
This iron-fisted approach to establishing despotic economic dominance in Europe is classic Leninism based on deceit. The assurance of lasting peace through open-ended post-89 "cooperation" is, in fact, one-way traffic. "Lasting 'cooperation' with these Leninist revolutionaries is impossible," Christopher Story remarked during his prescient 1995 New American interview, "since their purpose is to dominate, control, and destroy us. The 'cooperation' theme forms only one element of an equation which can be summarized as 'cooperation/blackmail.' In other words, the secret Leninist revolutionaries have told the West to 'cooperate - or else'."
So, on the one hand, the Kremlin refuses to embrace Western-style financial and political reforms (so much for the perestroika phase of the fake liberalisation). On the other, it is using the Western free market to sabotage any plans for diversifying gas supplies, relying on weak and myopic Western leaders to help gain a stranglehold on European gas provision by signing up long-term deals with Western consumers. Germany has even entered into an agreement with Russia to build a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea. This will secure Russia's big customers in Western Europe while also serving as a blunt political instrument with which to pressure Poland and the Baltic states by cutting off their gas supplies.
"Russia is desperate to stop the Nabucco pipeline, an EU-backed project to bring gas from Iran and central Asia, which threatens to challenge its own monopoly of gas deliveries from the East," explains Economist correspondent Lucas. Poland also threatens that monopoly with its pioneering plans to import gas in liquefied form by tankers from sources other than Russia. "These projects are expensive, but as vital to our security as radar was in World War II," says Lucas. "But just as politicians in the 1930's preferred appeasement to rearmament, our Western politicians are failing to support the scheme, preferring the short-term, easy gain of gas deals with Russia to the hard work of establishing the continent's independent energy security."
Marxist Dialectic
Nor is Putin neglecting military hardware in his repositioning of a new "reasonable" Kremlin on the world stage. Russia is now developing and deploying ultra-modern sea and land-based nuclear missiles which will be near impossible for Western defences to counter. Spending on high-tech conventional weapons is soaring, too, warns Lucas. "Already Russia's warplanes probe the airspace over the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, blithely blaming navigation errors. There is barely a squeak of protest from NATO." [Daily Mail, 30/12/05]
Only three months ago, the Russian President publicly stated that he is building missiles capable of overcoming US defences and hinted at resuming the production of medium-range missiles that unnerved Europe before they were banned under a 1987 Soviet-US arms reduction treaty. At the same time, sensing an opportunity to exploit growing anti-America sentiment, Putin is ratcheting up the pressure in a divide and conquer push.
In February 2007, before 250 world leaders and officials at an annual security conference in Munich, he stunned his audience by speaking out bluntly against America's global leadership, which he termed disastrous. The global missile defence system developed by the US would, he said, "give it a free hand to launch, not only local, but global conflicts." He complained loudly about the US setting up bases on Russia's borders in Bulgaria and Romania. Europe, he warned, by toeing the American line of trying to encircle Russia, was fraught with new confrontation and was against the best interests of the continent.
In a critique of breathtaking hypocrisy, though not entirely without merit, Comrade Vladimir rocketed 'pot calling kettle black' into new stratospheres of meaning. "We witness growing trampling of fundamental principles of international law," he cried. "One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders to impose its laws and its entire legal system on other states in all spheres - economic, political and humanitarian. Who will like it? This is very dangerous. Nobody feels safe anymore because nobody can find shelter behind the stone wall of international law. This policy fuels the arms race [and] pushes countries to get weapons of mass destruction." (2)
In all of this, Putin is simply exploiting the European split: between the "new Europeans" - the former socialist states seeking a tough stance against Russia, and the "old Europeans" - the western European states favouring closer cooperation with Russia (while also distancing themselves from Washington on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran). Stating that a resurgent Russia would work to restore the global balance of power, Russia's own pint-sized Napoleon told the security conference: "I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security." He called for "responsible and independent partners" to help Russia build a better world where there would be "security and prosperity for all, rather than for a selected few." (These "partners" presumably include Iran, to whom Russia is selling nuclear technology.)
