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The EIR Special Report entitled Global Show down: The Russian Imperial War Plan for 1988 was released at a press conference in Washington on July 24, 1985. Tarpley contributed the following chapter.

When nations have existed for a long and glorious time, they cannot break with their past, whatever they do; they are influenced by it at the very moment when they work to destroy it; in the midst of the most glaring transformations they remain fundamentally in character and destiny such as their history has formed them. Even the most daring and powerful revolution cannot abolish national traditions of long duration. Therefore, it is most important, not only for the sake of intellectual curiosity but also for the good management of international affairs, to know and understand these traditions.

François Guizot

The dominant ideology in the Soviet imperial bid for world domination is certainly not Marxism, Leninism, nor any species of historical or dialectical materialism. The ruling doctrine of Soviet imperial ambition is rather an insane cult belief, which sees in the present Soviet Empire the direct heir of the defunct Roman and Byzantine Empires, and thus the modern representative of a tradition that goes back to Babylon and beyond. This hideously irrational cult belief ascribes to Russian power the apocalyptic mission of purging the world of the heretical contagion of Western European Platonic humanism, best exemplified by the nation-building of Charlemagne and by the fifteenth-century Golden Renaissance of Italy.

This cult doctrine, dating back to the decades between the fall of Constantinople to the Turk in 1453 and Columbus's voyage to the New World in 1492, is that of Moscow as the Third Rome--which is indispensable for an understanding of Soviet Russian grand strategy in today's world.

The Kremlin's messianic imperialism is founded on the idea that Moscow will be the Third Rome, center of universal empire. The bearer of the cult of the Third Rome has been not so much the Russian state or the state security apparatus, although they have played their part. Moscow the Third Rome is rather the hallmark of that priesthood known as the Russian Orthodox Church. Today a resurgent Russian Orthodox Church, on the eve of its thousandth anniversary, is proposing to harness the formidable resources of the Soviet Empire, the greatest military power seen in world history, for the purpose of subjugating the world to the Third Rome.

Thus, less than forty years after the cataclysm of the Nazi Master Race, the Herrenvolk, humanity is once again threatened by an immensely powerful clique of fanatical madmen--more powerful than the Nazis could ever have dreamed of. In reviewing the origins of the Third Rome in the conflict between Western- Augustinian and Slavic-Byzantine civilizations, we will be looking into the minds of the composite Hitler that runs the Kremlin today, and will be sifting through the most primordial cultural impulses that impel Marshal Ogarkov, General Secretary Gorbachov, Politburo member Aliyev, Patriarch Pimen, and the rest of the Nomenklatura. For, it is from the cultural paradigm associated with the Third Rome, that these gentlemen derive their criteria of judgment, world outlook, even their most intimate sense of personal identity and will.

Insight into Soviet affairs begins with the realization that we are in fact dealing here with a different civilization with a cultural paradigm all its own. The entire course of Russian history, including most emphatically the current "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," has been profoundly influenced by the heritage of the Byzantine or East Roman Empire. That Byzantine Empire, with its capital in Constantinople, persisted for a full thousand years after the extinction of the Roman Empire in the West. What is today referred to as the Byzantine Empire called itself simply the Roman Empire, and in fact embodied an even more refined system of genocidal evil than the one presided over by Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and the other early emperors in the West. Even after the fall of Byzantium, many of its imperial functions continued to be exercised by the Venetian Republic, which lasted until the time of Napoleon.

The different cultural geometries of the Latin-Germanic West and the Slavic-Byzantine East must be grasped despite the fact, that each of these civilizations derives from the earlier Graeco-Roman classical civilization. The decisive difference is that whereas in the Byzantine sphere, the traditions of the decadent Roman Empire were taken over directly and lived on in their full virulence, in the West we witness a new beginning through the work of St. Augustine and his circle, who, basing themselves on Plato, laid the basis for Charlemagne's founding of a new state that would uplift humanity from the Dark Ages. Western civilization would be appropriately called Augustinian civilization, since this great dark-skinned African was its indispensable architect. On the Byzantine side, the founders include the emperors Aurelian, Diocletian, and Constantine.

The East-West conflict of today is best elucidated by the fact that a powerful current within the Slavic-Byzantine civilization, from at least the time of Charlemagne has seen its primary world- historical mission not in some positive achievement of its own, but rather in the merciless destruction of the Western-Augustinian paradigm. The unprecedented missile buildup of the Third Rome in our own age presages the coming fulfillment of this task.

The dominant schools of Sovietology and Kremlinology, the ones patronized by Averell Harriman, Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, are all bankrupt on precisely these crucial points. The same dupes and traitors of academe who babble of the crumbling Soviet Empire also are firmly agreed that the Soviet Union began in 1917 as a total transformation of the hitherto existing Russian society, the "wooden Russia" of monasteries, troikas, and samovars, to which they ascribe a highly positive value. In this way, the actual dynamic of Muscovite imperialism is hopelessly obscured, and the practical outcome of this faked analysis is support for old-fashioned, pre-communist Great Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church, precisely the most dangerous imperialist elements in the Soviet ruling combination.

An example of such highly suspect incompetence is the recent study, Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, by Suzanne Massey. President Reagan, at the suggestion of the White House Palace guard, read this book and met with its author on Sept. 28, l984, just before his meeting with the then Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Massey's view of Russian history is a cliche, dominated by a series of foreign invasions, from the Mongols in the thirteenth century to Napoleon at the beginning of the nineteenth (and by extension, Hitler). The result is a paranoid fear of outside aggression, which in turn impels Russian rulers to build up an immense military apparatus, of the type seen today. Newspaper accounts suggest that the President was struck by the vivid and romantic descriptions of foreign invasions that are the high-points of the book. Other Soviet experts remarked at the time that this sort of historiography renders precious service to Moscow's public relations apologetics, but the same is true of virtually all publications on the subject.

The Byzantine paradigm

Among the earliest recorded inhabitants of what is today Russia were the Scythians, of whom the Greek historian Herodotus assembled a profile back in the fifth century B.C. The Scythians were in the habit of drinking the blood of their enemies, flaying them, scalping them, and sometimes sewing the scalps together to provide themselves with garments. Herodotus notes also that the Scythians "never, by any chance, wash their bodies with water." Most interesting is the xenophobia of the Scythians: "They studiously avoid the use of foreign customs, not only therefore will they not adopt those of each other, but least of all Greek usages, as the example of Anacharsis, and afterwards of Scylas, sufficiently demonstrated," writes Hrodotus, referring to two prominent Scythians who were murdered by their own people because they had adopted foreign customs. (Herodotus, Cary translation, p. 262.)

