When Will Putin Die?

  By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

It is relatively easy to chronicle the Russian butcher Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.[2]  What is not crystal clear is when he will die, and what savagery will he unleash between now and then.

Will he be killed like Julius Caesar by those around him who betray him?  What will he do beforehand, in a desperate attempt to postpone the inevitable and cling to power?  Launch World War III, with Russia’s axis of evil partner China?

In a real sense, that war began long ago when China unleashed the deadly Coronavirus pandemic on the world, which still rages as the virus mutates.  Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—has offered his views about a possible scenario as follows:

A desperate Vladimir Putin is a dangerous Vladimir Putin, and there are signs Putin’s situation in Ukraine may be becoming desperate.

In the last week, the Russian army in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine was driven out of some 2,200 square miles of territory, according to the Ukrainians, whose soldiers are now two miles from the Russian border.

The Kharkiv battle was a rout for the surprised Russians who tore off their uniforms, threw down their weapons and fled, some on stolen bicycles.  For Russia, it was the worst defeat of the war.

That Moscow sustained a stunning setback is attested to by the news that Russian nationalists back home have begun to grumble openly about Putin’s management of the war he launched on Feb. 24.

Where does Putin stand now?

He is in the seventh month of a war he launched last winter, and he appears to be headed into this coming winter with no victory and no end to the war in sight.

His early offensives, while successful north of Crimea and in the Donbas, failed to capture Kiev, Kharkiv or Odessa on the Black Sea, Ukraine’s three largest cities, which were Russia’s strategic objectives.

Putin’s gains in the Donbas are the one great prize he has.  But his army is now demoralized and on the defensive.  The momentum of the war has shifted in Kiev’s favor.

Western and, in particular, the U.S. weapons Ukraine is being provided have proven devastating to the Russian forces, whose losses in tanks, armor and troops are major.

Thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed, wounded or captured.  Putin has no available reserves in Russia without imposing conscription to replace them.

The Ukrainians now appear to be guaranteed an endless supply of the modern U.S. weapons they have used to decimate the Russian army.

The present prospect for Putin is thus no victory, no end to the war, no end to the weekly casualty lists of dead, wounded and missing, a continued stalemate now, and the prospect of eventual defeat ahead.

Could Putin survive perceived defeat in a war he launched, and the personal, political and national humiliation he and Russia would sustain from such a defeat?  Would Putin be able to survive that and remain president of Russia after 22 years in power?

In short, in a war history will call Putin’s War, the tide is turning against the Russians, and Putin faces the prospect of having been the ruler who launched Russia’s least necessary and lost war.

What are Putin’s options?

The first is to stay the course, cut off oil and gas exports to NATO Europe, and hope Ukraine’s losses and Europe’s hardships this winter compel Kiev and its allies to accept a truce that allows Russia to retain some of the new territory it has gained since Feb. 24.

The problem with this course of action is that it is Ukraine’s army that appears to have time on its side now and the wind at its back.

The alternative to a war that lasts as long as the Ukrainians are willing to fight to drive the Russians out is for Russia to escalate and win, and force an end to the fighting.

How could Moscow do this?

First, Putin could raise the stakes, say we are at war with NATO, call up Russian’s army reserves, as in World War II, and conscript enough new soldiers to replace those already lost.

Second, there is the Grozny option, the devastating artillery, air and rocket assault the Russians visited upon the Chechen capital to bring an end to a separatist moment in 2000.

But would the Russians, before the eyes of the world, do to Kiev or Kharkiv what they did to Grozny a quarter century ago?

Beyond the Grozny option, there is the nuclear option.

Russia has thousands of tactical atomic weapons, the largest such arsenal in the world, and the threat to use, or the actual use of one or more of these weapons, would raise the stakes in the war exponentially.

Early in this war, Russia’s hawks talked openly of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.  That talk has begun anew.

The basic question comes down to this:

Would Putin threaten or use nuclear weapons to prevent a defeat and humiliation for himself and Russia?  And, if so, how and where would he use them?  And how would Kiev and the West respond?

America, Britain and France are all three both NATO and nuclear-weapons states.  But none has a vital interest in the outcome of this Ukraine war to justify a nuclear war with Russia, even if Russia resorts to first use of such a weapon.

The longer this war goes on, and the sooner the Russian bleeding becomes intolerable to Putin, the more likely it is that he will escalate, rather than capitulate and accept defeat and humiliation for his country and himself, leading to his removal from power.

Again, a desperate Putin is a dangerous Putin.[3]

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© 2022, Timothy D. Naegele

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[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass).  See, e.g., Timothy D. Naegele Resume-21-8-6  and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/accomplishments/   He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University.  He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service).  Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/articles/ and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/articles/), and studied photography with Ansel Adams.  He can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/30/will-putin-lead-us-to-world-war-iii-or-die-trying/ (“Will Putin Lead Us To World War III, Or Die Trying?”)

[3]  See https://buchanan.org/blog/putins-narrowing-options-159644 (“Putin’s Narrowing Options”)

Will Putin Lead Us To World War III, Or Die Trying?

  By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

The UK’s Economist has a comprehensive article or editorial about Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his “grand designs,” which is worth reading in its entirety:

What matters most in Moscow these days is what is missing.  Nobody speaks openly of the war in Ukraine.  The word is banned and talk is dangerous.  The only trace of the fighting going on 1,000km to the south is advertising hoardings covered with portraits of heroic soldiers.  And yet Russia is in the midst of a war.

In the same way, Moscow has no torch processions.  Displays of the half-swastika “z” sign, representing support for the war, are rare.  Stormtroopers do not stage pogroms.  Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ageing dictator, does not rally crowds of ecstatic youth or call for mass mobilisation.  And yet Russia is in the grip of fascism.

Just as Moscow conceals its war behind a “special military operation”, so it conceals its fascism behind a campaign to eradicate “Nazis” in Ukraine.  Nevertheless Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale University, detects the tell-tale symptoms: “People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism,” he wrote recently in the New York Times, “but today’s Russia meets most of the criteria.”

