Russia’s Remarkable
Renaissance
By F. William Engdahl
March 10, 2015 "ICH"
- "NEO"
-
Something remarkable is
taking place in Russia, and it’s quite
different from what we might expect. Rather
than feel humiliated and depressed Russia is
undergoing what I would call a kind of
renaissance, a rebirth as a nation. This
despite or in fact because the West, led by
the so-called neo-conservatives in
Washington, is trying everything including
war on her doorstep in Ukraine, to collapse
the Russian economy, humiliate Putin and
paint Russians generally as bad. In the
process, Russia is discovering positive
attributes about her culture, her people,
her land that had long been forgotten or
suppressed.
My first of many visits to
Russia was more than twenty years ago, in
May, 1994. I was invited by a Moscow
economics think-tank to deliver critical
remarks about the IMF. My impressions then
were of a once-great people who were being
humiliated to the last ounce of their life
energy. Mafia gangsters sped along the wide
boulevards of Moscow in sparkling new
Mercedes 600 limousines with dark windows
and without license plates. Lawlessness was
the order of the day, from the US-backed
Yeltsin Kremlin to the streets. “Harvard
boys” like Jeffrey Sachs or Sweden’s Anders
Aaslund or George Soros were swarming over
the city figuring new ways to rape and
pillage Russia under the logo “shock
therapy” and “market-oriented reform”
another word for “give us your crown
jewels.”
The human toll of that
trauma of the total collapse of life in
Russia after November 1989 was staggering. I
could see it in the eyes of everyday
Russians on the streets of Moscow,
taxi-drivers, mothers shopping, normal
Russians.
Today, some two decades
later, Russia is again confronted by a
western enemy, NATO, that seeks to not just
humiliate her, but to actually destroy her
as a functioning state because Russia is
uniquely able to throw a giant monkey wrench
into plans of those western elites behind
the wars in Ukraine, in Syria, Libya, Iraq
and well beyond to Afghanistan, Africa and
South America.
Rather than depression, in
my recent visits to Russia in the past year
as well as in numerous discussions with a
variety of Russian acquaintances, I sense a
new feeling of pride, of determination, a
kind of rebirth of something long buried.
Sanctions Boomerang
Take the sanctions war
that the Obama administration has forced
Germany, France and other unwilling EU
states to join. The US Treasury financial
warfare unit has targeted the Ruble. The
morally corrupt and Washington-influenced
Wall Street credit rating agencies have
downgraded Russian state debt to “junk”
status. The Saudis, in cahoots with
Washington, have caused a free-fall in oil
prices. The chaos in Ukraine and EU sabotage
of the Russian South Stream gas pipeline to
the EU, all this should have brought a
terrified Russia to her knees. It hasn’t.
As we have earlier
detailed, Putin and an increasing number of
influential Russian industrialists, some of
the same who a few years ago would have fled
to their posh London townhouses, have
decided to stand and fight for the future of
Russia as a sovereign state. Oops! That
wasn’t supposed to happen in a world of
globalization, of dissolution of the
nation-state. National pride was supposed to
be a relic like gold. Not in Russia today.
On the first anniversary
of the blatant US coup in Kiev that
installed a hand-picked regime of
self-professed Neonazis, criminals, and an
alleged Scientologist Prime Minister Andriy
Yansenyuk, hand-picked by the US State
Department, there was a demonstration in
downtown Moscow on February 22. An estimated
35,000 to 50,000 people showed up—students,
teachers, pensioners, even pro-Kremlin
bikers. They protested not against Putin for
causing the economic sanctions by his
intransigence against Washington and EU
demands. They protested the blatant US and
EU intervention into Ukraine. They called
the protest “Anti-Maidan.” It was organized
by one of many spontaneous citizen reactions
to the atrocities they see on their
borders. Internet satirical political
blogs are making fun of the ridiculous Jan
Paski, until last week the fumbling US State
Department Press Spokesperson.
Not even an evident False
Flag attempt in the London Financial Times
and Western controlled media to blame Putin
for “creating the climate of paranoia that
caused” Boris Nemtsov’s murder is being
taken seriously. Western “tricks” don’t work
in today’s Russia.
And look at US and EU
sanctions. Rather than weakening Putin’s
popularity, sanctions have caused previously
apolitical ordinary Russians to rally around
the president, who still enjoys popularity
ratings over 80%. A recent survey by the
independent Levada Center found 81 percent
of Russians feel negatively about the United
States, the highest figure since the early
1990s “shock therapy” Yeltsin era. And 71
percent feel negatively about the
European Union.