The first Russian centers, like Kiev, were created along the Dnieper River, which was a route of communication between the Byzantine Empire and its mercenaries in Scandinavia, whence the warlike Normans conducted their missions of conquest against the enemies of Byzantium. The steppes and forests were populated by Finns, and later by the Slavs. About A.D. 700, the Slavs came under the domination of a Viking people known as the Varangians, as legend recounts. These Vikings called the land Rus, and when one of them emerged as the uncontested ruler, his name turned out to be Rurik. Etymological speculation has it that Rus means simply "the earth," and that the dynasty of the Ruriks or Rurikids are legendary "earth kings." If this is so, Matushka Rus, Little Mother Russia, would turn out to be nothing other than Mother Earth herself.

The central fact of Russian history is the decision made in 988 by Prince Vladimir to convert from his previous pagan beliefs to the Orthodox Christianity purveyed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, himself an appendage of the Byzantine Emperor. Vladimir's conversion came as part of a package deal that also included his marriage to the Byzantine princess Anna, the sister of the two co-emperors of Byzantium, Basil and Constantine. With that, the Greek Orthodox faith, the church founded by the "Isoapostolic" Emperor Constantine, became the official and obligatory state religion for all of Vladimir's subjects in the Kievan Rus. At the same time, Vladimir became at least in theory the political satrap of the Byzantine Empire.

Vladmir, whom the Orthodox today call a saint, had a harem of more than 800 concubines, and is described by a German chronicle of the period as a fornicator immensus et crudelis--perhaps something of a rapist. Other chronicles relate that before choosing Orthodoxy, Vladimir carefully examined Judaism (which had been recently embraced by his neighbors, the Khazars), Islam, and Roman Catholicism (recently chosen by Poland and Hungary). He is said to have turned down Mohammed because of his belief that Russians need hard liquor, which that faith would have precluded.

Rusi est vesel piti,
Bez nego ne mozhet biti,

he commented: "Russians enjoy drinking, without which they cannot live" (Fitzroy McClean, Holy Russia).

From this time onwards, Russian development would be determined by the Byzantine Imperial model. Today numerous incompetent Sovietologists of the Kissinger school attribute features of the Russian regime, like state control of the means of production, or totalitarianism, to the recent, 1917 imposition of "Communism." In reality, both of these and much more are a slavish copy of the Byzantine Imperial system as it existed more than one and a half millennia ago.

The founders of this brand of communism were not Marx or Engels, but Roman Emperors like Aurelian, Diocletian, and Constantine. In particular Diocletian, who lived from A.D. 245-316, is in a strong position to claim the title of founder of Communism in the East.

The Roman Empire did not collapse in A.D. 476. In reality, the entire empire, East and West, went to pieces totally during the period between A.D. 200 and 300. This was a period of chaos, anarchy, internal coups d';aaetat and subversion, and external invasions by the barbarians, out of which emerged a new imperial structure which borrowed heavily from the practice of the Sassanian dynasty of Persia, of the Ptolemeic regime in Egypt, and from other oriental despotisms. This new system was even more sinister than the one that had prevailed from Augustus to the year A.D. 200, and it was this new system that persisted over the thousand year Reich of Byzantium, and continues, to shape Russian civilization down to the present day.

Thus, if the Soviet Empire of our time is a totalitarian military autocracy, the roots of this lie not in communism, but in Byzantium.

Totalitarianism

Diocletian's reforms created an oriental despotism of the most pervasive type, in which all aspects of life were most minutely controlled by the state. This was most evident in economic matters. The Codex Theodosianus of Roman and Byzantine law documents the obligation of every citizen to provide compulsory public service in the guild or corporation in which his father served. This was a class society, in which class status was inherited and enforced by administrative sanctions: no one was allowed to change his station or way of making a living. At the same time, the practice of each corporation or guild was rigidly fixed, also by imperial decree, according to "ancient custom." The affairs of shipmasters, breadmakers, charioteers, cattle and swine collectors, limeburners, wood transporters, and others were prescribed in adamant detail. This amounted in practice to an outlawing of any form of technological innovation, which would have interfered with the stability of the guilds and the value of their property, which could not be transferred or otherwise changed.

Diocletian imposed a crushing and complicated tax system, with payments in kind prescribed for commodities which the imperial state required. The tax burden was so heavy that vast areas of land became the property of the state through tax default. Large parts of the population became tax debtors to the state, and were forced to become serfs on the public lands. Under Diocletian, free labor in agriculture virtually disappeared in favor of hereditary serfdom, with the serfs being bound to the land and owned by the imperial state--a situation very similar to that in Russia in the seventeenth century, under the Romanov dynasty, and not unlike the Soviet collective farm system today.

Diocletian was also responsible for the celebrated Edict on Maximum Prices of A.D. 301, the most systematic attempt known in the ancient world to impose state control on economic activity. The decree sets maximum prices for a list of hundreds of commodities, including gold. But it also prescribes maximum wages for artisans, lawyers, and other trades and professions.

Most remarkable is the demagogic attack on capitalists, plutocrats, and producers, with which this "Communist" Emperor justified his edict:

If, indeed, any self-restraint might check the excesses with which limitless and furious avarice rages--avarice which with no thought for mankind hastens to its own gain and increase, not by years or months or days but by hours and even minutes--; or, if the general welfare could endure undisturbed by the riotous license by which it, in its misfortune, is from day to day most grievously injured, there would perhaps be left some room for dissimulation and silence, since human forbearance might alleviate the detestable cruelty of a pitiable situation. Since, however, it is the sole desire of unrestrained madness to have no thought for the common need and since it is considered among the unscrupulous and immoderate almost the creed of avarice, swelling and rising with fiery passions, to desist from ravaging the wealth of all through necessity rather than its own wish; and since those who extremes of need have brought to an appreciation of their most unfortunate situation, can no longer close their eyes to it, we--the protectors of the human race--viewing the situation, have agreed that justice should intervene as arbiter, so that the long-hoped-for solution which mankind itself could not supply might, by the remedies of our foresight, be applied to the betterment of all.... for we think it far better that the stains of intolerable depredation be removed from men's minds by the feeling and decision of the same men whom, as they daily plunged into more and more serious offenses and turned, in their blindness, to crimes against the state, their grievous iniquity had charged with the most cruel inhumanity, the enemies of individual and state.... For who is so insensitive and so devoid of human feeling that he cannot know, or rather, has not perceived, that in the commerce carried on in the markets or involved in the daily life of the cities, immoderate prices are so widespread that the uncurbed passion for gain is lessened neither by abundant supplies nor by fruitful years; so that without a doubt men who are busied in these affairs constantly plan to control the very winds and weather from the movements of the stars, and, evil as they are, they cannot endure the watering of the fertile fields by the rains from above which bring the hope of future harvests, since they reckon it their own loss if abundance comes through the moderation of the weather. And the men whose aim it always is to profit even from the generosity of the gods, to restrain general prosperity, and furthermore to use a poor year to traffic in harvest losses and agents' services--men who, individually abounding in great riches which could completely satisfy whole nations, try to capture smaller fortunes and strive after ruinous percentages--concern for humanity in general persuades us to set a limit, our subjects, to the avarice of such men. (Emperor Caesar Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus, Edictum de Maximis Pretiis, in Tenney Frank, An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome).