The Kremlin has built a cult of personality around Mr Putin and a cult of the dead around the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45.  Mr Putin’s regime yearns to restore a lost golden age and for Russia to be purged by healing violence.  You could add to Mr Snyder’s list a hatred of homosexuality, a fixation with the traditional family and a fanatical faith in the power of the state.  None of these come naturally in a secular country with a strong anarchist streak and permissive views on sex.

Understanding where Russia is going under Mr Putin means understanding where it has come from.  For much of his rule, the West saw Russia as a mafia state presiding over an atomised society.  That was not wrong, but it was incomplete.  A decade ago Mr Putin’s popularity began to wane.  He responded by drawing on the fascist thinking that had re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This may have begun as a political calculation, but Mr Putin got caught up in a cycle of grievance and resentment that has left reason far behind.  It has culminated in a ruinous war that many thought would never happen precisely because it defied the weighing of risks and rewards.

Under Mr Putin’s form of fascism, Russia is set on a course that knows no turning back.  Without the rhetoric of victimhood and the use of violence, Mr Putin has nothing to offer his people.  For Western democracies this onward march means that, while he is in power, dealings with Russia will be riven by hostility and contempt.  Some in the West want a return to business as usual once the war is over, but there can be no true peace with a fascist Russia.

For Ukraine, this means a long war.  Mr Putin’s aim is not only to take territory, but to crush the democratic ideal that is flourishing among Russia’s neighbours and their sense of separate national identity.  He cannot afford to lose.  Even if there is a ceasefire, he is intent on making Ukraine fail, with a fresh use of force if necessary.  It means that he will use violence and totalitarianism to impose his will at home.  He is not only out to crush a free Ukraine, but is also waging war against the best dreams of his own people.  So far he is winning.

War is peace

What is Russian fascism?  The F word is often tossed around casually.  It has no settled definition, but it feeds on exceptionalism and ressentiment, a mixture of jealousy and frustration born out of humiliation.  In Russia’s case, the source of this humiliation is not defeat by foreign powers, but abuse suffered by the people at the hands of their own rulers.  Deprived of agency and fearful of the authorities, they seek compensation in an imaginary revenge against enemies appointed by the state.

Fascism involves performances—think of all those rallies and uniforms—laced with the thrill of real violence.  In all its varieties, Mr Snyder says, it is characterised by the triumph of the will over reason.  His essay was entitled “We should say it. Russia is fascist”.  In fact the first to talk about it were Russians themselves.  One of them was Yegor Gaidar, the first post-Soviet prime minister.  In 2007 he saw a spectre rising from Russia’s post-imperial nostalgia.  “Russia is going through a dangerous phase,” he wrote.  “We should not succumb to the magic of numbers but the fact that there was a 15-year gap between the collapse of the German Empire and Hitler’s rise to power and 15 years between the collapse of the USSR and Russia in 2006-07 makes one think…”

By 2014 Boris Nemtsov, another liberal politician, was clear: “Aggression and cruelty are stoked by the television while the key definitions are supplied by the slightly possessed Kremlin master… The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting.  This hell cannot end peacefully.”

A year later Nemtsov, by then labelled a “national traitor”, was murdered beside the Kremlin.  In his final interview, a few hours before his death, he warned that “Russia is rapidly turning into a fascist state.  We already have propaganda modelled after Nazi Germany.  We also have a nucleus of assault brigades… That’s just the beginning.”

Nobody has signalled the growing influence of fascism more loudly than Mr Putin and his acolytes.  Far from Moscow’s prosperous streets, the Kremlin has marked tanks, people and television channels with the letter Z.  The half-swastika has been painted on the doors of Russian film and theatre critics, promoters of “decadent and degenerate” Western art.  Hospital patients and groups of children, some kneeling, have been arranged to form half-swastikas for posting online.

In the 1930s Walter Benjamin, an exiled German cultural critic, analysed fascism as a performance.  “The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” he wrote.  These aesthetics were designed to supplant reason and their ultimate expression was war.

Today the two faces of the war on television, Vladimir Solovyov and Olga Skabeeva, are caricatures of Nazi propagandists.  Mr Solovyov is often dressed in a black double-breasted Bavarian-style jacket.  Ms Skabeeva, severe and chiselled, has a hint of the dominatrix.  They project hatred and aggression.  They and their guests decry the West for having declared war on Russia and plead theatrically with Mr Putin to reduce it to ashes by unleashing the full might of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

This fantasy Armageddon is matched by real violence, the basis of the relationship between the Russian state and its people.  A Levada poll commissioned by Committee Against Torture (now itself blacklisted) showed that 10% of the Russian population has experienced torture by law-enforcement agencies at some point.  There is a culture of cruelty.  Domestic abuse is no longer a crime in Russia.  In the first week of the war young women protesters were humiliated and sexually abused in police cells.  Nearly 30% of Russians say torture should be allowed.

Atrocities committed by the Russian army in Bucha and other occupied cities are not just excesses of war or a breakdown in discipline, but a feature of army life that is spread more widely by veterans.  The 64th Motor Rifle Brigade, which allegedly carried out the atrocities, was honoured by Mr Putin with the title of “Guards” for defending the “motherland and state interests” and praised for its “mass heroism and valour, tenacity and courage”.  The brigade, based in the far east, is notorious in Russia for its bullying and abuse.

Like much else coming from the Kremlin, fascism is a top-down project, a move by the ruling elite rather than a grassroots movement.  It requires passive acceptance rather than mobilisation of the masses.  Its aim is to disengage people and prevent any form of self-organisation.  The Kremlin and television bosses can turn it up and down.  In the early years of his presidency Mr Putin used money to keep the people out of politics.  After the economy stalled in 2011-12 and the urban middle class came out on the streets to demand more rights, he stoked nationalism and hatred.  During the political calm after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 fascism was turned down as suddenly as it had come up.

Its resurgence in 2021-22 followed the decline in Mr Putin’s legitimacy, protests against the poisoning and arrest of Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader, and the growing alienation of younger Russians who are less susceptible to television propaganda and more open to the West.  To them Mr Putin was an ageing, vengeful and corrupt grandpa who had a secret palace exposed by Mr Navalny’s much-watched YouTube film in 2021.  Mr Putin needed to turn the volume back up again and Ukraine offered him the means.