Playing off parties against one another in this opportunistic way is pure Marxist dialectical methodology, as explained by Christopher Story twelve years ago while describing the fundamental continuum of pre- and post-89 Russia:
Golitsyn makes clear throughout The Perestroika Deception that the personalities on the stage of the so-called "former" Soviet Union are all secret members of the Communist Party, KGB officers, members of the huge Komsomol network numbering over 50 million, or members of the nomenklatura - or, at a lower level, druzhiny (vigilantes), who are used for staged demonstrations, televised provocations, and street events. As Golitsyn writes on page 19 of The Perestroika Deception:
…. "Scratch these new, instant Soviet 'democrats,' 'anti-Communists,' and 'nationalists' who have sprouted out of nowhere, and underneath will be found secret Party members or KGB agents," Golitsyn writes on page 123 of his new book. In accepting at face value the "transformation" of these Leninist revolutionary Communists into "instant democrats," the West automatically accepts as genuine the false "Break with the Past" - the single lie upon which the entire deception is based.Lenin advised the Communists that they must be prepared to "resort to all sorts of stratagems, maneuvers, illegal methods, evasions and subterfuge" to achieve their objectives. This advice was given on the eve of his reintroduction of limited capitalism in Russia, in his work Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder.... Another speech of Lenin's ... in July 1921 is again highly relevant to understanding "perestroika." "Our only strategy at present," wrote Lenin, "is to become stronger and, therefore, wiser, more reasonable, more opportunistic. The more opportunistic, the sooner will you again assemble the masses round you. When we have won over the masses by our reasonable approach, we shall then apply offensive tactics in the strictest sense of the word." |Emphasis in original.]
In short, the "former" Soviet Union - and the East European countries as well - are all run by people who are steeped in the dialectical modus operandi of Lenin. Without exception, they are all active Leninist revolutionaries, working collectively towards the establishment of a world Communist government, which, by definition, will be a world dictatorship.
It is difficult for the West to understand the Leninist Hegelian dialectical method - the creation of competing or successive opposites in order to achieve an intended outcome. Equally difficult for us to comprehend is the fact that these Leninist revolutionaries plan their strategies over decades and generations. This extraordinary behaviour is naturally alien to Western politicians, who can see no further than the next election. Western politicians usually react to events. Leninist revolutionaries create events, in order to control reactions to them and manipulate their outcomes.
As a measure of Putin's success at creating "competing opposites" to Communist advantage, his anti-American diatribe in February alarmed the "new Europeans" who well understand the Marxist dialectic, but was welcomed by the "old Europeans" who are prepared to turn a blind eye to everything in exchange for long-term gas contracts. Thus, the Czech Foreign Minister said Mr Putin's outburst had "clearly and convincingly argued why NATO should be enlarged." A poll conducted in Germany, on the other hand, showed that two in three Germans shared his anti-American sentiments and, at the same time, were not concerned about a stronger Russian military. While in Britain The Financial Times blithely declared: "America, the all-powerful, finds its hands tied by new rivals." Or more precisely, as Golitsyn would counter, old rivals peddling new lies.
Kremlin-ROC Inc.
To these overt economic and military threats, Putin has cultivated the insidious third arm of Russian Organised Crime [ROC]. Far more than a mere "mafia," it is so penetrated, manipulated and directed by the Kremlin through the Federal Security Bureau [FSB], the successor of the KGB, that it is effectively an organ of the state. Author Stephen Handleman even calls ROC perpetrators "Comrade Criminal," due to their having one foot in legitimacy while the other foot walks in the underworld that thrives in the shadows of Communism.
ROC consists of the political and financial elite intertwined with former KGB and army officers, Party apparatchiks and career criminals. They have vast experience of dealing with a totalitarian system and know how to get around police and suborn and corrupt officialdom. Most are shrewd and intelligent businessmen which is why their activities - money laundering, construction, offshore tax avoidance, manipulating stocks etc. - are overtly legitimate and very difficult to counter.
According to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, about two-thirds of the Russian economy is under the sway of crime syndicates. Swiss banks are said to hold $10 billion of ROC money. Louise Shelley, Director of the U.S. Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, says ROC is "the most diversified form of organised crime one sees in the world today. The Columbans are concentrated in drugs. The Mexicans are concentrated in drugs. The Russian organised crime out of Russia and the Ukraine has the greatest variety of illicit activity of any criminal groups in the world today." This destabilising global presence operating in 50 countries elicits regular calls for an International Criminal Court to deal with the problem - a solution which plays to the centralising Soviet agenda, as we shall later explain.