This document has more to do with the present Russian system than The Communist Manifesto. Notable is also the death penalty that Diocletian imposed on those who tried to circumvent his norms.

Totalitarianism was enforced by a massive growth in the imperial bureaucracy, with a reorganization of the province structure and the creation of a plethora of new bureaucratic posts and office staffs for total top-down administration of all facets of life. At the top was the emperor, or rather four co-emperors, two Augusti amd two subordinate Caesars who would succeed them, flanked by Politburos like the Consistorium and consilia sacra. Then there were hierarchies of iudices, duces, praetorian prefects, praeses, equites, and so on, all organized into a ranked table called the Notitia dignitatum, which corresponds directly to the Russian Nomenklatura used from the time of Peter the Great to the present day.

Militarism

The announced purpose of all these reforms was imperial defense. In the Edict Diocletian writes: "we, who by the gracious favor of the gods have repressed the former tide of ravages of barbarian nations by destroying them, must guard by the due defenses of justice a peace which was established for eternity" (Ibid., p. 311). Diocletian nearly doubled the number of legions, which went from 33 to 60, and built the military highway known as the Strata Diocletiana, which went from Damascus through Palmyra to Sura on the distant Euphrates. Taxation, administration, and the compulsory unpaid services of subjects in economic affairs all went for the imperial military machine. Autocracy

Diocletian copied the Persian imperial model, where the emperor was a god. An earlier emperor, Aurelian, had pioneered in this area, calling himself "Deus Aurelianus, Imperator Deus et Dominus Aurelianus Augustus." Diocletian, who came of humble background in the Dalmatian coast of Illyria, today's Yugoslavia, became not just pontifex maximus, or chief priest of the official state mystery cult religion, but a "son of gods and creator of gods," with the title of Jovius, meaning Jupiter. Diocletian was "a true autocrat, an emperor-god who wore the imperial diadem. Oriental luxury and oriental ceremonial were introduced at his court. His subjects, when granted an audience, had to fall on their knees before they dared to lift their eyes to view their sovereign. Everything concerning the emperor was considered sacred--his words, his court, his treasury; he himself was a sacred person" (A. A. Vasilyev, History of the Byzantine Empire, p. 62). The court ceremony was called the Adoratio of the emperor, who was always pictured equipped with a nimbus, or halo, like a saint. Eunuchs were introduced at the court.

Diocletian spent most of his time in Nicodemia in what is today Turkey, and only visited Rome once. He oriented the empire towards the East, a process that would be furthered still more by his successor Constantine, who set up his capital on the shores of the Bosporus at the eastern limit of Europe.

Under this totalitarian system, all aspects of human activity-- politics, economics, religion, and thought--were regarded as departments of the imperial state. The imperial state ran the economy for military purposes. The patriarch was at the head of the imperial church, but the deified emperor was its sacral leader, thus establishing the Byzantine idea of caesaropapism, with all power in the autocratic emperor. The church was a special, powerful department of the state bureaucracy.

This idea dominates Russia today, where the state religion merges Russian Orthodox idolatry with the cult of Stalin. There has never been a civilian or secular form of government in Russia. Lenin is taught to school children as a good spirit who intervenes to help those who are in difficulty, and almost all the Russian emperors, including Ivan the Terrible and now Nicholas II, are numbered among the saints of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In the Augustinian West we are accustomed to distinguish: 1) the nation state per se, with its governing functions; 2) civil society, composed of companies and corporations, trade unions, churches, associations, clubs, and other social institutions; and 3) the individual in his or her own private sphere. Slavic-Byzantine civilization, however, has always dissolved all three of these levels into the state, which in turn is always imbued with religious and cultist overtones. Any institutions in society which are not part of the state must be crushed, and ideas produced outside of the state bureaucracy are a threat to the state monopoly on intellectual life. The individual does not exist, but is rather swallowed up in the collective soul of the state or the "people." This is "Communism," as founded by Diocletian.

Vladimir brought all this to Russia, and above all he brought the Orthodox Church, the mystery cult religion of Byzantium. Orthodoxy is a thinly disguised variant of oriental paganism, in which the Virgin Mary (theotokos) retains the key characteristics of the Magna Mater, Cybele, Isis, Shiva, and the other Great Mothers concocted by oligarchical priesthoods over the millennia. For Orthodoxy, man is a worm who has no hope of ever approaching God through faith and good works in the real world, but only through mystical contemplation. Since mankind cannot be raised to the level of divinity, divine mysteries must be brought down to earth, especially through attempts to duplicate the Transfiguration of Christ in one's own monkish cell. This is the tradition of the hesychia, or inner calm and quietism. It later became the theology of the monasteries of Mount Athos, the holy mountain, the Venetian-Byzantine command center for the East over the last thousand years.

The Greek Orthodox Church joined by Vladimir of Kiev was not yet formally separated from the Roman Catholic Pope in Rome, since the definitive exchange of anathemas and excommunications between the Pope and the Greek Patriarch would come somewhat later, in 1054. But Orthodox theology had already repudiated the decisive theological and political commitment of those Western European humanists who had fought for the survival of civilization in the West after the extinction of the Roman Empire there.

In a word, Orthodoxy had already rejected the Filioque.

Augustine and the Filioque

The Filioque is the centerpiece of St. Augustine's concept of the Holy Trinity, and thus represents the concept upon which the positive achievements of Western civilization has been based. "The West" is not a geographic or racial concept, but rather indicates those areas in which the Filioque prevailed. "The East", by contrast, refers to those areas which rejected the Filioque out of fealty to the Byzantine Emperor and to the Greek Orthodox Church.

St. Augustine developed his theology of the Filioque in his works De Trinitate, Tractatus in Joannis Evangelium, and Contra Maximinum Arianum. In the second on these works, Augustine poses the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit: "Some may ask whether the Holy Spirit proceeds also from the Son." Augustine answers: "Why should we not believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from the Son, since he is the Spirit of the Son also (Migne, Patrologia Latina, p. 1,888 ff.)." This, Augustine argues, is proven in Scripture when Christ breathed the Holy Spirit on the disciples in the Pentecost. "What else did that breathing signify except that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from Him?" "The Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Father into the Son, and from the Son to the creatures ... but he proceeds at once from both." For Augustine, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son (or, expressed in Latin, ex Patre Filioque procedit).