Freedom is slavery

Russian fascism has deep roots, going all the way back to the early 20th century.  Fascist ideas flourished among White émigrés after the Bolshevik revolution and they were partly re-imported to the Soviet Union by Stalin after the war.  He feared that a victory over fascism, won with America and Britain, would empower and liberate his own people.  So he turned Soviet success into the triumph of totalitarianism and Russian imperial nationalism.  He re-branded war allies as enemies and fascists hellbent on destroying the Soviet Union and depriving it of its glory.

In the decades that followed, fascism was constrained by official communist ideology and by Russians’ personal experience of fighting the Nazis alongside the Western allies.  After the Soviet collapse, however, both of these constraints disappeared and the dark matter was released.  In addition, the liberal elite of the 1990s completely rejected the old Soviet values, sweeping away a strong tradition of anti-fascist literature and arts.

All the while fascism had festered undercover, within the KGB.  In the late 1990s Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of democratic reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev, talked openly about the security services as a cradle of fascism.  “The danger of fascism in Russia is real because since 1917 we have become used to living in a criminal world with a criminal state in charge.  Banditry, sanctified by ideology—this wording suits both communists and fascists.”

Such ambiguity was on full display in “Seventeen Moments of Spring”, a hugely popular 12-part television series made on the KGB’s orders in the 1970s.  On the face of it, the series was nothing more than an attempt to rebrand the Stalinist secret police.  Yuri Andropov, then KGB chief and later Soviet leader, wanted to glamorise Soviet spies and attract a new generation of young men into the service.  As it turned out, the programmes helped introduce a Nazi aesthetic into Russia’s popular culture—an aesthetic that would eventually be exploited by Mr Putin.

The hero is a fictional Soviet spy who infiltrates the Nazi high command under the name Max Otto von Stierlitz.  He is a high-ranking Standartenführer in the SS, whose mission is to foil a secret plan forged between the CIA and Germany near the end of the war.  Played by the best-loved Soviet actors, the Nazis in the film are humane and attractive.  Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who played the role of Stierlitz, was a model of male perfection.  Tall and handsome, with perfect cheekbones, he shone in a sleek Nazi uniform that had been tailored in the Soviet defence ministry.

Ordinary Russians were mesmerised.  Dmitry Prigov, a Russian artist and poet, wrote: “Our wonderful Stierlitz is the perfect fascist man and the perfect Soviet man at the same time, making transgressive transitions from one to the other with subduing and untraceable ease… He is the harbinger of a new age—a time of mobility and manipulativeness.”

Mr Putin was the beneficiary.  In 1999, just before he was named as Russia’s president, voters told pollsters that Stierlitz would be one of their ideal choices for the office, behind Georgy Zhukov, the Red Army’s commander in the second world war.  Mr Putin, a former KGB man who had been stationed in East Germany, had cultivated the image of a latter-day Stierlitz.

When VTSIOM, one of the pollsters, repeated the exercise in 2019, Stierlitz came in first place.  “An inversion has occurred,” the pollsters said.  “In 1999 Putin seemed the preferred candidate because he looked like Stierlitz; in 2019 the image of Stierlitz remains relevant because it is being implemented by the country’s most popular politician.”  On June 24th this year a statue to Stierlitz was unveiled in front of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) headquarters that was part of the Soviet KGB.

For Mr Putin, the fascist aesthetic is matched by a distinctively Russian fascist philosophy.  He and most of his former KGB peers embraced capitalism and rallied against liberals and socialists. They also projected the humiliation they had suffered in the first post-Soviet decade onto the whole country, portraying the end of the cold war as a betrayal and defeat.

Their prophet is Ivan Ilyin, a thinker of the early 20th century who was sent into exile by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and embraced fascism in Italy and Germany.  Ilyin saw fascism as a “necessary and inevitable phenomenon…based on a healthy sense of national patriotism”.  He provided justification for their self-appointed role as the state’s guardians.  As such, they were entitled to control its resources.

After the second world war, Ilyin rejected what he saw as Hitler’s errors, such as atheism, and his crimes, including the extermination of the Jews.  But he retained his faith in the fascist idea of national resurgence.  In 1948 he wrote that “fascism is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon and, historically speaking, far from being outlived.”  Accordingly, Mr Putin embraced religion, rejected anti-Semitism and eschewed collective leadership for his own direct rule, confirmed by plebiscites.

Ilyin’s book, “Our Tasks”, was recommended by the Kremlin as essential reading to state officials in 2013.  It ends with a short essay to a future Russian leader.  Western-style democracy and elections would bring ruin to Russia, Ilyin wrote.  Only “united and strong state power, dictatorial in scope and state-national in essence” could save it from chaos.

The Ilyin work Mr Putin is said to have read and reread is “What Dismemberment of Russia Would Mean for the World”, written in 1950.  In it the author argues that Western powers will try “to carry out their hostile and ridiculous experiment even in the post-Bolshevik chaos, deceptively presenting it as the supreme triumph of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘federalism’… German propaganda has invested too much money and effort in Ukrainian separatism (and maybe not only Ukrainian)”.

In 2005, following the first popular uprising in Ukraine, known as the Orange revolution, Mr Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.  Drawing on anti-Ukrainian feelings in Russia, he then set his country on a path of confrontation with the West.  That same year Ilyin’s body was brought back to Russia from Switzerland, where he had died in exile in 1954.  Mr Putin reportedly paid for the gravestone from his own savings.  In 2009 he laid flowers on Ilyin’s grave.

Ignorance is strength

The fact that Mr Putin has embraced fascist methods and fascist thinking holds an alarming message for the rest of the world. Fascism works by creating enemies. It makes Russia the brave victim of others’ hatred even as it justifies feelings of hatred towards its real and imagined foes at home and abroad.

Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and “moderniser”, recently posted on social media: “I hate them.  They are bastards and degenerates.  They want us, Russia, dead… I’ll do all I can to make them disappear.”  He did not bother to say who he had in mind.  But Russia’s hostility has three targets: the liberal West, Ukraine and traitors at home.  All of them need to take stock of what Russian fascism means.

