Трамп, Путин и Новая Холодная война. The Нью-Йоркер: Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley (1 из 2)

[sobiainnen]

Моё предисловие к двум текстам журнала "The New Yorker" от 06.03.2017:
Очередной номер американского журнала "The New Yorker" вышел с русским названием на обложке "The Нью-Йоркер" и изображением президента России Владимира Путина. "Владимир Путин мог повлиять на американские выборы, но его планы гораздо больше", - говорится в описании к рисунку (Vladimir Putin may have influenced the U.S. Presidential election, but his plans are much bigger). На изображении художника Барри Блитта Путин через монокль смотрит на президента США Дональда Трампа в образе бабочки. Героя на обложке зовут Юстас Владимирович Тиллей (Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley), а сам рисунок является отсылкой к обложке самого первого номера журнала, вышедшего 21 декабря 1925 года, где был изображен действующий с большим вкусом к жизни насмешливый дэнди Юстас Тилли (Eustace Tilley), ставший позже символом издания. В продаже датированный 6 марта номер The New Yorker появился 27 февраля, в нем напечатана статья журналистов Эвана Осноса и Джошуа Яффы, а также главного редактора издания Ремника Дэвида, которые рассказали об отношениях Путина и Трампа в статье "Трамп, Путин и Новая Холодная война. Что лежит за влиянием России на выборы 2016 года и что будет в дальнейшем?". Я уже размещал у себя на блоге большой пост с массой фотографий обложек западных журналов с Путиным (здесь: Владимир Путин в подсознании Запада: ГЕРР ЭКСЕЛЕНЦ! Служить будем вечно?! Массовый психоз и групповая фантазия (по Ллойду Демозу) // Forbes.ru, блог-книга Осьминог, Алексей Вишня "Политтехно". 17.03.2014).
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Залп журнала "The New Yorker", настроенного яро против Дональда Трампа и в каждом номере печатающего статьи с издёвками над Трампом, обозначает ещё одну грань поразивший тяжёлым недугом весь западный мир морок Putinophobia-Путинофобии, а именно - подсознание стоящих за влиятельными банкирами группы во главе со "злой ведьмой Бастиндой Клинтон" правильно понимает одну реальную вещь - судьба США и России, Трампа и Путина на долгие годы соединилась во взаимозависимость и необходимость в поддержке друг друга. А победа Трампа будет происходить на основе политической смычки высшей политической и банкирской элиты (условно, банкиров группы "Трампа", части американских и британских Ротшильдов, поставивших на консервативную революцию США и сброс долговых обязательств США через национализацию Федрезерва и избиение банкиров группы "Клинтон" с обвинением их в предательстве Конституции США и преступлениях против народа Соединённых Государств Америки) с простым рабочим (работающим) народом. Соединение высшей власти и простого народа побеждает все прослойки между ними безальтернативно. Таким же образом будет происходить в нашей стране возвращение Советской власти (сама красная ресоветизация будет происходить вынужденно - надо готовиться к Войне, а для этого вернуть доверие населения, которое сейчас есть к Путину, но совершенно нет к правящей белогвардейской либеральной смычке силовиков-чиновников-олигархата) - через смычку Путина и группы силовиков и политиков Путина с простым рабочим народом Российской Федерации, что позволит в этой электрической дуге справиться со всеми прослойками "элиты 1990-х начала 2000-х годов".

Только на основе советского строя и советского государственного управления Россия сможет реально создать Евразийский Союз и уже полной нашей массой в 300-350 миллионов человек населения заняться большими сложнейшими задачами. Только на основе старых американских консервативных WASP'овских ценностей США смогут заняться переустройством США (через крутое преобразование общества трансформировать нынешние "Атлантические США" в будущие "Тихоокеанские США"). Победа Трампа и Путина неизбежна, и счета враги за ущерб оплатят полностью. А Америка из разгорающейся гражданской войны выйдет окрепшая и закалённая. Это возможно только при разнообразной поддержке России ( политической, военно-политической, дипломатической, энергетической, экономической - через большие русские заказы американской экономике на мега проекты в Сибири и на Дальнем Востоке), ибо наше русское советское стратегическое планирование выше американского капиталистического (см.: Стратегическое планирование в США: военная мощь, прорывные технологии и доллар. Аналитический доклад. Александр Собянин, Марат Шибутов // ИА REGNUM. 25.05.2012).
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За нашу Советскую Родину! Победа будет за нами!
С уважением,
Собянин Александр Дмитриевич, руководитель службы стратегического планирования Ассоциации приграничного сотрудничества, член Экспертного совета Центра стратегической конъюнктуры, член Российско-Иранского совета по общественным связям.
http://conjuncture.ru/author/alexander_sobianin/
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Обложка журнала "The Нью-Йоркер" от 06.03.2017, автор рисунка Барри Блитт (Barry Blitt):
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/CoverStory-Blitt-Putin-883x1200-1487888276.jpg


Дэнди Юстас Тилли (Eustace Tilley) на обложке первого номера журнала "The New Yorker" 21.12.1926, автор рисунка Ри Ирвин (Rea Irvin).