The theological point involves the question of whether God is present in each and every concrete human individual as a divine spark, divine quality, or participation to some measure in the divine. If the Holy Spirit proceeds from Christ as well as from the Father, and since Christ breathed that Holy Spirit on His Church, each human being has access to the divine reason of the Holy Spirit as Logos. The Filioque provides the basis for real human knowledge, and thus for efficient human action on the order of nature and on the political world. It is the divine quality of Man thus guaranteed, which allows him to supplement God's initial act of creation with Man's own continuous creation during the course of history.

The denial of the Filioque, by contrast, destroys the Trinity. According to Augustine, the single difference between the Father and the Son is that the Father begets the Son, whereas the Son is begotten by the Father. But all their other qualities are exactly the same. If the Son is deprived of the full procession of the Holy Spirit/Logos, he is no longer God at the same level as the Father, but some inferior being. Thus, without the Filioque, the Trinity is destroyed in favor of some version of the Arian heresy, which boils down to the attempt to deny the full divinity of Christ.

The Greek view of the matter is seen in these excerpts from the De Fide Orthodoxa of the Eastern theologian and church father John Damascene: ";obWe believe;cb in one Father, the principle and cause of everything ... Father of only one by nature, his Only- Begotten Son ... and Projector of the most Holy Spirit.... The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. For this is the teaching of Holy Scripture... We also believe in the Holy Spirit ... who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son ... proceeding from the Father and communicated through the Son.... The begetting of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit are simultaneous.... Therefore, all that the Son and the Spirit have is from the Father, including their very existence. Unless the Father exists, neither the Son nor the Spirit exists. And unless the Father possesses a specific quality, neither the Son nor Spirit can possess it.... We do not speak of the Son as a cause. We speak of the Holy Spirit as from the Father and call him the spirit of the Father. And we do not speak of the Spirit as from the Son, although we call him the Spirit of the Son (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, pp. 94, 805 ff.).

For present purposes, the political significance of the Filioque must be considered more than its strictly theological impact. It should be clear that under the Byzantine system, all power and reason ial system. The denial of quasi-divine qualities to the mass of humanity has made the rejection of the Filioque the common platform of all oligarchical forces coming ids to the doctrine that Stalin is always right (the Logos proceeding only from the Father), and that all individuals must be directed in all the errible. The alternative is the Western system, seen in the Prussian Auftragsprinzip or assignment principle, in which the individual is given a large area of initiative to solve problems that emerge in the course of cas with which the individual politically agrees.

Thus, the Filioque creates the concept of the individual, who in turn participates in both freedom and necessity, and must accept responsibility for both. This idea of the exercise of individual reason has of Byzantium and its successors. It is the key to the fight between Western freedom and Soviet totalitarianism today.

As a result of Augustine's colossal authority as the pre-eminent Church Father of the Latin West, the Filioque concept was assimilated by numerous writers, including Boethius, Fulgentius, and many others. In these areas, this concept was so pervasive as to be virtually universal.

In 589 at the Spanish church council of Seville, which was presided over by Leander, the elder brother of Isidore of Seville, the Visigoths under King Reccared renounced Arianism and accepted Augustinian Roman Catholicism. In his first speech to the council, King Reccared declared that "the Holy Spirit also should be confessed by us and taught to proceed from the Father and the Son." At Toledo, the Filioque was inserted into the Credo or creed of the Western Church, adding to word "Filioque" to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed which had prevailed previously.

The full political importance of the Filioque and of its insertion into the creed became evident during the time of Charlemagne. Charlemagne King of the Franks and his councilors, above all Alcuin, strove to create a progressive humanist state out of the wreckage of Roman collapse and barbarian invasions. In so doing, they used the writings of Augustine as manuals of statecraft and theology. Charlemagne inevitably came into violent conflict with the Byzantine Empire, a conflict that increased when Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III, thereby breaking the Byzantine monopoly on a legitimate state form anywhere in Christendom.

The hallmark of Carolingian theology is the Filioque. Alcuin, who was of English origin, wrote of "the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son in an ineffable manner." In 802 Alcuin wrote a treatise entitled De Fide sanctae et individuae Trinitatis, a work grounded totally in Augustine. The Filioque was the centerpiece of the Libri Carolini, a summa theologica of the Charlemagne regime, which remarks on the subject that "the whole Catholic Church believes that he ;obthe Holy Spirit;cb proceeds from the Father and the Son." The Filioque was included in the creed as it was intoned and sung in the chapel of the Emperor at Aachen.

The Filioque had become the battle cry and political slogan in the fight for civilization against Byzantine decadence and oligarchism. The Byzantine attempt to refute and destroy the Filioque was led by the sinister Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople from 858 to 867 and then again from 878 to 886, who also, and not by coincidence, brought Orthodoxy to the Bulgarians, and thus prepared for its reception in Russia. Photius was determined to fight a doctrine that posed such a potentially lethal threat to the Byzantine system, and issued an Encyclical full of violent attacks on the Filioque as a doctrine, as an addition to the creed, and on those who supported these.

The substance of Photius' argument is that if the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son, this introduces two causes into the Trinity, whereas there is room for only one cause. Photius' argument never gets beyond the level of formal-logical trickery. All the more violently does he anathematize his Carolingian opponents: "Where have you learned this fact which you assert? In what Gospel have you found this word? To what Council belongs such blasphemy? Who will not stop his ears at this blasphemy? It stands in battle, as it were, against the Gospels." (Patrologia Graeca 102, 728-29, nos. 15 and 16)

Photius repeated these arguments in a letter written to the Patriarch of Aquilea, which dates from 883 or 884. He later developed them at greater length in a work called the Mystagogia, in which he counterattacked Ratramnus of Corbie and other Carolingian writers who had answered his original Encyclical. The Council of Worms, convening in 868, had reaffirmed the Filioque and had issued a warning to the Greeks. Among the participants was Bishop Anno. Photius had also held his own council in 879-880, at which the papal legates had sold out the Filioque.

In the Mystagogia Photius brings forward a new parade of arguments on the procession of the Holy Spirit, some of which are most revealing: "Just as the Son is born of the Father and lives unchangeable in himself, preserving his dignity of Son, so also the Most Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and lives unchangeable in himself, preserving his faculty of proceeding from the Father. Thus, the Spirit, coming forth from the uncaused Father ... ;obretains;cb the eternal character of his procession. So also the Son, who is born of the uncaused Father, would not know how to be the origin of any birth or any procession.... He would not know how to distort his privilege of being Son by introducing some new relation" (Patrologia Graeca 102, 324 and 326). Here the oligarchic intent of degrading the Son and, through Him, all of humanity, is evident.

