When Superpowers Collide (Part I)

Andrew Teece (22nd March 2023)

This four-part essay is an objective attempt to understand the current conflict in Ukraine – a conflict which threatens to spill out into a nuclear war – and how it came about. It explores the role played by Russia and of the United States & NATO. Examining the history of both Russia and the United States, independently and collectively, whilst occasionally branching off into other connected geopolitical topics, I have tried to condense the content to matters which I hope the reader will find relevant and interesting. This was no mean feat, given the potentially boundless subject matter.  The quotations in italics throughout the essay are direct quotes from Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel ‘War and Peace’, originally published in 1869 – a vast novel for a suitably vast theme!

Russian troops during WWI

Introduction

The first anniversary of the “special military operation” which Russia embarked upon into Ukraine passed three weeks ago. In reality, this is a further chapter of a war now in its tenth year. To better understand the ongoing conflict, it’s helpful for us to take a detour into history and geopolitics, as well as to shine a light on some of the key issues which the mainstream media remain deafeningly silent about. Evidently, some rules apply to certain countries, but not to others.

2023 marks the bicentenary of the Monroe Doctrine - a United States foreign policy position that vigorously opposed any European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere and maintained that any interference in the political affairs of the Americas was a politically hostile act.

The Monroe Doctrine held true through the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, and since being re-branded under the OAS by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1933, has persisted via various reinterpretations or reinstatements up to the present day. It therefore follows that any foreign power that places military forces near U.S. territory knows it is crossing a line that ought not to be crossed. This foundation is so central to U.S. foreign and military policy that its violation is considered justification for war. Although, when it comes to Russia, the United States and its NATO allies have blatantly disregarded this same principle for several decades.¹

Two Great Nations: A Brief History

Any context or relevant history has been completely absent from practically all mainstream media reports on the current Ukraine conflict. Therefore, it’s important that we take some time to examine this further. The author, Tim Marshall, playfully opened his geopolitical masterpiece, Prisoners of Geography, as follows:

“Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers and ask God: ‘Why didn’t you put some mountains in Ukraine?’ If God had built mountains in Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the North European Plain would not be such encouraging territory from which to attack Russia repeatedly. As it is, Putin has no choice: he must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west.”²

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The large expanse of flatland, known as the North European Plain, which lies to the West of Moscow, offers Russia very little in the way of defensible boundaries, resulting in a long history of invaders from the West, which the Russians are understandably wary about.

The Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth invaded in the 17^th Century. In the 18^th Century it was Sweden, and then, in 1812, Napoleon and France attacked Riga, moved on to burn down Smolensk, before marching on Moscow. During the 1918 Intervention as many as 14 foreign states occupied parts of Russia, albeit briefly. Just over two decades later the onslaught of Hitler’s Nazi war machine, during World War II, resulted in the largest and most deadly military operation in human history.

The total number of Russians killed in World War II is barely conceivable. Estimates vary but a reasonable figure is in the region of 26.6 million souls, with around 7.4 million of those being civillians. This equated to roughly one in every seven Russian citizens being sacrificed during the war.³ The effects of those devastating losses are still felt by the Russian people to this day - without which, world history could well have taken a very different course.

“The same question arose in every soul: For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”

Outside of the Soviet Union the WWII losses were quickly forgotten, and no sooner had the dust and ash settled than English writer George Orwell published an article predicting there would be a nuclear stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” This was 1945, and the first time that the term ‘The Cold War’ had been used.⁴ Orwell had an uncanny knack of foretelling the future, and by 1947 The Cold War had solidified. The height of The Cold War came about after the formation of NATO, in 1949, however, it wasn’t until 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, that the most dangerous point of The Cold War occurred. For several decades after World War II the planet was on high alert. The Soviet Union was the communist menace that had to be monitored with unending vigilance, at least as far as the United States and its European allies who had fallen under her orbit of influence were concerned.