First issue's cover with dandy Eustace Tilley, created by Rea Irvin. The image, or a variation of it, appears on the cover of The New Yorker with every anniversary issue.

Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley” / The Нью-Йоркер. 06.03.2017.
(под катом две статьи "Нью-Йоркера")


http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-2017-03-06
Culture Desk
March 6, 2017 Issue
By Francoise Mouly
Francoise Mouly has been the art editor at The New Yorker since 1993.
Vladimir Putin may have influenced the U.S. Presidential election, but his plans are much bigger. “I’m boning up on my Cyrillic,” Barry Blitt, the artist behind the cover of next week’s issue, says. In a riff on the magazine’s first cover, from 1925, by Rea Irvin, Blitt imagines a future in which our dandy mascot has become Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley and the lepidopteran under scrutiny is none other than a stunned Donald Trump. But Blitt isn’t the only one looking at what he calls “the butterfly effect.” This issue of the magazine features “Active Measures,” an investigation into the Trump-Putin drama by Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa.

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Трамп, Путин и Новая Холодная война. Что лежит за влиянием России на выборы 2016 года и что будет в дальнейшем?
Авторы: Эван Оснос, Джошуа Яффа, Ремник Дэвид

Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War. What lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election - and what lies ahead? / The New Yorker. 06.03.2017.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war


Annals of Diplomacy
By Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa
The D.N.C. hacks, many analysts believe, were just a skirmish in a larger war against Western institutions and alliances. Illustration by Christoph Niemann
Photographs: Yuri Smityuk/TASS/Getty; Spiegl/ullstein bild/Getty; Mikhail Metzel/TASS/Getty; from left to right: Vadim Ghirda/AP, Laski Diffusion/Getty, Lev Fedoseyev/TASS/Getty, Bulent Doruk/Anadolu Agency/Getty, Drew Angerer/Getty, Sergei Savostyanov/TASS/Getty, Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty, Aleksey Filippov/AFP/Getty
Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.
David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.
Joshua Yaffa is a New Yorker contributor based in Moscow. He is also a New America fellow.
This article appears in other versions of the March 6, 2017, issue, with the headline “Active Measures.”