The reach and cruelty of the ROC-Kremlin nexus exploded into headlines last year with the poisoning of Russian exile and ex-FSB lieutenant colonel Alexander Litvinenko. A large dose of radioactive polonium 210 was slipped into his food or drink during a meeting with a contact in a London sushi bar on 1 November. Used as a trigger in nuclear weapons and a billion times more radioactive than uranium, the rare isotope was expertly administered to avoid Litvinenko's instant death. It finally killed him on 23 November after weeks of excruciating pain, the polonium coursing through his blood and slowly destroying each internal organ of his body in turn.
Labelled "unprecedented" and "mind-boggling" by English detectives and scientists, British security sources quickly revealed that MI5 had identified the FSB as the most likely culprit. They are now hunting a trained assassin known as Igor - a former member of Russia's notorious Spetsnaz special forces and part of a group of ex-KGB agents called Dignity and Honour, who wage war against Mr Putin's opponents. The assassin was named in a document handed to Litvinenko by an Italian friend at the sushi bar where he was poisoned, which document contained an extraordinary hitlist with Litvinenko a prime target.
Italian Senator Paolo Guzzanti, who headed the Mitrokhin inquiry into KGB activity in his country (which found that Russia was behind the 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul II) also fingered the Kremlin. "During our work on the commission," he told The Mail on Sunday, "we had a lot of hostility from President Putin himself and his secret services and we were also threatened. (3) I have no doubt Litvinenko was murdered by the Russian secret services. He was able to confirm to us that Italy has the largest number of former Soviet agents anywhere in the world."
Litvinenko's father, too, was in no doubt. "My son died yesterday and he was killed by a tiny nuclear bomb," he declared. "It was so small that you could not see it. But the people who killed him have big nuclear bombs and missiles and those people should not be trusted. This regime is a mortal danger to the world."
A proud British citizen and outspoken critic of President Putin, who he accused of corruption and paedophilia, Litvinenko claimed to have left the FSB because he refused to obey Kremlin orders to kill Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a one time supporter of Putin who fled to London after the President turned against him. Litvinenko was also investigating the October 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a courageous Russian journalist dedicated to exposing Putin's brutal conduct of the Chechen war. In a statement dictated two days before his death he thanked the British medical staff, police, government and people for their care and support, before addressing Putin: "You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people."
Litvinenko had solid grounds for accusing Putin. In a dramatic, previously untranslated account uncovered and published by The Mail on Sunday [26/11/06], Litvinenko explained that during the 1990's, as an officer in the Anti-Terrorist Directorate of the FSB, he had conducted investigations into corruption. They especially involved FSB Colonel Evgeny Khokholkov who was extorting money from Uzbek drug barons but who had friends in high places and was always protected. His enquiries also uncovered endemic corruption in Moscow and "the massive involvement of the Moscow City Police Organised Crime Unit in criminal activity" that went "right to the very top." Subsequently, when Boris Yeltsin appointed little-known Colonel Vladimir Putin as FSB Director, Litvinenko met with him and handed over all his files, telling him there were clean officers and that the corruption could be rooted out. Putin said he would keep in touch, but he never called. Many months later, Litvinenko learned from perusing his own file that Putin "had ordered Internal Affairs to start a case against me right after that meeting… Shortly afterwards, I was fired from the FSB."
According to a former boss who went to Putin to put in a word on Litvinenko's behalf, it turned out that there was "common money" involved. This concerned Putin's relationship with the corrupt Colonel Khokholkov and his dealings with the Uzbek drug barons when he [Putin] was Deputy for Economic Affairs to the Mayor of St Petersburg. Litvinenko was finally thrown in gaol for a year and then released pending trial. Litvenenko recalled:
"My informant [in the St Petersburg city hall] came to see me following my release. 'Putin will squash you,' he said, 'and no one can help you. He has no choice because he was working with the Uzbek group. There is lots of common money there.' I could not believe that he was using the same phrase: common money. He was telling me that Putin had been directly linked with the mob that my investigations into Colonel Khokholkov had led me to. How close had I come to his name?
"My informant smiled: 'Remember the smuggling of rare metal in the early Nineties? Putin was in charge of export licensing. You worked on organised crime? Tell me, could anyone export a kilo of metal in those days without the mob? They would blow up the whole train. And he was right at the centre of it all. All his licenses were mob fronts'."