The renaissance I detect
is evident in more than protests or polls,
however. The US-instigated war in Ukraine
since March 2014 has caused a humanitarian
catastrophe, one which the US-steered German
and other western media have blocked out of
their coverage. More than one million
Ukrainian citizens, losing their homes or in
fear of being destroyed in the insane
US-instigated carnage that is sweeping
across Ukraine, have sought asylum in
Russia. They have been welcomed as brothers
according to all reports. That is a human
response that has untold resonances among
ordinary Russians. Because of the wonders of
YouTube and smart phone videos, Russians are
fully aware of the truth of the US war in
eastern Ukraine. Russians are becoming
politically sensitive for the first time in
years as they realize that some circles in
the West simply want to destroy them because
they resist becoming a vassal of a
Washington gone berserk.
Rather than bow to the US
Treasury’s Ruble currency war and the threat
that Russian banks will be frozen out of the
SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank
Financial Telecommunication) international
interbank clearing system, something likened
to an act of war, on February 16, the
Russian government announced that it had
completed its own banking clearing network
in which some 91 domestic credit
institutions have been incorporated. The
system allows Russian banks to communicate
seamlessly through the
Central Bank of Russia.
That is inside Russia
among banks that otherwise were vulnerable
even domestically to a SWIFT cut. Russia
joined the Brussels-based private SWIFT
system as the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989.
Today her banks are the second largest users
of SWIFT. The new system is inside Russia.
Necessary, but not sufficient, to protect
against SWIFT cutoff. The next step in
discussion is joint Russia-China interbank
clearing independent of SWIFT and
Washington. That is also coming.
The following day after
Russia’s “SWIFT” alternative was announced
as operational, Chinese Vice Foreign
Minister Cheng Guoping said China will build
up its strategic partnership with Russia in
finance, space and aircraft building and
“raise trade cooperation to a new level.” He
added that China plans to cooperate more
with Russia in the financial area and in
January Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister
Igor Shuvalov said that payments in national
currencies, de-dollarization, were being
negotiated with
China. China realizes that if Russia
collapses, China is next. Failing empires
try desperate measures to survive.
Russians also realize that
their leaders are moving in unprecedented
ways to build an alternative to what they
see as a morally decadent and bankrupt
American world. For most Russians the
disastrous decade of poverty, chaos and
deprivation of the Yeltsin era in the 1990’s
was reminder enough what awaits should
Russia’s leaders again prostitute themselves
to American banks and corporations for
takeover, Hillary Clinton’s infamous “reset”
of US-Russian relations she attempted when
Medvedev was President. Russians see what
the US has done in neighboring Ukraine where
even the Finance Minister, Natalia Jaresko,
is an American, a former State Department
person.
Russia and its leaders are
hardly trembling behind Kremlin walls. They
are forging the skeleton of a new
international economic order that has the
potential to transform the world from the
present bankruptcy of the Dollar System.
Moscow and Beijing recently announced, as I
discussed in a previous posting, their
project to create a joint alternative to the
US credit rating monopoly of Moody’s, S&P
and Fitch. President Putin’s travel agenda
in the past year has been mind-boggling. Far
from being the international paraiah
Washington and Victoria Nuland hoped for,
Russia is emerging as the land which has the
courage to “just say No!” to Washington.
Russia’s president has
been in Cyprus where possible basing for the
Russian navy was discussed, in Egypt where
General al-Sisi warmly welcomed the Russian
leader and discussed significant economic
and other joint cooperation. Late last year
Russia and the BRICS states agreed to form a
$100 billion infrastructure bank that makes
the US-controlled World Bank irrelevant. The
list grows virtually every day.
The special human side
For me, however, the most
heartening feature of this Russian
renaissance is in the generation which is
today in their late thirties to early
forties—young, highly intelligent and having
experience of both the depravity of Soviet
communist bureaucracy but as well of the
hollow world of US-led so-called “free
market capitalism.” I share some examples
from the many Russians I have come to know
in recent years.
What is unique in my mind
about this generation is that they are the
hybrid generation. The education they
received in the schools and universities was
still largely dominated by the classical
Russian science. That classical Russian
science, as I have verified from many
discussion with Russian scientist friends
over the years, was of a quality almost
unknown in the pragmatic West. An American
Physics professor from MIT who taught in
Moscow universities in the early 1990s told
me, “When a Russian science student enters
first year university, he or she already has
behind them 4 years of biology, 4 of
chemistry, of physics, both integral and
differential calculus, geometry…they are
starting university study at a level
comparable to an American post-doctoral
student.”
They grew up in a Russia
where it was common for young girls to learn
classical ballet or dance, for all children
to learn to play piano or learn a musical
instrument, to do sports, to paint, as in
classical Greek education of the time of
Socrates or Germany in the 1800s. Those
basics which were also there in American
schools until the 1950s, were all but
abandoned during the 1980s. American
industry wanted docile “dumbed-down” workers
who asked no questions.
