The Strange Election of 2016, Part One: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union and the Emergence of Vladimir Putin

The election of 2016 was in many ways one of the most controversial in American history. It became apparent to many observers that there were highly unusual factors at work in the campaign, particularly what appeared to be an extraordinary effort on the part of coordinated groups outside of the United States to attack a specific candidate and aid her opponent. Therefore, in order to understand the current mass of scandals and controversies surrounding Donald Trump, his principal associates, and a variety of figures in Russia, it will be necessary to understand the historical background of the situation.

Why does all of this matter?

Because to my knowledge, this is the first instance in American history where it can be credibly demonstrated that one of the two major candidates for president was aided by a foreign power with the knowledge, cooperation, and collusion of that candidate. If this matter were allowed to simply pass, it would permanently undermine the integrity of the U.S. electoral process itself and open the U.S. Government to even more foreign lobbyist influence than the considerable amount we see already. It would put U.S. foreign policy effectively under the control of one our adversaries, specifically a nation led by a sworn enemy of the United States. This matter is therefore quite possibly one of the most serious political scandals in American history, dwarfing such scandals as those which ruined the Grant Administration, the various financial scandals under Harding, and the sordid Watergate episode. It is equaled perhaps only by the deliberate effort on the part of Richard Nixon to destroy a potential settlement to the Vietnam War in order to aid his election in 1968.

How will my examination proceed?

There are a great many variables at work here, so sorting all of this out is challenging. I have decided on the following course of action:

1. I will try to explain why the rise and fall of the USSR was so consequential to its most fervent loyalists, and trace the political career of the figure who views the collapse of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe that must be reversed: Vladimir Putin. I will also try to put Russia's current geopolitical and economic situations in their proper context. I've decided to concentrate on the events that, in my view, led the Russian government in general, and Vladimir Putin specifically, to consciously interfere with and attempt to influence a presidential election in the United States as part of a larger program to weaken the United States politically.

2.  I will give a brief outline of the strange, duplicitous, and often mysterious career of Donald Trump, who is, despite his boasting, a failed businessman, and attempt to explain why Trump was so open to the blandishments of Putin's government.

3.  I will examine the careers of those with whom Trump has surrounded himself, especially those with extensive ties to Russian interests. I will also look at the financial machinations of institutions that Trump has used.

4.  I will trace the very serious accusations of money laundering that surround Trump and his associates.

5.   I will give as much detail as I can about the Russian cyber war on the West and the ways in which the Russian propaganda machine utilizes social media to advance Russian policy objectives.

6.  I will examine the roles of Julian Assange and Wikileaks which, despite protestations of neutrality, are actually conscious instruments of Russian policy.

7.  I will examine the increasingly compelling evidence that the Trump campaign and those allied to it actively welcomed, and quite possibly sought out, the assistance of the Russian government in winning the 2016 election.

8.   I will look at the disquieting ties between elements of the American Right and Putin's Russia.

9.  I will look at the onslaught of attacks the Russian cyber warriors launched against Hillary Clinton and the deliberate aid that was given to Trump. I will make note of one fact that rises above any others: The Russian effort was 100% designed to harm Clinton and aid Trump.

10.   I will look at the ways in which Donald Trump has acted to support Russian interests and has rewarded Vladimir Putin for his help.

11. I will finally examine the ways in which Trump and his associates have tried to hinder the investigation into these matters, and the potential Constitutional crisis the United States may be headed for.

Let me say at every juncture I will try to use the best available sources. I will not use information from conspiracy sites or the peddlers of conspiracy hypotheses. I will try to maintain high standards, and I will only say what I can back up with solid data.

So let's begin.

Some Brief Background on Russian Political and Social Norms

Russia has always been ruled by absolute monarchies, oligarchies, aristocracies, or dictatorships. The norms of democratic behavior we associate with the free Western nations are alien to Russian culture, although they are growing in some places within Russia. Russians, in their history, have seen (and perpetrated) an unbelievable amount of violence and brutality. They have been at war with virtually every one of their many, many neighbors at some time in their national story. As a consequence many of them highly value strength and stability, and view excessive personal freedom as disruptive to group unity. Russia's expansion from the area immediately surrounding Moscow in the 15th century to significant territories on three different continents (before Russia sold Alaska to the United States) is perhaps the greatest political expansion in world history, rivaling that of the Mongol Empire of which Russia was once a part. Many Russians think of the amassing of this empire as a great achievement, one which made their nation a global power. A great many Russians are very proud of their nation's culture as well. An unfortunate element of that culture has been devotion to the idea of a man who "rules with a strong hand". Many Russians (not all) have been conditioned to believe that such a figure is necessary to govern such a sprawling country, and assert Russian influence in world affairs.

