Putin, Vladimir

Putin, a career apparatchik in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a loyal agent of the Soviet secret police, the KGB (and head of its successor, the FSB), was now not only proclaiming himself to be a Christian, but had donned the mantle of global protector of Christianity and morality — to the rejoicing huzzahs of many Christians and conservatives in the West.

However, before bestowing Defender of the Faith accolades on Vladimir the Pious, we would do well to look carefully behind and beneath the highly contrived Christian image being spun by the Kremlin’s public relations department and gullible Christians with short memories in the West.

Sadly, the quotations noted are not unique, nor restricted to wild outliers.

Former GOP presidential candidate and author/commentator Patrick J. “Pat” Buchanan is a paleoconservative who seems to be enthralled with the “former” KGB chief. “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity,” Buchanan wrote, in one of his many pro-Putin syndicated columns.

The Buchanan column just quoted is entitled “Whose Side Is God on Now?,” not too subtly implying that Putin and his Kremlin comrades are now Heaven’s standard bearers against the decadent, post-Christian West.

Well, it is true, is it not, that President Vladimir Putin stands virtually alone among national leaders of the major powers in publicly proclaiming his Christian identity, and in condemning homosexual “marriage” — while leaders of the so-called Christian West have adopted the politically correct line that these unnatural unions are now sacrosanct? And is it not true that Putin and the Russian government have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild hundreds of Russian Orthodox churches destroyed during the militant atheism of the Soviet era? Has he not restored sacred holidays of the Julian Christian calendar? Did he not sign a national law last year outlawing advertisements for abortion? To which we must answer: yes, yes, yes, yes; true, true, true, true.

Additional “facts” can be cited to paint an even more striking image of Putin as pious champion of Christianity: crossing himself and kissing the icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary that he presented to Pope Francis during his 2013 visit to the Vatican; numerous appearances with (and blessings and endorsements from) Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church and other Christian church leaders; signing into law a “ban on the propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia” directed at children, while President Obama promotes the LBGT agenda at every level and every opportunity; speaking out against the persecution and murder of Christians by Islamic jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

All of this has led Catholic author/blogger Stephen K. Ryan to write glowingly of “born-again Christian” Putin:

Is Russian leadership more Christian than leadership in the US? Is the Russian Government more Christian than George Bush or Obama ever imagined the US might be? The answer to both questions is Yes, and thanks to born-again Christians, Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, Christian influence in matters of state is rapidly on the rise in Russia. Let’s look at the facts.

Yes, let’s look at the facts; all of the facts — and in context. First and foremost, in any review of the basics regarding Putin, the most outstanding fact is that he is a creature of the KGB. Our space limitations here will not allow even a partial cataloging of Putin’s many criminal actions that eclipse his much-publicized Christian statements and moral posturing. Here are just a few items that seem to have slipped down the memory hole for those who now see him as some kind of new global moral leader:

• Assuming and exercising dictatorial powers throughout Russia, unprecedented since Stalin’s time.
• Appointing more KGB/FSB agents to government positions than at any previous time in Soviet or Russian Federation history. As reported by the BBC and other news agencies, studies show that 80 percent or more of Putin’s political appointees and administrators come from the security/intelligence agencies.
• Murdering Russian citizens through a number of FSB-run “Chechen terrorist attacks” in order to whip up public support for invading Chechnya. These crimes have been well documented in, for instance, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State by David Satter, former Russian correspondent for the Financial Times of London and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University; Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror by FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko; The Assassination of Russia, a documentary film by Jean-Charles Deniau; The Litvinenko File by BBC reporter Martin Sixsmith; Disbelief, a documentary film by Andrei Nekrasov; and The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow John Dunlop.
• Invading, bombing, and occupying Chechnya, including destroying much of the country and wantonly killing many civilians, including women and children. Independent estimates of the number of civilian casualties in Chechnya range from 25,000 to 200,000.
• Restoring a bust of Lenin’s first Cheka chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky (who proclaimed, “We stand for organized terror”) to a place of honor at the notorious KGB Lubyanka headquarters, and attempting to restore a giant statue of Dzerzhinsky to its former place of honor in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square.
• Murdering Russian journalists, whistleblowers, and dissidents who are brave enough to challenge his corrupt dictatorship. Famous investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya is the most well-known example, but Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists cite dozens of additional cases and have named Putin one of the world’s top “predators” of journalists. The 2006 poison murder of FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko in Britain is well known, but less known are the cases of General Trofimov, Movladi Baysarov, opposition Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, co-chairman of the Liberal Russia political party Sergei Yushenkov, Kovalev Commission member Yuri Shchekochikhin, human rights attorney Stanslav Markelov, human rights activist Natalia Estemirova — and many others.
• Expanding the “soft persecution” of Christian churches and organizations that are outside of the rigid state control exercised within the Russian Orthodox Church.