At the same time Photius tries to defend the Byzantine F;auhrerprinzip in the realm of theology. He argues in effect, that if anyone other than Stalin is allowed the faculty of initiative, then this undermines Stalin's prerogatives. He also asserts that procession from the Son can be of no benefit: "If the procession of the Spirit from the Father is perfect, and it is, because it is a perfect God who proceeds from a perfect God, what then does procession from the Son add? If it adds something, it is necessary to state what it adds.... This theory is absolutely of no usefulness, neither for the Son, nor for anyone ... there is no way he can gain from it." As for Augustine's authority, Photius suggests that the works quoted by the Carolingians may be forgeries.

With the fight against the Carolingian heritage led by Photius, East became East, and West. The tragedy of Russia was then Vladimir's 988 choice of the East, which ought to be lamented as a calamity rather than celebrated, as the Soviet Empire is now preparing to do.

The Mongol domination:
The Golden Age of the Russian Orthodox Church

During the 20 years leading up to 1240, the Kiev Rus came under the increasing pressure of the Mongols, who until 1223 were under the leadership of Genghis Khan (the "ruler of the world"). The Mongols were at this time a tool of Venice. The Venetian political intelligence services, without equal anywhere in the world, provided the Mongol leadership with the most precise information concerning the troop and other dispositions of the Mongols' intended victims. This secret intelligence advantage of the Mongols was the decisive component in the development of their reputation for military prowess and invincibility as they moved to attack Europe during the first half of the 1200s. The first large- scale clash between the Prince of Kiev and the Mongols occurred at the River Kalka, near the Sea of Azov, in 1223, and resulted in a crushing victory for the Tartars. In 1240, the Mongols razed Kiev to the ground and slaughtered its inhabitants. For the next century and a half, most of Russia was dominated by a Tartar Empire called the Golden Horde, which had its capital near the later city of Stalingrad (Volgograd).

Mongol rule was based on the exacting of a very onerous tribute in the form of cash payments to the Mongol Khan. Attempts at rebellion were crushed with great bloodshed, but otherwise the Mongols controlled Russian affairs by making the various Russian princes their satraps, and also by making use of the institutional services of the Russian Orthodox Church, for which the Mongol domination, the age of Appanage Rus, was truly a Golden Age of growth and power. The church entered into a type of symbiosis with the Mongol Khanate, enjoying special powers and privileges. The top prelate of the Orthodox church enjoyed a status something like that of the Greek Patriarch under the Ottoman Empire, in which he served as the Ethnark of the Christians. In addition, the Mongols had great respect for the Russian prelates, whom they considered to be the best shamans and medicine men available anywhere in their vast domains.

The era of Mongol domination saw the unprecedented growth of Orthodox hesychast monasticism in the Russian lands. Hesychasm is the form of mystical irrationalism that was developed during the sixth century A.D. by St. John of the Ladder at the Monastery of St. Catherine of the Sinai, in what is today Egypt. This monastery was founded under the Byzantine imperial regime of Emperor Justinian and his Empress Theodora. Hesychasm was based on oriental models, especially Daoism and Zen Buddhism. Hesychia means inner calm or quiet, and was sought by the monks through mystical contemplation and exercises which were supposed to replicate for the individual the Transfiguration of Christ. The hesychast uses various devices to immerse himself in the "divine darkness," in the "cloud of unknowing" and to talk to God in an ecstatic trance. One such device is the so- called "Jesus prayer," in which the name of Jesus is attached to every breath that the monk takes. Another is literally the contemplation of the navel, since it was here that the union with God was thought to take place. Barlaam of Calabria, a Greek linked to the Dante-Petrarch network, ridiculed the Eastern monks as omphaloscopoi because of this habit of gazing at their belly buttons.

By the time of the Mongol domination of Russia, hesychasm had become the very special stock in trade of the pan-orthodox monastery of Mt. Athos the Holy Mountain in Greece, where the leading hesychast of the period was St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), who guided the hesychast party to total victory in a factional altercation in the Byzantine state and church bureaucracy.

Thus it came about that the monasteries founded in Russia during the Mongol domination were based most explicitly on the doctrine of Byzantine hesychasm. These monasteries were controlled in their operations by Mt. Athos, and generally served the purposes of the Venetian political intelligence agencies. Especially the fourteenth century, the heyday of monastery foundation, was marked by a great outburst of hesychasm in Russia.

One center of this monastic revival was Zagorsk, where in 1337 a Muscovite nobleman turned priest, St. Sergius of Radonezh, founded the celebrated monastery of the Holy Trinity, which became the principal home base for further projects in monastery foundation in a vast area through the course of the fourteenth century. During the hundred years after the creation of the Holy Trinity in Zagorsk, about 150 monasteries were founded, reaching as far north as the Solovetskii Monastery on an island in the White Sea. St. Sergius became known as the "Builder of Russia.

These monasteries became the center of elaboration of everything that can be lumped under the heading of "Russian culture." They developed the strenuous six-hour liturgy of the Russian church, its hagiographies of the lives of saints, its school of Byzantine icon painting, its characteristic music, and the like. All of these were founded on the basic world outlook of the unwashed, mystical, apocalyptic monks, which saw in reason and rationality a form of materialism, or the surrender to the things of this world, and thus sin and depravity. Irrationality was equated by the monks with piety, and this they were determined to cultivate, using their hesychast apparatus as a prime asset.

The attitude of the Russian Orthodox to the Mongols is perhaps best shown by the famous Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Novgorod, who submitted to the Tartar yoke without ever having been formally militarily defeated. Alexander paid his tribute and urged his fellow princes to do so. But although Alexander Nevsky was obedient to the Mongols, he waged pitiless war against the Western powers, including Swedes, Teutonic Knights, and Lithuanians. Thanks to the public relations apparatus of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexander Nevsky became a Russian national hero of the Mongol era, celebrated also because he kept out the Roman Catholic powers who would have harmed Orthodoxy. Alexander duly became a saint of the Russian church. In 1942, to celebrate the seven hundredth anniversary of Alexander's victories, Stalin instituted a Soviet military decoration named in his honor.