The informant further confided: "Vladimir fell for power very quickly. Look when Yeltsin drove to the Kremlin, only one traffic line was cleared. But for Vladimir they close down the whole highway. He is not fit for power. He has no political skills and a certain weird way of thinking. He is dangerous." (4)
Litvinenko told the informant he was crazy because he [Litvinenko] was being watched and that the FSB would soon know all about their conversation. Just three weeks later his friend was killed "by a hit-man from a passing bicycle. A direct hit from close range. I learned about it from TV. A presidential aide has been shot. One of many during the past decade."
Now, Putin may not be in Stalin's league, but his cold-blooded reaction to Litvinenko's agonising demise was in keeping with all we know of him and the "new" (quasi-consecrated) Russia he controls. "This was not a violent death," he told open-mouthed diplomats and reporters. A truly inhuman response.
In fairness, though, given the rate at which bodies are piling up as his critics bite the dust, murder must be a humdrum affair in the Putin household. Gunned down in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment, Anna Politkovskaya was only one of more than a dozen journalists openly critical of Mr Putin's policies who have been killed during his rule. But nobody is safe from Kremlin-ROC Inc., as Englishman Stephen Curtis discovered.
The managing director of a company which was the main shareholder in Yukos, the Russian oil firm run by billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky until he fell out with Putin, Curtis and his pilot were killed in a 2004 helicopter crash near Bournemouth airport. Days before the crash, he told relatives he was under surveillance and that he feared for his life. His uncle said his nephew had received threatening phone calls and that Curtis had warned him two weeks before his death that if anything happened to him in the next fortnight, "it would not be an accident."
"The Good Will Be Martyred"
This all serves as a very necessary corrective to the urbane Christian image projected by Vladimir Putin. An absurdity further cultivated by Russian Orthodox Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria prior to Putin's 14 March meeting with Pope Benedict at the Vatican. It was "a meeting between two Christians," he claimed, adding that "Russia and the Vatican have many things to do jointly to defend traditional moral values."
FSB propaganda of the first order, this pious mantra seriously undermines the credibility of the ecumenical prelate and casts doubt on his insistence that "In today's Russia the church is no longer a state department… The church is free. The state does not interfere into ecclesiastical affairs while the church refrains from any direct involvement into the political process."
The Bishop's benign assessment could not be further from the corrupt dictator we have sketched herein: a cold, ruthless figure surrounded by thugs and yes-men ("There is nobody willing to stand up to Putin in an argument," says his former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov); a man who describes the "collapse" of the Soviet Union - Stalin's empire - as "the geopolitical catastrophe of the century" (imagine the German Chancellor saying that of the Third Reich). Putin clearly has nothing whatsoever in common with Pope Benedict, just as his criminal Russian enterprise has no conception of "traditional moral values."
The Russian people would have been better served if the Bishop had told the truth about the amorality of his President and spoken up for his country: about its downward population spiral, fuelled by multiple abortions, alcohol and desperate poverty; the crumbling infrastructure of roads, railways, bridges and heating; and the fact that all this continues while Czar Vladimir and his cronies engorge themselves on the spoils of the fake liberalisation process. "What's particularly pernicious with [ROC]," states crime expert Louise Shelley, "is that the money moves only out. The Russian syndicates invest hardly anything in the countries of the former Soviet Union. So they are just parasites on their economy without returning any of the capital."
Bishop Hilarion could have mentioned much else besides. Such as the FSB, like its post-89 KGB forerunner, still running the gulag-style concentration camps and overseeing the kind of classic Soviet 'cleansing', torture and assorted thuggery referred to by Christopher Story in his 1995 interview:
According to a report in the June 30, 1993 issue of the highly respected Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Soviet gulag system remains. The February 11, 1993 Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that the gulag system consists, as previously, of hundreds of known and dozens of unknown prison camps, containing between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 prisoners. Torture has continued, as well as the abuse of psychiatric treatment. The population in Soviet Georgia has mysteriously declined from over 5 million to less than 3.8 million since Eduard Shevardnadze replaced the legitimately elected President Zviad Gamsakhurdia in March 1992. No explanation for this catastrophe has been forthcoming, and there are no indications of migration from Georgia to the West on the scale implied. Shevardnadze works secretly and dialectically with Moscow, where he has an apartment. His job is to squeeze the last sign of resistance out of the brave Georgian people, and he is presiding over this evil by every means at his disposal: induced famine, invasions of city residencies by country people (as in the Bolshevik Revolution), withholding fuel, hyperinflation, drug operations, thuggery by the regime's special repression forces, and military activities - after "allowing" Russia to establish numerous military bases throughout the territory. As for the repression carried out by the Russians in Tajikistan, no one knows the scale of the carnage that has taken place there.
