про Збигнева
http://www.monomakhos.com/more-on-the-eu-and-orthodoxy/
This war was not only waged against communism, but against Russia, as Brzezinski’s direct statements testified: “We destroyed the USSR, we will also destroy Russia.” “Russia is a dispensable state, anyway.” “The orthodoxy is the main enemy of America. Russia is a defeated country. It will be divided and put under guardianship.”8
http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=1137
Soft Power - the USA’s Cultural War against Russia, 1991 - 2010
The new strategy and its centers
by Peter Bachmaier*, Austria
During the last two decades a reorientation of American strategic thinking has taken place: War is no longer defined in purely military terms, but is also waged with the help of non-military, informative and psychological methods called “psychological warfare” or “cultural war”. These methods have a long history. The American military strategist Liddell Hart had already developed the strategy of indirect approach prior to the Second World War.1 The American and British armed forces made use of “psychological warfare” against Germany during the Second World War, and later on it was used to re-educate the German people. After the end of the war, the CIA and the Department of Defense founded think tanks like the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Institute of Herman Kahn and others, which were primarily directed against the Soviet Union. These institutes were modeled on the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, a British Institute specializing in psychological warfare.
The methods in these centers were developed by a number of sociological institutes. The American empirical social sciences, i.e. sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology, communication studies etc. were developed in their present form by initiative and financing of military and intelligence agencies in the 1940s and 1950s.2 Other sources were the big foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. They were all famous scientific centers like the New School for Social Research in New York, the Bureau of Applied Social Research in Princeton (run by Paul Lazarsfeld), the Institute for Social Research (run by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, which returned to Frankfurt in 1949), the Center for International Studies (CENIS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the alternative Esalen Institute in California, established by Michael Murphy and Gregory Bateson - a center of counter-culture, which was also involved in the organization of the Woodstock Festival in 1968 - and they received the contracts. In particular, the prominent institutes of communication sciences stood out by the programs for psychological warfare.
These institutes published magazines like the Public Opinion Quaterly (POQ), the American Sociological Review, the American Political Science Review etc. Working for these institutes were experts - usually emigrants from Germany and Austria - who later earned their reputation in sciences, among them Paul Lazarsfeld, Oskar Morgenstern, Leo Loewenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, Gabriel Almond, Daniel Lerner, Daniel Bell, Robert Merton and many others. These were the same experts and institutes that were also responsible for the reeducation of the people in Germany. Some of these projects were also involved in the preparation of the Cultural Revolution in the sixties with all its accompaniments such as rock music, drug culture and sexual revolution.
In a special way the “Soviet Studies” depended on the government. The Russian Research Project in Harvard, run by Raymond Bauer and Alex Inkeles, was a joint venture between the CIA, the U.S. Air Force and the Carnegie Corporation. The institute published a study in 1956, entitled “How the Soviet System Works”, which became a standard reader in Soviet Studies.3 One means of psychological warfare among others was the radio programs for Eastern Europe influenced by the CIA, “one of the cheapest, safest and most effective tools of the U.S. foreign policy”, Jean Kirkpatrick explained later. There were, for example, the Voice of America, RIAS Berlin, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which are still broadcasting in Russian and in the languages of the CIS countries.4 These programs were submitted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had been founded in 1950 in Paris by 400 employees of the CIA.5
The victory over the Soviet Union was particularly achieved with the help of these non-military methods. The strategy, which did not intend any coexistence with the Soviet Union, but aimed at “disassembling” the Soviet system, was elaborated by the Reagan administration in 1982.6 The plan included seven strategic initiatives, among them as point 4: Psychological warfare, aimed at producing fear, uncertainty, loss of orientation both among the nomenclature and the population.7 This war was not only waged against communism, but against Russia, as Brzezinski’s direct statements testified: “We destroyed the USSR, we will also destroy Russia.” “Russia is a dispensable state, anyway.” “The orthodoxy is the main enemy of America. Russia is a defeated country. It will be divided and put under guardianship.”8
In 1990, Joseph Nye, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an ally of Zbigniew Brzezinski introduced the term “soft power” or “smart power” for these methods; the term goes back to the same roots as “Social Engineering”.9
He published his book “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics” in 2005, in which he suggested that America is to become attractive by its culture and its political ideals. The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, a neo-conservative think tank, whose board of directors hosts Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, established a Commission on Smart Power in 2006, headed by Joseph Nye and Richard Armitage. In 2009, the commission published a memorandum “A Smarter, More Secure America”, which aimed at enhancing America’s influence in the world by “soft” methods.10
First successful application of the new strategy: the Perestroika
For the first time these new methods were used as a strategy in the “Perestroika”, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. The Perestroika had its positive aspects; it re-established the freedoms of opinion and of movement, but it was also a substantial instrument of influence of the West.11 Within the Central Committee, the CPSU and the nomenclature a group emerged, which shifted to the positions of the West and aimed at introducing the western neoliberal system.
The real architect of the Perestroika was Alexander Yakovlev, who had been the CPSU Central Committee’s secretary for ideology since 1985, and who had studied in Washington in the 1950s and had been a proponent of neo-liberalism since then, as he explained to me in a discussion in Vienna on 9 November 2004. People such as Yegor Gaidar, Grigory Jawlinsky, Boris Nemzow, Viktor Chernomyrdin, German Gref and Anatoly Chubays belonged to his network. With the help of these people, Yakovlev established the West’s fifth column in the USSR, which has been pulling the wires up to now. Boris Yeltsin was also a man of the Americans, who was recruited directly in the American Congress in September 1989 on the occasion of an invitation by the Esalen Institute in California, which had maintained an American-Soviet exchange program since 1979. With its help he could take over in 1991.12
By intervention of George Soros, Gorbachev was made a member of the Trilateral Commission, which held a conference in Moscow in January 1989, at which Henry Kissinger and Valéry Giscard D ’Estaing also participated.
Western organizations for cultural influence in Russia
In the perestroika era the lodges and their run-up organizations were permitted again.13 On Kissinger’s request, Gorbachev permitted the establishment of the B’nai B’rith lodge in Moscow in May 1989. Since that time about 500 lodges have been founded in Russia by the Grand Lodges of England, France, America, etc. At the same time more open organizations, clubs, committees and foundations were established for politicians, businessmen and members of the professions that had no relation to the rituals, but shared the principles of the lodges. There are several thousand members of Masonic lodges in Russia who participate in the rituals, but in addition there are ten times as many members of the “maçonnerie blanche” (white masonry), who take no part in rites but accept the principles and are led by Masonic brethren. Such organizations are the Magisterium club, the Rotary Club, Lions Club, the Soros Foundation, etc. Their members consider themselves to be the elite with special rights to govern.14
The Russian PEN Centre, another front organization, was founded to control the literary scene. Its members have included well-known writers and poets like Bella Achmadulina, Anatoly Pristavkin, Evgeny Yevtushenko, Vasily Aksyonov and Viktor Erofe’ev.