1. Soft Targets

On April 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the K.G.B., ordered foreign-intelligence operatives to carry out “active measures”-aktivniye meropriyatiya-against the reelection campaign of President Ronald Reagan. Unlike classic espionage, which involves the collection of foreign secrets, active measures aim at influencing events-at undermining a rival power with forgeries, front groups, and countless other techniques honed during the Cold War. The Soviet leadership considered Reagan an implacable militarist. According to extensive notes made by Vasili Mitrokhin, a high-ranking K.G.B. officer and archivist who later defected to Great Britain, Soviet intelligence tried to infiltrate the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committees, popularize the slogan “Reagan Means War!,” and discredit the President as a corrupt servant of the military-industrial complex. The effort had no evident effect. Reagan won forty-nine of fifty states.
Active measures were used by both sides throughout the Cold War. In the nineteen-sixties, Soviet intelligence officers spread a rumor that the U.S. government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the eighties, they spread the rumor that American intelligence had “created” the AIDS virus, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. They regularly lent support to leftist parties and insurgencies. The C.I.A., for its part, worked to overthrow regimes in Iran, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Chile, and Panama. It used cash payments, propaganda, and sometimes violent measures to sway elections away from leftist parties in Italy, Guatemala, Indonesia, South Vietnam, and Nicaragua. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early nineties, the C.I.A. asked Russia to abandon active measures to spread disinformation that could harm the U.S. Russia promised to do so. But when Sergey Tretyakov, the station chief for Russian intelligence in New York, defected, in 2000, he revealed that Moscow’s active measures had never subsided. “Nothing has changed,” he wrote, in 2008. “Russia is doing everything it can today to embarrass the U.S.”
Vladimir Putin, who is quick to accuse the West of hypocrisy, frequently points to this history. He sees a straight line from the West’s support of the anti-Moscow “color revolutions,” in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, which deposed corrupt, Soviet-era leaders, to its endorsement of the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Five years ago, he blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. “She set the tone for some of our actors in the country and gave the signal,” Putin said. “They heard this and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work.” (No evidence was provided for the accusation.) He considers nongovernmental agencies and civil-society groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the election-monitoring group Golos to be barely disguised instruments of regime change.
The U.S. officials who administer the system that Putin sees as such an existential danger to his own reject his rhetoric as “whataboutism,” a strategy of false moral equivalences. Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser under President Obama, is among those who reject Putin’s logic, but he said, “Putin is not entirely wrong,” adding that, in the past, “we engaged in regime change around the world. There is just enough rope for him to hang us.”*
The 2016 Presidential campaign in the United States was of keen interest to Putin. He loathed Obama, who had applied economic sanctions against Putin’s cronies after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine. (Russian state television derided Obama as “weak,” “uncivilized,” and a “eunuch.”) Clinton, in Putin’s view, was worse-the embodiment of the liberal interventionist strain of U.S. foreign policy, more hawkish than Obama, and an obstacle to ending sanctions and reestablishing Russian geopolitical influence. At the same time, Putin deftly flattered Trump, who was uncommonly positive in his statements about Putin’s strength and effectiveness as a leader. As early as 2007, Trump declared that Putin was “doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.” In 2013, before visiting Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, Trump wondered, in a tweet, if he would meet Putin, and, “if so, will he become my new best friend?” During the Presidential campaign, Trump delighted in saying that Putin was a superior leader who had turned the Obama Administration into a “laughingstock.”
For those interested in active measures, the digital age presented opportunities far more alluring than anything available in the era of Andropov. The Democratic and Republican National Committees offered what cybersecurity experts call a large “attack surface.” Tied into politics at the highest level, they were nonetheless unprotected by the defenses afforded to sensitive government institutions. John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a former chief of staff of Bill Clinton’s, had every reason to be aware of the fragile nature of modern communications. As a senior counsellor in the Obama White House, he was involved in digital policy. Yet even he had not bothered to use the most elementary sort of defense, two-step verification, for his e-mail account.
“The honest answer is that my team and I were over-reliant on the fact that we were pretty careful about what we click on,” Podesta said. In this instance, he received a phishing e-mail, ostensibly from “the Gmail team,” that urged him to “change your password immediately.” An I.T. person who was asked to verify it mistakenly replied that it was “a legitimate e-mail.”
