Gorbachev Warns That America And Russia Are Preparing For 'Many Years Of Confrontation'

The US and Russia are preparing for “many long years of confrontation,” according to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Writing on Wednesday in the Russian state newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta, the 83-year-old delivered his grim assessment, warning that the frosty relations between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin could have “terrible consequences”.

The "new Cold War", as Gorbachev recently described increasing tensions between Washington and Moscow, was brought about by the crisis in Ukraine, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its military encroachment into the state on the side of pro-Russian separatists.

The elder statesmen, whose policies of perestroika and glasnost led to the dissolution the Soviet Union in 1991, wrote: "The result of events in recent months is a catastrophic fall of the level of trust in international relations. Judging by the recent declarations, diplomats of both sides are preparing for many long years of confrontation. This is extremely dangerous."

He continued: “With such emotions running so high, as we have now, we may not survive through these years. Somebody may just lose control of himself. We must do our best to overturn this tendency.”

More at the Huff. Post

Mauerfall Berlin 9.11.1989

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Belarus: 20 years under dictatorship and a revolution behind the rest of Europe

Tucked away behind the vast, charmless apartment blocks and broad thoroughfares so beloved of Soviet town planners, the Minsk History Museum boasts Belarus’s best exhibition of the summer. Back in the BSSR (the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, as it was then known) is a showcase of Soviet memorabilia and propaganda that takes visitors back a generation to a time when this was one of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics.

Or is it? Some would argue you don’t have to enter the exhibition to be Back in the BSSR. Streets in the capital are still named after Marx and Engels. A statue of Lenin dominates a city centre square. There’s even a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the original Soviet secret policeman and the first statue toppled in Moscow when the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991. A metro ride costs 20p. People smoke indoors. Almost no one has tattoos. This feels like a place that is at least one revolution behind the rest of us, maybe more.

And then there is the leader. This summer, Europe’s longest-serving ruler - the only post-Soviet president that Belarus has known - marks 20 years in office. Since Alexander Lukashenko came to power in 1994, parliament has been emasculated, political opponents driven into exile or disappeared, and the media have been silenced. This is a country where the KGB is still called the KGB. It is the last European country to use the death penalty – a bullet to the back of the prisoner’s head. Last month, Lukashenko announced he intended to bring back “serfdom” to “teach the peasants to work more efficiently”.

More at The Guardian

The Putin System

The Putin System - a point-of-view documentary that presents an ominous view of what Putin is willing to do to ensure Russia regains its position on the world stage.
The Putin System chronicles the remarkable life of Putin, a tough, young leader who is not afraid to make harsh decisions and holds a secret purpose-to restore the old Russia of his dreams.
The Putin System is directed by Jean-Michel Carré in association with Jill Emery for the French production company Les Films Grain De Sable.

The dying remorse of Mikhail Kalashnikov

It´s a question that seems to have haunted Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, as he pondered the fate of his own soul towards the end of his life – despite his public protestations to the contrary.

He may have made little money from the wildly successful weapon of choice for the world’s revolutionaries, drug cartels, terrorists, kidnappers, pirates and soldiers, saying once he would have been better off making a lawn mower. But he was feted by the Russian Motherland for whom it was developed towards the end of World War II and perfected in 1947, the year for which the Avtomat Kalashnikova is named. His awards from the Soviet authorities included the Order of Lenin and the Hero of Socialist Labour.

Now, however, it has emerged that Mr Kalashnikov was suffering “spiritual pain” at the thought of the slaughter his invention had wrought, and the “devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression” his assault rifle fed.

More on Independent.ie

Rockefeller Global Tentacles Exposed in 1959 by the Soviet Union

The Rockefeller global oil and banking empire has been the subject of much critical commentary on the Internet. However, the Rockefeller Octopus’s tentacles into every facet of America’s banking, oil (through their control of Standard Oil), military, educational, and foreign policy apparatus was exposed in a monograph prepared by the Soviet Union in 1959. An English translation of the Soviet article prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Documents Division and dated December 16, 1959, was uncovered from the CIA’s archives. The paper is titled: “About Those Who Are Against Peace.”
The arguments in the Soviet paper generally concur with President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the American people shortly before the inauguration of President Kennedy in January 1961. In his speech, Eisenhower warned the American people about the dangers posed to America’s democracy by the “military-industrial complex.”

There is nothing in the Soviet paper that rings false about the Rockefellers… The oligarchic family has exercised control over America’s foreign policy through their part-sponsorship of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg Group – all three shadowy organizations of the world’s elite class who determine monetary, foreign, and military policies behind closed doors. Rockefeller funding of Columbia University and the University of Chicago have helped inflict on the United States some of the most brazen neo-conservatives serving inside and outside of government.
The paper states “In 1957, the Rockefeller oligarchy of American oil industrialists controlled a capital of 61.4 billion dollars. The precise size of the Rockefeller fortune is a state secret in America: the American press noted at one time that special measures are taken so that data concerning the largest fortunes of the U.S. are not published.”

Red Ice Creations - Strategic Culture Foundation

Coming Back

On May 18, 1944, Joseph Stalin deported 218,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia. Using personal testimonies, this film tells the story of the Tatars' expulsion from their homeland and their long struggle to return.
It was only in 1989, with the opening up of the Soviet Union, that they were able to come back in large numbers. Most, finding Russians living in their former homes, built shacks in which to live. Today, 300,000 Tatars live in Crimea - 5,000 of them still in shacks. Even those with houses suffer because they only have minority status. Despite this, 150,000 more are still hoping to return home.