The foundation Open Society, founded in Moscow as early as 1988 by George Soros, was the most powerful mechanism of destabilization and destruction in the hands of the people in the background in the 1990s. Soros directed his activities towards changing people’s worldview to the neo-liberal spirit, enforcing the American way of life and training young Russians in the United States. The Soros Foundation supplied the funds to finance the major Russian periodicals and to award special awards for the promotion of literature.15
Within the framework of his program, the foundation published text books in which Russian history was presented in the neoliberal, cosmopolitan sense. In September 1993, while the parliament was shot at, I had the opportunity to participate in a prize awarding ceremony in the Russian Ministry of Education. George Soros handed over the prizes to the authors of Russian text books for history and literature, and the Russian Secretary of Education Evgeny Tkachenko explained, what the goal of the new school books was: “It is about destroying the Russian mentality.”
Soros’ programs in the cultural sector were so various that practically the entire non-governmental sector depended on being sponsored by the Open Society. The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), founded in Vienna in 1983 and likewise supported by Soros promoted the reform of the educational system and the universities in Russia and the post-socialist countries. Between 1997 and 2000 alone, the foundation granted 22,000 scholarships worth 125 million Dollar.16
A further American think tank is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), founded in 1982 by Reagan, which for its part finances institutes of the American Democratic and Republican Parties and their offices in Moscow. Above all, it supports private media and pro-western political parties and movements. The budget of the NED is decided upon by the US Congress as a support for the State Department. Prominent politicians like John Negroponte, Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams are members of the executive committee. The NED is the continuation of CIA operations with other means. Among other things the NED financed the following Russian organizations (2005): The association Memorial for historic education and the protection of the human rights, the Muscovite Helsinki Group, the Sakharov Museum, Mothers of Chechnya for Peace, the Society for Russian-Chechnian Friendship, the Chechnian National Rescue Committee (altogether 45 organizations in one year).17
The Muscovite Carnegie Center was established in 1993 as a department of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, founded in 1910 by Andrew Carnegie as an independent research center for international relations. The experts at the Muscovites center are concerned with the most important issues of Russian domestic and foreign policy. There is a collection of information on the problematic points of the country’s development. The center publishes anthologies, monographs, periodicals and reference books as well as a quarterly magazine “pro et versus”, the series of “Working Papers” and it regularly holds lectures and conferences. The foundation is financed by large companies such as BP, General Motors, Ford, Mott as well as by Soros, Rockefeller, the Pentagon, the State Department and the British State Department. So far, it has been headed by Rose Goettemoeller, former employee of the Rand Corporation, who is now deputy Secretary of State.
The representatives of the Russian commercial world in the supervisory board are Pjotr Aven, Sergei Karaganov, Boris Nemzov, Grigory Yavlinsky and Yevgeny Yasin, the president of the Muscovite School of Economics. Prominent staff members are Dmitry Trenin, who also works for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and Lilya Chevzova, who are both regularly invited to the West in order to tell the people there that Russia limits democratic freedoms. The center’s research is extensively used by the Russian political class and also by the West. The work of the Muscovite center is supported by the headquarters in Washington via a “Russia and Eurasia Program” (REP).18
The foundation Freedom House, founded in 1941 on the initiative of Eleanor Roosevelt, emerged from the struggle against isolationism in the USA. Its official aim was the fight against National Socialism and Communism; today it is financed by Soros and the U.S. government. In the 1990s Freedom House established offices in nearly all CIS states and founded the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (members: Z. Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, James Woolsey - former CIA boss). The most well-known project today is “Freedom in the World”, which has been analyzing all the states in the world annually since 1972 and divides them into “free”, “partially free” and “un-free” states.19
In 1992, the Russian branch of the Rockefeller Foundation called Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in Moscow and in 52 further Russian cities. The foundation attempted to introduce the subject “Sex Education” in all Russian schools, a subject which was actually intended to destroy the family and reeducate the people towards the ideal of a new human being. This project was not successful, because officials of the Ministry of Education, teachers, parents and the Orthodox Church resisted; the project was rejected at a conference of the Russian Academy for Teacher Training in 1997.20
In the West, the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are regarded as components of the civil society. In the case of Russia they do not have anything to do with the structure of direct democracy, but they are agencies financed and steered by the West.
The western influence on the educational system and the media
An important long-term target of western lobbying has been the educational system and higher education. After the 1991 turnaround, centralism and Marxist ideology were eroded with the help of western advisors. The 1992 Education Act and the constitution of the Russian Federation of 1993 established a profound reorientation of the educational system following the western model of the neoliberal-democratic paradigm. It included the introduction of free market elements in the educational system and the construction of a civil society.21
Granting western credits to the educational system was closely linked to its compliance with the donors’ requirements. In this way the educational system was transformed according to the neoliberal concept. A non-governmental sector with expensive private schools was established. The private high schools and universities were profit-oriented and demanded school and study fees. The educational system was aligned to economic requirements by the PISA studies of the OECD. Many schools in rural areas were closed as they were no longer “profitable”. Today, many children do no longer go to school or they drop off. According to a UNESCO report, 1.5 million children in Russia did not attend a school in the year 2000. Drug abuse among schoolchildren spread, a phenomenon which was formerly unknown.22
The most important reform was that of university education, which was evaluated right after the 1989 turnaround by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which then worked out a program for a restructuring according to the Anglo-American model. In 2004, the Bologna Declaration was legally introduced: i.e. the transition to the four-year BA and the following two-year MA studies as well as the introduction of an administrative board with president and advisory board for universities whose members are also representatives of businesses. Many Russian education experts consider this to be a destruction of the Russian universities’ tradition, because the education process is reduced to the mere passing on of information. 40 % of the approximately 1000 colleges and universities in the Russia of today where the new elite is to be trained are privately owned and many of them were established by the West.23
A further sector, which is attentively watched by the West, is the media, which went through the largest transformation after 1991. After 1991, media were privatized by neoliberal reforms and taken over by oligarchs or by foreign countries. Many TV stations, newspapers and magazines were taken over by foreign owners like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which publishes the most prominent financial Russian newspaper “Vedomosti” together with the “Financial Times”, and the largest advertising company News Outdoor Group, which is active in approximately 100 cities in Russia. The Bertelsmann Inc., which owns the largest European television program RTL, operates the country-wide program Ren TV.24 The Bertelsmann Foundation, founded in 1977 by Reinhard Mohn and now one of the most powerful think tanks in the European Union, co-operates with the Moscow-based Gorbachev Foundation, which also maintains branches in Germany and in the USA.
During the Yeltsin era, the media were almost completely in the hands of the new oligarchy, which was closely connected with the western financial centers. Gusinsky possessed the largest television station NTW, and Boris Beresovsky controlled the newspapers. When Putin began to re-stabilize the Russian state, the most urgent task was to regain control of the media, because otherwise the government would have been toppled.
Last not least, it is the everyday culture that has to be considered because with its rock concerts, the internet, private television programs, cinema palaces, discos, music CD, DVDs, comics, advertisements and fashion it is almost the same as in the West.