Mr Putin has long sought to undermine Western democracies.  He has supported far-right parties in Europe, such as National Rally in France, Fidesz in Hungary and the Northern League in Italy.  He has interfered in American elections, hoping to help Donald Trump defeat the Democrats.

Even if fighting stops in Ukraine, the devotee of Ilyin in the Kremlin will not settle into an accommodation with Western democracies.  Mr Putin and his men will do everything in their power to battle liberalism and sow discord.

For centuries Russia has been partly European, but Kirill Rogov, a political analyst, wrote recently that the war in Ukraine enabled Mr Putin to cut off that part of its identity.  As long as Mr Putin is in power, Russia will build alliances with China, Iran and other anti-liberal countries.  It will, as ever, be in the ideological vanguard.

The outlook for Ukraine is even more bleak.  A few weeks after the start of the war Ria Novosti, a state news agency, published an article that called for the purging “of the ethnic component of self-identification among the people populating the territories of historical Malorossia and Novorossia [Ukraine and Belarus] initiated by the Soviet powers.”

Ukraine, Mr Putin said, was the source of deadly viruses, home to American-funded biological labs experimenting with strains of coronavirus and cholera.  “Biological weapons were being created in direct proximity to Russia,” he warned.

On Russian state television, Ukrainians are called worms.  In a recent talk show Mr Solovyov joked: “When a doctor is deworming a cat, for the doctor it is a special operation, for the worms it is a war and for the cat it is cleansing.”  Margarita Simonyan, the boss of RT, a state-controlled international tv network, stated that “Ukraine cannot continue to exist.”

The purpose of the invasion is not just to capture territory but to cleanse Ukraine of its separate identity, which threatens the identity of Russia as an imperial nation.  Along with its punitive forces, the Kremlin has also dispatched hundreds of schoolteachers to re-educate Ukrainian children in the occupied territories.  It equates an independent sovereign Ukraine with Nazism.  Either Ukraine will cease to exist as a nation state or Russia itself will be infected by the idea of emancipation that will destroy its imperial identity.

The bleakest of all is the outlook for Russia.  Mr Putin did not plan on a war of attrition.  He imagined that a strike on Kyiv would rapidly lead to a new regime in Ukraine and the submission of Ukrainian society to his will.  So far, Mr Putin has failed to defeat Ukraine.  But he has succeeded in defeating Russia.

Talk of bodily contamination and cleansing is not limited to Ukraine.  Russia also contains alien elements—oyster-slurping, foie-gras-eating traitors who mentally live in the West and are infected with ideas of gender fluidity.  The Russian people, Mr Putin declared in a tv address, will “simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth” leading to “a natural and necessary self-detoxification of society”.

Like Stalin, Mr Putin distrusts and fears the people.  They need to be controlled, manipulated and, when necessary, suppressed.  He excludes them from real decision-making.  As Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist, argues, they are needed for the ritual of elections that demonstrate the legitimacy of the ruler, but the rest of the time they should be invisible.  Mr Yudin calls this attitude “people on call”.

The war changed everything.  As Hitler told Goebbels in the spring of 1943, “the war…made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times”.  Soon Mr Putin was able to impose de-facto military rule and censorship.  He blocked Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and any remaining independent media, isolated the country from poisonous Western influence and chased anyone who objected to the war out of the country.  Any public statement that challenges the Kremlin’s version of events in Ukraine is punishable by a 15-year prison sentence.

Gregory Asmolov, of King’s College London, argues this new political reality was unimaginable only months ago and is the Kremlin’s most significant achievement in the conflict.  The war has enabled Mr Putin to transform Russia into what Mr Asmolov calls a “disconnective society”.  He wrote that “These efforts are driven by the notion that it’s impossible to protect the internal legitimacy of the current leadership and keep citizens loyal if Russia remains relatively open and linked up to the global networked system.”

So far Mr Putin’s aim has been to paralyse Russian society rather than rally the crowds.  The show of unity and mobilisation is achieved by television operating in the information space cleared of alternative voices.  Among television viewers—mostly people over 60—more than 80% support the war.  Among 18- to 24-year-olds, who get their news from the internet, it is less than half.  This is perhaps why the symbolic representatives of the Z-operation are not working men and women, but a babushka with a red-flag and an eight-year-old “grandson” (painted on murals and imprinted on chocolate wrappers, respectively).  They are the ideal television viewers and reality-show extras.

The combination of fear and propaganda produces what Mr Rogov calls an “imposed consensus”.  The state publicises opinion polls showing that the majority of Russians support the “special military operation”.  The main reason people support Mr Putin is that they think everybody else does, too.  The need to belong is powerful.  Even when people have access to information, they “simply ignore it or rationalise it, just to avoid destroying the concept of self, country and power…created by propaganda,” notes Elena Koneva, a sociologist.

The engine of fascism does not have a reverse gear.  Mr Putin cannot turn back to a reality-based brand of authoritarianism.  Expansion is in its nature.  It will seek to expand both geographically and into people’s private lives.  As the war drags on and casualties mount, the question is whether Mr Putin can mobilise the passive majority or whether they start to grow restive.  The elites in the Kremlin, the army and the security services will watch closely.

Two plus two make four

Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who fought in the first world war and survived the second, wrote that “Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions.”  His book, “The Language of the Third Reich”, describes how the dissociating prefix ent- (de-) gained prominence in Germany during the war.

As Russian tanks stormed Ukraine in the small hours of February 24th, Mr Putin began his war against Ukraine with that same dissociating prefix.  The goal, he said, was denatsifikatsia (de-Nazification) and demilitarizatsia (de-militarisation).  Ria Novosti, the state news agency, later added that “De-Nazification inevitably will be also de-Ukrainisation.”

“Germany was almost destroyed by Nazism,” Klemperer wrote, “The task of curing it of this fatal disease is today termed ‘de-Nazification’.  I hope, and indeed believe, that this dreadful word…will fade away and lead no more than a historical existence as soon as it has performed its current duty… But that won’t be for some time yet, because it is not only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also…the typical Nazi way of thinking and its breeding-ground: the language of Nazism.”[2]

A fascinating and thought-provoking summary of history, which can change in an instant:

  • “Dead men tell no tales.”  Putin can and may be snuffed out by one or more assassins; or cancer or some other ailment may take his life.

