Читать книгу Operation Dragon - Ion Mihai Pacepa - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

UNDERCOVER FEUDALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Russia was the first hell on earth that legitimized theft and the elimination of despised groups of wealthy people as tools of national policy under the doctrine of socialism. The “kulak” or bourgeois class was eliminated and its property redistributed to the victors of the November 1917 socialist revolution. The imperial family’s wealth and rich Russians’ land were seized by the new Communist Party, and the Russian economy was nationalized. Property rights were eliminated, and most of Russia’s major property owners were killed.

In 1931, socialism became the only religion allowed in Russia. Stalin’s political police dynamited the Cathedral of Christ the Savior—the site of the premiere in 1882 of Tchaikovsky’s famous 1812 Overture, a symphony written to give thanks to God and the heroes of the war against Napoleon. Some fifty thousand other Russian churches were also demolished. Some six hundred bishops, forty thousand priests, and one hundred and twenty thousand monks and nuns were killed.¹

In the mid-1930s, the Communist Party itself was coopted by Stalin, who stole all the country’s top-level positions and pinned them onto his chest. By the middle of the twentieth century, Russia had reverted to a dismal autocratic feudalism, nicknamed socialism.

In August 1939, Soviet killing and stealing moved abroad. By signing the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, along with its secret protocol, Stalin made off with Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and portions of Poland and Finland. During World War II, Stalin shifted focus to stealing Western technologies. Lacking private ownership and the vitality of competition, Soviet technological progress stalled. So Stalin sought to steal whatever the Soviets could not invent on their own. After World War II, Stalin also netted all of Eastern Europe and helped engineer Mao’s victory in China. A few years later, the Kremlin managed to dispossess more than a third of the world’s population of their properties.

It was nothing new for Russia. The astute French observer Astolphe Louis-Léonor, aka Marquis de Custine, concluded in 1839 that “everything is deception” in Russia. Like the Romans, Custine noted, the Russians “have taken their sciences and their arts from foreign lands. They have intelligence, but theirs is an imitative mind and, consequently, more ironic than fertile—it copies everything and creates nothing.”² The Soviet Union’s satellites were forced to Russianize and rewrite history accordingly. In communist Romania, the national radio headquarters was located on Alexander Popov Street because Soviet history held that the Russian Popov, not Guglielmo Marconi, had invented the radio. In reality, Popov was an insignificant Russian physicist, who on May 7, 1895, had presented a paper on a wireless lightning detector based on the work of Marconi. The Soviet Union and its satellite countries were all required to celebrate that day as Radio Day.

Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, was an educated lawyer who spent most of his mature life (1900–1917) in Western Europe, where political parties played a dominant role. He therefore quite naturally conceived of everything in terms of political parties. In his fundamental theoretical work, What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin developed his theory that the proletarian communist revolution should be led by a political party that would act as the “vanguard of the proletariat.” In his vision, that “party of a new type,” to which he devoted twenty years to construct, was to be the revolution’s mentor, leader, and guide. The other main Western-educated Soviet theorist, Leon Trotsky, went a step further: “The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition of an honorable, popular, really democratic foreign policy.”³ After the October Revolution, Trotsky became the commissar of foreign affairs and later of war.

In October 1917, when Lenin returned to Russia to head his communist revolution, he found a country very different from the Europe in which he had matured politically. Unlike Marx’s England and Germany, whose economic problems had been caused by the industrial revolution, Russia was an agricultural backwater. Though nominally freed by Alexander II in 1861, Russia’s peasants had never really owned property or been allowed to make decisions for themselves. Feudal Russia had no relevant history of political parties, unlike England and Germany. Furthermore, the Russia at the center of Lenin’s revolution had a long history as a political police state, back to the sixteenth century’s Ivan the Terrible, a feudal lord who ruled through a personal political police or praetorian guard. Every Russian tsar built his own political police force, which, more than any other instrument of government, was used to keep the country quiet and under his or her control.

When Peter the Great ascended to the throne at the end of the seventeenth century, he set up a secret police loyal solely to himself, the Preobrazhensky Prikaz. So secret was this organization that the exact date of its creation is still a mystery. Following Ivan the Terrible’s principle that “anyone who is not with me is a traitor,” Peter unleashed his new instrument of power against whoever spoke out against him, from his own wife and the nobles who dared to defy him to drunks who made jokes at his expense. Peter even entrusted the Preobrazhensky Prikaz with luring his own son and heir, the tsarevich Aleksey, back to Russia from abroad and torturing him to death.

Months after Tsar Nicholas I took the throne, he established the Third Section of his Imperial Chancellery as his secret police. His 1845 Criminal Code laid down draconian penalties for anyone guilty of writing or spreading written or printed works or representations intended to arouse disrespect for sovereign authority or for the personal qualities of the sovereign. The law in Russia was therefore, quite expressly, that there was no freedom of speech in Russia and, moreover, that harboring any intention of speaking in any manner that the tsar did not like was criminal. It amounted to the institutionalization of political crime in Russia.

