Why? “One wonders if you have relatives there that you are trying to protect” from Putin’s police, or perhaps [this is] a misguided loyalty to the homeland.”

It is true that I write about the danger of Putin’s Russia mainly because of its “cooperation” with China, which cooperation was established officially in 2001, but few Americans except me publicly noticed the sinister danger of such cooperation in the development of post-nuclear super weapons.

The population of China exceeds four times that of the USA, and eight times that of Russia. Why is this important? Those Westerners who write about the “China threat,” while knowing nothing about it, speak about how big China’s army is. Actually, it is tiny compared with the population of China. The size of its population is important as a source not of soldiers, but of scientists and technologists, such as Tsung-Dao Lee, a genius of high-energy particle physics, who received the Nobel Prize in 1937 and established in Beijing in 1998 the Chun-Tsung [Chun is the name of his wife] Endowment Fund to distribute scholarships among the most gifted students at five universities in China.

Graduated in China as of today are 442,000 engineers a year (with 48,000 graduates having masters’ degrees) compared to 60,000 engineers a year in the USA. This is the real army, whom annual growth exceeds the relevant U.S. numbers already more than seven times.

A reader of mine told me in her mail that China has been the most peaceful country in the history of mankind: her military superiority over Europe on high seas and the ground was overwhelming, yet it never tried to conquer Europe and America. True! But why not? Because until the 19th century China regarded the West as a dirty rabble, eating raw food with hands off chunks of wood and the strategic goal of China’s enormous navy, patrolling the southern and eastern coasts of Asia, was to prevent those dirty white-faced savages from landing.

I will not speak of China’s china and silk or of mathematics and astronomy. Let me say instead that the gas for warming and lighting appeared in the Center of the World (China) over 2000 years earlier than it did in Europe. No wonder, Christopher Columbus was to the Center of the World a savage, quite innocuous as long as he was scouring “India” for gold and slaves, and not trying to land on southern or eastern coast of Asia.

Whatever has happened since then? The West has discovered freedom, which many Chinese (recall Tiananmen Square) consider more precious than China and silks. Now the new emperors (dictators) of China are threatened not by the dirt, rags, and poverty of the West, but by its freedom, with which the Chinese can sweep away the new emperors as so much chaff. Obviously, either they will annihilate or enslave the rest of the world or freedom, discovered in the post-Roman West in 1215 “in England will deprive them of their dictatorship of the proletariat,” where the word “proletariat” denotes the neo-imperial selves.

Here is where Putin’s Russia comes in. In 1991, the dictatorship fell in Russia, and in 1992 Yeltsin opened for international inspection the huge archipelago of development of post-nuclear super weapons in Soviet Russia. When Stalin’s Russia produced the atom bomb in 1949 (from 1941 to 1945 and her resources were consumed by conventional war, as were those of Germany), Stalin ordered the development of post-nuclear super weapons.

In 1992 Yeltsin established in particular freedom of the press in Russia. I published in the major periodicals and in particular, criticized him. I sent him a letter proposing a television program that would show that “democracy is the worst form of government, except other forms,” as Churchill put it. I have never visited Russia (in contrast to my reader Donald Kakretz, “a frequent traveler to the land of Rus”), since I value freedom (and the resulting genius in culture, and Russian book or paintings or music of genius I can enjoy in the United States).

Be that as it may, Yeltsin could not preserve democracy. The Communist Party marched with the portraits of Lenin and Stalin, while Zhirinovsky declared that first of all Jews should be annihilated, and when I published an article on the subject in a Moscow periodical, he interceded or pretended to intend to assassinate me in New York, and the FBI proposed to us a “safe apartment.” Fortunately, his father was found to have been Jewish, and the joke was: “Zhirinovsky is the purest Russian—his mother is Russian and his father a lawyer.

Yeltsin resigned before his second term was out, and recommended Putin, a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB, as “a strongman,” able to preserve democracy. Actually, he has been moving to dictatorship. In 2001 he officially began to cooperate with the dictatorship of China.

Recall Stalin: he concluded a treaty with Hitler under which Hitler was receiving raw materials for the production of military equipment. Stalin’s goal was to divide the world with Hitler. Is Putin’s goal to divide the world with Hu Jintao?

Hitler feared that Stalin would attack him, Hitler, to preempt Stalin’s preemption.

Before our emigration from Russia, we had been living in our three-storied country house because I was the only native Russian capable of translating classical Russian literature into English. Our friends brought for dinner an important American. I entertained him by my anti-Sovietism, and he was delighted. Then I said: “Well, in China it is even worse.”

He became ashen gray. “How can you say this?” He was visibly shaken.

I recall the scene whenever I meet an American unwilling to apply to China what was said during the Cold War about Stalin’s Russia.

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.