Russian biology, Russian
math, Russian physics, Russian astrophysics,
Russian geophysics—all disciplines
approached their subject with a quality that
had long before disappeared from American
science. I know, as I grew up during the
late 1950’s during the “Sputnik Shock,”
where we were told as high school pupils we
had to work doubly hard to “catch up to the
Russians.” There was a kernel of truth, but
the difference was not lack of American
students working hard. In those days we
worked and studied pretty hard. It was the
quality of Russian scientific education that
was so superior.
Teaching of the sciences
especially, in Russia or the Soviet Union,
had been strongly influenced by the German
education system of the 1800s, the so-called
Humboldt Reforms of Alexander von Humboldt
and others.
The strong ties in Russian
education with classical 19th Century German
culture and science went deep, going back to
the time under Czar Alexander II who freed
the serfs in 1861, following the example of
his friend, Abraham Lincoln. The ties were
deepened to German classical culture later
under Czar Alexander II prior to the 1905
Russo-Japanese War when the brilliant Sergei
Witte was Transport Minister, then Finance
Minister and finally Prime Minister before
western intrigues forced his resignation.
Witte translated the works of the German
national economist Friederich List, the
brilliant opponent of England’s Adam Smith,
into Russian. Before foreign and domestic
intrigues manipulated the Czar into the
disastrous Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907
against Germany a pact which made England’s
war in 1914 possible, the Russian state
recognized the German classical system as
superior to British empiricism and
reductionism.
Many times I have asked
Russians of the 1980s generation why they
came back to Russia to work after living in
the USA. Always the reply more or less, “The
US education was so boring, no challenge…the
American students were so shallow, no idea
of anything outside the United States…for
all its problems, I decided to come home and
help build a new Russia…”
Some personal examples
illustrate what I have found: Irina went
with her parents to Oregon in the early
1990s. Her father was a high-ranking
military figure in the USSR. After the
collapse he retired and wanted to get away
from Russia, memories of wars, to live his
last years peacefully in Oregon. His
daughter grew up there, went to college
there and ultimately realized she could be
so much more herself back in Russia where
today as a famous journalist covering
US-instigated wars in Syria and elsewhere
including Ukraine, she is making a
courageous contribution to world peace.
Konstantin went to the USA
to work as a young broadcast journalist, did
a master’s degree in New York in film and
decided to return to Russia where he is
making valuable TV documentaries on dangers
of GMO and other important themes. Anton
stayed in Russia, went into scientific and
business publishing and used his facility
with IT to found his own publishing house.
Dmitry who taught physics at a respected
German university, returned to his home St
Petersburg to become a professor and his
wife also a physicist, translates and
manages a Russian language internet site as
well as translating into Russian several of
my own books.
What all these Russian
acquaintances, now in their late 30s or
forties share is that they were born when
the remnants of the old Soviet Russia were
still very visible, for better and for
worse, but grew to maturity after 1991. This
generation has a sense of development,
progress, of change in their lives that is
now proving invaluable to shape Russia’s
future. They are also, through their
families and even early childhood, rooted in
the old Russia, like Vladimir Putin, and
realize the reality of both old and new.
Now because of the brazen
open savagery of Washington policies against
Russia, this generation is looking at what
was valuable. They realize that the
stultifying bureaucratic deadness of the
Soviet Stalin heritage was deadly in the
USSR years. And they realize they have a
unique chance to shape a new, dynamic Russia
of the 21st Century not based on the
bankrupt model of the now-dying American
Century of Henry Luce and FD Roosevelt.
This for me is the heart
of an emerging renaissance of the spirit
among Russians that gives me more than hope
for the future. And, a final note, it has
been policy among the so-called Gods of
Money, the bankers of London and New York,
since at least the assassination in 1881 of
Czar Alexander II, to prevent a peaceful
growing alliance between Germany and Russia.
A prime aim of Victoria Nuland’s Ukraine war
has been to rupture that growing
Russo-German economic cooperation. A vital
question for the future of Germany and of
Europe will be whether Germany’s politicians
continue to kneel to the throne of Obama or
his successor or define their true interests
in closer cooperation with the emerging
Eurasian economic renaissance that is being
shaped by President Putin’s Russia and by
President Xi’s China.
Ironically, Washington’s
and now de facto NATO’s “undeclared war”
against Russia has sparked this remarkable
renaissance of the Russian spirit. For the
first time in many years Russians are
starting to feel good about themselves and
to feel they are good in a world of some
very bad people. It may be the factor that
saves our world from a one world
dictatorship of the bankers and their
military.
F. William Engdahl is
strategic risk consultant and lecturer,
he holds a degree in politics from Princeton
University and is a best-selling author on
oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the
online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook”.