The more moderate Aleksandr II abolished his predecessor’s Third Section but created his own Department of State Police. This body failed to save his life, however, for in 1881 he was assassinated with a primitive hand grenade. Yet Ivan the Terrible’s political police persisted, in one form or another, throughout the history of Russia. At the time of the October Revolution, it was called the Okhrana, founded in 1881 by Alexander II. Responsible only to the tsar, it had the power to search, imprison, and exile on its own sole authority entirely independently of Russian law.

It was natural for Lenin to integrate his plans into this centuries-old tradition. On December 20, 1917, only two months after his final return to Russia, Lenin created his own political police, the famous Cheka (Vserossiyskaya Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya po Borbe s Kontrrevolyutsiyey i Sabotazhem, or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), which became the parent organization for subsequent generations of political police organizations.

The Cheka’s coat of arms consisted of a shield, for protecting the revolution against traitors, and a sword, for putting its edge to those traitors’ necks. Thus, the roots of this emblem led back to the days of Ivan the Terrible rather than to the political ideology of Karl Marx. In 1917, Lenin described the Cheka as a temporary organization needed to subdue his domestic enemies and consolidate the rule of his party. It is nevertheless clear that he envisioned a key role for this organization from the beginning. The Russian word “cheka” means linchpin, and the Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya was surely so named to have its initials, pronounced Che Ka, convey that sense.

The Cheka was the most rapidly expanding Soviet organization. It had started out with twenty-three men, but within a couple of years it numbered over two hundred thousand. A 1993 book written by British writer John Costello and Russian intelligence officer Oleg Tsarev, based on original KGB documents, reports that in 1920 “the Cheka’s total strength was approaching a quarter of a million, and that it outnumbered the peak strength of the Tsar’s Okhrana by more than two to one.” In 1921, Soviet Russia counted more Cheka officers than party members.⁴

Twenty-one million people were killed by Lenin’s new political police during the first fifteen years of socialism in Russia, such that it is no wonder that the socialist Cheka’s magazine was named Krasnye Terror (Red Terror). Even more than the Spanish Inquisition, the socialist political police, under each of its numerous names, has been synonymous with killing. The Spanish Inquisition used to kill individuals they deemed to be heretics. The Soviet political police indiscriminately killed its faithful, its unfaithful, and its priests as well. But all in all, socialism—and only in Russia—killed three times more people than Nazism. The murder rate extended to China and other countries where the socialist experiment has been tried expands many times beyond that.

In an August 11, 1918, handwritten order demanding that at least one hundred kulaks (prosperous peasants) be hanged in the town of Penza to set an example, Lenin wrote with his own hand: “Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers … Do it in such a way that people for hundreds of [kilometers] around will see, tremble, know and scream out: they are choking and strangling to death these bloodsucking kulaks.”⁵

A 1918 article published in Red Terror magazine under the signature of Martyn Ivanovich Latsis, a deputy of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, explained: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.” Latsis’s instructions to the Cheka were equally conclusive. “During investigation,” he wrote, “do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education and profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance of the Red Terror.”⁶

At Lenin’s direction, the Soviet Union’s first commissar of Public Health in 1918, Nikolai Semashko, organized the Soviet Union’s “free” socialist health care system. Later it would play a major role in bankrupting the nation, as after the political police, it was the largest Soviet bureaucracy. The government takeover of health care killed even more people throughout the Soviet bloc than the Cheka did, and the effects are long-lasting. In today’s Russia it is still normal to have two patients share the same hospital bed.

Lacking the vitality of private enterprise, medical progress stagnated. The Nobel Prize for Medicine tells the story in a nutshell. During the last century, the United States’s free-market medical care system was awarded seventy-two Nobel prizes. The Soviet Union’s socialized medical system got none. (Tsarist Russia did get one Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1904 for Ivan Pavlov’s conditional reflex theory.)

Bribery was the second major nightmare the Semashko “free” health care system generated. Everyone in the Soviet system knew one had to “stimulate” the bureaucracy to get any medical care. If you needed surgery, you knew that the first thing you had to do was find out what size of bribe would be acceptable to the bureaucrats who could approve that particular surgery. In 2008, The Lancet medical journal reported that in Russia, each doctor and nurse still had “his or her little tax” and that “they all prefer cash in envelopes, of course.” Nurses took 50 rubles ($2) to empty a bedpan and 200 rubles ($8) to give an enema. Surgical operations started at 300 rubles, but “the sky’s the limit.”