Concerning the last point above, organ­izations such as the Keston Institute of Oxford, England; International Christian Concern; and others have documented that Russia’s Ministry of Justice has been using the pretext of “looking for religious extremism” to carry out illegal inspections, harassment, and suppression of Baptist, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Adventist, Latter Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and independent churches and Christian organizations. Churches other than the ROC find it difficult to get visas for priests and ministers to come to Russia, or to get permission to have meetings for Bible studies, prayer groups, and worship services.

While Putin was hailed by pro-life forces in the West for signing a law restricting advertising for abortion, Russia maintains the highest abortion rate (37.4 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44) of any country reported in United Nations data. What’s more, the government still provides free abortion service. The official number of abortions in Russia hovers around one million annually, but pro-life critics say the actual number may be several times that. The Putin government, however, does appear to be somewhat in earnest on this issue, but for practical, not moral reasons. With a falling birthrate and facing demographic implosion, Russia needs to dramatically ramp up its fertility rate to sustain any hope of futurity.

Vladimir Putin’s condemnations of the depravity of modern, anti-Christian culture have won rave reviews from Western Christians, which might lead many to think that Putin’s Russia is some exemplary redoubt of wholesome virtue. However, Russia today is every bit as degenerate (if not more so) as the fleshpots of the West. Pornography, child pornography, prostitution, child prostitution, sex trafficking of women and children, drug trafficking, drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, homicide, and other social pathologies are rampant throughout Russia and cannot simply be blamed on the “decadent West.”

As recounted by the great journalist Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006), the bravest of all the many Putin-critics to be systematically assassinated, in her book Putin’s Russia:

At the beginning of the Great Matins service there stood, shoulder to shoulder with Putin as if at a military parade, Prime Minister Fradkov and Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin’s new éminence grise, head of the president’s office, a man of diminutive stature with a large head. The three men clumsily and clownishly crossed themselves, Medvedev making his crosses by touching his hands to his forehead and then to his genitals. It was risible. Medvedev followed Putin in shaking the patriarch’s hand as if he were one of their comrades, rather than kissing it as prescribed by church ritual. The patriarch overlooked the error. The spin doctors in the Kremlin are effective but, of course, pretty illiterate in these matters and had not told the politicians what to do. Alongside Putin there stood the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, who had been behind the rebuilding of the cathedral and who alone knew how to invoke the protection of the Cross in a competent manner. The patriarch addressed Putin as ‘Your Most High Excellency,’ which made even those not directly involved wince. Given the numerous ex-KGB officers occupying top government positions, the Easter Vigil has now taken over from the May Day parade as the major obligatory national ritual.

The beginning of the Great Matins service was even more comical than the handshakes with the patriarch. Both state television channels did a live broadcast of the procession around the cathedral that precedes the service. The patriarch participated in this, despite being ill. The television commentator, who was a believer and theologically knowledgeable, explained to viewers that in the Orthodox tradition, the doors of the church should be shut before midnight because they symbolize the entrance to the cave where Christ’s body was placed. After midnight the Orthodox faithful taking part in the procession await the opening of the church doors. The patriarch stands on the steps at their head and is the first to enter the empty temple where the Resurrection of Christ has already occurred.

When the patriarch had recited the first prayer at the doors of the temple, they were thrown open to reveal Putin, our modest president, shoulder to shoulder with Fradkov, Medvedev, and Luzhkov.