Moreover, many Russians have been brought up in deeply religious or socially conservative contexts. Many are disdainful of ethnic or racial minorities, and many find homosexuality and other forms of "deviance" deeply disturbing. Paradoxically, bribery and corruption are so deeply embedded in Russian society as to constitute expected norms of behavior. Alcoholism is a severe problem. There is widespread anti-Semitism as well.

For more than 350 years Russians were governed by figures who called themselves Tsar or Tsarina. And it was the collapse of the Tsarist system that brought about huge consequences, ones which are still being felt a century later.

The Communists in Power

The following information may seem superfluous to you. Trust me, there is a point to it.

The catastrophes of the First World War led to the downfall of Russia's monarchy in February/March 1917. A short-lived democratic government took over, the first true democratic state in Russian history, the Provisional Government. In this turbulent period a small, ruthlessly disciplined group, led by an unwavering, politically brilliant fanatic named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, emerged as a powerful force. Calling themselves the Bolsheviks, they stood for a Marxist economic vision combined with a willingness to use any tactics, however brutal, to win. The Bolsheviks—the Russian Communists—seized control of St. Petersburg in a coup d'état against the Provisional Government in October/November 1917, and won control of Moscow soon after. This seizure led to a horrifying civil war that swept over much of Russia, a war that saw many sides contending for power. The Communists and their sympathizers were known as the Reds. Their very diverse opposition, the members of which sometimes worked at cross purposes, were known as the Whites. (The United States briefly but ineffectively intervened on behalf of the Whites.) During this struggle the Tsar and his family were captured, and eventually murdered, by the Bolsheviks. The Red-White civil war lasted until 1921, and was marked by hideous atrocities, some of which were unthinkably barbaric, on both sides. After 7,000,000 people had died of war, famine, and disease, the Reds emerged triumphant. They inherited a ruined and prostrate land. Lenin's government ruled by terror to an amazing degree, formally executing in five years' time 40 times the number of people the Tsarist government had executed in the previous 50. The instrument of terror was known as The Cheka, the Soviet Secret Police. The name The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to designate the country was formally adopted in 1922. Lenin died in 1924 and was entombed in a mausoleum off of Red Square in Moscow, where his (alleged) corpse remains to this day.

In the 1920s, a figure who had been a minor player in the revolution and civil war quietly gathered power and influence, and in December 1927 he seized control of the leadership. A Georgian by birth, his adopted name was Joseph Stalin. Stalin rapidly consolidated power, killing, imprisoning, or exiling his principal opponents. Leon Trotsky, who had been Lenin's right-hand man, was exiled and then chased across the world, until the Soviet secret police caught up with him in 1940 and split his head open with an axe. In the USSR itself Stalin instituted astonishingly sweeping changes, carried out with maximum cruelty and coercion. Industry was expanded at break-neck speed, often with the help of American technical experts and finance. Millions of farmers died in the forced collectivization of agriculture, culminating in a horrific famine in 1932-33 that may have starved more than 5,000,000 people to death, particularly in Ukraine. Stalin lashed out against his potential enemies in the Party by initiating a sweeping purge, which eventually cast its net wider and wider, devouring millions of victims. The horrible forced labor camp system, started under Lenin, expanded to monstrous size and deadliness under Stalin. It was known by its notorious acronym: The GULAG. Its deadliest branch, Kolyma, in northeastern Siberia, exterminated over one million people between 1932 and 1954.

Overseeing the purges, the savage persecution of religion, the murder of farmers who resisted having their land stolen, and the forced labor camps was the successor to the Cheka: The NKVD. The NKVD, itself purged on occasion, had unlimited power of arrest and interrogation, often using the most terrible tortures imaginable on its victims. It struck fear in the hearts of most Soviets. Stalin had crushed all real or imagined opposition by the late 1930s, using NKVD savagery on a wide scale.