And so it goes. The Soviet hammer smites "the good" still.
Core Objective
One need only consider the "new" Russia we have described to comprehend two simple things: firstly, something was very clearly lacking in the 1984 consecration; secondly, the blood-soaked pages of the twentieth-century have merely been turned in order to continue the Communist World Revolution "by other means," as Lenin himself taught, with a view to achieving that principal aim most clearly pursued by the Gorbachev Foundation. Christopher Story explains:
[T]he technique being used by the International Department/Gorbachev Foundation is to assert the existence of hideous "global problems" - the environment, world health, global security, the global crime epidemic, terrorism - which are "too big" for nation-states to handle. Accordingly, "global structures" are required in order to address these problems; and the Gorbachev Foundation projects these "solutions" to the international elite. A "global justice system," for instance, would require a national legal system to be revised so as to enable anyone to be arrested anywhere, for any "offense," at any time. Another theme floated by Gorbachev is that wherever human rights abuses are taking place, the international community should have carte blanche to intervene across borders. Such an arrangement, naturally, would render such borders pointless.
All these initiatives are subtly aimed at doing away with the nation-state, which is the core objective originally enunciated by Lenin shortly after seizing power. The Gorbachev Foundation is one of the leading contemporary instruments working towards this objective. It is much more dangerous than its predecessors because it has successfully deceived the West that its intentions are entirely altruistic.
What's In a Name?
Ultimately, blind faith and flippant rejoinders are all that remain for those still persuaded, despite all, that the 1984 consecration was the end of the matter. 'What's in a name?' they shrug.
Well, according to Jesus and Mary, everything. And the sooner "Russia" is named in a final 'A grade' consecration, the sooner that benighted land "will be converted and there will be peace."
Ninety years on, we still await, with hope and certainty, the promised triumph of the Immaculate Heart. It will happen, "but it will be late," Our Lord told Sr Lucy in May 1936. "Nevertheless," He added, "the Immaculate Heart of Mary will save Russia. It has been entrusted to her."
For our part, to hasten the glorious victory, let us undertake to live the message of Fatima: completing the Five First Saturdays, praying the Rosary each day, turning away from sin and doing penance as our Blessed Mother requested.
Our Lady of the Rosary, enlighten and strengthen the Holy Father!
Blessed Jacinta, Blessed Francisco, Sr Lucy, pray for us!
FOOTNOTES
(1) New Lies for Old, Anatoliy Golitsyn, G. S. G. & Associates, Incorporated, 1990, ISBN 0-945-00113-4. See also the book review of Golitsyn's The Perestroika Deception, Christian Order, Nov. 1997.
(2) Putin went on to point out to his Munich audience that Brazil, China, India and Russia were the emerging centres of world economic power which "will inevitably get converted into political clout." Around the same time, in New Delhi, the Foreign Ministers of Russia, India and China were meeting to discuss closer interaction in a trilateral format. This shameless situation is noteworthy because Golitsyn was most frequently attacked for suggesting in New Lies for Old that the Sino-Soviet "split" was also false and designed to persuade the West that the world Communist movement was disunited. In fact, the spectacle of "non"-Communism in Russia and overt Communism in China is just another Leninist dialectical deception: an illusory "split" masking the continued military collaboration of the most powerful Communist Parties in the world. Golitsyn expertly documented that as long ago as 1960, at the Eighty-One Party Congress in Moscow, the two Parties formally ratified their long-term collaboration in the mutual objective of "convergence" leading to world government.
(3) In addition, an attempted 2005 assassination of Guzzanti by 6 Ukrainians, who were trying to smuggle grenades into Italy hidden inside hollowed-out Bibles, was foiled after a tip-off from Litvinenko.
(4) A common refrain among Russians in the know. One of Putin's former colleagues during his rise to power, Marina Salye, found him "cold, sinister" and became convinced that he was no democrat, that he still had a KGB mindset and that he was the centre of a web of financial and political corruption. She offered foreign correspondent Ann Leslie "fat files" which she said would prove this. "Of course," she declared, "'they' could kill me! I have too much evidence of Putin's corruption and abuse of power." Fortunately, unlike her good friend Anna Politkovskaya, she has thus far survived. - Daily Mail, 25/11/06.