The American political landscape also offered a particularly soft target for dezinformatsiya, false information intended to discredit the official version of events, or the very notion of reliable truth. Americans were more divided along ideological lines than at any point in two decades, according to the Pew Research Center. American trust in the mainstream media had fallen to a historic low. The fractured media environment seemed to spawn conspiracy theories about everything from Barack Obama’s place of birth (supposedly Kenya) to the origins of climate change (a Chinese hoax). Trump, in building his political identity, promoted such theories.
“Free societies are often split because people have their own views, and that’s what former Soviet and current Russian intelligence tries to take advantage of,” Oleg Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general, who has lived in the United States since 1995, said. “The goal is to deepen the splits.” Such a strategy is especially valuable when a country like Russia, which is considerably weaker than it was at the height of the Soviet era, is waging a geopolitical struggle with a stronger entity.
In early January, two weeks before the Inauguration, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, released a declassified report concluding that Putin had ordered an influence campaign to harm Clinton’s election prospects, fortify Donald Trump’s, and “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.” The declassified report provides more assertion than evidence. Intelligence officers say that this was necessary to protect their information-gathering methods.
Critics of the report have repeatedly noted that intelligence agencies, in the months before the Iraq War, endorsed faulty assessments concerning weapons of mass destruction. But the intelligence community was deeply divided over the actual extent of Iraq’s weapons development; the question of Russia’s responsibility for cyberattacks in the 2016 election has produced no such tumult. Seventeen federal intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia was responsible for the hacking.
In testimony before the Senate, Clapper described an unprecedented Russian effort to interfere in the U.S. electoral process. The operation involved hacking Democrats’ e-mails, publicizing the stolen contents through WikiLeaks, and manipulating social media to spread “fake news” and pro-Trump messages.
At first, Trump derided the scrutiny of the hacking as a “witch hunt,” and said that the attacks could have been from anyone-the Russians, the Chinese, or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds.” In the end, he grudgingly accepted the finding, but insisted that Russian interference had had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” Yevgenia Albats, the author of “The State Within a State,” a book about the K.G.B., said that Putin probably didn’t believe he could alter the results of the election, but, because of his antipathy toward Obama and Clinton, he did what he could to boost Trump’s cause and undermine America’s confidence in its political system. Putin was not interested in keeping the operation covert, Albats said. “He wanted to make it as public as possible. He wanted his presence to be known,” and to “show that, no matter what, we can enter your house and do what we want.”

Illustrations by Cristiana Couceiro


2. Cold War 2.0

Remarkably, the Obama Administration learned of the hacking operation only in early summer-nine months after the F.B.I. first contacted the D.N.C. about the intrusion-and then was reluctant to act too strongly, for fear of being seen as partisan. Leaders of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies met during the summer, but their focus was on how to safeguard state election commissions and electoral systems against a hack on Election Day.
That caution has embittered Clinton’s inner circle. “We understand the bind they were in,” one of Clinton’s senior advisers said. “But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, ‘I’m speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack. The Russian government at the highest levels is trying to influence our most precious asset, our democracy, and I’m not going to let it happen.’ A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice. My attitude is that we don’t have the right to lay blame for the results of this election at anybody’s feet, but, to me, it is bewildering-it is baffling-it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House.”
The Obama circle, which criticizes Clinton’s team for failing to lock down seemingly solid states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that the White House acted appropriately. “What could we have done?” Benjamin Rhodes said. “We said they were doing it, so everybody had the basis to know that all the WikiLeaks material and the fake news were tied to Russia. There was no action we could have taken to stop the e-mails or the fake news from being propagated. . . . All we could do was expose it.”
Last September, at a G-20 summit, in China, Obama confronted Putin about the hacking, telling him to “cut it out,” and, above all, to keep away from the balloting in November, or there would be “serious consequences.” Putin neither denied nor confirmed the hacking efforts, but replied that the United States has long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddle in Russian affairs.



