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 Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
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When the Soviet dictatorship collapsed in Russia, and Yeltsin was elected president in 1991, haters of Russia opined a priori that nothing good would come out of it because Òthe Russians have never known freedomÑeven before 1917 they were living under the czars.Ó The unintentional humor of this clichŽ is that under Nicholas II the Russians enjoyed greater cultural freedom than did the Americans. Tolstoy's novel ÒThe Resurrection,Ó published in Russia under Nicholas II, could not have been published in the United States without deletions to avoid a lawsuit for indecencyÑof Tolstoy, who was in his period of fundamentalist Christianity, as the title of the novel indicated.
Well, for every nation there are plenty of haters. Emigres from the United States to Soviet Russia explained to me that the United States is a ganglandÑdidn't I know that President Truman himself never concealed the fact that he had been helped to come to power by the notorious gangster Pendergast, and Truman even attended the gangster's funeral in 1945? The America-haters concluded that the United States would never be a democracy, since who are the Americans? They pretend that their ancestors have all come from England. But many of them have come from Germany, a country of Nazism, from Italy, a country of Fascism, or from Spanish-speaking and other tyrannies.
When the Soviet dictatorship collapsed along with Gorbachev, and Yeltsin was elected president, the U.S. media treated Gorbachev (who had expected before the collapse to obtain post-nuclear superweapons, able to destroy the Western means of nuclear retaliation and thus establish world domination) better than they did Yeltsin (who opened in 1992 Gorbachev's giant development of post-nuclear superweapons to international inspection).
Nation-haters may err historically. In the 18th and 19th centuries all educated classes of continental Europe from Portugal to Russia spoke FrenchÑsometimes better than their mother tongues, and considered the English-speaking to be savages on the outskirts of the world. Voltaire regarded the absolutism of Louis XIV (who said ÒThe State is meÓ) as the highest peak of political and cultural efflorescence, and he called Shakespeare a Òdrunken barbarian.Ó
Yet for all my love of French culture, I decided well before my college age that England, not France, pioneered what Churchill called ÒdemocracyÓ and defined as Òthe worst form of government except all others,Ó including the absolutism of Louis XIV. Voltaire was proved to be prejudiced against the English-speaking.
Without any prejudice for or against Òthe RussiansÓ I began in 1991 to write for the Russian periodicals, including ÒIzvestia,Ó and excluding ÒPravda,Ó which remained Soviet. Since I published whatever I wrote, I found empirically that freedom of the press in Yeltsin's Russia was unabridged. But as soon as Putin succeeded Yeltsin, my life as a Russian columnist was over.
Soon after he was elected, Putin gave an interview to ÒKommersant Daily,Ó in which he explained how beneficial the KGB had been Òas a link between the government and the people.Ó
Let us suppose that Putin is a villain who intended right from the start to abolish Yeltsin's democracy in order to become the dictator, with the KGB and all. But surely he was not obliged to eulogize the KGB publiclyÑfor all the world to witness! The fact that he did so indicates that the former KGB lieutenant-colonel knew nothing about democracyÑcould not tell democracy from Soviet dictatorship, complete with the KGB.
Incidentally, I had proposed to Yeltsin a national TV series, explaining the political ABC. He reacted favorably, but then the project was bogged. One result: Putin as a political illiterate. All Russians were political illiterates except for a narrow stratum of the intelligentsia.
As a weekly columnist of ÒMoscow PravdaÓ (not to be confused with ÒPravdaÓ) I could not pass in silence Putin's eulogy of the KGB. Out of fear, the newspaper did not publish the column. Out of fear, it did not inform me about it. Out of fear, it stopped publishing me. Out of fear, it did not inform me, but put away my new columns to make believe that they had been publishing them.
The society that was beset by fears to such an extent even before Putin did anything repressive is bound to sink into dictatorship (or into the absolutism of Louis XIV).
But why on earth had Yeltsin recommended Putin as the successor to himself, owing to which Putin won his fist presidential election?
Meet Gennadiy Zyuganov!