The aim of the American strategy is the transfer of the western system of values onto the Russian society. The Russian state is to be de-ideologized. In the 1993 constitution the national ideology was disavowed as characteristic of totalitarianism and prohibited in article 13.25
The official Soviet ideology was based on a materialistic philosophy, but it also included elements of a national idea and was the brace that held the state together. The state was deprived of its value orientations and the national idea by this prohibition. The mental vacuity has been filled by western popular culture .
The cultural offensive of the USA aims at establishing a multicultural, i.e. cosmopolitan, pluralistic and secular society in Russia, in which the uniform Russian national culture is dissolved. The people, i.e. the community of citizens with their common history and culture, are to be converted into a multinational population.
The resistance of the Russian state and the intelligentsia
The state concept implemented by president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin since 2000, in particular the demand for a strong state, included a partial re-centralization, the transition from a multinational to a nationally influenced understanding of the Russian state as well as the tendency to grant to the Russian-orthodox church and religion a privileged position within the state.
In April 2001 the national energy company Gazprom took over the control of the TV station NTW. The daily paper “Sewodnja” (Today) was discontinued, the editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine was dismissed. Boris Beresovski’s television station TW-6 was closed in January 2002 and Beresovski emigrated to England.
In September 2003 the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovski wanted to take over the liberal weekly paper Moskowskije Nowosti (Moscow News), in order to support the liberal opposition parties Union of Right Forces and Jabloko in the forthcoming election campaign. This political activity was an important reason why Khodorkovski was arrested in October 2003. These measures had been necessary, because otherwise the oligarchy would have succeeded in gaining control of the government with the help of media power. The three most important television stations - ORT, Rossya and NTW - as well as an important part of the print media are controlled by national companies (Gazprom and Vneshtorgbank) or directly by the state (RTR), today.
The oligarch Vladimir Potanin is still controling the daily papers “Izvestya” and “Komsomolskaya Pravda”. At present the “Novaya Gaseta” (under control of the oligarch Alexander Lebedev and former Soviet president Gorbachev) and the daily paper “Wedomosti” (a project of the “Wall Street Journal” and “Financial Times”) are considered to be media independent of the government.26 Since 1993, 214 journalists have been murdered in Russia, statistics say, 201 journalists in the Yeltsin era and 13 since Putin has taken office; most of them in his first term of office, whereas during the second term there were only three.27
The 1999 national doctrine for education and the conception of 2001 reintroduced national and patriotic ideas into the content-related, ideological sphere. A shift towards the values of the Tsar era met with the postulate to maintain the advantages of the Soviet Union’s educational system. The private schools and clerical academies run by the Russian-orthodox church and officially recognized since 2007 hold a privileged position. New topics such as the mandatory preparation for military services and, since 2007, the new subject “Foundations of Orthodox Culture” have been introduced into the school’s curricula.28
One means of the cultural war was the campaign of the western media against Russia, which has been going on for ten years, now, especially since Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 and the slogan of which is “Russia on the way back to the Soviet system!” A further example is the so-called persecution of progressive artists, which is said to consist of the removal of so-called blasphemic and pornographic works from public exhibitions. These were, however, mainly provocations by NGOs financed by the west. The Sakharov Center, whose aim is to implement the open society, organized an exhibition in 2003 called “Caution! Religion”, which also showed blaspheme and anti-Christian exhibits. Thereupon the Duma demanded to take action against the leadership of the center from the public prosecutor’s office. In 2005 the organizers were adjudged to a penalty.
In the year 2005 the government introduced a new national holiday on 4 November, close to the old anniversary of the October Revolution on 7 November. This time, however, the victory over the Polish invasion troops in 1612 was to be celebrated. In 2006 a new law was passed dealing with the non-governmental organizations, according to which they all had to re-register and their funding from abroad was to be controlled more strictly. In early 2008 all regional offices of the British Council were closed, except the Muscovite office, because the Council was criticized for anti-Russian activity.29
In contrast to the time of the Perestroika and the Yeltsin era the Russian intelligentsia was no longer neoliberal, since the NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 but national-patriotically minded. The writers, artists, film makers and the theatre people are patriots today and are supported by the Kremlin. The government also controls the political reporting of the media, particularly on television, but a bit less in the newspapers.
The main figure of the traditionalists has formerly been Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was however criticized for his insufficient criticism of the West. The leading group today are the “down-to-earth people” [po venniki]; they are Christian orthodox, but see the Soviet period in the tradition of Russian history. Their ideologists are village writers such as Valentin Rasputin, Vassily Belov and Viktor Astafyev. In the magazines “Nash sovremennik”, “Moskva” and “Molodaya gvardya” the patriotic ideology has been elaborated since the 1970s and 1980s.
The Foundation for the Historical Perspective, which is managed by the former Duma MP Natalya Narotshnizkaya, representing a patriotic and Christian program, possesses the series of publications “Zvenja”, the Internet magazine “Stoletie” and organizes lectures and conferences. The national-patriotic intelligentsia discusses a fundamental change of the system, planning a strong state and a closure of the borders. The federations of creative artists like the writers’ federation, the artists’ federation, the federation of the filmmakers have cultural centers, galleries, cinema centers and magazines at their disposal and organize a dense program of events. There are 150 theatres, opera houses and concert halls in Moscow, which predominantly perform classical plays and concerts. Director’s theatres, abstract art and atonal music are a minority’s program.30
Austria and Germany are seen positively, above all the old German culture is seen in a positive light; they have an idea of it, which comes from the past, but they do not really know, what is taking place in Germany today. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn hoped that Germany could form a kind of bridge between Russia and the remainder of the world as Germany and Russia feel mutually attracted to each other.31 The German media however draw a distorted picture of Russia: that Russia was on the way back to the Soviet system and that the neoliberal intellectuals fight a desperate battle of defense. As an example, they present the pornographic author Viktor Jerofejev, who was invited to Germany by the magazine Die Zeit.32 The crucial question in Russia today is not, however, whether it will become a communist dictatorship again, but whether it will become a western-style “dictatorship of relativism” or a Christian society.33
Religious renewal
The decisive resistance against westernization today comes from the Orthodox Church, which is anti-modernist and traditionalist. The Orthodoxy advocates traditional values such as marriage, family and maternity and rejects homosexuality. The churches are full, predominantly with young and very young people. The majority of the young people confess to orthodoxy, i.e. to Christianity, and marries in Church, again. There are again 100 million faithful, 30 000 priests and 600 monasteries. The Clerical Academy in Sergyev Possad is filled; there are four applicants for one place. There is an orthodox radio station, a publishing house, a number of magazines, military clergymen in the army as well as a hospital and a prison ministry, and in the schools Religious Education has de facto been reintroduced for the first time since 1917. According to a survey, 70% of the Russians call themselves religious.34
In 2007 the Russian-Orthodox Church and the Vatican decided to resume talks in order to eliminate their differences of so many years. Archbishop Ilarion, head of the Foreign Office of the patriarchy, former Russian-Orthodox bishop of Vienna, commented that “We are allies and face the same challenge: an aggressive secularism.”35
Orthodoxy is called the “religion of the majority” in Russia. On 4 November, the day of nationhood in Russia, I could observe an unusual procession on the Red Square. The Patriarch walked in the first row, the leaders of the Islam, the Jewish community and the Buddhists in the second. That was meant as a visible symbol: “The Patriarch is the head of the predominating religion. He unifies the faithful and promotes the co-operation of the religious communities. The Patriarch is the mental leader of the whole people, not only of the orthodox believers.”36
Conclusions
Nowadays, Russia finds itself in a crisis, which is first expressed in the financial and monetary system, but has also hit the cultural sector. Its deeper cause is that the pluralistic secular society does not provide the people with a real community, a world view and a sense in life.
