#103 PUBLIC SERVICE

THANK YOU, ALEXIE AND YULIA NAVALNY, FOR YOUR HEARTFELT PUBLIC SERVICE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

ussian President Vladimir Putin gave a State of the Nation address from Moscow, on February 29, 2024.

The State of the Nation is the Russian President’s look into the future, a veritable crystal ball with the benefit of hindsight and the inside knowledge of what is actually going on inside the government offices of the Kremlin.

Putin’s staunchest political rival was put to rest the next day.

Alexie Navalny died in an Arctic Prison colony on Feb 16, 2024. Navalny was not a political dissident. Navalny was a legitimate political alternative to the rule of Putin that hit so close to home he initially found himself marginalized from government machinations, poisoned and then imprisoned with concurrent multi-year prison sentences.

What is going on in Russia has always been a real concern for Westerners, even after the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. Democracy was the polar opposite of the rule of the communist dictators that had brutalized the population since the Bolshevik Revolution against the Russian monarchy in October 1917.

The empires of the world went to war with each other, and the Russians went to war with themselves, over and over again until the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989. The concrete wall was chiseled apart as the Soviet Union (Russian Empire) deconstructed into individual nation states, just as the Global Empires had done in the post-World War One years until about 1948.

Putin has been President or Prime Minister of Russia since 1999, initially changing positions because of the constitutional term limit for one, and then removing the term limit for the other, to be able to rule ad infinitum.

The Russians make another pretense toward democracy in two weeks time, when Putin will be re-elected, one way or another, if you know what I mean. Even the legitimate votes will be tainted because the autocratic machines control media to shape and control the individual conscience of electors.

Alexie Navalny will not vote or be elected, as a ‘soon to be forgotten’ prisoner of conscience now finally resting at peace after a long conflict during Putin’s dirty war with the opposition.

Putin, during the State of the Union Address, celebrated the 10 year anniversary of the Russian Spring when Russia annexed the Crimea from Eastern Ukraine. To solidify the annexation, Moscow spent the next few years building a bridge connecting the land masses and supporting rebellion in the nearby Donetsk Oblast border region prior to sending in a military invasion force two years ago, last week.

And if you ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Western powers just watched the whole conflict escalate. Zelenskyy is so transparently opposite of Putin that he might join you in the back alley for a little tete-a-tete (not to be confused with the Tet Offensive).

Russia had 42 million people living below the poverty line. And now, Putin claims only 13 million live under the poverty line. How the 42 million got there below the line in the first place under Putin’s leadership, he did not say.

Russia has so much income from oil and gas reserves and so many willing customers that the country has been well on the way to solving all the nation’s problems for quite some time now. One can surmise that prior to helping out the 42 million, Russia used the revenue from oil and gas reserves to rebuild the military, and to, what Navalny might describe as corruption, developing and helping out the Russian Oligarchs with close association to the political leadership.

Billions of rubels have been distributed to public organizations and non-profits throughout Russia to help those people living in poverty, according to Putin. Those people who could not be helped were likely sent off to the live war theater in the Ukraine, which Putin still refers to as a ‘special military operation’.

This terminology infers temporary duration of specific importance to the national security in the language of Orwellian double-speak. But the war in the Ukraine has become a long, drawn-out war of attrition for which the Russian people should feel less and less secure about.

The Western world has never fully trusted Russia since 1917 when the Russian Czar and his family (all except Anastasia) were executed by the Revolutionary Guard.

Canadians played hockey with Team Russia as part of a Détente and also because of the hubris of National Hockey League Players who assured themselves of victory for national unity interests until of course Team Canada began to lose.

But few Canadians and even fewer National Hockey League players actually trusted the Soviets. What the hockey players really wanted to do was to beat them.

People embraced Russia post Berlin Wall as the Soviet Era travel restrictions were removed and the political economy moved from communism to democratic capitalism. But other than seeking business opportunities, everyone doubted their genuine interest in peace and reconciliation.

Russia, unfortunately, had been given the benefit of the doubt, because the former communist dictatorship appeared to be moving toward a capitalist democracy.

And Crimea was mistakenly treated as a one off in 2014, with Putin using double-speak again when frequently referencing the results of a referendum as a pretext for annexation.

The world has surely taken notice now that the invasion of a capitalist democracy is an example of Russia’s hostile intent towards the West.

If you are Russian looking out, the answer to solving the war in Ukraine is to ending the autocratic rule inside Russia because people do not want war, only autocrats do.

People do not want to become widows and mourn for fallen fathers and sons and daughters. But time and time again the dictators and autocrats take their militaries into war, sometimes against worse regimes than themselves, but often against more vulnerable enemies. Few dictators go to war to lose, other than the Chinese Dynasties.

Putin correctly pointed out that the United States has hundreds of military bases around the world as he strolled the masculine virtuoso aspects of protecting sovereignty and the safety of the citizens with modern weapon systems such as the Avangard Missile System, which is a hypersonic glide vehicle that can carry conventional and nuclear warheads.

Russia has developed these weapon systems to protect the nation as the people further develop a unique culture in opposite directions to the incrementally cultural deconstruction occurring in the West, according to the three-time (or 4X) president, two-time prime minister, soon to be autocrat for life.

The United States military bases around the world are positioned to prevent a Crimea, although, not sure what happened in 2014, and in response to just such an arms race that can restart on any given Sunday, just as the build-up has started up again.

While the world is aware of Alexie Navalny and his widow Yulia Navalnaya, who spoke to the European Parliament in Strassberg prior to Alexie’s funeral, opposition to Putin is still a minority and even in a democracy a minority does not overturn the leadership.

Among the older generations, the present reality with Putin is likely better than the memory of Joseph Stalin.

Stalin, and to a lesser extent, founding father of Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) Vladimir Lenin, ruled with fear and blood as much as bread and water to a population impoverished by the monarchical rule of Czar Nicholas.

Stalin and Lenin promised the people prosperity without the predatory capitalist methods and income disparities of western powers. The monarchical imperialists and the capitalist exploiters that run the machines that concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands had been driven out.

But Stalin had to continually purge millions of people within the soviets to maintain power toward the so-called more equitable economic political system of socialism, including during the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938.

Putin offers the Russian people something better than that past trauma. However, Putin controls the political conscience of the people through this past, intergenerational trauma, just as much as with the natural human desire not to want for food and water.

The West at one time embraced the new Russia in the hope that better conditions for humanity within the former soviets would mold a more compassionate civilization.

The liberated population post 1989 was embraced in part because of the romanticized notions of the Russian culture that exist in the West. The popular writings of Leo Tolstoy and the critically acclaimed novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, and popular films such as Dr. Zhivago (1965), create positive impressions about the civilization, not the ruling establishment.

But the patience of the West has worn thin. While obtaining political power is extremely competitive in the West, the assassination of political opponents is taboo in democratic societies. And the West no longer has an appetite for expansionist wars over established political borders, despite roots in a past controlled by warring, capitalist empires, colonizing entire civilizations for profit for centuries.

The Western capitalist democracies, though, will not cede control to the Eastern autocrats because of this distaste for war. Defensive wars are seen in the West as a horrible necessity. Even a nuclear attack by Russia will attract reprisal nuclear attacks.

An attack on Europe might result in an attack on Iran, and an attack on New York would surely result in an attack on Moscow. If London goes, Saint Petersburg will fall.

Countries such as China and India, who continue to trade with Russia, will be boycotted. Shipping lines will be blockaded. The world may fall into darkness. Ecosystems on the planet may change. The global economy will become compartmentalized again just as geopolitics had been prior to the push toward globalization.

Disturbing, but that is to where the road, currently being travelled, leads.