Stalin struck a deal with Adolf Hitler in 1939 that made Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union allies. It was during this period, 1939-41, that Stalin seized control of the Baltic States and other territories in eastern Europe. Hitler double-crossed Stalin in 1941, invading Russia, a move that shocked Stalin even though he had received immense amounts of intelligence about the impending attack. As the Germans advanced into Soviet territory, the NKVD massacred entire prisons rather than let the prisoners fall into German hands. The USSR was in a desperate war for survival. The land war in Russia dwarfed any other struggle the world had seen. By its end, Russia and its Western allies (chiefly the U.S., the U.K., and Canada) had crushed Nazi Germany. Stalin refused to let the West know what kind of losses the USSR had sustained, for fear of revealing Russia's true weakness. We now believe somewhere between 27,000,000 and 32,000,000 Soviet citizens died in World War II. (By comparison the U.S. lost 400,000. Over twice that many died in one Soviet city, Leningrad, alone.) The Red Army seized control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the eastern part of Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania. By 1948 Communist governments were firmly in charge in all of them. (The last two states broke from Soviet control, but remained Communist.)

The USSR was challenged by the United States and its postwar president Harry Truman. Greece and Turkey were saved from Communist seizure. NATO was established. The Marshall Plan helped rebuild Western Europe. An attempted Soviet blockade of Berlin was broken in 1948-49. In Korea, a war of conquest launched by the North's Communist government in June 1950 was stopped, after 3 million dead. The NKVD waged war not just against Stalin's internal enemies but the nation referred to in NKVD documents as "The Main Enemy"—the United States. The U.S. had decided on a program called containment to restrict the growth of Soviet power. There would be no attempt by the U.S. to invade Soviet territory, but the U.S. would resist that territory's expansion. The covert arm of the U.S. effort was called the CIA, an offshoot of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. The CIA and the NKVD (renamed and reorganized after the war, but with the same functions) were mortal enemies, and waged a bitter clandestine war against each other. In the early 1950s, the Soviet Secret Police adopted yet another name: The KGB.

It was into this history and into this background that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again) in 1952, in the final months of Stalin's terrible reign.

When Stalin died (finally!) in March 1953, a vicious power struggle ensued in which one of Stalin's henchmen, Nikita S. Khrushchev, eventually emerged victorious. The Soviet Union crushed rebellions in Eastern Europe (East Germany 1953, Hungary and Poland 1956) and sought to keep pace with the growing nuclear might of the United States. Khrushchev denounced Stalin, while omitting the crimes he himself had committed. China, which had come under the control of the homicidal Mao Zedong in 1949, split with the USSR in 1960. Khrushchev erected the Berlin Wall in 1961 and helped bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in 1962 (The Cuban Missile Crisis). Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, drastically expanded the USSR's military power in an effort the make it the equal of the United States.

The USSR aided the U.S.'s opponents in Vietnam, propped up the Castro dictatorship in Cuba and supported the Kim family in North Korea. It financed terrorist movements against the West (at least according to some observers) and backed "liberation movements in Africa. The USSR's military growth came at the expense of the civilian population's prosperity, and the USSR was quite accurately described as "a Third World nation with nuclear weapons". Brezhnev brutally cracked down on domestic dissent, using all the terrible methods of the authoritarian state to silence and intimidate critics. Reform in Czechoslovakia was crushed in 1968. In 1979 the USSR intervened in a domestic crisis in Afghanistan, and in the years that followed unleashed a barbaric war on the Afghan people in an effort to forcibly impose a Communist state. In 1982 Yuri Andropov, the KGB chairman, succeeded Brezhnev in power but only lasted briefly. After another elderly leader died soon after, the Communist Party chose a younger, more dynamic man, Mikhail Gorbachev, as leader of the USSR. Gorbachev initiated serious reforms, which Vladimir Putin hated and despised. Among Gorbachev's policies was the withdrawal of Soviet support for East Germany's decaying government. (See below.) Despite Gorbachev's efforts, the rot and corruption and economic idiocy of the USSR could not be corrected. After a failed coup by Communist die-hards in August 1991, Gorbachev's power diminished, and he was ultimately forced to watch the USSR disintegrate. The secession of Ukraine was absolutely key in this process. The Soviet Union formally collapse on 25 December 1991. Boris Yeltsin became the leader of the new Russian Federation. There were many Russians now living in the newly liberated republics of the former USSR.