Despite her stupefying vastness and great mineral wealth, Russia’s Achilles heel is, and always has been, her geography. Along with the aforementioned vulnerable flatlands, the agricultural growing season is short, and she struggles to distribute whatever is grown across the eleven time zones which are governed from Moscow. The largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, Vladivostok, is frozen over for several months of the year, as is the port at St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, thus preventing the Russian fleet operating as a global power. For this reason, and throughout the days of the Russian Empire, and later under the Soviet Union, the all-year-round, warm-water port of Sevastopol on the Crimea peninsula was, and still is, of crucial importance to Russia.⁵

In 1954, the country which exists today as Ukraine was part of the USSR. The final piece was Crimea which was transferred from Russia to Ukraine by the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev – a fact that is regarded as simply unbelievable to many Russians now.⁶ This became a potential conundrum for Russia when Ukraine declared its independence, in 1991, after the collapse of The Soviet Union – a subject we will return to in due course.

Unlike her Russian counterpart, the evolution of the United States has not been confined by the same geographical straightjackets. The last of the original thirteen colonies to be established was Georgia, in 1732. In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson publicly announced that he coveted New Orleans, and the following year, without a shot being fired, the United States simply bought the territory of Louisiana from France. This was a vast area consisting of roughly the middle third of the existing United States, and at $15 million it was something of a steal. A ten-year process of white U.S. settlement by stealth was enough to foment the 1835-6 Texas Revolution and thereby push the Mexicans out of Texas. Nevertheless, the 1845-6 Mexican War was required to force the Mexicans to accept that their land stopped at the southern edge of the Rio Grande and thus California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and part of Colorado completed the picture. With dozens of major ports on three main oceans and almost impossible to invade, the world witnessed the birth of the greatest superpower that history has ever known.⁷ However, superpowers, as we shall discover, don’t like to be challenged.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, all was well between the United States and Russia, which officially became The Soviet Union in 1922. Comparatively few people know that several U.S. banks and corporations, closely affiliated with Wall Street, provided significant direct funding for the Bolshevik Revolution, particularly through Leon Trotsky.⁸ It should be noted that these J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller-backed financial institutions were not Bolsheviks, nor were they allied with any particular ideology, other than the relentless pursuit of profit and power. As Professor Antony Sutton insightfully notes in his book, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution:

“Where the United States could have exerted its dominant influence to bring about a free Russia, it truckled to the ambitions of a few Wall Street financiers who, for their own purposes, could accept a centralised tsarist Russia or a centralised Marxist Russia, but not a decentralised free Russia.”⁹

The mission of the Wall Street financiers, according to Sutton, was to “pave the way for control, either through the Kerensky government or the Bolshevik revolutionaries, of the Russian market and resources.”¹⁰ As well as an overriding motivation to capture the post-war Russian market, it was also imperative, to these Wall Street mercenaries, to keep Russia in conflict with Germany for as long as possible, thus weakening both nations. It has always been of key strategic importance to American ambitions that a strong Russia-German alliance should not be allowed to flourish – a subject which we will return to later, when discussing the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.

Formal diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States began in 1933, and in 1941, under The Lend-Lease Act, the U.S. President, Franklin Roosevelt, provided millions of dollars’ worth of weapons and other support for the USSR’s fight against Nazi Germany during World War II.¹¹

“War is not a polite recreation, but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to realize this and not make a game of it... as it stands now it's the favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous.”

By 1945 the war had ended, with the Soviet Union and United States as close allies. Even so, Europe was in ruins, with hunger and disease everywhere. Roosevelt had led the United States to a victory he never lived to see. FDR had died hoping to create a lasting peace both in Europe and with the Soviet Union and had “sought to construct a durable post-war order by offering Moscow a prominent place in it.”¹² Knowledge of Roosevelt’s strategy for accomplishing this goal, however, soon disappeared, and no sooner had Harry Truman taken office as President, the two great nations began drifting apart.

Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference

FDR & Stalin

“They talked about peace, but did not believe in its possibility.”

Roosevelt’s death, from a perspective of future world-peace, was untimely, to say the least; two weeks before the first ever United Nations conference was held in San Francisco. Roosevelt’s health had been declining for some time, although much of the detail was hidden from the American public. Roosevelt died at his home at Warm Springs, Georgia, on 12^th April 1945, with the official cause of death being an intracerebral haemorrhage.¹³ The President’s attending cardiologist, Howard Bruenn, hastily made the diagnosis. The following morning, Roosevelt’s body was placed in a flag-draped coffin and loaded on to the presidential train for the trip back to Washington. FDR was buried at the Rose Garden of Springwood Estate, New York on 15^th April 1945.