 • I have written extensively about Putin[3], and was in Berlin when the Soviet Union collapsed and its soldiers were selling their uniforms and plumbing fixtures from their barracks, and retreating to “tent cities” in the USSR.

  • Russians may be treated as pariahs globally for at least a generation.

  • What I wrote several years ago is worth repeating:

Russia is weaker today than the former USSR before it collapsed.  It spans nine time zones and includes 160 ethnic groups that speak an estimated 100 languages.  It is by no means monolithic, and may crumble “overnight.”  Once Putin is gone, Russia may be dismembered—never to rise again—with China taking part (e.g., Siberia, which it covets) and the rest becoming independent states like the former Yugoslavia.

Each of the new states will act in its own best interests, just as has been true in the former Yugoslavia, and among the countries that were spun off from the USSR—which have thrived as part of the West.  Putinism will not survive Putin.  It will suffer an ignominious death, like its namesake; and constitute a tragic watershed in history, like Adolf Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” and Nazism.[4]

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© 2022, Timothy D. Naegele

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[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass).  See, e.g., Timothy D. Naegele Resume-21-8-6  and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/accomplishments/   He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University.  He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service).  Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/articles/ and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/articles/), and studied photography with Ansel Adams.  He can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/07/28/vladimir-putin-is-in-thrall-to-a-distinctive-brand-of-russian-fascism (“Vladimir Putin is in thrall to a distinctive brand of Russian fascism”)

[3]  See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/russias-putin-is-a-killer/ (“Russia’s Putin Is A Killer”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/the-death-of-putin-and-russia-the-final-chapter-of-the-cold-war/ (“The Death Of Putin And Russia: The Final Chapter Of the Cold War”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/is-putin-right/ (“Is Putin Right?”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/07/a-cowards-approach-to-russias-pygmy-putin/ (“A Coward’s Approach To Russia’s Pygmy Putin?”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/01/27/ (“Will Putin Seize Ukraine, And If So When?”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/02/24/russias-kgb-trained-killer-putin-may-be-more-dangerous-than-hitler-or-stalin/ (“Russia’s KGB-Trained Killer Putin May Be More Dangerous Than Hitler Or Stalin”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/02/25/sever-the-head-of-a-snake-and-it-dies/ (“Sever The Head Of A Snake, And It Dies”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/02/27/putin-must-be-treated-as-a-war-criminal/ (“Putin Must Be Treated As A War Criminal”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/12/terminate-putin-now-and-the-war-in-ukraine-may-end-and-world-war-iii-might-be-avoided/ (“Terminate Putin Now, And The War In Ukraine May End, And World War III Might Be Avoided”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/20/rip-joe-biden-and-vladimir-putin/ (“RIP Joe Biden And Vladimir Putin”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/04/16/putin-must-die-now/ (“Putin Must Die Now”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/04/23/russians-are-the-walking-dead/ (“Russians Are The Walking Dead”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/04/30/russia-must-not-be-crippled-but-destroyed-like-the-soviet-union-before-it/ (“Russia Must Not Be Crippled, But Destroyed Like The Soviet Union Before It”)

[4]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/the-death-of-putin-and-russia-the-final-chapter-of-the-cold-war/ (“The Death Of Putin And Russia: The Final Chapter Of The Cold War”)

World War III

  By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

Some of us have lived through World War II, the Korean War, our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and “minor skirmishes” such as John F. Kennedy’s “Bay of Pigs” fiasco in Cuba.[2]  In the tony area of Los Angeles called Brentwood, just up the street from where O.J. Simpson killed his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman, my elementary school classmates and I went through mock nuclear attack drills.  We had to hide under our school desks and cover our heads, to protect ourselves against “falling debris” from Soviet attacks that thankfully never came.

Growing up a mile or so west of the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, my first and only childhood memories of World War II were of giant searchlights—like those used at Hollywood movie premieres—scanning the skies for Japanese aircraft.  Was this an overreaction?  The fact is that a Japanese submarine shelled the Santa Barbara oilfields at Ellwood, just north of today’s UCSB college campus.[3]

Now, in a country that few Americans knew anything about, Russia’s KGB-trained killer Vladimir Putin’s thugs have destroyed much of Ukraine, and have raped and tortured Ukrainian women, and subjected Ukrainians to barbarism not seen in Europe since World War II.  Many forget that when his Soviet antecedents entered Berlin at the end of that war, they raped an estimated 2 million German women.  A former secretary of mine was a young girl there; and what she witnessed was unspeakable.  No human being should ever go through that, she told me, yet it is happening again, as Putin’s barbarians defy all civilized norms.

And all of this is occurring as the world slowly recovers from China’s deadly Coronavirus pandemic and its lockdowns, which have killed or injured millions, physically, economically and mentally.  Not satisfied, the Chinese huns in Beijing are threatening war unless the United States and the West acquiesce to their demands regarding Taiwan and the Pacific.[4]  As if this was not enough, Putin even threatens the Arctic[5], in addition to unleashing a nuclear war.

None of the catastrophes overshadow the possibility of nation-ending EMP attacks, which might kill millions.[6]  Is this pure and unadulterated madness?  Of course it is.[7]  And it is occurring at a time in history when the United States is leaderless, and perhaps more divided than at anytime since the Vietnam War.  We have a President who can barely utter a complete thought, and who may have been mentally impaired after at least two brain operations.[8]  And we have a Vice President standing in the wings and waiting for him to “croak,” who was a former ho.[9]

Also, illegal aliens (including human traffickers and members of drug cartels) have been flooding across our borders, unobstructed.  Crime has been spiraling out of control because our police have been targeted by the thugs, slugs, hoods and mongrels of “Black Lives Matter,” Antifa and other far-Left groups, which have burned our cities and destroyed black and other businesses.  Prices for gasoline and other commodities have reached stratospheric levels, and are expected to climb even higher, because America’s eco-Nazis have sought to curtail or destroy our oil production and independence.  And shortages of vital goods exist.

The United States has been weakened at a critical time in history when we as Americans—of all colors, ethnicities, religious beliefs and economic levels—can ill afford it.  Needless to say, this whets the appetites of our enemies, and is what they have been planning carefully for years.  Our automobile sales lots are empty because of the shortage of chips and other essential parts.  Our laptops and many cellphones are made in China; and if Chinese products were removed from the shelves of Walmart stores, they would be decimated.