Al Jazeera

Soviet War Paintings

Soviet War Paintings Part 1 – Part 2

Echoes of Soviet era as Russian PM formally accepts nomination to run for president

Chants rang out around Luzhniki stadium in Moscow: "Putin! Putin! Putin!", which gave way to "The people! Medvedev! Putin!" and then "Russia! Russia! Russia!" Delegates from the ruling United Russia party dutifully applauded while youth activists, bussed in from the provinces, waved bulky flags for two hours straight.

But one man was not happy. "When you scream 'Putin! Medvedev!' that's well enough," Vladimir Putin called out from the podium as he officially accepted his party's nomination for a presidential election that he is all but assured of winning. "But when you say 'Russia!' the whole room should shout," he ordered.

A great roar rose up as Putin loudly banged the podium in time to his subjects' obedient chants.

After four years as prime minister, a role he took up because of a constitutional ban on any individual serving more than two consecutive terms as president, Putin is not just returning to the Kremlin. He is embracing a neo-Soviet cult of personality that has transformed from publicity stunts showing off his physique and prowess to all-out adoration intent on proving that no other leader is fit to run Russia.

The Guardian

The Battleship Potemkin

The Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein, has been called one of the most influential propaganda films of all time, and was named the greatest film of all time at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. (Wikipedia)

Masquerade in Moscow

The Russian Bolshevik revolution was not a spontaneous uprising of the masses.  It was planned, financed, and orchestrated by outsiders.  Some of the financing came from Germany which hoped that internal problems would force Russia out of the war against her.  But most of the money and leadership came from financiers in England and the United States.  It was the perfect example of the Rothschild formula in action.

This group centered mainly around a secret society created by Cecil Rhodes, one of the world's wealthiest men at the time. The purpose of that group was nothing less than world dominion and the establishment of a modern feudalist society controlled by the world's central banks.  Headquartered in England, the Rhodes inner-most directorate was called the Round Table.  In other countries, there were established subordinate structures called Round-Table Groups.  The Round-Table Group in the united States became known as the Council on Foreign Relations.  The CFR, which was initially dominated by J.P. Morgan and later by the Rockefellers, is the most powerful group in America today.  it is even more powerful than the federal government, because almost all of the key positions in government are held by its members.  In other words, it is the United States government.

More on Activist Post

Russian human rights activist Yelena Bonner dies at 88

The Russian human rights activist Yelena Bonner has died at the age of 88 after a long illness. She married the nuclear scientist and fellow human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. Mrs Bonner became active in the human rights movement in the 1960s, and was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a rights monitoring body. She swiftly became one of the Soviet Union's leading rights activists.

When her husband was sent into internal exile for his activism, it was Mrs Bonner that made sure his writing got out, and when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, it was his wife who collected the award on his behalf.

She was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation in 1984 and exiled to Gorki, but she was allowed to travel to the US a year later. Sakharov died in 1989, but Yelena Bonner continued her political activism and criticism of the Russian political system.

BBC News – Sakharov Center

Belarus president re-elected

Alexander Lukashenko has won a fourth term as the president of Belarus following an election marred by a violent police crackdown on demonstrators and the arrest of opposition challengers.

The state electoral commission said early on Monday that Lukashenko had won 79.7 per cent with 100 per cent of votes counted in the former Soviet republic. It put voter turnout in sub-zero temperatures at more than 90 per cent.

Separately, Russian election observers invited by the Belarus leader ruled that the election was legitimate.
But international observers and western governments accused Belarus' leader of using fraud and violence to remain in power after more than 16 years of repressive rule, saying on Monday that Lukashenko's re-election had been seriously flawed.
US and European leaders have criticized Lukashenko for a wave of violence directed at rival presidential candidates and their supporters in the hours after the election.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the count in Sunday's vote was "bad or very bad'' in half the country's precincts.
It also strongly criticised the violent dispersal by riot police of a post-election protest rally.

Lukashenko on Monday bristled at the criticism of how police handled the demonstration, saying it was beyond the OSCE election observers' mandate. "What does what happened at night have to do with the election? The election was over,'' he said at a news conference. Al Jazeera 

Belarus strongman brutally suppresses post-election uprising - The Telegraph

Belarus president's rival Vladimir Neklyayev dragged from hospital bed – The Guardian

Drawings from the Gulag

Drawings from the Gulag consists of 130 drawings by Danzig Baldaev (author of the acclaimed Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia series), describing the history, horror and peculiarities of the Gulag system from its inception in 1918. Baldaev's father, a respected ethnographer, taught him techniques to record the tattoos of criminals in St. Petersburg's notorious Kresty prison, where Danzig worked as a guard. He was reported to the K.G.B. who unexpectedly offered support for his work, allowing him the opportunity to travel across the former U.S.S.R. Witnessing scenes of everyday life in the Gulag, he chronicled this previously closed world from both sides of the wire. With every vignette, Baldaev brings the characters he depicts to vivid life: from the lowest "zek" (inmate) to the most violent tattooed "vor" (thief), all the practices and inhabitants of the Gulag system are depicted here in incredible and often shocking detail. In documenting the attitude of the authorities to those imprisoned, and the transformation of these citizens into survivors or victims of the Gulag system, this graphic novel vividly depicts methods of torture and mass murder undertaken by the administration, as well as the atrocities committed by criminals upon their fellow inmates.

Artbook

More images on itsdeadlicious.com and more about gulags on the very interesting gulaghistory.org