Let’s get our house in order first before trying to save Russia from the Russians and save Georgia from Saakashvili’s folly, as Kim Zigfeld proposes to do.

“Why do Kim Zigfeld’s sock puppets (like Dave Essel) always pretend to be Australian? The language (”neo-Soviet”, Putin’s Russia somehow = Communist) is all the same. I would just like to know who the anonymous blogging collective known as La Russophobe/Kim Zigfeld actually is, how long they actually lived in Russia if at all, and how they feel about slandering real people using their real names.”

I think have it exactly wrong. If you won’t call the people of Russia to account for their misdeeds (supporting Putin and his draconian crackdown on civil society, or turning a blind eye to it, and refusing to demand that the Kremlin spend windfall oil revenues on national welfare rather than cold war) then you can’t expect them to behave responsibly or affect reform.

Russia is the way it is because of the people of Russia. They informed on their neighbors, or turned a blind eye as others did so, during the time of Stalin, and they are continuing to do so now — in no small part because confused people like you rationalize their behavior.

Time is running out for the Russians. A third national collapse within a century is in the offing, and this one could be fatal. Russian people must demand reform, as Alice correctly states: “Otherwise, Russia shrinks to nothing and is overrun by its southern neighbors.”

At any rate, it’s irrelevant. Russia may get a lot worse but it won’t collapse, and anyone rooting for it to do so they can repeat the 90s sale of the century (or do you think it was a coincidence that global commodity prices tanked in 98′ when oligarchs were selling oil and metals at below world market prices to their Western partners, such as George Soros?) is going to be disappointed. Russia went bankrupt in 1998 because the oligarchs sold off its resources dirt cheap and transferred all the money offshore, thus it could not collect taxes, could not pay wages, and this spiral went on for several years under Yeltsin until the collapse. Putin saw all of that and resolved not to allow it to happen again. Say what you will about his other failures (buying $50 billion of Fannie and Freddie paper with Stabilization Fund money may have been one, since that money didn’t go into Russian infrastructure, but into U.S. Treasuries and other “safe” but fruitless assets) but at least there has been no repeat of 1998 even as oil prices and stock markets melted down. How about Iceland, Hungary, and other liberal democracies that are NATO members? They are in effect bankrupt.

I don’t deny that the biggest threat to the health and long term security of Russia are the Russian people themselves. But I also don’t take the Stalinist attitude that if they don’t live up to my (and your) expectations of liberal democracy, that they deserve to die off already, which is the Kim Zigfeld attitude. This is a totalitarian attitude – you either adopt Western style democracy now, or else.

Democracy has only been imposed at the point of a bayonet in maybe two extraordinary cases, three at the most. It certainly was no in the cards because Russia in 1991 was not even close to being as subjugated as Japan and Germany. Gorbachev (and the faction that the late Patriarch Alexy of blessed memory backed) simply wanted the end of the Cold War without having their noses rubbed in their defeat through the expansion of a military alliance they were excluded from to the Kremlin walls. To say that Russia today is governed by an alumni of KGB men is to miss the point. Of course they were all KGB, but the KGB by the perestroika era had already turned to the pursuit of making money, and during the 90s when oligarchs armies and proxies were killing eachother they were the only ones people could trust for their “kryshe” (roof), so the KGB alumnis govern by default.

What exactly you people think will follow some sort of “colored revolution” over there, I have no idea. Even under the pro-Western Yeltsin the Russians never would have tolerated the U.S. putting missile defense systems in their front yard (more or less, to justify the system itself by provoking the Russians into a stupid response, like putting cruise missiles in Kaliningrad) or NATO (particularly German) troops in Ukraine, a country to which 20-30% of the Russian population has blood ties and vice versa. You might as well ask Americans how they feel about a Chinese alliance with Mexico and Venezuela, since you know, to echo the Condi Rice hardline, they’re sovereign nations too. They can do what they want. If Cuba wants a Chinese radar that can track objects into outer space and every aircraft over the U.S. from the East Coast to the Rockies (the equivalent of our brain fryer radar planned for Poland), why the hell not? These are the consequences of a stupid, pointless antagonizing of Russia that does nothing to make us the slightest bit safer.

It is doubtful that an overthrow of the Putin-Medvedev regime would somehow bring about something better for Russia. In fact, at that point, you might at that point see real fascism and exclusion of foreigners, and not the alleged sort or cases of skinhead violence in the streets we keep hearing about. Better to keep a struggling Czar who acknowledges and implements some liberal reforms, however painfully slow they may be in a country where everyone tries to steal as much as they can, than to throw him out and the end up with a new gang of Bolsheviks. Putting it all on Putin as if Putin were a saint Russia would be a utopia is utopian thinking. And pretending that Putin has the time or the inclination to sit up there and plot every single new stupid piece of legislation or persecute some dissident is silly.

If you really do care about the future of the world in the mid-21st century and beyond, pray that Russians start popping out more kids and that Putin/Medvedev double or triple the baby money allotment. As we’re seeing in Greece now, no babies = no bucks. The nationalist group around Putin at least wants to save their country. If they have to closely align with the Russian Orthodox Church, whether some are sincere belivers or just want some national ideology, so be it. It’s hilarious to me that they are accused of reviving the “neo-Soviet Union” at the same time as being Czarist and obscurantist. It’s like the idiotic remark by Glenn Beck that Putin has banned all non-Orthodox churches while “Putin” is building mosques. One might as well say that Sarkozy is closing Catholic churches and building mosques and it’s Sarkozy’s fault that France is turning Muslim and Catholics are dying out. But such is just another example of the idiocy that passes for informed comment on Russia these days.

-up to $10 billion annual arms trade with them depending on how you calculate purchasing parity it could be $50 billion,

-almost the same political system

-long lasting agreement on military union against the USA including intensive cooperation of the intelligence services for many decades

De facto we should see them as a UNIFIED REGIME.

In their strategic unity Russia provides and balances China with :

-enormous strategic arm forces: tens of thousands of nuclear weapons,
-enormous numbers of missiles of different ranges including intercontinental
-the largest stockpile ob biological weapons and possibly chemical

So China will never dare to act aggressively towards Kremlin untill they face a common enemy: USA

Here, from the news of today:

Russia-China military links have moved beyond arms sales in recent years to incorporate joint anti-terrorism drills and border protection exercises. Much of that progress has come within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a loose alliance of Central Asian states dominated by Beijing and Moscow.

In contrast, military-to-miliary ties between Beijing and Washington have hit a recent low following China’s reported suspension of some senior-level visits and other planned exchanges, announced earlier this month to the Pentagon but not publicly confirmed by Chinese officials.

An agreement was announced for a hot line between the Pentagon and China’s Defense Ministry in Beijing, but progress on setting it up appears to have stalled.

reported by AP

the regime there is based on

2.3 million KGB force
2.5 million police force
1.7 million military force

On top of that there probably at least 10 million if not 20 of different bureaucrats employed by state

All those armies of parasites and professional thugs is payed from around 300 billion a year oil, gas and other raw materials exports that is basically stolen from future russian generations if any will come of course:

looks like kremlin course is to cut the population to the level of not more then 20 million in the coming decades

The ghost of the old Soviet Empire still lives and breathes in Putin and his band of ghouls. That ghost is what enlightened observers wish to see destroyed, so that a free Russia can begin to grow in the hearts of the Russian people. Otherwise, Russia shrinks to nothing and is overrun by its southern neighbors.