Russia does not need the “materialistic and egoistic culture” of the present western society, but a universal national ideology, which includes all aspects of the people’s lives, develops the country and averts all danger that threatens the people’s existence.37
The “revised version” [reset] of the Russian-American relations during the last two years has however changed nothing in the long-term anti-Russian orientation of the American policy and does not prevent the CIA from being more active than ever in Russia. After Obama’s visit in Moscow Hillary Clinton also stressed that the USA hold on to their idea of the absolute world leader. Russia will sooner or later face the choice either to develop a sovereign state which closes its borders and repels the undermining of its culture, or to capitulate and become a province of the West. •
1 Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach, 1st ed. 1929, 2nd ed. 1954
2 Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960, New York, Oxford U.P. 1994, p. 4
3 Simpson, Science of Coercion, p. 87
4 A. Ross Johnson, R. Eugene Parta, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington 2010
5 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London 1999, dt. Ausgabe: Wer die Zeche zahlt … Der CIA und die Kultur im Kalten Krieg, Berlin 2001; Simpson, Science of Coercion, p. 68
6 Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, New York 1994
7 S.G. Kara-Murza, A.A. Aleksandrov, M.A. Muraškin, S.A. Telegin, Revolucii na eksport [Revolutionen für den Export], Moskva, 2006
8 Quoted from: V.I.Jakunin, V.Bagdasarjan, S.S.Sulakšin, Novye technologii bor’by s rossijskoj gosudarstvennost’ju [New Technologies in the Fight against the Russian State], Moskva, 2009, p. 50
9 Joseph Nye, Bound to Lead: the Changing Nature of American Power, Basic Books 1990; Joseph Nye, Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy, Foreign Affairs, vol. 85, No. 4, July/August 2006, pp. 139-148
10 Richard Armitage, Joseph S. Nye, A Smarter, More Secure America, CSIS Commission on Smart Power, 2009
11 Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administrations’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, New York 1994
12 This can be read in the official Yeltsin biography written by Wladimir Solov’ev and Elena Klepikowa, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, 1992. After having heard Yeltsin in a Congressional committee, David Rockefeller said: “This is our man!”
13 O. A. Platonov, Rossija pod vlast’ju masonov [Russia in the hands oft he Freemasons], Moskva 2000, S. 35.
14 Platonov, Rossija, p. 3.
15 Platonov, Rossija, p. 15.
16 Jakunin, Novye techologii, S. 81.
17 Jakunin, Novye technologii, S. 90
18 Jakunin, Novye technologii, S. 94f.
19 Jakunin, Novye technologii, S. 92.
20 www.pravda.ru 03/19/2008.
21 Gerlind Schmidt, Russische Föderation, in: Hans Döbert, Wolfgang Hörner, Botho von Kopp, Lutz R. Reuter (ed.), Die Bildungssysteme Europas, Hohengehren 2010 ( = Grundlagen der Schulpädagogik, vol. 46, 3rd ed.), p. 619.
22 Schmidt, Russische Föderation, p. 635.
23 Schmidt, Russische Föderation, p. 632.
24 Pierre Hillard, Bertelsmann - un empire des médias et une fondation au service du mondialisme, Paris 2009, p. 27.
25 «1. In the Russian Federation ideological diversity shall be recognized. 2. No ideology may be established as state or obligatory one.” Art. 13 of the constitution of the Russian Federation, December 1993.
26 A. Cernych, Mir sovremennych media [The world of current media], Moskva 2007.
27 Roland Haug, Die Kreml AG, Hohenheim 2007.
28 Schmidt, Russische Föderation, p. 639.
29 Das Feindbild Westen im heutigen Russland, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin 2008.
30 Vladimir Malachov, Sovremennyj russkij nacionalizm [The current Russian nationalism], in: Vitalij Kurennoj, Mysljaškaja Rossija: Kartografija sovremennych intellektual’nych napravlenij [The reflecting Russia: Cartography oft he current intellectual mainstreams], Moskva 2006, p. 141 ff.
31 Interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Der Spiegel No. 30, 23/07/2007; Marc Stegherr, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kirchliche Umschau, No. 10, October 2008
32 Nikolaj Plotnikov, Russkie intellektualy v Germanii [Russian Intellectuals in Germany], in: Kurennoj, Mysljaškaja Rossija, a.a.O., p. 328.
33 Westen ohne Werte? Gespräch mit Natalja Alexejewna Narotschnizkaja, Direktorin des russischen Instituts für Demokratie und Zusammenarbeit in Paris, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Nr. 51, 29.02.2008.
34 Jakunin, Novye technologii, p. 196ff.
35 Interview in: Der Spiegel
36 Der Spiegel, Nr. 51, 14/12/2009.
37 Pope Benedict XVI Encyclic «Spe salvi», Rome 2007, in which he talks about a «dictatorship of relativism»; Jakunin, Novye technologii, p. 174f.
* Dr Peter Bachmaier, born in Vienna in 1940, studied in Graz, Belgrade and Moscow, 1972 - 2005 member of the Austrian Institute for East and South-East Europe, since 2006 secretary of the Bulgarian Research Institute in Austria; in 2009 three-month studies in Moscow. Lecture, held at the conference “Mut zur Ethik” in Feldkirch, 3 September 2010.
“Future workshops” in Russia
In July 2010, the 21st German-Russian future workshop with approximately 40 participants took place in the context of the Petersburg Dialogue between Germany and Russia in Yekaterinburg. These seminars, to which young Russian high-level personnel is invited regularly, were established in September 2004 by the German Society for Foreign Policy, which organized the first “future workshop” on the topic “Germany and Russia in the global world” in the Bertelsmann publishing house Gruner und Jahr in Hamburg. The goal of the seminars, which today are supported by the Körber Foundation, is to account for the communist past and to spread the idea of the democratic civil society. The German speakers explain the young Russians that a strategic partnership with Russia would be possible only on the basis of common western values. They advise them to eliminate the imperial inheritance of Russia and submit to the rules of globalization.
The Germans tell the Russians that they have already discussed the consequences of war and National Socialism in Germany since the 1960s and have come to terms with the past, and accuse the Russians to stick to Soviet identity by remembering the victory in the Second World War. They also say that the Russians were not willing to tackle totalitarianism comprehensively, and thus prevented a further democratization of their society. The Russian participants answer that in 1991 a breach in their historical consciousness took place, which led to the decay of fundamental values in their society. So far, the Russians are not willing to completely “separate from the past” and accept the “universal values”.