What was the legacy of the USSR? Lenin, Stalin, and the other Communist leaders may have caused the deaths of 30,000,000 Soviet citizens in famines, forced labor camps, mass shootings, and various methods of secret police terror. Add to this the 30,000,000 or so dead in the Second World War which Stalin helped bring about, and it is likely that SIXTY MILLION people lost their lives on account of the actions of the Soviet government. The environment of Russia was horrendously polluted, perhaps even permanently damaged in many areas. It was estimated that, by Western standards, 85% of the Soviet people lived in poverty. The infant mortality rate was so bad that Russia stopped publishing it. Corruption reached fantastic levels, permeating every corner of Russian life. The infrastructure of the USSR was on the point of collapse in many areas, many Russian cities were little better than mass slums, life expectancy was below that of any nation in the developed world, and much of the Communist party's membership drifted into organized crime of a particularly nasty variety.

And what was Vladimir Putin's judgment about all this? Let me quote him directly, from 2005:

"Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself."

The statement is chilling and clear in its meaning. Its implication is deeply troubling: Putin intends to restore Russia to its former glory. He intends to restore Russian hegemony in the territory of the old USSR while crushing independence movements within Russia itself, and he is ready to use any means he has to in order to do so.

The Life and Mindset of Vladimir Putin

So it is important to understand the world in which Putin grew up, and the ideas that were firmly inculcated in his brain. In my view the following statements reflect Putin's mentality:

A.   By 1991, with the exception of a few months, Russia had always been an autocracy or oligarchy of some sort, and had never had a freely chosen government—and this was the natural order of things. The "democratization" of Russia after December 1991 was both unnatural and undesirable.

B.   Russia was one of the world's great powers, and its status as such had to be maintained.

C.  The chief barrier to Russia becoming even more powerful and influential was the United States of America, a state which had challenged Soviet power everywhere in the world, and had helped push the USSR to collapse.

D.  The Cold War was Putin's reality from the time he was young until December 1991, when the USSR formally disintegrated. His worldview was shaped by the struggle against the U.S. Putin's entire ethos is that of the old Soviet Secret Police.

E.  How did the successful ruler govern? With a strong hand, brooking no opposition. And that ruler had the right to take whatever he saw fit by way of wealth and power.

F. And this point is absolutely key:

Putin sees the West in general, and the United States in particular, as the enemy of Russian power and ambition. He sees it as his job to weaken the power of both.

Putin's Character: The Assessment of a Russian Author

Having said that, let's examine an excerpt from an incisive biography of Putin by author Masha Gessen. This excerpt is from The Telegraph (UK) for 25 February 2012.

Gessen’s book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, provides a compelling and exhaustive portrait of a man who rose without trace from being a minor KGB and St Petersburg bureaucrat to become what Gessen describes as 'the godfather of a mafia clan’, who has amassed a personal fortune that in 2007 was estimated by one Kremlin insider to be $40 billion...

'I remember in 2005 I was asked to write a piece about Putin as a threat to democracy. I said, you’ve missed the story – he’s not a threat, there is no democracy. And then I realised that the real story was to try and explain who this man was. Because really, nobody knew.’

Gessen argues that as the product of a highly secretive institution, the KGB, Putin has been able to control the details of his life, and shape his own mythology, more than almost any other modern politician – certainly any Western one.

Putin, she writes, was 'a faceless man’ promoted by people who wanted to 'invent’ a president. But that plan was subverted by the man himself and the secret-police apparatus that formed him and continues to sustain him. Rather than being the safeholder of a new era of democracy, as his sponsors had hoped, Putin has turned Russia into 'a supersize model of the KGB’, where there can be no room for dissent or even independent action...

'I think a lot of his resentment goes back directly to that period,’[the fall of the Soviet Union] Gessen says. 'Having been in the KGB at a bad time, having been outside the country when everything was changing… He’s a very vengeful man – that’s one of his particular traits of character. And that vengefulness has carried through. He’s pursuing a vendetta against everybody who was ever opposed to the Soviet Union.’... [My emphasis]

In a sense, Gessen says, Putin’s methods are in a long and ignoble tradition of Russian politics: the exercise of fear. 'That’s true of his private way of conducting politics, and it’s true of his public rhetoric. He is the heir to the great Russian tradition of “we are a country under siege” poli­tical rhetoric, which has been used throughout Russian history.