In October, as evidence of Russian meddling mounted, senior national-security officials met to consider a plan of response; proposals included releasing damaging information about Russian officials, including their bank accounts, or a cyber operation directed at Moscow. Secretary of State John Kerry was concerned that such plans might undercut diplomatic efforts to get Russia to cooperate with the West in Syria-efforts that eventually failed. In the end, security officials unanimously agreed to take a measured approach: the Administration issued a statement, on October 7th, declaring it was confident that the Russians had hacked the D.N.C. The Administration did not want to overreact in a way that could seem political and amplify Trump’s message that the vote was rigged.
The White House watched for signs that Russian intelligence was crossing what a senior national-security official called “the line between covert influence and adversely affecting the vote count”-and found no evidence that it had done so. At the time, Clinton was leading in the race, which, the official said, reinforced Obama’s decision not to respond more aggressively. “If we have a very forceful response, it actually helps delegitimize the election.”
That sense of caution continued during the transition, when Obama was intent on an orderly transfer of power. Secretary of State Kerry proposed the creation of an independent bipartisan group to investigate Russian interference in the election. It would have been modelled on the 9/11 Commission, a body consisting of five Republicans and five Democrats who interviewed more than twelve hundred people. According to two senior officials, Obama reviewed Kerry’s proposal but ultimately rejected it, in part because he was convinced that Republicans in Congress would regard it as a partisan exercise. One aide who favored the idea says, “It would have gotten the ball rolling, making it difficult for Trump to shut it down. Now it’s a lot harder to make it happen.”
During the transition, officials in the Obama Administration were hearing that Trump was somehow compromised or beholden to Russian interests. “The Russians make investments in people not knowing the exact outcome,” one senior Administration official said. “They obtain leverage on those people, too.” No conclusive evidence has yet emerged for such suspicions about Trump. Another Administration official said that, during the transfer of power, classified intelligence had shown multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russian representatives, but nothing that rose to the level of aiding or coordinating the interference with the election. “We had no clear information-that I was aware of-of collusion,” the official said. That question, however, persists, and will likely be a central focus for congressional investigators.
By Inauguration Day, January 20th, the evidence of a wide-scale Russian operation had prompted the formation of a joint task force, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the financial-crimes unit of the Treasury Department. Three Senate committees, including the Intelligence Committee, have launched inquiries; some Democrats worry that the Trump Administration will try to stifle these investigations. Although senators on the Intelligence Committee cannot reveal classified information, they have ways of signalling concern. Three weeks after the election, Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and six other members of the committee sent a public letter to Obama, declaring, “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public.” At a hearing in January, Wyden pushed further. While questioning James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., Wyden cited media reports that some Trump associates had links to Russians who are close to Putin. Wyden asked if Comey would declassify information on that subject and “release it to the American people.” Comey said, “I can’t talk about it.” Wyden’s questioning had served its purpose.
Later, in an interview, Wyden said, “My increasing concern is that classification now is being used much more for political security than for national security. We wanted to get that out before a new Administration took place. I can’t remember seven senators joining a declassification request.” Asked if he suspects that there has been improper contact between the Trump campaign and Russian interests, Wyden said, “I can’t get into that”-without revealing classified information. “But what I can tell you is, I continue to believe, as I have for many months, that there is more that could be declassified.” He added, “When a foreign power interferes with American institutions, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s business as usual,’ and leave it at that. There’s a historical imperative here, too.” After viewing the classified materials, Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the Russia investigation, “This may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”
Two weeks before the Inauguration, intelligence officers briefed both Obama and Trump about a dossier of unverified allegations compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. The thirty-five-page dossier, which included claims about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 trip to Moscow, had been shopped around to various media outlets by researchers opposed to Trump’s candidacy. The dossier concluded that Russia had personal and financial material on Trump that could be used as blackmail. It said that the Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for years. According to current and former government officials, prurient details in the dossier generated skepticism among some members of the intelligence community, who, as one put it, regarded it as a “nutty” product to present to a President. But, in the weeks that followed, they confirmed some of its less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals. “They are continuing to chase down stuff from the dossier, and, at its core, a lot of it is bearing out,” an intelligence official said. Some officials believe that one reason the Russians compiled information on Trump during his 2013 trip was that he was meeting with Russian oligarchs who might be stashing money abroad-a sign of disloyalty, in Putin’s eyes.
Trump denounced the dossier as a fake. Putin’s spokesman called it “pulp fiction.” But, before the dossier became public, Senator John McCain passed it along to the F.B.I.; later, some of his colleagues said that it should be part of an investigation of Trump. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, vowed to investigate “everywhere the intelligence tells us to go.”
For many national-security officials, the e-mail hacks were part of a larger, and deeply troubling, picture: Putin’s desire to damage American confidence and to undermine the Western alliances-diplomatic, financial, and military-that have shaped the postwar world.
Not long before leaving the White House, Benjamin Rhodes said that the Obama Administration was convinced that Putin had gone into an “offensive mode beyond what he sees as his sphere of influence,” setting out to encourage the “breakup” of the European Union, destabilize NATO, and unnerve the object of his keenest resentment-the United States. Rhodes said, “The new phase we’re in is that the Russians have moved into an offensive posture that threatens the very international order.” Samantha Power offered a similar warning, shortly before leaving her post as United Nations Ambassador. Russia, she said, was “taking steps that are weakening the rules-based order that we have benefitted from for seven decades.”
For nearly two decades, U.S.-Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable. Although the two countries have come to agreements on various issues, including trade and arms control, the general picture is grim. Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like “the second Cold War.”
The level of tension has alarmed experienced hands on both sides. “What we have is a situation in which the strong leader of a relatively weak state is acting in opposition to weak leaders of relatively strong states,” General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said. “And that strong leader is Putin. He is calling the shots at the moment.” Shirreff observes that nato’s withdrawal of military forces from Europe has been answered with incidents of Russian aggression, and with a sizable buildup of forces in the vicinity of the Baltic states, including an aircraft-carrier group dispatched to the North Sea, an expanded deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin, for its part, views the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders as itself a provocation, and points to such U.S. measures as the placement of a new ground-based missile-defense system in Deveselu, Romania.
Robert Gates, who was Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, describes relations between Obama and Putin as having been “poisonous” and casts at least some of the blame on Obama; referring to Russia as a “regional power,” as Obama did, was “the equivalent of referring to ISIS as a J.V. team,” in his view. “I think the new Administration has a big challenge in front of it in terms of stopping the downward spiral in the U.S.-Russia relationship while pushing back against Putin’s aggression and general thuggery,” Gates said. “Every time NATO makes a move or Russia makes a move near its border, there is a response. Where does that all stop? So there is a need to stop that downward spiral. The dilemma is how do you do that without handing Putin a victory of huge proportions?”
Some in Moscow are alarmed, too. Dmitry Trenin, a well-connected political and military analyst for the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that in early fall, before Trump’s victory, “we were on a course for a ‘kinetic’ collision in Syria.” He said that the Kremlin expected that, if Clinton won, she would take military action in Syria, perhaps establishing no-fly zones, provoking the rebels to shoot down Russian aircraft, “and getting the Russians to feel it was Afghanistan revisited.” He added, “Then my imagination just left me.”
Not in a generation has the enmity run this deep, according to Sergey Rogov, the academic director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, in Moscow. “I spent many years in the trenches of the first Cold War, and I don’t want to die in the trenches of the second,” Rogov said. “We are back to 1983, and I don’t enjoy being thirty-four years younger in this way. It’s frightening.”