As for 1989, Zyuganov was the Vice Chairman of The Ideology Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As of 1995 he was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of his own Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which received 35 percent of the votes in the Duma (Parliament). There was a difference between 1989 and 1995, though. The Soviet dictatorship discarded Stalin in 1956. But Zyuganov's demonstrators carried the portraits of Lenin AND of Stalin, and Zyuganov was anti-Semitic, as Stalin was at the end of his life.
Meet Vladimir Zhirinovsky!
Zhirinovsky's program can be summed up in one sentence of his: ÒI will follow in Hitler's footsteps.Ó Zhirinovsky's party captured nearly a quarter of the votes in the Duma in 1993, while Yeltsin's party, ÒRussia's Choice,Ó came in a distant second, with 15 percent of the vote.
I published an article in a Russian newspaper in which I called Zhirinovsky a super-Hitler. Why? Hitler never spoke publicly of Òmaking short shriftÓ of Jews. Zhirinovsky spoke of it even before he came to power.
Zhirinovsky's newspaper counterattacked my article. The newspaper said that my article was so well written that it was clear I was working for the CIA. There was evidence that the new Hitler or super-Hitler was going or pretended to be going to assassinate me in New York. The FBI helped me with my protection. If Zhirinovsky had come to power I would have been no doubt his first target.
But he didn't come to power: it was found that his father (a lawyer) was a Jew. The joke was: ÒZhirinovsky is a pure Russian: his mother was Russian and his father a lawyer.Ó His dream to become the Russian Hitler was over.
Yeltsin believed that Putin, a strong-willed disciplinarian, would be able to cope with the seething cauldron of Stalinism and Hitlerism.
It is often assumed in the United States today that a certain villain (such as Saddam Hussein1) is responsible for a dictatorship, while Òthe peopleÓ yearn for democracy and hence must be liberated. It is impossible to regard Putin as such a villain. He is a political illiterate among political illiterates, and political illiteracy is driving the country to a full-fledged dictatorship. The Russian intelligentsia believes that the latest presidential election whereby Putin was re-elected was a put-up job, and they had called to boycott it. Last month Putin decided that local authorities should be appointed by him, not elected.
He does not seem to plan the country's movement toward full-fledged dictatorship. The latter is the lowest form of government, and Russia is SINKING into it.
Why should the West worry?
Full-fledged dictatorship in a large 20th-century country has always been fraught with dictators' secret preparations for world domination. Their secrecy is possible since a dictator can allocate any resources for any weapons research and production in total secrecy. This research can be secret since any reprisals can be wreaked on anyone who violates the secrecy. Recall that the Soviet launching of a space satellite ahead of the United States was a total surprise to the world outside Soviet Russia.
The full-fledged dictatorship in Russia will enable the dictator of Russia to go from his present Òstrategic partnershipÓ (whereby Putin sells China whatever weapons the People's Liberation Army wants) to his alliance with China for their joint world domination. Recall the Soviet-Nazi treaty, with its secret clauses dividing the world. Actually, Hitler's Germany invaded Stalin's Russia to use its enormous resources for Nazi world domination. Well, the dictators of large militarily powerful countries can gamble in secrecy and without any supervision on the part of legislature and media. They win or lose, but the outside world is always the loser.
The West has done nothing to prevent the movement of Russia toward full-fledged dictatorship though the radio station ÒLiberty,Ó broadcasting for Russia, seems still to exist at American taxpayers' expense. It was founded during the Cold War and I participated in it in the 1970s until I understood that it was just a waste of taxpayers' money. Today the United States, including its two presidential candidates, has been too preoccupied with the creation of democracy in Iraq to pay sufficient attention to the growing full-fledged dictatorship in Russia (or to notice such dictatorship, full grown in China right from 1949, and developing post-nuclear superweapons since 1986).
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For more information about Drexler's Foresight Institute and its lobbying in Congress, see www.foresight.org
To learn more about the Chris Phoenix report, suggesting a Ònano Manhattan Project,Ó go to crnano.org.
For information about the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, Inc., including how you can help, please e-mail me at navlev@cloud9.net.
The link to my book online is www.levnavrozov.com. You can also request our webmaster@levnavrozov.com to send you by e-mail my outline of my book.
It is my pleasant duty to express gratitude to the Rev. Alan Freed, a Lutheran pastor by occupation before his retirement and a thinker by vocation, for his help in the writing of this column.
Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.