You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. An evening of comic entertainment on Holy Night. What is there to like about this individual? He profanes everything he touches.

The Russian Orthodox patriarch at the time of Putin’s Easter show was patriarch Aleksi II, who died on December 5, 2008. Lt. Gen. (r) Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest Soviet bloc official to defect to the United States, writes of Aleksi II, “The KGB had carried him under the codename ‘DROZDOV’ and awarded him its Certificate of Honor, as was learned from a KGB archive accidentally left behind in Estonia.”

Additionally, we know more from “original KGB documents known as the Mitrokhin Archive (described by the FBI as the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source).” We also know more “from Politburo documents released by Father Gleb Yakunin, vice chairman of a Russian parliamentary commission that investigated the KGB’s manipulation of the church.”

And with those details in hand, the “election” of a new patriarch in 2009 was quite a sight to behold:

On January 27, 2009, the 700 Synod delegates assembling in Moscow were indeed presented with a slate listing three candidates. All, however, belonged to the secret KGB army: Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk worked for the KGB under the code name “MIKHAYLOV”; Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk has just been identified as having labored for the KGB under the codename “OSTROVSKY”; Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga was recently discovered to have been listed under the codename “TOPAZ”.

When the bells at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow announced that a new patriarch had been elected, Metropolitan Kirill, aka “MIKHAYLOV,” proved to be the winner. Presumably, the KGB/FSB considered him to be in a better position to carry out its tasks abroad, where he had directed his efforts during most of his professional life. In 1971, the KGB had sent him to Geneva (Switzerland) as a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church to the World Council of Churches (WCC), the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries. His task was to use his position in the WCC to spread the doctrine of Liberation Theology—a Marxist religious movement born in the KGB—throughout Latin America. In 1975, the KGB had infiltrated “MIKHAYLOV” into the WCC’s central committee, and in 1989 the KGB had appointed him chairman of the Russian patriarchate’s foreign relations as well—positions he still held when he was “elected” patriarch. Indeed, in his acceptance speech “MIKHAYLOV” announced that he would establish religious television channels in Russia that would broadcast abroad.

It is also worthwhile to note that Lenin and Stalin were the masterminds behind the plot to eradicate Christianity in Russia and Ukraine. In 1996, Yale University Press’s Annals of Communism series published a collection of documents from Vladimir Lenin’s secret archive. On March 19, 1922, amid a mass famine in Russia and Ukraine, Lenin issued the following orders:

It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping [short of] crushing any resistance.

This kicked into high gear under Stalin. On September 11, 1932, Stalin wrote to one of his henchmen:

At this point the question of Ukraine is the most important. The situation in Ukraine is very bad. If we don’t take steps now to improve the situation, we may lose Ukraine. The objective should be to transform Ukraine, in the shortest period of time, into a real fortress of the U.S.S.R.

A year later, Pavel Postyshev, another Stalin henchmen, told a meeting of the Central Committee in Ukraine, “Under the direct leadership and directions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and personally of comrade Stalin, we smashed the Ukrainian nationalist counterrevolution.”

Stalin’s method of destroying true Christianity in Ukraine was addressed in a 1953 speech by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and dedicated his life to bringing the crime to an end. In this speech to the Ukrainian community of New York commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet-orchestrated Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933, which left somewhere between seven and twelve million dead, Lemkin explained:

Going along with this attack on the intelligentsia was an offensive against the churches, priests and hierarchy, the ‘soul’ of Ukraine. Between 1926 and 1932, the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, its Metropolitan Lypkivsky and 10,000 clergy were liquidated. In 1945, when the Soviets established themselves in Western Ukraine, a similar fate was meted out to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. That Russification was the only issue involved is clearly demonstrated by the fact that before its liquidation, the Church was offered the opportunity to join the Russian Patriarch at Moscow, the Kremlin’s political tool.

Only two weeks before the San Francisco conference, on 11 April 1945, a detachment of NKVD troops surrounded the St. George Cathedral in Lviv and arrested Metropolitan Slipyj, two bishops, two prelates and several priests. All the students in the city’s theological seminary were driven from the school, while their professors were told that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had ceased to exist, that its Metropolitan was arrested and his place was to be taken by a Soviet-appointed bishop. These acts were repeated all over Western Ukraine and across the Curzon Line in Poland. At least seven bishops were arrested or were never heard from again. There is no Bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church still free in the area. Five hundred clergy who met to protest the action of the Soviets, were shot or arrested.