3. Putin’s World



Putin’s resentment of the West, and his corresponding ambition to establish an anti-Western conservatism, is rooted in his experience of decline and fall-not of Communist ideology, which was never a central concern of his generation, but, rather, of Russian power and pride. Putin, who was born in 1952, grew up in Leningrad, where, during the Second World War, Nazi troops imposed a nine-hundred-day siege that starved the city. His father was badly wounded in the war. Putin joined the K.G.B. in 1975, when he was twenty-three, and was eventually sent to East Germany.
Posted in one of the grayest of the Soviet satellites, Putin entirely missed the sense of awakening and opportunity that accompanied perestroika, and experienced only the state’s growing fecklessness. At the very moment the Berlin Wall was breached, in November, 1989, he was in the basement of a Soviet diplomatic compound in Dresden feeding top-secret documents into a furnace. As crowds of Germans threatened to break into the building, officers called Moscow for assistance, but, in Putin’s words, “Moscow was silent.”
Putin returned to Russia, where the sense of post-imperial decline persisted. The West no longer feared Soviet power; Eastern and Central Europe were beyond Moscow’s control; and the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union were all going their own way. An empire shaped by Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin was dissolving.
In Moscow, Western reporters could arrange visits to crumbling nuclear-weapons sites, once secret underground bunkers, and half-empty prison camps. The most forbidding commissars of the Soviet Union-leaders of the K.G.B., the Army, and the Communist Party-failed in an attempt to pull off a counter-revolutionary coup d’etat, in August, 1991, and were locked away in a notorious prison called the Sailor’s Rest. Other high-ranking loyalists, refusing the judgment of the new order, administered justice for themselves. The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, knowing that he was about to be arrested, wrote a note (“I lived honestly all my life”), shot his wife, shoved the barrel of a revolver into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
For Westerners caught up in post-Cold War triumphalism, it was easier to take note of the new liberties than of the new anxieties, which were profound for millions of Russians. The fall of the imperial state meant the loss of two million square miles of territory, a parcel larger than India. Tens of millions of ethnic Russians now found themselves “abroad.” Amid newfound freedoms of expression, travel, religion, and association, there was also a palpable sense of disorientation, humiliation, and drift.
In speeches and interviews, Putin rarely mentions any sense of liberation after the fall of Communism and the Soviet Union; he recalls the nineteen-nineties as a period of unremitting chaos, in which Western partners tried to force their advantages, demanding that Russia swallow everything from the eastward expansion of NATO to the invasion of its Slavic allies in the former Yugoslavia. This is a common narrative, but it ignores some stubborn facts. The West welcomed Russia into the G-8 economic alliance. The violence in the Balkans was the worst in Europe since the end of the Second World War and without intervention would likely have dragged on. And Russian security concerns were hardly the only issue at stake with respect to the expansion of NATO; Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries in the region were now sovereign and wanted protection.
“It just felt to me grotesquely unfair, if that word can be used in geopolitics, that yet again the Central Europeans were going to be screwed,” Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s leading adviser on Russia and the region, said. “To tell them they had to live in a security limbo because the Russians would have hurt feelings and be frightened just didn’t hold water.” Nevertheless, American politicians did worry about how reordering the economic and security arrangements of Europe would affect a fallen power and would-be partner. Clinton and his advisers were aware that reactionary political forces in Russia-the so-called “red-brown coalition” of diehard Communists and resurgent nationalists-viewed the United States as exploitative and triumphalist and hoped to gain control of the state.
In 1996, during a summit meeting in Moscow, Clinton went for an early-morning run with Talbott in the Sparrow Hills, near Moscow State University. Clinton had known Talbott since they were students at Oxford, and confided his anxiety. He did not regret the expansion of NATO or the decision, at last, to battle Serbian forces in Bosnia. But he knew that he was making Yeltsin’s political life excruciatingly difficult.
“We keep telling ol’ Boris, ‘O.K., now, here’s what you’ve got to do next-here’s some more shit for your face,’ ” Clinton told Talbott as they ran. “And that makes it real hard for him, given what he’s up against and who he’s dealing with.”
Earlier that year, Yeltsin had summoned Talbott. “I don’t like it when the U.S. flaunts its superiority,” he told him. “Russia’s difficulties are only temporary, and not only because we have nuclear weapons but also because of our economy, our culture, our spiritual strength. All that amounts to a legitimate, undeniable basis for equal treatment. Russia will rise again! I repeat: Russia will rise again.”
When the 1996 election season began, Yeltsin was polling in the single digits. Much of the country held him responsible for economic measures that seemed to help only those close to Kremlin power. For millions, reform-including the “shock therapy” pushed by Western advisers and politicians-meant a collapse in basic services, hyperinflation, corruption, kleptocratic privatization, and an economic downturn as severe as the Great Depression. Most Russians blamed not the corrosion of the old system but, rather, the corruptions of the new. Demokratiya (democracy) was popularly referred to as dermokratiya (shit-ocracy). Yeltsin, benefitting from the support of both the oligarchs and the International Monetary Fund, managed to eke out a victory against his Communist opponent, but he continued to drink heavily, despite a history of heart attacks, and, in his final years in power, was often a sorry, inebriated spectacle.
On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Yeltsin appeared on national television sitting in front of a Christmas tree. Looking blocky and moribund, he said that he was resigning. “I am sorry that many of our dreams failed to come true,” he said. “I am sorry that I did not live up to the hopes of people who believed that we could, with a single effort, a single strong push, jump out of the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past and into a bright, wealthy, civilized future. I used to believe that myself.”
A man who had resisted a coup eight years earlier no longer had the endurance for office or the political imagination to advance the cause. “I have done all I could,” he said. “A new generation is coming.” With that, he appointed as his successor Vladimir Putin, a relatively obscure intelligence agent who had been accelerated through the ranks because he had proved himself disciplined, shrewd, and, above all, loyal to his bosses.