Moscow was first fortified in 1156, at a time when Novgorod was already a large trading center and Kiev a European city of the first rank. Moscow began its ascendancy when the Russian church selected the Princes of Moscow as its chosen instruments. In the early fourteenth century the Metropolitan of Russia was nominally based in Kiev and was in fact something of a vagabond. In 1326 the Metropolitan chose Moscow as his official residence, and advised the Moscow prince that if he were to build a church and dedicated it to the Virgin, and bury the Metropolitan there upon his death, Moscow would be magnified beyond all other Russian cities, and the future Metropolitans would help the Muscovite princes to defeat their foes. Shortly thereafter, in 1339, we pick up the first notes of the Imperial theme in Moscow, with a scribe comparing the prince of Moscow with the Byzantine Emperors Constantine, Justinian, and Manuel Comnenus. By this time the Grand Prince and the Metropolitan of Moscow were adding "Of all Rus," or "Of all the Russias" to their titles.

But none of Moscow's new pretensions would have been possible without the permission of the Mongol overlords. In the year 1328 Ivan Kalita, or Ivan the Moneybag, was recognized by the Tartar Khan as the Grand Prince of Muscovy. The moneybag was an allusion to the special role of the Prince of Moscow as the principal tax collecting agent for the Mongol Khan. Collecting tribute for the Tartars from the other Russian princes was combined with a role of policing them in case of any revolts against the Tartars, which the Muscovites often joined in putting down.

Thus, out of the Mongol Dark Age there emerged an immensely stronger Russian Orthodox Church, with the Grand Prince of Moscow representing the political-military concentration of that Orthodox power. Later Moscow was to play a leading role in the Venetian- controlled process of removing the Tartar yoke. The Venetians, who had helped to create the vast Mongol Empire, now determined to collapse it. The overthrow of the Mongols coincided with the final, decisive war between Venice and Genoa, the two greatest world naval powers of the time, which was the War of Chioggia, which reached its climax in the Genoese siege of the Venetian lagoon in 1379 and 1380. The year 1380 saw the first signal victory of Moscow over the Tartars at the battle of Kulikovo field on the Don. Muscovite military preparations had been aided this time by St. Sergius, and the Muscovite commander, Grand Prince Dmitrii, won a decisive victory and the honorific title of "Donskoi." Interestingly enough, a Genoese detachment fought on the side of the Mongols against the Muscovites at Kulikovo field.

The emergence of the full-fledged doctrine of Moscow the Third Rome began during the middle of the fifteenth century. Everything once again revolved around the Filioque, this time as the centerpiece of efforts of humanists from the entire world to defeat the growing power of the Ottoman Empire, better called the Ottoman dynasty of the Byzantine Empire, whose tradition it continued. These humanists also sought to defeat Venice, which was using the Turks in a geopolitical attack on the Italian Renaissance. These were the issues that dominated the Ecumenical Council that convened in Florence in 1439.

The Council of Florence:
Russia rejects the Renaissance

The Council of Florence was the supreme moment of the Italian Golden Renaissance, uniting one of the most distinguished gatherings of humanists the world has ever seen. Their project was to transform the course of history, exporting the Golden Renaissance to all points of the compass, and dealing a fatal blow to oligarchical forces in East and West. The Council of Florence was based on a principled ecumenicism: the Eastern and Western churches were to be united on the basis of the acceptance of the Filioque by all participants. This would provide the platform for a general political alliance of Christendom against the Turks. In particular, the Medici dirigistic system of economic development was to be introduced everywhere in a crash program to stem the Ottoman advance. At the time, the final Turkish assault on Constantinople was imminent. Defeating the Turks would defeat the Venetians, and open the door to the general economic and cultural uplifting of humanity.

This project was received with more violent rejection in Moscow than in any other place in the world, and Moscow glories in this rejection to this day, founding upon its benighted backwardness the patent of its imperial ambition.

The Council of Florence was attended by the Byzantine Emperor, John VIII Paleologus, by the Patriarch of Constantinople Joseph II, accompanied by some two dozen archbishops and metropolitans from the East, including Bessarion of Nicaea, later a Roman cardinal, and the philosopher Gemisthos Plethon. The proceedings in Florence were sponsored by Cosimo de' Medici, and attended by Pope Eugenius IV. Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus was involved in the preparations on the Latin side, as was Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future humanist Pope Pius II. Included in the Orthodox delegation was the Metropolitan of Moscow, Isidore, who was a Greek by birth. Isidore developed during the theological and doctrinal debates of the council into a strong and active supporter of the Union of the churches.

The Grand Prince of Moscow in those years was Vasili II, called the Dark or the Blind, since his eyes had been gouged out by some of his relatives in the course of a power struggle. At the time that Isidore set out for the council of Florence, Vasili was young and ignorant, and very much a creature of the Orthodox priesthood. The Orthodox were opposed to the idea of an eighth ecumenical council, since they contended that the seventh council had given them the true faith, signed, sealed, and delivered. Vasili grudgingly granted his permission for Isidore to go to the council, but bid him farewell with a threat: "You are going to the Eighth Council, which should never take place according to the rules of the holy fathers; when you return from it, bring us back our ancient Orthodoxy which we have received from our ancestor Vladimir ... bring us nothing new and strange, for whatever you will bring to us that is new will displease us." This is the version given by the Tale of Isidore's Council, a chronicle of these events composed after the fact by the priest Simeon, who opposed the Church Union.

In Florence, the prelates of East and West endorsed the project of Union. The Patriarch was reconciled to the cause of unity and died a short time after, and his tomb can be seen today in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. But a part of the Eastern delegation opposed the Union. Among them was Mark, Metropolitan of Ephesus, and Abraham, Bishop of Suzdal, in Russia.

The Decree of Union, Laetentur Caeli (Let the Heavens Rejoice), was issued on July 6, 1439. This Decree states:

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In the name therefore of the Holy Trinity, of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, with the approval of this holy Council of Florence, in order that this truth of the faith be believed, received, and professed by all Christians, we define that the Holy Spirit is eternally from the Father and the Son, and that the Holy Spirit has its essence and its being at the same time from the Father and the Son, and proceeds from each as from one cause and single source.

We declare that that which is said by the holy doctors and fathers, namely that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, means to make known that the Son also, just like the Father, is according to the Greek expression a cause, and according to the Latin expression a principle, of the existence of the Holy Spirit.

And because all things which are of the Father have been given by the Father to his only begotten Son in engendering him, except for being the Father, the Son receives eternally from the Father, by whom he is eternally engendered, this: that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son.

We define additionally the explanation given by these words "and from the Son" Filioque to be for the purpose of declaring the truth, and to have been added legitimately and reasonably to the symbol by what was then urgent necessity.