It was no secret that Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, held a huge amount of admiration for FDR, despite frictions arising between the two shortly before Roosevelt died. Stalin had also forged a relationship, of sorts, with FDR’s son, Elliot Roosevelt, after having first met with him in 1943. In late 1946, Gardner Cowless, publisher of LOOK magazine, asked Elliot to go to Moscow to interview Stalin. Roosevelt accepted and what transpired was remarkable. At the end of a long interview, he turned to the Soviet leader to ask one more question: “Why is that my mother has never been permitted to visit Moscow, even though she has made three very formal applications for the trip?” Elliot asked. Stalin replied, “You don’t know why?” Elliot confirmed that he didn’t. Stalin responded, “Don’t you know who killed your father?” to which a shocked Roosevelt answered, “No.” Stalin then rose from his chair and continued, “Well, I’ll tell you why I have not invited her here. As soon as your father died, I asked my ambassador in Washington to go immediately to Georgia with a request to view the body.” Stalin believed that if Gromyko could see the body, he would confirm that the cerebral haemorrhage that had caused his death had caused extensive discoloration and distortion.¹⁴ Elliot confirmed he had no knowledge of this, and Stalin continued “Your mother refused to permit the lid of the coffin to be opened so that my ambassador could see the body.” Adding “I sent him there three times trying to impress upon your mother that it was very important for him to view the President’s body. She never accepted that. I have never forgiven her.” Bemused, Elliot asked, “But why?” Stalin took a few steps around the office and, almost in a rage, roared, “They poisoned your father, of course, just as they have tried, repeatedly, to poison me.” “They, who are they?” Elliot asked. “The Churchill gang!” Stalin bellowed, “They poisoned your father, and they continue to try to poison me…the Churchill gang!” Decades later Elliot confirmed this story again, in a 1986 interview with Parade magazine.¹⁵

Others, such as Colonel Fletcher Prouty, have also written about Stalin’s claims. For those not familiar with Prouty, he will best be remembered as the model for the mysterious Colonel X, played by Donald Sutherland, in Oliver Stone's 1991 film, JFK.¹⁶ It was evident that FDR’s vision for the future of the world, and for world peace – and which was broadly consistent with that of JFK’s after him – was in contrast to the aims and objectives of the Anglo-American ruling establishment; a unipolar world imposed by force. The passage of time means that corroborating, with hard evidence, such claims as those which Joseph Stalin made to Elliot Roosevelt about his father’s death is nigh-on impossible. That said, FDR had survived a previous assassination attempt in the form of a shooting, in 1933, which claimed the life of Chicago Mayor, Anton Cermak.¹⁷ Furthermore, on the official death certificate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it is confirmed that no autopsy was ever carried out!¹⁸

Despite the above, the reader should be in no doubt that the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin’s leadership, had long-since descended into a dark regime of intense paranoia and gruesome brutality. Other than journalists, like Malcolm Muggeridge, and intellectuals, such as George Orwell, (ironically, both of whom leaned heavily to the political left) many in the West refused to acknowledge the true horrors of Stalin’s rule and preferred, instead, to bury their heads in the sand, repeatedly making excuses for the utopian ideals of the communist system. Throughout the 1930s, the true extent of the ongoing atrocities was largely ignored or supressed in the West. In fact, one Western journalist, New York Times correspondent, Walter Duranty, was handsomely rewarded by the Soviet regime for publishing outright lies. Contrary to many reports at the time, the reality was that millions of Soviet citizens were killed in internal repression and political purges, such as The Great Terror, and millions more perished due to engineered famine, such as that which became known as the Holodomor, in Ukraine. Stalin had “collectivised” the farms in the USSR, which meant that the productive farmers – or Kulaks – were forced off their land which was handed over to the state. Consequently, widespread starvation, and even cannibalism, ensued. About six million Ukrainians starved to death between 1932 and 1933. To get an idea of the ghastliness of this period, the Soviet regime printed posters declaring that: “To eat your own children is a barbarian act!”¹⁹ In 1934, census officials had estimated that the population of the USSR would stand at 168-170 million, projecting a rise to 172 million by 1937. When the real figures arrived, they were quite different. A total population of 162 million meant that as many as eight million people were ‘missing’ – the majority of which were no doubt victims of the engineered famine, and their unborn children. Instead of accepting the result of the census, Stalin abolished it.