Source: Newsletter, DGAP, 20 July 2010
This war was not only waged against communism, but against Russia, as Brzezinski’s direct statements testified: “We destroyed the USSR, we will also destroy Russia.” “Russia is a dispensable state, anyway.” “The orthodoxy is the main enemy of America. Russia is a defeated country. It will be divided and put under guardianship.”8
http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=1137
Soft Power - the USA’s Cultural War against Russia, 1991 - 2010
The new strategy and its centers
by Peter Bachmaier*, Austria
During the last two decades a reorientation of American strategic thinking has taken place: War is no longer defined in purely military terms, but is also waged with the help of non-military, informative and psychological methods called “psychological warfare” or “cultural war”. These methods have a long history. The American military strategist Liddell Hart had already developed the strategy of indirect approach prior to the Second World War.1 The American and British armed forces made use of “psychological warfare” against Germany during the Second World War, and later on it was used to re-educate the German people. After the end of the war, the CIA and the Department of Defense founded think tanks like the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Institute of Herman Kahn and others, which were primarily directed against the Soviet Union. These institutes were modeled on the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, a British Institute specializing in psychological warfare.
The methods in these centers were developed by a number of sociological institutes. The American empirical social sciences, i.e. sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology, communication studies etc. were developed in their present form by initiative and financing of military and intelligence agencies in the 1940s and 1950s.2 Other sources were the big foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. They were all famous scientific centers like the New School for Social Research in New York, the Bureau of Applied Social Research in Princeton (run by Paul Lazarsfeld), the Institute for Social Research (run by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, which returned to Frankfurt in 1949), the Center for International Studies (CENIS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the alternative Esalen Institute in California, established by Michael Murphy and Gregory Bateson - a center of counter-culture, which was also involved in the organization of the Woodstock Festival in 1968 - and they received the contracts. In particular, the prominent institutes of communication sciences stood out by the programs for psychological warfare.
These institutes published magazines like the Public Opinion Quaterly (POQ), the American Sociological Review, the American Political Science Review etc. Working for these institutes were experts - usually emigrants from Germany and Austria - who later earned their reputation in sciences, among them Paul Lazarsfeld, Oskar Morgenstern, Leo Loewenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, Gabriel Almond, Daniel Lerner, Daniel Bell, Robert Merton and many others. These were the same experts and institutes that were also responsible for the reeducation of the people in Germany. Some of these projects were also involved in the preparation of the Cultural Revolution in the sixties with all its accompaniments such as rock music, drug culture and sexual revolution.
In a special way the “Soviet Studies” depended on the government. The Russian Research Project in Harvard, run by Raymond Bauer and Alex Inkeles, was a joint venture between the CIA, the U.S. Air Force and the Carnegie Corporation. The institute published a study in 1956, entitled “How the Soviet System Works”, which became a standard reader in Soviet Studies.3 One means of psychological warfare among others was the radio programs for Eastern Europe influenced by the CIA, “one of the cheapest, safest and most effective tools of the U.S. foreign policy”, Jean Kirkpatrick explained later. There were, for example, the Voice of America, RIAS Berlin, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which are still broadcasting in Russian and in the languages of the CIS countries.4 These programs were submitted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had been founded in 1950 in Paris by 400 employees of the CIA.5
The victory over the Soviet Union was particularly achieved with the help of these non-military methods. The strategy, which did not intend any coexistence with the Soviet Union, but aimed at “disassembling” the Soviet system, was elaborated by the Reagan administration in 1982.6 The plan included seven strategic initiatives, among them as point 4: Psychological warfare, aimed at producing fear, uncertainty, loss of orientation both among the nomenclature and the population.7 This war was not only waged against communism, but against Russia, as Brzezinski’s direct statements testified: “We destroyed the USSR, we will also destroy Russia.” “Russia is a dispensable state, anyway.” “The orthodoxy is the main enemy of America. Russia is a defeated country. It will be divided and put under guardianship.”8
In 1990, Joseph Nye, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an ally of Zbigniew Brzezinski introduced the term “soft power” or “smart power” for these methods; the term goes back to the same roots as “Social Engineering”.9
He published his book “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics” in 2005, in which he suggested that America is to become attractive by its culture and its political ideals. The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, a neo-conservative think tank, whose board of directors hosts Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, established a Commission on Smart Power in 2006, headed by Joseph Nye and Richard Armitage. In 2009, the commission published a memorandum “A Smarter, More Secure America”, which aimed at enhancing America’s influence in the world by “soft” methods.10
First successful application of the new strategy: the Perestroika
For the first time these new methods were used as a strategy in the “Perestroika”, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. The Perestroika had its positive aspects; it re-established the freedoms of opinion and of movement, but it was also a substantial instrument of influence of the West.11 Within the Central Committee, the CPSU and the nomenclature a group emerged, which shifted to the positions of the West and aimed at introducing the western neoliberal system.
The real architect of the Perestroika was Alexander Yakovlev, who had been the CPSU Central Committee’s secretary for ideology since 1985, and who had studied in Washington in the 1950s and had been a proponent of neo-liberalism since then, as he explained to me in a discussion in Vienna on 9 November 2004. People such as Yegor Gaidar, Grigory Jawlinsky, Boris Nemzow, Viktor Chernomyrdin, German Gref and Anatoly Chubays belonged to his network. With the help of these people, Yakovlev established the West’s fifth column in the USSR, which has been pulling the wires up to now. Boris Yeltsin was also a man of the Americans, who was recruited directly in the American Congress in September 1989 on the occasion of an invitation by the Esalen Institute in California, which had maintained an American-Soviet exchange program since 1979. With its help he could take over in 1991.12
By intervention of George Soros, Gorbachev was made a member of the Trilateral Commission, which held a conference in Moscow in January 1989, at which Henry Kissinger and Valéry Giscard D ’Estaing also participated.
Western organizations for cultural influence in Russia
In the perestroika era the lodges and their run-up organizations were permitted again.13 On Kissinger’s request, Gorbachev permitted the establishment of the B’nai B’rith lodge in Moscow in May 1989. Since that time about 500 lodges have been founded in Russia by the Grand Lodges of England, France, America, etc. At the same time more open organizations, clubs, committees and foundations were established for politicians, businessmen and members of the professions that had no relation to the rituals, but shared the principles of the lodges. There are several thousand members of Masonic lodges in Russia who participate in the rituals, but in addition there are ten times as many members of the “maçonnerie blanche” (white masonry), who take no part in rites but accept the principles and are led by Masonic brethren. Such organizations are the Magisterium club, the Rotary Club, Lions Club, the Soros Foundation, etc. Their members consider themselves to be the elite with special rights to govern.14
The Russian PEN Centre, another front organization, was founded to control the literary scene. Its members have included well-known writers and poets like Bella Achmadulina, Anatoly Pristavkin, Evgeny Yevtushenko, Vasily Aksyonov and Viktor Erofe’ev.