Throughout the entire region, clergy and laity were killed by hundreds, while the number sent to forced labour camps ran into the thousands. Whole villages were depopulated. In the deportation, families were deliberately separated, fathers to Siberia, mothers to the brickworks of Turkestan and the children to Communist homes to be ‘educated’. For the crime of being Ukrainian, the Church itself was declared a society detrimental to the welfare of the Soviet state, its members were marked down in the Soviet police files as potential ‘enemies of the people’. As a matter of fact, with the exception of 150,000 members in Slovakia, the Ukrainian Catholic Church has been officially liquidated, its hierarchy imprisoned, its clergy dispersed and deported.

These attacks on the Soul have also had and will continue to have a serious effect on the Brain of Ukraine, for it is the families of the clergy that have traditionally supplied a large part of the intellectuals, while the priests themselves have been the leaders of the villages, their wives the heads of the charitable organizations. The religious orders ran schools, and took care of much of the organized charities.

That the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill/“MIKHAYLOV,” would praise the two men responsible for all this tells all you need to know about the state religion of Putin’s Russia. It also says a lot about what kind of fate awaits any true Christians who would fall under Russian domination.

Hope for the besieged Christians of the world belongs not in the hands of Vladimir Putin, but in a new American president who will defend them from both the Islamic State and the KGB.

Building a New World Order

Somewhat behind the scenes but hardly in total secrecy, Putin and his supposed nemeses among the global government-promoting Western establishment are in fact working together toward what they call a “New World Order.” Toward that end, globalists have long been advancing what they refer to as “convergence.” In essence, for the world to be ruled under a single global regime, East and West, Third World and First World, will all have to “converge” — meet in the middle, perhaps. (See article Putin: Key Player in the ‘New World Order.’”) In recent decades, however, it has become clear that the scheme involves making the United States and Europe more like China and Russia, rather than the other way around, playing the public on both sides to accelerate the process.

This, too, has been a long-term operation. As far back as 1953, then-Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither, an important operative with the global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), explained the strategy to congressional investigator Norman Dodd. The major tax-exempt foundations and key government insiders, he explained, were working “to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” The White House was apparently fully on board as well.

This, too, has been a long-term operation. As far back as 1953, then-Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither, an important operative with the global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), explained the strategy to congressional investigator Norman Dodd. The major tax-exempt foundations and key government insiders, he explained, were working “to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” The White House was apparently fully on board as well.

It is of course true that, outwardly at least, Russian society has in some ways become more “Western” oriented, even though the tragic and horrific legacy of mass-murdering communist tyranny is still everywhere. While Russia now has many “companies,” the economic system is similar to Communist China’s — state-owned behemoths run by regime functionaries and cronies. The system is often referred to as “state-capitalism,” or, more properly, communism with a thin façade of “markets.” Even the media in Russia remains largely owned and controlled by Putin and his apparatchiks.

It is of course true that, outwardly at least, Russian society has in some ways become more “Western” oriented, even though the tragic and horrific legacy of mass-murdering communist tyranny is still everywhere. While Russia now has many “companies,” the economic system is similar to Communist China’s — state-owned behemoths run by regime functionaries and cronies. The system is often referred to as “state-capitalism,” or, more properly, communism with a thin façade of “markets.” Even the media in Russia remains largely owned and controlled by Putin and his apparatchiks.

The United States, meanwhile, is quickly moving in a similar direction, with the federal government gobbling up, subsidizing, controlling, and bailing out companies while increasingly trying to dictate how they operate. Power is quickly being usurped from other branches and levels of government, becoming consolidated in the federal executive branch instead of where it belongs. As explained in a September 22 cover story in this magazine by Charles Scaliger, “In very many respects, American government and society are now aligned with the vision of the Communist Manifesto.”