'And I think Putin believes that. It’s an assumption he was born and bred with, and he’s never thought to challenge it. I don’t think he is a very smart man, nor a very educated man. He’s an average Soviet functionary with stronger than average emotions, and higher than average vindictiveness.

'He’s a tiny, mean guy who will bite you if you get too close; and that’s the kind of country he’s tried to build. And that’s been the extent of Russian foreign policy for the last 12 years. What is Russia’s foreign policy agenda? You can’t figure it out from who Russia becomes friends with or sells arms to or negotiates with, because it’s really simple. Russia wants to be feared. That’s it.’

Gessen likens Putin to 'the godfather of a mafia clan’ ruling Russia. And 'like all mafia bosses, he barely distinguishes between his personal property, the property of his clan and the property of those beholden to his clan.’

Corruption has been virtually institutionalised under his regime. Last year the Transparency International 'Corruptions Perception Index’ ranked Russia joint 143rd out of the 182 countries listed, along with Nigeria and Mauritania.

Putin’s own acquisitiveness is typified, Gessen says, in two apparently minor but telling incidents. In 2005, while hosting a group of American businessmen in St Petersburg, Putin pocketed a diamond-encrusted ring belonging to Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots American football team, after asking to try it on, and allegedly saying, 'I could kill someone with this.’ After a flurry of articles in the US press, Kraft announced the ring had been a gift, preventing an uncomfortable situation from spiralling out of control.

Later that year, Putin was a guest at the Guggenheim museum in New York. At one point his hosts brought out a conversation piece – a glass replica of a Kalashnikov automatic weapon filled with vodka (which can be picked up in Russia for about $300). According to Gessen, Putin nodded to his bodyguards, who took the piece away, 'leaving the hosts speechless’. 'I do suspect it’s a compulsion,’ she says...

She pauses. 'There is a theory that is popular among journalists that to Putin there are enemies and there are traitors. And enemies have a right to exist; he might not like them, but they have a right to exist. Traitors don’t have a right to exist. It’s a nice theory. I like it because I’m such a clear-cut enemy that I should be safe.’ [End]

PUTIN'S SWIFT RISE TO POWER

1975: Joins the KGB, the direct successor to the Cheka and NKVD. He spies on foreigners visiting Leningrad for the first few years of his career.

1984: Putin is assigned to the KGB station in Dresden, East Germany. He becomes fluent in German. Putin's outpost works extensively with the East German secret police, the Stasi. It is said that Putin became involved with industrial espionage during this time.

1989:  Soon after the Berlin Wall is opened up, Germans begin demonstrating against the KGB in Dresden. Putin is said to be enraged and humiliated by the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev's government does nothing to defend the station.

1990:  Putin is literally the last KGB agent out the door of the Dresden headquarters. He is a Lt. Colonel by this time. Putin bitterly resents leaving under the circumstances of Soviet collapse.

1990: Putin becomes a senior advisor to St. Petersburg mayor  Anatoly Sobchak, who had once been his mentor.

1991: Putin formally resigns from the KGB.

1994: Putin becomes deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.

1996: Putin is transferred to Moscow to work as President Boris Yeltsin's first deputy manager.

1998: Putin is named presidential first deputy chief of staff in charge of Russian regions.

July 1998 to August 1999: Putin serves as director of the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the KGB. 

August 1999: Boris Yeltsin appoints Putin prime minister. Yeltsin's regime is noted both for its disarray and its amazing levels of corruption.

4, 9, and 13 September 1999: A horrific string of apartment bombings in three different Russian cities kills 272 people. Prime Minister Putin is quick to blame Chechen separatists for the terror. On 18 September a truck bomb kills 17 more. Evidence will later emerge that shows the FSB was actually behind the operation. Several people investigating the matter are killed under suspicious circumstances in subsequent years. Putin's popularity soars in the wake of the bombings. Putin authorizes a renewed campaign against Chechnya. In the years to follow, tens of thousands of Chechen civilians will be wiped out.