The game of chess is won by those who plan ahead, and advance methodically from move to move, and from “check” to “checkmate.”  Right now it can be argued that China and Russia are moving ever so close to having us in “check,” by crippling our great nation.  Their next move would be “checkmate,” which would destroy our lives as we have known them.  Only by waking up now, and realizing fully the perils we face, can we avoid a catastrophic end that none of us ever thought would be possible.

_____

© 2022, Timothy D. Naegele

_____

[1]  Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass).  See, e.g., Timothy D. Naegele Resume-21-8-6  and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/accomplishments/   He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University.  He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service).  Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/articles/ and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/articles/), and studied photography with Ansel Adams.  He can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2]  See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion (“Bay of Pigs Invasion”)

[3]  See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood (“Bombardment of Ellwood”)

[4]  See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10906289/China-threatens-war-saying-smash-smithereens-independence-plot-Taiwan.html (“China threatens war when it comes to ‘independence plot’ over Taiwan”)

[5]  See https://news.yahoo.com/russian-military-moves-in-the-arctic-worry-the-us-and-nato-090027224.html (“Russian military moves in the Arctic worry the U.S. and NATO”)

[6]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/emp-attack-only-30-million-americans-survive/ (“EMP Attack: Only 30 Million Americans Survive”) (see also the comments beneath the article)

[7]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/01/world-war-iii-has-begun/ (“World War III Has Begun”)

[8]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/08/08/biden-is-brain-dead/ (“Biden Is Brain Dead”) and https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10906963/Top-Democrats-say-Biden-NOT-run-election-2024.html (“Top Democrats say Biden should NOT run for re-election in 2024”)

[9]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/brain-dead-joe-biden-has-picked-willie-browns-ho-as-our-next-president/ (“Brain Dead Joe Biden Has Picked Willie Brown’s Ho As Our Next President”)

The Death Of Putin And Russia: The Final Chapter Of The Cold War

 By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

The death of Russia’s brutal dictator-for-life Vladimir Putin, and the end of Russia, will comprise the final chapter of the Cold War—which began at the end of World War II, and lasted more than 70 years.

Lots of us have lived through that war since we were children.  Growing up a mile west of UCLA’s Westwood campus in Los Angeles, and attending elementary school not far away in the suburb of Brentwood, my classmates and I had to go through mock nuclear explosion drills and hide under our desks and shield our heads from “falling debris.”  I remember it well.

It is estimated that the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of more than 30 million men, women and children—his own countrymen—including millions during the collectivization of the Soviet farms in the 1930s.  As the Soviets moved through Germany and captured Berlin at the end of World War II, they raped at least two million German women in what is now acknowledged as the largest case of mass rape in history.[2]

To their credit, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush set their sights on destroying the Soviet Union; and it is gone, without a shot being fired.  After Soviet forces left Afghanistan in humiliation and defeat—and in body bags—the USSR imploded.  The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain fell, and the rest is history.  Yet, the Cold War did not end.

Putin is a killer, and Stalin’s heir.[3]  After World War II, he came to prominence as a KGB operative in East Germany—or the DDR, as it was known before the collapse of Erich Honecker’s government—which was one of the most repressive regimes in the Soviet Union’s orbit, or the Evil Empire.  Following the USSR’s implosion, Putin and his thugs and cronies hijacked Russia’s incipient democracy, and have been exploiting it ever since.

Despite being a “public servant” all of his life, Putin has amassed a fortune estimated to be $70 billion; “Versailles” has been built for him already[4]; and his cronies have amassed billions of dollars too, and are living like kings outside of Russia.  The Russian people need to recover what Putin and his cronies have stolen from them, and then terminate all of them—like the last Czar and his family, and Italy’s Benito Mussolini.  Nothing less will suffice.

The world must never forget that Putin left the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing to launch his aggression against Georgia. Then, he left the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and launched his aggression against Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.  Also, the world must never forget that in addition to downing Malaysia Airlines Flight 17—and killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board—Putin killed Alexander Litvinenko and countless others.

Russia is crippled as a result of our economic sanctions and the fall of oil prices. By ratcheting up the sanctions even more—such as unilaterally denying Russia access to the SWIFT banking system—Putin and Russia will be in free fall, and in a death spiral from which they will not recover.  Putin’s “invasion” of Syria may prove to be quicksand for him, just as Afghanistan was for the Soviets.

Russia is weaker today than the former USSR before it collapsed.  It spans nine time zones and includes 160 ethnic groups that speak an estimated 100 languages. It is by no means monolithic, and may crumble “overnight.”  Once Putin is gone, Russia may be dismembered—never to rise again—with China taking part (e.g., Siberia, which it covets) and the rest becoming independent states like the former Yugoslavia.

Each of the new states will act in its own best interests, just as has been true in the former Yugoslavia, and among the countries that were spun off from the USSR—which have thrived as part of the West.  Putinism will not survive Putin.  It will suffer an ignominious death, like its namesake; and constitute a tragic watershed in history, like Adolf Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” and Nazism.

Let the celebrations begin.  The end is near . . .

© 2015, Timothy D. Naegele

_______________________________________________

[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and http://www.naegele.com/documents/TimothyD.NaegeleResume.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from UCLA, as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal. Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com; see also Google search: Timothy D. Naegele

[2]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/the-silent-voices-of-stalin’s-soviet-holocaust-and-mao’s-chinese-holocaust/ (“The Silent Voices Of Stalin’s Soviet Holocaust And Mao’s Chinese Holocaust”)

[3]  See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/russias-putin-is-a-killer/ (“Russia’s Putin Is A Killer”)

[4]  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin%27s_Palace

Russia’s Putin Is A Killer

By Timothy D. Naegele[1]

Russia’s dictator-for-life Vladimir Putin is every bit as sinister and evil as Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-tung.[2] He is a ruthless killer—of his own people and others, and of the human spirit.  Recently, he warned against despotism and chaos in Russia[3], which is equivalent to Hitler warning against the death camps, or Stalin and Mao warning against the ravages of communism.  Putin is the face of America’s enemies today, personified, as well as the enemy of free peoples everywhere.  He is responsible for the dismantling of Russia’s incipient democracy.[4] Despots like him are destroyed ultimately.  However, in the interim, the death and destruction they bring about are savage, barbaric and tragic.  Like a Mob boss, Putin is apt to die a cruel and horrible death, mirroring the cruelty that he and his ex-KGB lackeys have brought to so many in Russia and elsewhere.