Moscow was at this time a village of log huts huddled together on a vast plain. Isidore returned there on March 19, 1441, wearing the red hat of a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, and carrying a Latin cross before him. When he held mass at the cathedral, he replaced the declaration of fealty to the Greek Patriarch with the name of the Roman pontiff. After the service, in the words of the Second Sophia Chronicle, "Isidore ordered the proclamation of the decisions of this apostate eighth council ... that is, of the sugar-coated falsities of the Latins; all this in order to remove Christendom from the Divine Revelation." This included the Filioque, as well as the use of unleavened bread in the mass, which the Greeks taught was the Apollinarian heresy, the denial of the human nature of Christ. Upon hearing all this, the chronicles relate, Grand Prince Vasili, a true defender of the Orthodox faith, saw that the "wolf-like" Isidore was a heretic, refused to accept a benediction from him, and soon after that decreed the ouster of Isidore from the Metropolitan See of Moscow. Isidore was then arrested and jailed in the Chudov monastery, awaiting trial. This hostile reception for Isidore had of course been prepared in advance, most probably in Venice, where the Russian delegation had passed on its way home. Here certain key members of that delegation went into open revolt against Isidore and his support for the Union of the Churches. Isidore was thus lucky to get out of Moscow alive. Isidore was in Constantinople fighting the Turks when the city fell, but escaped and died in Rome.

But Vasili the Blind had been well briefed by his Orthodox controllers, the tools of Mount Athos and of Venice. His vicious, spiteful repudiation of the Decree of Union guaranteed the continued degradation of the Russian population as thralls of the Orthodox priesthood. The civilization of the Italian Renaissance, the luminous Quatrocento Florentine world of Cusanus, Brunelleschi and Leonardo, never reached Moscow.

Venice had won an important battle in its war against the Renaissance, and the Russians are paying for it to this day. Such rabid rejection of the most advanced form of civilization yet attained anywhere in the world is indicative of the wellsprings of blind chauvinism and xenophobia that lurk in the shadowy corners of the Russian soul.

Since all the other powers had accepted the Council of Florence, it became the opinion of the Orthodox true believers that Russia had emerged as the only land of the true faith, the only truly Christian country in the world.

The chronicles of the period reflect on the one hand the idea that the Paleologue Byzantine Emperor had become an apostate, and on the other the inchoate notion that an imperial mission for Moscow may now be looming on the horizon. One chronicler addresses the Paleologue Emperor: "O great sovereign Emperor; why did you go to them? What were you thinking of? What have you done? You have exchanged light for darkness; instead of the Divine Law you have received the Latin faith; instead of truth and righteousness, you have loved flattery and falsity. Formerly you were the agent of piety, now you are the sower of evil seeds; formerly you were clothed by the light of the Heavenly spirit, now you are clothed in the darkness of unbelief" (From Selections from the Holy Writings against the Latins and the tale about the composition of the Eighth Latin council).

The first notes of the Moscow Imperial Theme are also in these Russian chronicles of the council of Florence. Here Vasili the Blind, although strictly speaking no more than a grand prince or grand duke, is referred to as "the white Tsar of All Russia." Vasili is the "New Constantine," the "great, Sovereign, God-crowned Russian Tsar.

In his chronicle of these events, the Orthodox monk Simeon reflected above all the defamation of Florence and the self- righteous exultation touched off among the Orthodox unwashed of the Russian monasteries because of the actions of Vasili II. He concludes his Tale of Isidore's Council with the following:

Rejoice oh pious Grand Prince Vasili, for you have confirmed the Russian land in faith; truly you have placed on your head the crown of holy baptism. Rejoice, Orthodox Prince Vasili, for you have confirmed all your priests; they who were naked, you have confirmed.... Rejoice, Orthodox Prince Vasili, you have stifled the Latin heresy and would not let it grow amongst Orthodox Christians.... Rejoice, Orthodox Prince Vasili, the confirmer of Orthodoxy and of all the Russian lands ... the joy and the happiness of the Divine Church and of all Orthodox Christians.... Rejoice, Orthodox Grand Prince Vasili Vasilievich, beautified by the crown of the Orthodox Greek faith, and with you rejoice all the Orthodox princes of the Russian land.... Rejoice, Prince Vasili, for you are renowned in all the Western lands and in Rome itself; you have glorified the Orthodox faith and the whole land of Russia (In Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, New Haven, 1961, p. 37).

In 1448, Vasili II ordered all of the bishops in his realm to elect a new metropolitan to replace Isidore. With that, the Russian Orthodox Church came into being as an autocephalous church under its own metropolitan, quite independent of the wishes of the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople. That Patriarch was considered by the Russians to be in the grip of the devil, for he was still bound by the Florence Decree of Union his predecessor had signed, although he refused to promulgate the Union in his church of Hagia Sophia.

Then, on May 29, 1453, the Turks entered Constantinople, killed the Emperor, sacked the city, occupied the Hagia Sophia, and took the Greek Patriarch prisoner. The end of the Eastern Roman Empire at the hands of the murderous Ottomans gave rise to a wave of general consternation and terror in Europe, but this consternation certainly was not shared by the Russians. Instead, they regarded the destruction of Tsargrad, the old imperial city, with Schadenfreude and self-righteous complacency. Such, they felt, were the fruits of subjugating oneself to the Roman heretics: the destruction of the Eastern Empire was in the Russian view the vengeance of God against those who had betrayed his true faith through their compacts with the Western apostates. The Turks were merely the instruments of a justly merited and inevitable divine retribution. Russia, they concluded, had been confirmed in its status as sole homeland of the true faith.

Moscow the Third Rome

Centuries before, at the Council of Chalcedon, Constantinople had been declared the New Rome or Second Rome. From the point of view of imperial legitimacy, that Second Rome had now ceased to exist, just as the original Rome had in A.D. 476. What took place at this point, according to the messianic theoreticians of Muscovite imperialism, is a process of translatio imperii, or transfer of the seat of empire, and thus by definition of the capital of the world, since the empire in theory at least embraces all lands of the planet.

In 1472, Ivan III, the son of the Orthodox champion Vasili the Blind, arranged to marry Sophia (or Zoe) Paleologue, the niece of the last Emperor of Byzantium. This marriage was set up with the help of the Venetian Pope Paul II, who had cared for Sophia as his ward for over ten years. Members of Sophia's entourage came to Moscow with letters from the Venetian Signoria which certified Sophia as the true heiress to the Byzantine throne (a matter about which there was some doubt), and specified that the man who married her would in effect become the Byzantine Emperor. The dynastic succession that underpinned the Third Rome was thus of Venetian manufacture, and Venetian influence in Moscow increased still further through the large number of Venetians who came to Russia in Sophia's retinue. Grand Prince Ivan began to call himself Tsar (Caesar) or Emperor, and adopted the double-headed eagle of Byzantium as the symbol of the Russian monarchy. Ivan also began to call himself autocrator (samoderzhets), the precise Byzantine term for one-man imperial rule.