March 2000: Putin is elected President of the Russian Federation.

Yes, in ten years, Putin went from a minor official to the Russian presidency, a meteoric rise.

PUTIN IN POWER

Control of the Media

Putin has relentlessly moved to put Russia's independent media under government control. If you're interested in pursuing this in detail, let me suggest the following links to you:

"How the Media Became One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons"

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/how-the-media-became-putins-most-powerful-weapon/391062/

"The Bloodless Murder of Russia’s Independent Media"

https://freedomhouse.org/blog/bloodless-murder-russia-s-independent-media

"List of journalists killed in Russia"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia

The International Federation of Journalists, the world's largest organization of journalists, has also kept close track of the shocking destruction of press freedom in Russia under Putin.

And here is a quote about this situation:

“In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has. Have you been able to prove that? Do you know the names of the reporters that he’s killed? Because I’ve been – you know, you’ve been hearing this, but I haven’t seen the names."--Donald Trump, December 2015

Treatment of Opposition Figures

Putin has been brutal toward his political opponents, crushing all efforts to mount an effective political resistance to his program. If you are interested in the details, there are many places you can find them. I've included a list from an Australian news site:

(Here: http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/heres-a-list-of-all-the-putin-critics-who-wound-up-murdered/news-story/4e2952b107b0c7159887e303062c9694)

Here’s a list of all the Putin critics who wound up murdered

NOBODY knows if or when Russian activist and writer Vladmir Kara-Murza will emerge from the coma he slipped into last week following his suspected poisoning with an “unknown substance”.

But Mr Kara-Murza’s wife Evgenia is certain he was targeted for his role in convincing the US to impose sanctions on Russian officials over the 2009 death of another vocal opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin — Sergei Magnitsky.

The 35-year-old remains on life support in a Moscow hospital after suddenly falling ill on February 2 as he prepared to fly home to the US for his daughter's birthday. He survived similar suspected poisoning two years ago.

Mr Kara-Murza had been travelling around Russia in recent weeks to promote his documentary about his friend Boris Nemtsov, a liberal opposition politician who was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.

Hours before he fell ill, Mr Kara-Murza had paid tribute to Mr Nemtsov on Facebook, posting a photograph of roses and a portrait of his dead friend with the caption: “We’re here. We remember”.

Like Evgenia Kara-Murza, Russian opposition MP Ilya Ponomarev believes Mr Putin’s cronies are responsible for Mr Kara-Murza’s current condition, just as they were allegedly behind the murders of Mr Magnitsky and Mr Nemtsov.

“For me, there is no doubt that authorisation for such a thing and for the (attempted) assassination of such a public figure like Vladimir (Kara-Murza) could have only come from higher circles of the current authorities,” Mr Ponomarev told the ABC on Wednesday.

“I am not saying it was ordered directly by (Russian President) Vladimir Putin, but it has to be ordered by somebody very close to him.”

Here is a list of the 10 most prominent Putin critics who wound up dead. We can only hope Mr Kara-Murza does not join them.

THE PUTIN CRITICS WHO ENDED UP MURDERED

Boris Nemtsov 2015

Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov was a Russian physicist, statesman and liberal politician opposed to the Putin Government.

He was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant metres from the Kremlin, just hours after urging the public to support a march against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Despite Mr Putin taking “personal control” of the investigation into Mr Nemtsov’s murder, the killer remains at large.

Boris Berezovsky 2013

Boris Berezovsky was a Russian billionaire who fled to Britain after falling out with Mr Putin. While in exile he threatened to bring down the Russian president by force.

He was found dead inside a locked bathroom at his Berkshire home, with a ligature around his neck, in an apparent suicide.

However, a coronial inquest into his death recorded an open verdict after his cause of death could not be established.

The British police had investigated several previous alleged assassination attempts against him.

Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova 2009

Human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov represented journalists (including murdered reporter Anna Politkovskaya) who found themselves in hot water after writing articles critical of Mr Putin. He was shot by a masked gunman near the Kremlin.

Journalist Anastasia Baburova, who was walking with him, was gunned down as she tried to help him.

Sergei Magnitsky 2009

Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in police custody after he was allegedly subject to a brutal beating and then denied medical treatment.