The foundation Open Society, founded in Moscow as early as 1988 by George Soros, was the most powerful mechanism of destabilization and destruction in the hands of the people in the background in the 1990s. Soros directed his activities towards changing people’s worldview to the neo-liberal spirit, enforcing the American way of life and training young Russians in the United States. The Soros Foundation supplied the funds to finance the major Russian periodicals and to award special awards for the promotion of literature.15
Within the framework of his program, the foundation published text books in which Russian history was presented in the neoliberal, cosmopolitan sense. In September 1993, while the parliament was shot at, I had the opportunity to participate in a prize awarding ceremony in the Russian Ministry of Education. George Soros handed over the prizes to the authors of Russian text books for history and literature, and the Russian Secretary of Education Evgeny Tkachenko explained, what the goal of the new school books was: “It is about destroying the Russian mentality.”
Soros’ programs in the cultural sector were so various that practically the entire non-governmental sector depended on being sponsored by the Open Society. The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), founded in Vienna in 1983 and likewise supported by Soros promoted the reform of the educational system and the universities in Russia and the post-socialist countries. Between 1997 and 2000 alone, the foundation granted 22,000 scholarships worth 125 million Dollar.16
A further American think tank is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), founded in 1982 by Reagan, which for its part finances institutes of the American Democratic and Republican Parties and their offices in Moscow. Above all, it supports private media and pro-western political parties and movements. The budget of the NED is decided upon by the US Congress as a support for the State Department. Prominent politicians like John Negroponte, Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams are members of the executive committee. The NED is the continuation of CIA operations with other means. Among other things the NED financed the following Russian organizations (2005): The association Memorial for historic education and the protection of the human rights, the Muscovite Helsinki Group, the Sakharov Museum, Mothers of Chechnya for Peace, the Society for Russian-Chechnian Friendship, the Chechnian National Rescue Committee (altogether 45 organizations in one year).17
The Muscovite Carnegie Center was established in 1993 as a department of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, founded in 1910 by Andrew Carnegie as an independent research center for international relations. The experts at the Muscovites center are concerned with the most important issues of Russian domestic and foreign policy. There is a collection of information on the problematic points of the country’s development. The center publishes anthologies, monographs, periodicals and reference books as well as a quarterly magazine “pro et versus”, the series of “Working Papers” and it regularly holds lectures and conferences. The foundation is financed by large companies such as BP, General Motors, Ford, Mott as well as by Soros, Rockefeller, the Pentagon, the State Department and the British State Department. So far, it has been headed by Rose Goettemoeller, former employee of the Rand Corporation, who is now deputy Secretary of State.
The representatives of the Russian commercial world in the supervisory board are Pjotr Aven, Sergei Karaganov, Boris Nemzov, Grigory Yavlinsky and Yevgeny Yasin, the president of the Muscovite School of Economics. Prominent staff members are Dmitry Trenin, who also works for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and Lilya Chevzova, who are both regularly invited to the West in order to tell the people there that Russia limits democratic freedoms. The center’s research is extensively used by the Russian political class and also by the West. The work of the Muscovite center is supported by the headquarters in Washington via a “Russia and Eurasia Program” (REP).18
The foundation Freedom House, founded in 1941 on the initiative of Eleanor Roosevelt, emerged from the struggle against isolationism in the USA. Its official aim was the fight against National Socialism and Communism; today it is financed by Soros and the U.S. government. In the 1990s Freedom House established offices in nearly all CIS states and founded the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (members: Z. Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, James Woolsey - former CIA boss). The most well-known project today is “Freedom in the World”, which has been analyzing all the states in the world annually since 1972 and divides them into “free”, “partially free” and “un-free” states.19
In 1992, the Russian branch of the Rockefeller Foundation called Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in Moscow and in 52 further Russian cities. The foundation attempted to introduce the subject “Sex Education” in all Russian schools, a subject which was actually intended to destroy the family and reeducate the people towards the ideal of a new human being. This project was not successful, because officials of the Ministry of Education, teachers, parents and the Orthodox Church resisted; the project was rejected at a conference of the Russian Academy for Teacher Training in 1997.20
In the West, the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are regarded as components of the civil society. In the case of Russia they do not have anything to do with the structure of direct democracy, but they are agencies financed and steered by the West.
The western influence on the educational system and the media
An important long-term target of western lobbying has been the educational system and higher education. After the 1991 turnaround, centralism and Marxist ideology were eroded with the help of western advisors. The 1992 Education Act and the constitution of the Russian Federation of 1993 established a profound reorientation of the educational system following the western model of the neoliberal-democratic paradigm. It included the introduction of free market elements in the educational system and the construction of a civil society.21
Granting western credits to the educational system was closely linked to its compliance with the donors’ requirements. In this way the educational system was transformed according to the neoliberal concept. A non-governmental sector with expensive private schools was established. The private high schools and universities were profit-oriented and demanded school and study fees. The educational system was aligned to economic requirements by the PISA studies of the OECD. Many schools in rural areas were closed as they were no longer “profitable”. Today, many children do no longer go to school or they drop off. According to a UNESCO report, 1.5 million children in Russia did not attend a school in the year 2000. Drug abuse among schoolchildren spread, a phenomenon which was formerly unknown.22
The most important reform was that of university education, which was evaluated right after the 1989 turnaround by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which then worked out a program for a restructuring according to the Anglo-American model. In 2004, the Bologna Declaration was legally introduced: i.e. the transition to the four-year BA and the following two-year MA studies as well as the introduction of an administrative board with president and advisory board for universities whose members are also representatives of businesses. Many Russian education experts consider this to be a destruction of the Russian universities’ tradition, because the education process is reduced to the mere passing on of information. 40 % of the approximately 1000 colleges and universities in the Russia of today where the new elite is to be trained are privately owned and many of them were established by the West.23
A further sector, which is attentively watched by the West, is the media, which went through the largest transformation after 1991. After 1991, media were privatized by neoliberal reforms and taken over by oligarchs or by foreign countries. Many TV stations, newspapers and magazines were taken over by foreign owners like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which publishes the most prominent financial Russian newspaper “Vedomosti” together with the “Financial Times”, and the largest advertising company News Outdoor Group, which is active in approximately 100 cities in Russia. The Bertelsmann Inc., which owns the largest European television program RTL, operates the country-wide program Ren TV.24 The Bertelsmann Foundation, founded in 1977 by Reinhard Mohn and now one of the most powerful think tanks in the European Union, co-operates with the Moscow-based Gorbachev Foundation, which also maintains branches in Germany and in the USA.
During the Yeltsin era, the media were almost completely in the hands of the new oligarchy, which was closely connected with the western financial centers. Gusinsky possessed the largest television station NTW, and Boris Beresovsky controlled the newspapers. When Putin began to re-stabilize the Russian state, the most urgent task was to regain control of the media, because otherwise the government would have been toppled.
Last not least, it is the everyday culture that has to be considered because with its rock concerts, the internet, private television programs, cinema palaces, discos, music CD, DVDs, comics, advertisements and fashion it is almost the same as in the West.