One of Putin’s first decrees was to protect Yeltsin from future prosecution. Then he set out to stabilize the country and put it on a course of traditional Russian autocracy. “As Yeltsin started to withdraw, the old system reconsolidated, and Putin finalized this regression,” Andrei Kozyrev, the foreign minister between 1990 and 1996, said. “The fundamental problem was an inability to complete the economic and political reforms, and so we slipped back into confrontation with the West and NATO.”
Putin revealed his distrust for an open system almost immediately. He saw a state that had become barely functional, and he set about restoring its authority the only way he knew how: manually, and from the top. He replaced the freewheeling anarchy of Yeltsin’s rule with something more systematized, casting aside or coopting the oligarchs of the nineteen-nineties and elevating a cast of corrupt satraps loyal to him-an arrangement that became known as Kremlin, Inc. Every aspect of the country’s political life, including the media, was brought under the “vertical of power” that he constructed. When Yeltsin held office, privately owned television stations, such as NTV, reported on the horrific war in Chechnya and even satirized Yeltsin and other Kremlin leaders on a puppet show called “Kukly.” NTV, which was owned by an oligarch named Vladimir Gusinsky, seemed to test Putin in the beginning, airing discussions about corruption and human-rights abuses; “Kukly” added a puppet depicting the new President. Putin was not amused. Within five months of taking power, he dispatched armed Interior Ministry troops to raid Gusinsky’s headquarters; by 2001, Gusinsky had been forced to give up NTV to more obedient owners and had fled the country. Ever since, television has been under strict federal control.
Putin, in his first few years in office, was relatively solicitous of the West. He was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. When he spoke at the Bundestag, later that month, he addressed its members in German, the language that he had spoken as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden. He even entertained the notion of Russian membership in NATO.
America’s invasion of Iraq, which Putin opposed, marked a change in his thinking. Bush had made some progress with him on bilateral issues such as nuclear-arms proliferation, but by 2007 Putin had grown deeply disenchanted and came to feel that the West was treating Russia as a “vassal.” Robert Gates recalls a security conference, in Munich, in 2007, at which Putin angrily charged that the United States had “overstepped its national borders in every area” and that the expansion of NATO was directed against Russian interests. “People were inclined to pass it off as a one-off,” Gates said. “But it was a harbinger.”
For Putin, it was a story of misplaced hopes and rejection: he became convinced that, no matter how accommodating he might try to be, Western powers-the United States, above all-had an innate disinclination to treat Russia as a full partner and a respected member of the international order. At home, Putin was increasingly drawn to an authoritarian, nationalist conception of the Russian state. He knew that the fall of Communism and Soviet power had left a vacuum-the lack of a “national idea” to replace Marxism-Leninism. When Putin returned to the Presidency for a third term, in 2012, he felt the need to develop a Russian ideology of his own, and called on currents that run deep in Russian political culture: nationalism, xenophobia, and social conservatism. When, four years ago, Putin endorsed anti-gay legislation, for instance, he was playing to entrenched conservative prejudices that predate Soviet Communism-perhaps not for Western-oriented intellectuals and the urban middle class but for many millions of others.
Putin was hardly surprised by the liberal umbrage voiced by the Obama Administration and other Western governments. That confrontation was the point, a means of cementing his authority at home by playing up the notion of an encircled, perpetually menaced Russian state. Although Putin grew up under Soviet atheism, he nonetheless decried secular Americans and Europeans for “rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization.” His conservatism, he insisted, “prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”
He was alarmed by the Obama Administration’s embrace of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. And he was infuriated by the U.S.-led assault on Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. In early 2011, as Libyans challenged Qaddafi, Putin was ostensibly offstage, serving as Prime Minister; his protege Dmitry Medvedev was President, and made a crucial decision not to veto an American-backed U.N. Security Council resolution in favor of military action in Libya. In a rare public split, Putin condemned the decision, comparing the resolution to a “medieval call to the crusades.” In October, 2011, a crowd of Libyans found Qaddafi hiding in a culvert with a gold-plated 9-mm. pistol, dragged him out, and killed him-a gruesome event that was broadcast worldwide. From Putin’s perspective, this was a case study in Western intervention: stir up protests, give them rhetorical support and diplomatic cover, and, if that doesn’t work, send in the fighter jets. The epilogue comes in the form of uncontrollable violence and an inglorious end for the country’s leader. According to Mikhail Zygar, the former editor-in-chief of the independent Internet station TV Rain and the author of “All the Kremlin’s Men,” Putin absorbed the death of Qaddafi as an object lesson: weakness and compromise were impermissible. “When he was a pariah, no one touched him,” Zygar wrote. “But as soon as he opened up he was not only overthrown but killed in the street like a mangy old cur.”
Putin also regarded the anti-Kremlin, pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow, which started in 2011, as a rehearsal for an uprising that had to be thwarted. Together with the upheavals abroad, they compounded his grievances against the West. Obama’s national-security adviser at the time, Tom Donilon, observed that Putin’s concerns were then focussed on domestic political stability and perceived foreign threats to it. He was convinced that “there were efforts under way to undermine his regime,” Donilon said. “From the outset of his second run as President, in my judgment, he was bringing Russia to a posture of pretty active hostility toward the United States and the West.” In September, 2013, after Putin declined requests to turn over Edward Snowden, Obama cancelled a planned summit in Moscow. “The communication really broke after that,” Donilon said. He saw Putin steadily remove non-intelligence personnel from his orbit. “In sharp contrast to the Chinese situation, there’s not a Russian national-security ‘system,’ ” he said. “He works with a very small group of individuals, namely, former K.G.B. and F.S.B. people.”