Just before his death he had been hired by British-American businessman William Browder to investigate a multi-million tax fraud against the Russian state which Mr Browder’s businesses had become unwittingly involved in.

Mr Magnitsky was allegedly arrested after uncovering evidence suggesting that police officials were behind the fraud.

In July 2012 he was posthumously convicted of tax evasion. Mr Browder successfully lobbied the US government to impose sanctions on those linked to Magnitsky’s death, sanctions which have been linked to the suspected poisoning of Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Natalia Estemirova 2009

Natalia Estemirova was a journalist who sometimes worked with Anna Politkovskaya (who was also assassinated). She specialised in uncovering human rights abuses carried out by the Russian state in Chechnya. Ms Estemirova was kidnapped outside her home before being shot in the head and dumped in nearby woodland. Nobody has been convicted of her murder.

Anna Politkovskaya 2006

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist who was critical of Putin, accusing him of turning his country into a police state in her book Putin's Russia. She was murdered by contract killers who shot her at point blank range in an elevator in her building.

Five men were convicted of her murder, but the judge found that it was a contract killing, with $150,000 paid by “a person unknown.

Alexander Litvinenko 2006

Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who died three weeks after drinking a cup of tea at a London hotel that had been laced with deadly polonium-210. A British inquiry found that Mr Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who were acting on orders that had “probably been approved by President Putin.”

Mr Litvinenko was a vocal opponent of Mr Putin, accusing him of blowing up an apartment block and ordering the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Paul Klebnikov — 2004

An American investigative journalist of Russian descent, Paul Klebnikov was killed outside his office in a drive-by shooting in Moscow. He was editor in chief of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. He had written about corruption and the personal lives of wealthy Russians, publishing a list of the country’s richest people.

Sergei Yushenkov 2003

Sergei Yushenkov was a Russian politician shot dead as he tried to gather evidence proving the Putin government was behind the bombing of a residential apartment block. He was killed with a single bullet to the chest just hours after his organisation Liberal Russia had been recognised by the Justice Ministry as a political party. [End article]

And then there is this interesting tidbit from USA Today from 2 May 2017, which I am including verbatim:

A former member of the Russian parliament is gunned down in broad daylight in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. A longtime Russian ambassador to the United Nations drops dead at work. A Russian-backed commander in the breakaway Ukrainian province of Donetsk is blown up in an elevator. A Russian media executive is found dead in his Washington, D.C., hotel room.

What do they have in common? They are among 38 prominent Russians who are victims of unsolved murders or suspicious deaths since the beginning of 2014, according to a list compiled by USA TODAY and British journalist Sarah Hurst, who has done research in Russia.

The list contains 10 high-profile critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, seven diplomats, six associates of Kremlin power brokers who had a falling out — often over corruption — and 13 military or political leaders involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including commanders of Russian-backed separatist forces. Two are possibly connected to a dossier alleging connections between President Trump's campaign staff and Kremlin officials that was produced by a former British spy and shared with the FBI. [Emphasis added]

Twelve were shot, stabbed or beaten to death. Six were blown up. Ten died allegedly of natural causes. One died of mysterious head injuries, one reportedly slipped and hit his head in a public bath, one was hanged in his jail cell, and one died after drinking coffee. The cause of six deaths was reported as unknown. [End]

In short, Putin has been willing to resort to the most brutal methods, and has unhesitatingly had his opponents and critics silenced permanently.

And here is yet another pertinent quote about all this:

[In response to a statement that Putin is a killer]:

 “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”--Donald Trump, February 2017

THE GEOPOLITICAL AND ECONOMIC STATUS OF RUSSIA TODAY

Russia's economy underwent a near-total collapse following the disintegration of the USSR. It has recovered strongly, but a striking fact remains: The United States dwarfs Russia economically. Further, Russia's economy has stalled, and has actually contracted in recent years Here are the figures, direct from the CIA World Factbook:

GDP (purchasing power parity):

$3.862 trillion (2016 est.)

$3.822 trillion (2015 est.)

$3.891 trillion (2014 est.)  This ranked Russia 194th among the world's economies for growth.

GDP (official exchange rate):

$1.283 trillion (2016 est.)

Per capita GDP: $26,900, 72nd in the world.

By way of comparison, the U.S. GDP in 2016 was $18.62 trillion, with a per capita GDP of $57,600.