The aim of the American strategy is the transfer of the western system of values onto the Russian society. The Russian state is to be de-ideologized. In the 1993 constitution the national ideology was disavowed as characteristic of totalitarianism and prohibited in article 13.25
The official Soviet ideology was based on a materialistic philosophy, but it also included elements of a national idea and was the brace that held the state together. The state was deprived of its value orientations and the national idea by this prohibition. The mental vacuity has been filled by western popular culture .
The cultural offensive of the USA aims at establishing a multicultural, i.e. cosmopolitan, pluralistic and secular society in Russia, in which the uniform Russian national culture is dissolved. The people, i.e. the community of citizens with their common history and culture, are to be converted into a multinational population.
The resistance of the Russian state and the intelligentsia
The state concept implemented by president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin since 2000, in particular the demand for a strong state, included a partial re-centralization, the transition from a multinational to a nationally influenced understanding of the Russian state as well as the tendency to grant to the Russian-orthodox church and religion a privileged position within the state.
In April 2001 the national energy company Gazprom took over the control of the TV station NTW. The daily paper “Sewodnja” (Today) was discontinued, the editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine was dismissed. Boris Beresovski’s television station TW-6 was closed in January 2002 and Beresovski emigrated to England.
In September 2003 the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovski wanted to take over the liberal weekly paper Moskowskije Nowosti (Moscow News), in order to support the liberal opposition parties Union of Right Forces and Jabloko in the forthcoming election campaign. This political activity was an important reason why Khodorkovski was arrested in October 2003. These measures had been necessary, because otherwise the oligarchy would have succeeded in gaining control of the government with the help of media power. The three most important television stations - ORT, Rossya and NTW - as well as an important part of the print media are controlled by national companies (Gazprom and Vneshtorgbank) or directly by the state (RTR), today.
The oligarch Vladimir Potanin is still controling the daily papers “Izvestya” and “Komsomolskaya Pravda”. At present the “Novaya Gaseta” (under control of the oligarch Alexander Lebedev and former Soviet president Gorbachev) and the daily paper “Wedomosti” (a project of the “Wall Street Journal” and “Financial Times”) are considered to be media independent of the government.26 Since 1993, 214 journalists have been murdered in Russia, statistics say, 201 journalists in the Yeltsin era and 13 since Putin has taken office; most of them in his first term of office, whereas during the second term there were only three.27
The 1999 national doctrine for education and the conception of 2001 reintroduced national and patriotic ideas into the content-related, ideological sphere. A shift towards the values of the Tsar era met with the postulate to maintain the advantages of the Soviet Union’s educational system. The private schools and clerical academies run by the Russian-orthodox church and officially recognized since 2007 hold a privileged position. New topics such as the mandatory preparation for military services and, since 2007, the new subject “Foundations of Orthodox Culture” have been introduced into the school’s curricula.28
One means of the cultural war was the campaign of the western media against Russia, which has been going on for ten years, now, especially since Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 and the slogan of which is “Russia on the way back to the Soviet system!” A further example is the so-called persecution of progressive artists, which is said to consist of the removal of so-called blasphemic and pornographic works from public exhibitions. These were, however, mainly provocations by NGOs financed by the west. The Sakharov Center, whose aim is to implement the open society, organized an exhibition in 2003 called “Caution! Religion”, which also showed blaspheme and anti-Christian exhibits. Thereupon the Duma demanded to take action against the leadership of the center from the public prosecutor’s office. In 2005 the organizers were adjudged to a penalty.
In the year 2005 the government introduced a new national holiday on 4 November, close to the old anniversary of the October Revolution on 7 November. This time, however, the victory over the Polish invasion troops in 1612 was to be celebrated. In 2006 a new law was passed dealing with the non-governmental organizations, according to which they all had to re-register and their funding from abroad was to be controlled more strictly. In early 2008 all regional offices of the British Council were closed, except the Muscovite office, because the Council was criticized for anti-Russian activity.29
In contrast to the time of the Perestroika and the Yeltsin era the Russian intelligentsia was no longer neoliberal, since the NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 but national-patriotically minded. The writers, artists, film makers and the theatre people are patriots today and are supported by the Kremlin. The government also controls the political reporting of the media, particularly on television, but a bit less in the newspapers.
The main figure of the traditionalists has formerly been Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was however criticized for his insufficient criticism of the West. The leading group today are the “down-to-earth people” [po venniki]; they are Christian orthodox, but see the Soviet period in the tradition of Russian history. Their ideologists are village writers such as Valentin Rasputin, Vassily Belov and Viktor Astafyev. In the magazines “Nash sovremennik”, “Moskva” and “Molodaya gvardya” the patriotic ideology has been elaborated since the 1970s and 1980s.
The Foundation for the Historical Perspective, which is managed by the former Duma MP Natalya Narotshnizkaya, representing a patriotic and Christian program, possesses the series of publications “Zvenja”, the Internet magazine “Stoletie” and organizes lectures and conferences. The national-patriotic intelligentsia discusses a fundamental change of the system, planning a strong state and a closure of the borders. The federations of creative artists like the writers’ federation, the artists’ federation, the federation of the filmmakers have cultural centers, galleries, cinema centers and magazines at their disposal and organize a dense program of events. There are 150 theatres, opera houses and concert halls in Moscow, which predominantly perform classical plays and concerts. Director’s theatres, abstract art and atonal music are a minority’s program.30
Austria and Germany are seen positively, above all the old German culture is seen in a positive light; they have an idea of it, which comes from the past, but they do not really know, what is taking place in Germany today. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn hoped that Germany could form a kind of bridge between Russia and the remainder of the world as Germany and Russia feel mutually attracted to each other.31 The German media however draw a distorted picture of Russia: that Russia was on the way back to the Soviet system and that the neoliberal intellectuals fight a desperate battle of defense. As an example, they present the pornographic author Viktor Jerofejev, who was invited to Germany by the magazine Die Zeit.32 The crucial question in Russia today is not, however, whether it will become a communist dictatorship again, but whether it will become a western-style “dictatorship of relativism” or a Christian society.33
Religious renewal
The decisive resistance against westernization today comes from the Orthodox Church, which is anti-modernist and traditionalist. The Orthodoxy advocates traditional values such as marriage, family and maternity and rejects homosexuality. The churches are full, predominantly with young and very young people. The majority of the young people confess to orthodoxy, i.e. to Christianity, and marries in Church, again. There are again 100 million faithful, 30 000 priests and 600 monasteries. The Clerical Academy in Sergyev Possad is filled; there are four applicants for one place. There is an orthodox radio station, a publishing house, a number of magazines, military clergymen in the army as well as a hospital and a prison ministry, and in the schools Religious Education has de facto been reintroduced for the first time since 1917. According to a survey, 70% of the Russians call themselves religious.34
In 2007 the Russian-Orthodox Church and the Vatican decided to resume talks in order to eliminate their differences of so many years. Archbishop Ilarion, head of the Foreign Office of the patriarchy, former Russian-Orthodox bishop of Vienna, commented that “We are allies and face the same challenge: an aggressive secularism.”35
Orthodoxy is called the “religion of the majority” in Russia. On 4 November, the day of nationhood in Russia, I could observe an unusual procession on the Red Square. The Patriarch walked in the first row, the leaders of the Islam, the Jewish community and the Buddhists in the second. That was meant as a visible symbol: “The Patriarch is the head of the predominating religion. He unifies the faithful and promotes the co-operation of the religious communities. The Patriarch is the mental leader of the whole people, not only of the orthodox believers.”36
Conclusions
Nowadays, Russia finds itself in a crisis, which is first expressed in the financial and monetary system, but has also hit the cultural sector. Its deeper cause is that the pluralistic secular society does not provide the people with a real community, a world view and a sense in life.