In Russia, despite claims of real reform from the Soviet days, the old communist KGB-FSB bosses still run virtually the entire show. “Four out of five political leaders and state administrators in Russia either have been or still are members of the security services,” the BBC reported, citing research in a study about the surging influence of the KGB-FSB in the “new” Russia under Putin’s rule. Unsurprisingly, many of the KGB officials in question were appointed by Putin himself. Other key Soviet figures simply became crony “oligarchs,” buying up state-controlled resources for pennies on the dollar under the phony guise of “privatization.” Those who oppose or expose them often end up dead.

Even former Soviet bosses have compared Putin’s “United Russia” party to the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or CPSU. Still today, Putin and his comrades proudly march their military forces around Moscow’s Red Square covered in Lenin images and Soviet-era symbols, such as the infamous hammer and sickle and the red star, as the Soviet National Anthem blares in the background.

Going back even further in history, virtually the entire communist project in world domination and terror — from the original Bolshevik revolution and the building up of Stalin, to Chairman Mao’s murderous takeover of China and Fidel Castro’s bloody rise to power in Cuba — has been facilitated every step of the way by Western globalists. For a good primer on the subject, check out Professor Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974, Arlington House). Not only is there very little credible evidence to suggest anything has changed, there are countless indications that Moscow continues to play its globalist-assigned role in the building of the New World Order and the accompanying merging of East and West.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is providing a rationale for continued Western integration — via the EU, NATO, and the “transatlantic partnership” — to counter the Russian bear. But in addition, Putin is also pursuing a “New World Order” via the regionalization approach. Chief among the schemes, for now at least, is the “Eurasian Union,” which brings together the regimes ruling Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Eventually, Putin and his counterparts hope to expand the union to include other former Soviet regimes in the region, particularly members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Many analysts see the developments as the ongoing re-emergence of the Soviet Union. In a 2011 piece by Putin about the scheming published by Izvestia, headlined “A new integration project for Eurasia: The future in the making,” the former KGB boss denied that his emerging regional union represented a rebirth of the USSR. However, his words revealed an almost total adherence to the publicly announced Western globalist strategy for building the New World Order — using progressive regionalization of power on the road to true global government while manufacturing and exploiting crises along the way.

“It took Europe 40 years to move from the European Coal and Steel Community to the full European Union,” Putin observed in the Izvestia op-ed, now published on the website of the Kremlin’s diplomatic mission to the EU. “The establishment of the Customs Union and the Common Economic Space is proceeding at a much faster pace because we could draw on the experience of the EU and other regional associations.” Indeed, even the harmonized Eurasian regulatory regime being imposed via the regional scheme is “in most cases consistent with European standards,” he added. Soon, it may be compatible with regulations in “North America,” too, as the EU-North America “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” moves along.

As for Putin and company’s broader vision, again, it may as well have been spelled out by Kissinger in one of his “New World Order” op-eds. Putin wrote: “We suggest a powerful supranational association capable of becoming one of the poles in the modern world and serving as an efficient bridge between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region. Alongside other key players and regional structures, such as the European Union, the United States, China and APEC, the Eurasian Union will help ensure global sustainable development.” Sustainable development, of course, as regular readers of this magazine know well, represents the pinnacle of the Western globalist vision for its new order — centralized, global control over every facet of human life.

Putin also explained that his regional regime would be “based on WTO principles,” referring to the globalist World Trade Organization. Like the other regional building “blocs” of the New World Order, it will pursue the same goals. “The Eurasian Union will be based on universal integration principles as an essential part of Greater Europe united by shared values of freedom, democracy, and market laws,” he explained.

Eventually, as part of the globalist strategy, the quest for world order will have to “relate these regional orders to one another,” as Kissinger put it. Again, Putin follows the line. “Russia and the EU agreed to form a common economic space and coordinate economic regulations without the establishment of supranational structures back in 2003,” he wrote. “In line with this idea, we proposed setting up a harmonized community of economies stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, a free trade zone and even employing more sophisticated integration patterns. We also proposed pursuing coordinated policies in industry, technology, the energy sector, education, science, and also to eventually scrap visas. These proposals have not been left hanging in midair; our European colleagues are discussing them in detail.”