The head of the census bureau, Ivan Kraval, and resident of one of the most exclusive neighbourhoods in Moscow, was arrested and executed by firing squad. But Stalin didn’t stop there. Not only did this particular purge include census officials, but many of the statisticians who had access to the original numbers were also arrested and executed in the latter months of 1934.²⁰

There is a notion known as the Good Lenin/Bad Stalin thesis²¹ - the thought process behind which should be self-explanatory to the reader. This is propaganda – historical revisionism which sugar-coats the reality of the Soviet system. As ex-communist, James Burnham, points out:

“Terror is proved by historical experience to be integral to communism, to be, in fact, the main instrument by which its power is increased and sustained. From the beginning of the communist regime in Russia, every major political and economic turn has been carried through by terror.”²²

The Soviet Union was many things, but a worker’s paradise it was most certainly not.

The Cold War

 As alluded to earlier, the Cold War was a prolonged period of existential anxiety for much of the world. Much to the consternation of the United States and Britain, soon after the end of World War II, the Soviets had begun to install left-wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe which had previously been liberated by the Red Army. A clear divide had emerged by 1947-48 when U.S. aid, provided under the Marshall Plan, to western European countries had brought those nations under U.S. influence, while the Soviets were installing openly communist regimes across eastern Europe.²³ In response to the Soviets unsuccessfully blockading the Western-held sectors of West Berlin, the United States and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a unified military command to resist the Soviet presence in Europe.²⁴ Communism was getting a bad rap, and deservedly so. Following the Chinese communists coming to power in 1949, and the Soviet-backed communist government of North Korea invading South Korea in 1950, the Korean war erupted, lasting until 1953.

1953 was also the year of long-time Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin’s death, following which there was a relaxing of tensions between the United States and USSR. The Soviet Bloc countries formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, which was the same year that West Germany was admitted into NATO.

By 1958, both the United States and USSR had begun developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, which saw tensions rise again, and which came to a head in 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The concept of “mutually assured destruction” was persuasive enough for both nations to sign the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned aboveground nuclear weapons testing. A 25-year arms race subsequently ensued between the two nations. Mainstream history narrates that the Soviets were humiliated by their military inferiority, and out of determination for that to never happen again, began a build-up of both conventional and strategic forces that the United States was forced to match.²⁵ The truth is, in order to fund this arms race, the Soviets were forced to borrow heavily from Western banks. A Washington Post article of 11^th May 1982 reported that:

“As of last Sept. 30, the Soviet Union and its six East European allies owed Western commercial banks $65.4 billion--an eightfold increase in communist debt since 1970. Both Poland and Romania have fallen behind on their interest payments to Western banks, and even the Soviet Union reportedly has asked some Western companies for a few months' grace in paying bills. Western financial institutions have become involved so deeply in the affairs of communist countries that several New York banks have specialists who work full time just on Romania, and financiers from Chase Manhattan and Deutsche Bank regularly advise Communist officials in Warsaw and Bucharest on how best to revamp their economies to pay back loans.”²⁶

Who was keeping up with who? In any case, in the coming decades, this borrowing would come back to haunt the Soviets.

Cold War disquiet eased off in the 1970s, demonstrated by the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) which led to SALT I and II, respectively. The two superpowers set limits on their anti-ballistic missiles, and on their nuclear-weapon-carrying strategic missiles.²⁷ Tensions, nonetheless, were never far away.

A Mujahideen fighter during the Afghan / Soviet Union conflict.

Following the 1978 Saur Revolution, Soviet leaders believed they were acting with surgical precision when they sent troops into Afghanistan to prevent U.S. influence from filling a political vacuum. Instead, they were bogged down in an endless quagmire. Ten years of bloodshed ensued and a loss of lives totalling in the millions, with the Afghan Mujahideen fighting unflinchingly to repel the Soviet advancement. During this conflict, Washington began a “Faustian affair with some of the most brutal fanatics on earth.²⁸ In 1986 the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, collaborated on a plan to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan Jihad, with more than 100,000 Islamic militants signing up to be trained. Most of the training took place in Pakistan, where the Mujahideen camps were run by the CIA and Britain’s MI6. But there was no shortage of volunteers who were recruited from an Islamic college in Brooklyn and were given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia – this was known as Operation Cyclone.²⁹ Many of the Islamist militants went on to join the Taliban, having been taught by the Americans and British in the specifics of bomb-making and other black arts. One of the key Mujahideen personnel during this time was none other than Osama bin Laden. By early 1989, defeated, the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, and it is by no means an exaggeration to state that the Mujahideen had contributed significantly to the demise of the Soviet Empire, and even to ‘communism’ itself.³⁰