Russia has been plagued by serious inflation in recent years as well. Its largest exports are petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas. (This is important.) Financial experts consider Russia far too reliant on oil for revenue, and therefore highly vulnerable to declines in the price of oil.

The Factbook's assessment:

A combination of falling oil prices, international sanctions, [my emphasis] and structural limitations pushed Russia into a deep recession in 2015, with the GDP falling by close to 4%. The downturn continued through 2016, with GDP contracting by 0.6%. Government support for import substitution has increased recently in an effort to diversify the economy away from extractive industries. Russia is heavily dependent on the movement of world commodity prices and the Central Bank of Russia estimates that if oil prices remain below $40 per barrel in 2017, the resulting shock would cause GDP to fall by up to 5%.

Geopolitically, Russia has felt threatened by the expansion of NATO eastward since the fall of the USSR. All of the former Soviet-controlled states of East Europe are in it now, as well as the Baltic states. Political observers agree that weakening or destroying NATO is a key Russian objective.

Russia has acted to undermine the European Union as well, which I will detail later. It has supported political movements aimed at breaking up the EU, especially in support of the Brexit Referendum in the UK in 2016.

Putin's Russia has acted aggressively not only in Chechnya, where it waged a brutal war between 1999 and 2009 (the Second Chechen War), which may have caused anywhere from 25,000 to 80,000 deaths, but it also waged a very brief, ugly conflict with Georgia in August 2008. Most alarmingly, perhaps, has been the clash with Ukraine. Ukraine gained independence in 1991. In 2004 an election now widely viewed as rigged installed a pro-Russian president named Viktor Yanukovych. The disputed election triggered massive demonstrations, and soon Yanukovych stepped down. However, in 2010, he was elected president in a non-controversial election. In 2013 his government began to move away from the EU and toward closer relations with Russia. Demonstrations erupted in Kiev. Vladimir Putin gave Yanukovych significant economic help. In early 2014 protests became deadly. Yanukovych was driven out. Violence seemed to be along ethnic lines, with ethnic Russians supporting Yanukovych and ethnic Ukrainians opposing him. The president was deposed. To quote the BBC on what happened next, "27-28 February [2014]: Pro-Russian gunmen seize key buildings in the Crimean capital, Simferopol. Unidentified gunmen in combat uniforms appear outside Crimea's main airports. 1 March: Russia's parliament approves President Vladimir Putin's request to use force in Ukraine to protect Russian interests. 16 March: Crimea's secession referendum on joining Russia is backed by 97% of voters, organisers say, but vote condemned by West as a sham. 17 March: The EU and US impose travel bans and asset freezes on several officials from Russia and Ukraine over the Crimea referendum. 18 March: President Putin signs a bill to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federation."

Pro-Russian separatists have been active in Ukraine, and despite Putin's denials, Russian military forces appear to have invaded areas of eastern Ukraine, aiding the rebels. The U.S. pledged aid for Ukraine in 2014. Both the U.S. and the EU imposed significant economic sanctions. You'll see later why all this matters so much. Oh, one note: a key figure in getting Viktor Yanukovych elected was a man named Paul Manafort. We'll come across him later, in much greater detail. But just a brief quote from a Time magazine article:

 A U.S. embassy cable sent from Kiev to Washington in 2006 described Manafort’s job as giving an “extreme makeover” to a presidential hopeful named Viktor Yanukovych, who had the backing of the Kremlin and most of Ukraine’s wealthiest tycoons. His Party of Regions, the cable said, was “a haven” for “mobsters and oligarchs.”

Much more to come later.

In sum:

--Vladimir Putin is an iron-fisted ruler in the long and tragic Russian tradition. He does not hesitate to kill or imprison those who oppose him.

--He sees the fall of the USSR, one of the worst polities in human history, as a catastrophe.

--Putin views the West, especially the United States, with hostility. He is an enemy of the U.S.

--Russia's economic situation is precarious.

--Putin's foreign policy has been aggressive, as he answers what he sees as threats to Russian hegemony in East Europe and to Russia's internal stability.

Into this picture will enter a very interesting figure. We'll deal with his career next.

Here is Part Two: http://jmillersexcerpts.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-strange-election-of-2016-part-two.html