He was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg; and he joined the KGB officially when he was 23, and rose through its ranks.  He came to prominence as a KGB operative in East Germany—or the DDR, as it was known before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Erich Honecker’s government—which was one of the most repressive regimes in the Soviet Union’s orbit, or the Evil Empire.  Russia has a brutal history, especially since the rise of communism; and Putin is a product of that system.  Stalin and Mao were the most ruthless killers of their own people[5], and that is Putin’s heritage.  He learned his craft well; and he must be viewed in this context, not as some Westernized Russian democrat, which he is not.  Under Putin, Stalin’s reputation has undergone a renaissance, despite being the killer of more than 30 million men, women and children who were his own countrymen.[6] Putin is Stalin’s heir.

Some people argue there is a “soft side” to Putin, and that he has been principled and acted in the best interests of Russia.  Indeed, it is argued that he fended off his ex-KGB lackeys in the selection of Dmitry Medvedev as Russia’s President, when Putin was ineligible to run for a third consecutive presidential term because of constitutionally-mandated term limits.  Stalin, Hitler and Mao had soft sides too.  Like Putin, they smiled and were shown in “photo ops” befriending children and women.  In reality, they were butchers just as Putin is.  Yes, the numbers of innocent people killed may differ among the four of them.  However, each one brutally repressed democratic forces, systematically killed their own countrymen and others, and decimated the human spirit.[7] When Putin was coming to power, I was told by an old friend on Capitol Hill that he was a “smoother version” of Stalin, and I will never forget those prescient and ominous words.

Russia is not a Third World country today, but it is close—and certainly it is no longer a superpower.  Based on its gross domestic product (GDP), it ranks behind Italy, Brazil, Spain and Canada; and it is less than nine percent the size of the United States.[8] Its military expenditures are 9.5 percent of the American spending[9]; and its antiquated Soviet-era conscript military was on display in Georgia.  Indeed, Putin left the Olympic games in Beijing and traveled to the Georgian border, where he directed the Kremlin’s cruel aggression against its vastly smaller neighbor.  Today, the U.S. military has no peers; and when arrayed against “paper tigers” and backlot bullies like Putin’s Russia, Americans can be proud of what George W. Bush accomplished.

He kept American safe and strong; however, there are serious questions whether Barack Obama is building on and not diminishing that strength.  The idea that the U.S. and Russia would agree in principle on a deal to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) with a new agreement that would cut each side’s nuclear arsenal is absurd.[10] The Russians cannot be trusted; and Obama’s weakness is on display when he cuts any deals with Putin.  China must be America’s focus of attention, not the backwater country of Russia.  China must be included in any agreement, or else the cart is placed before the horse.  Also, Obama surrendered to Putin by scrapping Bush’s proposed antiballistic missile shield for Eastern Europe—in the Czech Republic and Poland—which emboldened Putin and sent the worst signals possible to our allies in “New Europe.”[11]

Those who “scold” Putin are subjected to harsh dictatorial rebukes, at the very least.[12] His treatment of others is strikingly similar to how Stalin, Hitler and Mao treated their adversaries.  Prison without trial—or “kangaroo trials”—has been commonplace.[13] More often than not, they disappear or are ruthlessly killed to send loud and clear messages to those who challenge the dictator, or otherwise might be considered “enemies of the state.”  Like Stalin before him, the full extent of Putin’s atrocities will never be known; and his “fingerprints” will not be found on the “murder weapons.”  However, make no mistake about it: none of it would have happened without him.

In addition to what has been described above, it is useful to catalog some of the more heinous crimes and horrors that have happened since he came to power, for which he is responsible directly or indirectly:

•  Russian apartment bombings in September 1999, which led the country into the Second Chechen War, and brought Putin to power.[14]

•  The assassination in London of former Russian state security officer Alexander Litvinenko who claimed, inter alia, that Putin ordered the Russian apartment bombings.[15]

•  The Dioxin poisoning of Victor Yushchenko, which left the Ukrainian President’s face greatly disfigured, jaundiced, bloated, and pockmarked.[16]

•  The brutal “Second Chechen War,” in which Russian troops entered Chechnya and took control over the country, with unofficial estimates ranging from 25,000 to 50,000 dead or having “disappeared.”[17]

•  A widespread crackdown on media freedoms, with Russian reporters being killed and muzzled—such as the shooting death of Anna Politkovskaya[18]—and media outlets being shut down.[19]

•  Miscellaneous jailings, killings and disappearances—including one of Putin’s mistresses.[20]

At some point in time, he will be eliminated and disappear from the pages of history, just like so many other two-bit, tinhorn despots before him.  Again, it is apt to happen violently, in an instant.  Regardless of how he departs, one can only hope that it happens soon—and his reign of terror and that of his ex-KGB lackeys ends, like it did for Stalin, Hitler, Mao and their thugs.  The sooner the better.[21]

© 2010, Timothy D. Naegele

See also “The Death Of Putin And Russia: The Final Chapter Of The Cold War“

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[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass), the first black senator since Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War.  He practices law in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles with his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates (www.naegele.com).  He has an undergraduate degree in economics from UCLA, as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University.  He is a member of the District of Columbia and California bars.  He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal.  Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years.  See, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles

[2] See, e.g., http://www.naegele.com/documents/StalinMaoHolocausts.pdf

[3] See http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.4578e814909f0ad722594e6c798584f9.4c1&show_article=1

[4] See, e.g., http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-russia-democracy24-2010jan24,0,3025105,full.story (“[A] democracy museum about Putin, the man whose ascent to power was marked by the loss of a free press, the unsolved killings of political critics and harsh crackdowns on antigovernment protests”)

[5] See, e.g., http://www.naegele.com/documents/StalinMaoHolocausts.pdf (“Aside from ordering the killing of those in the Soviet hierarchy, it is estimated that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of more than 30 million men, women and children—his own countrymen—including millions during the collectivization of the Soviet farms in the 1930s.  . . .  [A]s the Soviets moved through Germany, they raped at least two million German women in what is now acknowledged as the largest case of mass rape in history.”)