In the words of ultra-nationalistic Russian politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Afghan conflict also gave hope to the eternal Russian dream of its army being able to “wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.³¹ Although this time it was a secondary consideration, the age-old dilemma of a Russian warm-water port had reared its head, yet again.

The end of the Soviet Empire

“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”

The decades-long arms race with the U.S. and the agonisingly protracted war in Afghanistan had seriously imperilled the Soviet economy. As the Soviet Union began to collapse, she was forced to look to the West:

“I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together…we have two great interests in common: that we should both do everything we can to see that war never starts again, and therefore we go into the disarmament talks determined to make them succeed.”³²

These were the words of Margaret Thatcher, in December 1984. Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, faced with a stagnant economy and the problem of a downward slide in oil prices through the 1980s. An ineffectual start led Gorbachev to announce deeper economic reform. Glasnost, a policy of “maximum openness” – simultaneously increased freedom of the press and transparency of state institutions. Intended to reduce corruption at the top of the Communist Party, it also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the western world, particularly the United States, thus accelerating ‘détente’ between the two nations.³³ Through the late 1980s and into the next decade, Gorbachev was regarded as a hero by most in the West. Time magazine’s 1987 Man of the Year charmed the media, signed disarmament treaties, and even picked up a Nobel Peace Prize, in 1990, despite the country’s economy continuing its nose-dive. The second of Gorbachev’s twin policies, Perestroika,³⁴ intended to relax the production quota system and allow private ownership of business, theoretically paving the way for desperately needed new foreign investment, but which led, instead, to something of a free-for-all for grasping Western financiers, most notably under Operation Hammer. This was a multi-billion dollar ‘investment strategy’ project conceived by George H.W. Bush and staffed with CIA operatives, aimed at destabilising the ruble, the seizure of major energy and munitions industries, and the handing-over of said industries to international bankers and corporations. The unethical activities of Operation Hammer were carried out under the rubric of equally unethical legislation such as Executive Order 12333, which had been promulgated by President Reagan in 1981, in order to “unleash” America’s intelligence community from the limitations imposed on it after the Church Committee hearings of the mid-1970s.³⁵

Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher

In May 1991, Gorbachev had pleaded for $100 billion in economic aid from the democratic world, asserting that it would be well worth it to the West to bolster global security by priming a Soviet recovery.³⁶ Two months later, and despite his pleas for aid, Gorbachev did not expect the reception he encountered at the 1991 G7 summit. As Naomi Klein laid out in her book, The Shock Doctrine, “The nearly unanimous message that Gorbachev received from his fellow heads of state was that, if he did not embrace radical economic Shock Therapy immediately, they would sever the rope and let him fall”. Gorbachev wrote afterwards that the “tempo and methods of transition were astonishing.”³⁷ The democratic process in Russia was well under way, but in order to push through a Chicago School economic programme, “that peaceful and hopeful process that Gorbachev had begun had to be violently interrupted, then radically reversed.”³⁸ Sadly for Gorbachev, he knew full well that the only way to impose the kind of shock therapy being advocated by the G7 and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was by force. Incredibly, within two weeks of the Nobel Committee declaring an end to the Cold War, Western newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Economist were urging Gorbachev to model himself on one of the Cold War’s most notorious killers; Augusto Pinochet!³⁹

With unpayable debts to Western banks, financiers such as George Soros and Jeffrey Sachs, and others under the umbrella of the IMF, were able to apply their model of Shock Therapy to the Soviet Economy during the first years of the 1990s. A model which had been successfully used to wreck the Polish economy in the preceding couple of years, bringing about widespread destabilisation, savage austerity, huge levels of unemployment, and a 600% annual rise in inflation, as well as allowing these financiers a free-reign to strip the Polish economy of anything of value for pennies on the dollar. The Shock Therapy model – or planned misery - had been so successfully applied to the Polish economy that the same principles could be simply transferred to Russia, although this time there would be more ‘shock’ and less ‘therapy’.