Dissent has now been effectively marginalized. Opposition candidates are frequently kept off the ballot on legal technicalities, and, when they do make it on, they are denied media coverage, let alone the “administrative resources” enjoyed by pro-Kremlin politicians. Some thirty journalists have been murdered in Russia in the past decade and a half; human-rights groups that receive funding from abroad are registered in Moscow as “foreign agents.” And contemporary Russian television is not only compliant but celebratory. “Imagine you have two dozen TV channels and it is all Fox News,” Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister under Putin and now a critic, said.
Yet those channels bear little resemblance to the dreary Soviet broadcasts with their stilted language and shabby production values. Just as Putin no longer fills prison camps with countless “enemies of the people,” as Stalin did, but, rather, makes a chilling example of a famous few, like the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky or the group Pussy Riot, his propagandists have taken their cue from foreign forms: magazine shows, shout-fests, game shows, and reality shows. There are many figures in public life who are not permitted to appear on any talk show or news program. Russians can still find independent information on Facebook and various Web sites; critical books and magazines are available in stores and online; Echo of Moscow, a liberal radio station, hangs on. But, even in the Internet era, more than eighty per cent of Russians get their news from television. Manipulation of TV coverage is a crucial factor in Putin’s extraordinarily high popularity ratings, typically in excess of eighty per cent-ratings that Donald Trump both admires and envies.
In October, 2012, on the occasion of Putin’s sixtieth birthday, Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of “News of the Week,” a favorite TV show of Putin’s, delivered a long encomium to the President: “In terms of the scope of his activities, Putin can be compared to only one of his predecessors in the twentieth century-Stalin.” NTV aired a documentary, “Visiting Putin,” that sent a broadcaster to his office and his house on the outskirts of Moscow. Although well-informed critics have said that Putin is worth tens of billions of dollars and has twenty residences at his disposal, the program portrayed him as a near-ascetic, who wakes at eight-thirty, lifts weights, swims long distances, eats a modest breakfast (beet juice, porridge, raw quail eggs), and works deep into the night.
“All these TV genres emphasize the stature of Putin, as being above everybody and everything-not just the ultimate boss but the embodiment of Russian statehood,” Masha Lipman, the editor of the journal Counterpoint, said. The most important political space is not the grounds of the Kremlin. It is the space within the President’s skull.
“A well-known person once said, ‘You can get much farther with a kind word and a Smith & Wesson than you can with just a kind word,’ ” Putin says in “President,” a long documentary that aired on state television in 2015. “Unfortunately, he was right.” Later in the documentary, the host asks Putin if he thinks that the West fears Russia, because a “once failing state” is now “suddenly a powerful political player.” He calls Putin “the leader, if I may say, of the conservative part of both European and American society.”
Putin accepts both premises. “The so-called establishment, the political and economic elites of these countries, they like us only when we are poor and standing there with a beggar’s bowl,” he says. “As soon as we start talking about our interests and they start feeling some element of geopolitical competition, well, they don’t like that.”
In February, 2014, hours after President Victor Yanukovych of Ukraine, weakened by months of protests, fled Kiev, Putin made the decision to invade Crimea. He feared that Ukraine would turn its back on Russia and gravitate toward Europe. It was a way for Putin to signal, loudly and rudely, that he was finished going along with the Western-led order. It was personal as well. Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., said that the fall of Yanukovych led Putin to worry about his own power and well-being. “It happened in the heart of the Slavic world, and he could not allow it to become a precedent for a similar movement in Russia against him,” Morell said. “He had to crush it.”
Putin and members of his circle also saw the Syrian civil war as an opportunity to halt a trend that had started with the invasion of Iraq and continued through the downfall of dictators in Egypt and Libya. A former senior U.S. official who has interacted with Russians said, “There was this period of time when the United States, in Putin’s view, was able to use international institutions to take on regimes that we found offensive, right through Libya, and Putin was determined to put a stake in the ground in Syria, to have Russia be at the table, and be able to resist the international community’s efforts to continue this pattern of conduct.” As Russia’s Defense Minister, Sergey Shoigu, remarked last month, Russia’s intervention in Syria “helped solve the geopolitical task of breaking the chain of ‘color revolutions.’ ” Russian television, of course, covered the siege of Aleppo as an enlightened act of liberation, free of any brutality or abuses.
In the United States, the issue of what to do about Russia was a growing point of contention between the Pentagon and the White House. Ukraine’s government wanted advanced weaponry to help battle Russian-backed rebels. Evelyn Farkas, the Pentagon’s most senior policy officer for Russia, strongly supported the request; Obama and others on his national-security team turned it down. Instead, the U.S. provided “nonlethal” aid, including vehicles, radar, and body armor. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 2014, Farkas argued for greater American force, calling Russia’s actions “an affront to the international order that we and our allies have worked to build since the end of the Cold War.”
The Administration believed, with considerable justification, that escalating the conflict would provoke retaliation from Russia, push Putin into a corner, and-since Putin would never let the rebels suffer a battlefield defeat-prove costly for Ukraine. But Farkas disagreed: “We just ignore everything the Russians do in Ukraine because, well, that’s Ukraine and the stakes are so high for Russia there. They wouldn’t risk it in the U.S.” Finally, she gave up trying to convince Obama. “I was so done,” she said. “I was so tired of fighting.” She resigned in October, 2015, and eventually became a foreign-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton, who had sometimes favored the use of military force when Obama did not. “The crazy thing was, when I joined the Clinton campaign, I was, like, Great, I’m not going to have to fight anymore, because she got it on Russia,” Farkas said. “Then it just got worse.”

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Трамп, Путин и Новая Холодная война. The Нью-Йоркер: Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley (2 из 2)