[6] See id.

[7] See, e.g., http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118463398015768385.html?mod=googlenews_wsj (“Russia has become, in the precise sense of the word, a fascist state.  It does not matter here, as the Kremlin’s apologists are so fond of pointing out, that Mr. Putin is wildly popular in Russia: Popularity is what competent despots get when they destroy independent media, stoke nationalistic fervor with military buildups and the cunning exploitation of the Church, and ride a wave of petrodollars to pay off the civil service and balance their budgets.  Nor does it matter that Mr. Putin hasn’t re-nationalized the ‘means of production’ outright; corporatism was at the heart of Hitler’s economic policy, too.”)

[8] See, e.g., https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2195.html (2009 est.) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29 (2009 est.)

[9] See, e.g., http://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2009/05/05A and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures#Chart_by_country_or_organization

[10] See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7013042.ece; see also https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/emp-attack-only-30-million-americans-survive/

[11] See, e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/world/europe/18shield.html; see also https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/the-end-of-barack-obama; https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/barack-obama-america%E2%80%99s-second-emperor; https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/26/obama-in-afghanistan-doomed-from-the-start; http://www.philstockworld.com/2009/10/11/greenspan%E2%80%99s-legacy-more-suffering-to-come/

[12] See, e.g., http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/58572/ (“Few Russians in positions of power dare to openly criticise Putin. . . .”); http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6145UJ20100205 (“Putin told the leaders [of his United Russia party] to warn voters of the consequences of voting for untried opposition parties.  United Russia must always explain that ‘proper and well organized leaders are always capable of solving any problems and that in the absence of such leaders, anarchy prevails,’ he said.”)

One of the “untried opposition parties” to which Putin was referring is former World Chess Champion—many people consider him the greatest chess player of all time—Garry Kasparov’s “The Other Russia,” a coalition that opposes Putin’s government.  See http://www.theotherrussia.org/ Indeed, Kasparov has vowed to “restore democracy” to Russia by toppling Putin, of whom he is an outspoken critic.

Kasparov has said: “An anti-democratic regime can be neither reformed nor modernized; it can only be dismantled.  All the hope that goes into finding a way to somehow reform or perfect the current system is in vain.  It’s impossible, because the essence of the system will remain the same.”  See http://www.theotherrussia.org/2010/02/03/kasparov-russias-european-choice/ He adds: “After a year and a half of [Dmitry] Medvedev’s tenure as president of Russia, Putin’s authoritarian regime has only become more severe.”  See id.

[13] See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Vladimir_Putin#Relations_with_.22oligarchs.22 (e.g., the criminal prosecution and imprisonment of Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, president of Yukos oil company, as payback for his support of Putin’s opponents); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky

[14] See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Vladimir_Putin#Domestic_terrorism_accusations (“The chain of command was as follows: Putin (former director of the secret service, future president) – Patrushev (Putin’s successor as director of the secret service) – secret service General German Ugryumov (director of the counter-terrorism department).  Maxim Lazovsky (the owner of Lanako, the company that employed the secret service agents behind the 1994-5 terrorist attacks) and Lieutenant-Colonel Abubakar were two secret service operatives directly responsible for the practical organization of the bombings.” [Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, “The Age of Assassins. The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin,” Gibson Square Books, London, 2008, p. 106]); see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[15] See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Vladimir_Putin#Domestic_terrorism_accusations; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_up_Russia:_Terror_from_within and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubyanka_Criminal_Group; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko

[16] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Yushchenko#Dioxin_poisoning (“On September 27, 2009 Yushchenko said in an interview . . . that the testimony of the three men who were at a dinner in 2004 at which he believes he was poisoned were staying in Russia.  Ukrainian prosecutors said Russia has refused to extradite one of the men, the former deputy chief of Ukraine’s security service, Volodymyr Satsyuk, because he holds both Russia and Ukrainian citizenship.”)

[17] See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War; see also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechnya#Human_rights (“In 2006 Human Rights Watch reported that pro-Moscow Chechen forces under the effective command of President Ramzan Kadyrov, as well as federal police personnel, used torture to get information about separatist forces.  ‘If you are detained in Chechnya, you face a real and immediate risk of torture.  And there is little chance that your torturer will be held accountable,’ said Holly Cartner, Director Europe and Central Asia division of HRW.”); http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/11/12/chechnya-research-shows-widespread-and-systematic-use-torture; see id. (“On July 1, 2009, Amnesty International released a detailed report covering the human rights violations committed by the Russian Federation against Chechnyan citizens.  Among the most prominent features was that those abused had no method of redress against assaults, ranging from kidnapping to torture, while those responsible were never held accountable.  This lead to the conclusion that Chechnya was being ruled without law, being run into further devastating destabilization.”); see http://www.naegele.com/documents/AmnestyInternational-RussianFederation-Rulewithoutlaw.pdf

[18] See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Vladimir_Putin#Allegations_of_political_assassinations_and_muzzling_of_reporters (“On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who ran a campaign exposing corruption in the Russian army and its conduct in Chechnya, and a strong critic of Putin and the FSB, whom she had accused of trying to set up a Soviet-style dictatorship, was killed.  She was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow.”); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya

The Federal Security Service—or FSB—is the main domestic security agency of the Russian Federation, and the successor agency of the dreaded Soviet-era Cheka, NKVD and KGB.

[19] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alina_Kabayeva#Marriage_controversy

[20] See, e.g., http://news.oneindia.in/2010/02/08/mumof-vladimir-putins-love-childvanishes.html (“The woman who gave birth to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s love child[, Russian gymnast, Alina Kabayeva,] is said to have vanished”); see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alina_Kabayeva#Marriage_controversy; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin#Family_and_personal_life

[21] See also, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/12/georgia (Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has described Putin as “following a course that is horrifyingly similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s”)