“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.”

In Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev soon found himself facing an adversary who was more than willing to play the role of a Russian Augusto Pinochet.⁴⁰ Yeltsin held the post of Russian President and therefore had a lower profile than Gorbachev, who headed the entire Soviet Union. However, that changed dramatically on 19^th August 1991, a month after the G7 summit, when a group of old-guard communists drove tanks up to the White House (Russian Parliament building) and tried to stage a coup. Yeltsin climbed atop one of the tanks, denounced the aggression and emerged as a “courageous defender of democracy.⁴¹ Soon after, Yeltsin pulled off a political masterstroke by forming an alliance with two other Soviet republics; Ukraine and Belarus. The result was an abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, a move which forced Gorbachev’s resignation. The signing of the Belovezha Accords, on 8^th December 1991, formalised the end of the Soviet Union⁴² and, as President of the new Russian Federation, Yeltsin wasted no time in embracing Jeffrey Sachs’ “big bang” approach to establishing a capitalist economy.⁴³

Boris Yeltsin’s reign was so chaotic that Russia was effectively turned into a casino, giving rise to a group of rapacious financiers, who arrogantly referred to themselves as ‘oligarchs’, using the country as their playground to pillage and plunder her various resources. Most notable of this group was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, extensively trained in money laundering and now exiled in London.⁴⁴ Khodorkovsky seized control of most of the Siberian oil reserves, which included the privatisation of the giant oil company, Yukos - securing a 78% stake in the company for $310 million, even though it was then worth an estimated $5 billion. In a move that would make many a reader shudder, international banker Jacob Rothschild, George Soros and Henry Kissinger were subsequently appointed as Yukos board members.⁴⁵

To all appearances Khodorkovsky was ready to sell these prize assets off to the Anglo-American oil cartel, prior to the elevation of Vladimir Putin to the Russian Presidency, and who took office on the final day of the Twentieth Century. Ex-KGB officer, Putin, was regarded as the man to repress the oligarchs in conformity with the usual Russian model of political economy.

These oligarchs had become ostentatiously rich via crooked privatisation deals during the booze-soaked presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Not only did they create and bankroll what became Putin’s political party, Unity, they engineered Yeltsin’s stunning comeback victory in the 1996 presidential elections, without which Yeltsin could never have appointed Putin as his prime minister. This position then acted as a launching pad for Putin’s presidential bid.⁴⁶

Putin didn’t exactly eliminate the oligarchy, he offered them a deal: “bend to my authority, stay out of my way and you can keep your mansions, superyachts, private jets and multi-billion-dollar corporations.”⁴⁷ Those who stayed loyal during Putin’s long reign became like “ATM machines for the president and his allies” and those who reneged on Putin’s deal were imprisoned in Siberia, forced into exile or died in mysterious circumstances. Khodorkovsky was one such victim of Putin’s iron fist. Having made his $15 billion fortune, largely through a crooked scheme during the Yeltsin administration known as “loans for shares” he came unstuck, by all appearances, after daring to challenge Putin during a televised meeting in early 2003. Khodorkovsky - at the time mulling over a merger with the American oil company, Exxon Mobil – had made allegations of corruption at a state-owned oil company. There was no shortage of irony in Khodorkovsky’s claims, but Putin and his allies hated it. In October that year, masked agents stormed Khodorkovsky’s private jet during a refuelling stop and arrested him at gunpoint. He was charged with tax evasion and fraud and was thrown into a Siberian jail where he would languish for the next decade.⁴⁸ Putin, the authoritarian, had sent out a very clear message. There was far more, however, to Khodorkovsky's imprisonment than mere televised insubordination. In the months following his public criticism of Putin, Khodorkovsky had also been working as an adviser to Washington's well-connected private equity firm, Carlyle Group⁴⁹ and, under Yukos, had begun steps to acquire Sibneft, one of Russia’s largest oil producing and refining groups.⁵⁰ It was reliably alleged that Khodorkovsky, "using his vast wealth, had bought the votes of the Russian Duma, or lower house"⁵¹ prior to a decisive forthcoming election, and that this was the "first step by Khodorkovsky in a plan to run against Putin the next year as President."⁵² Victory would have allowed Khodorkovsky to change election laws regarding energy privatisation in his favour. In preparation, in September 2003, Khodorkovsky had embarked on a "charitable spree in Washington"⁵³ and Washington had taken the bait. Along the way he entertained Condoleezza Rice and Vice President, Dick Cheney, as well as former U.S. President and Carlyle Group board member, George H.W. Bush.⁵⁴ With Khodorkovsky’s assistance, the tentacles of Washington's Pentagon were reaching far and deep into Russia, and the Exxon buy-up of Yukos-Sibneft would have constituted a "literal energy coup d'etat".⁵⁵ In the words of William Engdahl in his revealing book, Full Spectrum Dominance, "Cheney knew it; Bush knew it; Khodorkovsky knew it. Above all, Vladimir Putin knew it and moved decisively to block it."⁵⁶