People in the United States are not used to baksheesh, but in the future, if our health care system is being run by bureaucrats, we will soon get the hang of it. It may not start out as blatant bribes, but soon bribery is sure to become the rule in one way or another. In France, for instance, the government bureaucracy recently introduced a €1 franchise on every medical consultation, described as a “contribution au remboursement de la dette sociale” (contribution to the repayment of the social debt). That was followed by an €18 franchise on “costly” medical procedures. Now French patients are learning that if they discreetly slip an envelope with cash into the pocket of the doctor’s white lab coat hanging in his office, they will get more “attention.” And a little extra attention may indeed be vital in a centralized system in which doctors are obliged by law to see sixty to seventy patients a day.

The 2007 Romanian movie The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which won more than twenty international prizes, depicts the Semashko-style health care system through the heartbreaking true story of Constantin Nica, a retired Romanian engineer who had the misfortune of growing old in a country that still ran a nightmarish government health care system twenty years after its last Communist dictator was gunned down by his own people.

The fictional Mr. Lazarescu, gravely ill, is followed as a Romanian government ambulance shuttles him from one government-owned hospital to the next. At the first three hospitals, although the doctors determine that he does need urgent surgery, the bureaucracy refuses to take him in because he is too old and does not have enough money to bribe the hospital personnel. Mr. Lazarescu stubbornly refuses to give up, but at the fourth hospital, he dies after a delayed and botched surgery. (The real Mr. Nica was actually dumped onto a park bench and left there to die.) Mr. Lazarescu’s real enemy was not his illness but the uncaring, authoritarian attitude so deeply ingrained in bureaucratic practice. The whole movie is so realistic that even The New York Times—a strong supporter of government-run health care—had to admit that the movie “absorbs you into its world.”

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu might be required viewing for our contemporary candidates for public office as they ponder U.S. government health care for all. Romania’s example may give them at least some food for thought.

Ronald Reagan once said that freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. Russia proved him right. Toward the end of his life, the ailing Lenin dictated a political “testament” dated December 25, 1922, in which he began by worrying that Stalin, “having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”

In a postscript dated January 4, 1923, Lenin described Stalin as being “too crude” and called for him to be replaced as the leader of the Bolshevik Party by another communist who would be “more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”⁷ A few months later, Lenin chose Leon Trotsky, at that time the war commissar, as the leader of the Bolshevik Party and his own successor. In self-defense, Stalin thereupon formed a coalition with Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the father of Russia’s socialist secret police, which had successfully protected Lenin’s dictatorship by arbitrarily executing a reported quarter of a million real and imagined enemies. Drawn up by Felix Dzerzhinsky himself, a dezinformatsiya ploy put the baton of succession firmly in Stalin’s hands. In January 1924, when Lenin died, Trotsky happened to be away in the Crimea taking the cure. Dzerzhinsky made sure that he was misinformed about the date of the funeral. With his only rival far from Moscow, Stalin easily managed to place the crown on his own head. A few months later, he rewarded Dzerzhinsky’s loyalty by making him a candidate member of the Politburo.

Over the years, Stalin made Dzerzhinsky an object of Communist veneration second only to Lenin, though he buried that cult deep in secrecy, as he did with all the really important things in the Soviet Union. Lenin was embalmed and put on display in Red Square. After Dzerzhinsky’s death in 1926, a figure representing him—using death impressions of his face and hands and dressed in a Cheka uniform—was placed in a glass coffin and exhibited at the officers’ club of what would later be called the KGB, now the FSB.⁸ Then, in December 1937, on the twentieth anniversary of the Cheka’s founding, Stalin raised Dzerzhinsky to the rank of “knight of the revolution.”

Stalin is long gone, but killings by political police are still alive. In all Eastern European countries “liberated” by Stalin’s Red Army, the way to Soviet-style socialism was paved with killings. On February 2, 1945, for instance, the NKVD—which had openly taken over the whole Bulgarian military, police, and economy—executed three regents, twenty-two ministers, sixty-eight members of parliament, and eight advisors to King Boris after accusing them of being Nazi war criminals. In the following months, another 2,680 members of Bulgaria’s “fascist” government were executed as war criminals, and 6,870 were imprisoned despite the fact that Bulgaria had never been at war with the Soviet Union and most of those leaders had been instrumental in eventually moving Bulgaria over to the Allies’ side. These trials were so outrageous that in February 1950, Washington broke off diplomatic relations with Sofia.

In August 1998, Russian General Albert Makashov charged that American-paid Jewish Zionists were ruining the motherland. He called for the “extermination of all Jews in Russia,” shouting in the Duma: “I will round up all the Yids [pejorative for Jews] and send them to the next world.” Russian television replayed this clip over and over again, and on November 4, 1998, the Duma endorsed Makashov’s pogrom. It voted (121 to 107) to defeat a parliamentary motion to censure his hateful statement. Eighty-three of the Communist Party’s 132 members in the Duma voted for Makashov, and of the remainder all but one declined to vote. Just before this vote, a former Soviet spy chief, General Yevgeny Primakov, had become Russia’s prime minister. At the November 7, 1998, demonstration marking the eighty-first anniversary of the October Revolution, crowds of former KGB officers showed their support for the anti-Semitic general, chanting “Hands off Makashov!” and waving signs with anti-Semitic slogans.⁹

When the KGB archives are finally opened in full, we will find that Soviet socialism was deeply anti-Semitic and killed many more Jews than Nazi Germany did. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. The Jews, who for centuries were not protected by the power of a nation-state, have always served as a convenient scapegoat for both Nazism and communism.