Russia does not need the “materialistic and egoistic culture” of the present western society, but a universal national ideology, which includes all aspects of the people’s lives, develops the country and averts all danger that threatens the people’s existence.37
The “revised version” [reset] of the Russian-American relations during the last two years has however changed nothing in the long-term anti-Russian orientation of the American policy and does not prevent the CIA from being more active than ever in Russia. After Obama’s visit in Moscow Hillary Clinton also stressed that the USA hold on to their idea of the absolute world leader. Russia will sooner or later face the choice either to develop a sovereign state which closes its borders and repels the undermining of its culture, or to capitulate and become a province of the West. •
1 Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach, 1st ed. 1929, 2nd ed. 1954
2 Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960, New York, Oxford U.P. 1994, p. 4
3 Simpson, Science of Coercion, p. 87
4 A. Ross Johnson, R. Eugene Parta, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington 2010
5 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London 1999, dt. Ausgabe: Wer die Zeche zahlt … Der CIA und die Kultur im Kalten Krieg, Berlin 2001; Simpson, Science of Coercion, p. 68
6 Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, New York 1994
7 S.G. Kara-Murza, A.A. Aleksandrov, M.A. Muraškin, S.A. Telegin, Revolucii na eksport [Revolutionen für den Export], Moskva, 2006
8 Quoted from: V.I.Jakunin, V.Bagdasarjan, S.S.Sulakšin, Novye technologii bor’by s rossijskoj gosudarstvennost’ju [New Technologies in the Fight against the Russian State], Moskva, 2009, p. 50
9 Joseph Nye, Bound to Lead: the Changing Nature of American Power, Basic Books 1990; Joseph Nye, Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy, Foreign Affairs, vol. 85, No. 4, July/August 2006, pp. 139-148
10 Richard Armitage, Joseph S. Nye, A Smarter, More Secure America, CSIS Commission on Smart Power, 2009
11 Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administrations’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, New York 1994
12 This can be read in the official Yeltsin biography written by Wladimir Solov’ev and Elena Klepikowa, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, 1992. After having heard Yeltsin in a Congressional committee, David Rockefeller said: “This is our man!”
13 O. A. Platonov, Rossija pod vlast’ju masonov [Russia in the hands oft he Freemasons], Moskva 2000, S. 35.
14 Platonov, Rossija, p. 3.
15 Platonov, Rossija, p. 15.
16 Jakunin, Novye techologii, S. 81.
17 Jakunin, Novye technologii, S. 90
18 Jakunin, Novye technologii, S. 94f.
19 Jakunin, Novye technologii, S. 92.
20 www.pravda.ru 03/19/2008.
21 Gerlind Schmidt, Russische Föderation, in: Hans Döbert, Wolfgang Hörner, Botho von Kopp, Lutz R. Reuter (ed.), Die Bildungssysteme Europas, Hohengehren 2010 ( = Grundlagen der Schulpädagogik, vol. 46, 3rd ed.), p. 619.
22 Schmidt, Russische Föderation, p. 635.
23 Schmidt, Russische Föderation, p. 632.
24 Pierre Hillard, Bertelsmann - un empire des médias et une fondation au service du mondialisme, Paris 2009, p. 27.
25 «1. In the Russian Federation ideological diversity shall be recognized. 2. No ideology may be established as state or obligatory one.” Art. 13 of the constitution of the Russian Federation, December 1993.
26 A. Cernych, Mir sovremennych media [The world of current media], Moskva 2007.
27 Roland Haug, Die Kreml AG, Hohenheim 2007.
28 Schmidt, Russische Föderation, p. 639.
29 Das Feindbild Westen im heutigen Russland, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin 2008.
30 Vladimir Malachov, Sovremennyj russkij nacionalizm [The current Russian nationalism], in: Vitalij Kurennoj, Mysljaškaja Rossija: Kartografija sovremennych intellektual’nych napravlenij [The reflecting Russia: Cartography oft he current intellectual mainstreams], Moskva 2006, p. 141 ff.
31 Interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Der Spiegel No. 30, 23/07/2007; Marc Stegherr, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kirchliche Umschau, No. 10, October 2008
32 Nikolaj Plotnikov, Russkie intellektualy v Germanii [Russian Intellectuals in Germany], in: Kurennoj, Mysljaškaja Rossija, a.a.O., p. 328.
33 Westen ohne Werte? Gespräch mit Natalja Alexejewna Narotschnizkaja, Direktorin des russischen Instituts für Demokratie und Zusammenarbeit in Paris, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Nr. 51, 29.02.2008.
34 Jakunin, Novye technologii, p. 196ff.
35 Interview in: Der Spiegel
36 Der Spiegel, Nr. 51, 14/12/2009.
37 Pope Benedict XVI Encyclic «Spe salvi», Rome 2007, in which he talks about a «dictatorship of relativism»; Jakunin, Novye technologii, p. 174f.
* Dr Peter Bachmaier, born in Vienna in 1940, studied in Graz, Belgrade and Moscow, 1972 - 2005 member of the Austrian Institute for East and South-East Europe, since 2006 secretary of the Bulgarian Research Institute in Austria; in 2009 three-month studies in Moscow. Lecture, held at the conference “Mut zur Ethik” in Feldkirch, 3 September 2010.
“Future workshops” in Russia
In July 2010, the 21st German-Russian future workshop with approximately 40 participants took place in the context of the Petersburg Dialogue between Germany and Russia in Yekaterinburg. These seminars, to which young Russian high-level personnel is invited regularly, were established in September 2004 by the German Society for Foreign Policy, which organized the first “future workshop” on the topic “Germany and Russia in the global world” in the Bertelsmann publishing house Gruner und Jahr in Hamburg. The goal of the seminars, which today are supported by the Körber Foundation, is to account for the communist past and to spread the idea of the democratic civil society. The German speakers explain the young Russians that a strategic partnership with Russia would be possible only on the basis of common western values. They advise them to eliminate the imperial inheritance of Russia and submit to the rules of globalization.
The Germans tell the Russians that they have already discussed the consequences of war and National Socialism in Germany since the 1960s and have come to terms with the past, and accuse the Russians to stick to Soviet identity by remembering the victory in the Second World War. They also say that the Russians were not willing to tackle totalitarianism comprehensively, and thus prevented a further democratization of their society. The Russian participants answer that in 1991 a breach in their historical consciousness took place, which led to the decay of fundamental values in their society. So far, the Russians are not willing to completely “separate from the past” and accept the “universal values”.
Source: Newsletter, DGAP, 20 July 2010