Part 2 of this essay summarises events between approximately 1990 and 2002. I explore NATO expansion in depth, how domestic political events in the U.S. and Russia had far-reaching implications globally, Vladimir Putin’s relationship with the West, the Twenty-First-Century imperial ambitions of the Anglo-American establishment, as famously laid out in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book ‘The Grand Chessboard’, 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’, and what Western incursions into Afghanistan meant for U.S.-Russia relations.

1. Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine, p.1.

2. Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography, Intro p. vii.

3. Invasions of Russia: https://www.rbth.com/history/330753-which-countries-dared-to-invade-russia

4. Cold War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

5. Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography, p.12-13, 16

6. Khrushchev transfer of Crimea: https://min.news/en/world/f9d5d96d687b429eb2a0911eda21bbc8.html

7. Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography, p.68-72

8. Prof. Antony Sutton, Wall Street & The Bolshevik Revolution, p.21-37

9. Prof. Antony Sutton, Wall Street & The Bolshevik Revolution, p.19

10. Prof. Antony Sutton, Wall Street & The Bolshevik Revolution, p.87

11. Lend Lease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

12. Mary Elise Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, p.21

13. Roosevelt Death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt#Final_months_and_death

14. Stalin & Elliot Roosevelt interview: https://rielpolitik.com/2017/05/28/who-killed-franklin-d-roosevelt/

15. Stalin claims FDR was poisoned: https://rielpolitik.com/2017/05/28/who-killed-franklin-d-roosevelt/

16. Fletcher Prouty: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/jun/22/guardianobituaries

17. FDR assassination attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt#Presidency_(1933%E2%80%931945)

18. FDR Death Certificate: http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box20/t901ay01.html

19. Holodomor Famine: https://historycollection.com/holodomor-stalins-genocidal-famine-starved-millions-1930s/

20. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine, p.306-307

21. Michael Malice, The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil, p.195

22. James Burnham, The Struggle for the World, p.71

23. Cold War: https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War

24. Cold War: https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War

25. Cold War: https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War

26. Soviet borrowing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/05/11/money-is-often-bottom-line-in-east-west-ties/f521c391-9d49-4a72-af3c-a4ad7ae3dd74/

27. Cold War: https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War

28. John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, p.151

29. John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, p.152

30. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, p.208

31. Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography, p.12

32. Thatcher on Gorbachev: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105592

33. Glasnost: https://www.britannica.com/topic/glasnost

34. Perestroika: https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/perestroika-and-glasnost

35. Executive Order 12333: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/73976501.pdf

36. Gorbachev Pleads for $100bn: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/23/world/gorbachev-pleads-for-100-billion-in-aid-from-west.html

37. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p.219

38. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p.220

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p.221

42. Belovezha Accords: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belovezha_Accords

43. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p.222

44. Webster Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, p.145

45. Yukos: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rothschild-is-the-new-power-behind-yukos-9wtmr3d90nz

46. Putin & the Oligarchy: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how-putin-conquered-russias-oligarchy

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Khodorkovsky Carlyle Group adviser: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2003/11/10/arrested-russian-businessman-is-carlyle-group-adviser/7e20a4a3-b67b-493e-bc4e-f05f63ec7ac5/

50. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance, p.59

51. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance, p.58

52. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance, p.59

53. Khodorkovsky ties to Washington: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/05/opinion/autumn-of-the-oligarchs.html

54. Ibid.

55. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance, p.60

56. Ibid.