Nowadays, the general perception is that Nazi Germany was the cradle of anti-Semitism, and it is not easy to change that perception. Nevertheless, before the words “Nazi Holocaust” were on everyone’s tongue, we had the Russian word “pogrom,” which means massacre. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Long before the 1930s, when the German Nazis invented the Jewish Holocaust, the Russian tsars conducted Jewish pogroms. Russia’s first major pogrom against Jews took place on April 15, 1881, in the Ukrainian town of Yelisavetgrad, named for Empress Elizabeth. Russia’s administration and army were experiencing grave disorders and gross corruption, and emissaries from St. Petersburg called for the people’s wrath to be vented on the Jews. The impoverished peasants obliged.

The 1939 edition of an authoritative Russian dictionary defines pogrom: the government-organized mass slaughter of some element of the population as a group, such as the Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia. Let us go back to the beginning. After 1492, when some of the Jews expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella began settling in Russia, they became involved in tax collection and the administration of large estates where peasants worked. Those were two of the few occupations Jews were allowed to pursue in tsarist Russia. Naturally, the new Jewish immigrants hardly made themselves loved in their new country.

In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a band of Nihilists. Alexander III, his successor, decided to save Russia from anarchy by transforming it into a nation containing only one nationality, one language, one religion, and one form of administration, and he began his new policy by instigating more Yelisavetgrad-style pogroms. A wave of killings, rapes, and the pillaging of Jews spread quickly to hundreds of other towns, reached Warsaw, and moved on to the rest of the Russian empire. The tsarist authorities held the victims responsible for the violence.

In an 1881 memorandum to Tsar Alexander III, the minister of interior, Count Nikolay Ignatyev, blamed the pogroms on “the Jews’ injurious activities” directed against the peasantry. A tsarist investigative commission concluded: “The passion for acquisition and money-grabbing is inherent in the Jew from the day of his birth; it is characteristic of the Semitic race, manifest from almost the first page of the Bible.”¹⁰

These anti-Semitic ideas were soon embodied in a document entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, forged by Tsar Alexander III’s newly created political police, the Okhrana.¹¹ To disguise its hand, the Okhrana claimed it to be the minutes of the first Zionist Congress (held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897), at which the Jews had allegedly plotted to take over the world.

The legendary head of the KGB dezinformatsiya department, General Ivan Agayants, introduced General Pacepa to the secrets of this unique forgery. The Protocols was originally compiled by the Okhrana to smear Russia’s Jews who wanted to modernize the country and to limit the influence of its old aristocracy. The author of the Protocols was an Okhrana disinformation expert, Petr Ivanovich Rachovsky. Then assigned to France, he saw that the Dreyfus affair had divided France into two irreconcilable factions and aroused an enormous wave of anti-Semitism.¹² Rachovsky lifted most of his text from an obscure 1864 French satire called Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu) by Maurice Joly, which accused Emperor Napoleon III of plotting to seize all the powers in French society. Rachovsky then merely substituted the words “the world” for France and “the Jews” for Napoleon III.

On October 20, 1894, Alexander III unexpectedly died of nephritis. This caused the Okhrana to sit on the Protocols until 1903, at which time it published them to bolster the weak tsar Nicholas II’s hand against Jewish liberals who favored modernization in Russia. After the Russian Revolution of 1905, a constitution was promulgated and a Duma created. Count Sergey Witte, a former Okhrana target, became prime minister. The Okhrana then used the Protocols to undermine him, publishing it in Paris under the name of a mystic Russian priest, Sergius Nilus, as part of an anti-revolutionary propaganda campaign.

General Sakharovsky showed Pacepa a copy of the Nilus edition from the tsar’s library. According to him, the Protocols had been the most resilient piece of disinformation in history. In 1921, the Times of London published a devastating exposure of the forgery by printing extracts from the Protocols side-by-side with plagiarized passages from the Joly book.¹³ But that didn’t stop the Protocols from becoming the basis for much of Hitler’s anti-Semitic philosophy, as expressed in Mein Kampf, written in 1923. In fact, Nazi Germany translated the Protocols into many languages and flooded the world with it in support of its allegation that there was a Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination and that the persecution of Jews was a necessary tool of self-defense for Germany.

Now the Protocols has attained new prominence in the Arab and Islamic world.