With so much Venetian encouragement, the imperial theme now became the ruling obsession of the political theoreticians and mythographs in the Moscow monasteries. A legend was dusted off to the effect that the insignia of empire that had once belonged to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had been taken to Byzantium and thence to Kiev, with their magical powers now devolving upon Moscow. In the closing years of the fifteenth century we find the fanciful pseudo- history "The Legend of the Princes of Vladimir," (Skazaniye o Knyazyakh Vladimirskikh) which invents a hitherto unknown brother of the Roman Emperor Augustus, called Prus. This fantastic Prus, says the chronicle, had been sent by his brother the emperor to the banks of the Vistula to introduce imperial order into eastern Europe. Prus thus became the founder of Prussia. Fourteen generations later, the Slavs invited a descendant of Prus to become their ruler, and this turns out to have been none other than the legendary Rurik, the alleged founder of the Kiev dynasty of which St. Vladimir was a representative. The message here is clear enough: The Tsars of Moscow are genealogically and dynastically the legitimate heirs of the original Roman emperors. Now only an historical or eschatological doctrine was needed for the translatio imperii to be consummated.

The model for this new doctrine was provided by a certain Dmitri Gerasimov, who in 1492 composed a work called "The Legend of the White Cowl." In the course of this story a character representing the old Roman Pope Sylvester makes the following prophecy: "Ancient Rome fell from glory and the Christian faith through pride and willfulness: In the new Rome, which is Constantine's city, the Christian faith similarly is perishing through the oppression of the sons of Hagar. But in the Third Rome, which stands in the land of Russia, the grace of the Holy Ghost has shone forth; and know, then, that all Christian men in the end will enter into the Russian kingdom, for Orthodoxy's sake.

"The Legend of the White Cowl" brought Rome to Russia, but not specifically to Moscow, for indeed Gerasimov was thinking of Novgorod as the new world center. Moscow the Third Rome required a more specific investiture.

Not surprisingly, this was provided by a monk: by Filofei of Pskov, whose name is sometimes transliterated as Philotheus or Philotheos. Pskov was a commercial republic, a smaller sister of Novgorod. Filofei lived in the monastery of St. Eleazar in the years after 1510, when Grand Duke Vasili III of Moscow had added Pskov to his domains. Of Filofei it is known that he wrote five letters to contemporaries, especially to government officials and to rulers. The most interesting of these letters are one to a certain Moscow government official resident in Pskov, one addressed to Vasili III, and one to the latter's son, Ivan IV (later "The Terrible").

The content of Filofei's letters is the systematic exhortation of the rulers of Moscow to implement the God-given status of their city as the Third Rome. In his letter to the official, whose name was M. G. Misjur-Munexin, Filofei notes that some 90 years have gone by since the destruction of Byzantium, and that empire has not been restored. The Greeks, writes Filofei, "betrayed the Greek Orthodox faith to the Latins." The Latins are heresiarchs, and Filofei recalls that the crucifixion of Christ was a joint atrocity of the Jews and the (west) Romans. Despite this, the Roman Empire is eternal, because Our Lord was born and registered under Roman rule.

Filofei then goes on: "I would like to say a few more words about the existing orthodox empire of our most illustrious and most high ruler. He is, in the entire world, the only tsar of the Christians, the ruler of the holy, divine throne of the Holy, Ecumenical, and Apostolic Church, which exists, instead of the Roman and Constantinople Church, in the city of Moscow which God has saved, as the church of the holy and famous Dormition of the most pure Mother of God. This church alone shines on the entire globe brighter than the sun. For know, you lover of Christ and lover of God: All Christian empires have ceased and have come together in the One Empire of our Ruler, according to the prophetic books: that is the Russian Empire ;obroseiskoe tsarstvo;cb. For two Romes have fallen, but the third one stands, and a fourth there shall not be" (adapted from texts in Hildegard Schaeder, Moskau Das Dritte Rom, Darmstadt 1957, after texts in V. Malinin, Starets Eleazarova monastyrya Filofei i ego poslaniya, Kiev, 1901). This prophecy is accompanied by suitably apocalyptic imagery borrowed from the Revelation of St. John the Divine.

In his later and most celebrated letter to the Grand Prince Vasili III, Filofei gives the classic, definitive exposition of the cult doctrine of Moscow The Third Rome:

I write to you, the Most bright and most highly-throning Sovereign, Grand Prince, orthodox Christian Tsar and lord of all, rein-holder of the Holy ecumenical and Apostolic Church of God of the Most Holy Virgin ... which is shining gloriously instead of the Roman or Constantinopolitan ;obone;cb. For the Old Rome fell because of its church's lack of faith, the Apollinarian heresy; and of the second Rome, the city of Constantine, the pagans broke down the doors of the churches with their axes. And now there is the Holy synodal Apostolic church of the reigning third Rome, of your tsardom, which shines like the sun in its orthodox Christian faith, pious tsar, as all empires ;obtsardoms;cb of the orthodox Christian faith have gathered into your single empire ... you are the only tsar for the Christians in the whole world. Do not break, o Tsar, the commandments laid by your ancestors, the Great Constantine and the blessed Vladimir, and the God-chosen Iaroslav, and the other blessed saints, of which root you are.... Listen and attend, pious Tsar, that all Christian empires are gathered in your single one, that two Romes have fallen, and the third one stands, and a fourth one there shall not be; your empire will not fall to others, according to the great Evangelist. (Ibid.)

The rest of the letter is devoted to a denunciation of crimes of sodomy being carried out in monasteries.

This insane cult belief, spawned by Venetian intelligence among the hesychasts of the Russian monasteries, and transmitted by those monasteries into the whole body of Russian culture, remains to this day the program of the Russian Orthodox Church and of the Muscovite state. The Russians, the only ones in the world who have kept the true faith, will one day compel the world into an universal empire for the purpose of purifying and purging the decadent "putrid" West and the other wayward races influenced by the West. For this pervasive cult, Russian territorial claims include the entire world.

Thus, in 1547, Ivan the Terrible, strong in the teaching of the monk Filofei, assumed the official title of Tsar, Emperor. The Russian Empire was proclaimed as the direct successor of the Scond Rome, Byzantium.

In 1589, the Muscovites prevailed upon the Patriarch of Constantinople, who was engaged in a fund-raising tour through their territories, to elevate the Metropolitan of Moscow to the full status of a Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. As the Greek Patriarch performed the ceremony, he uttered the words of Filofei of Pskov: "Since the old Rome fell because of the Apollinarian heresy, and the Second Rome, which is Constantinople, is possessed by the godless Turks, thy Great Russian Tsardom, pious Tsar ... is the Third Rome ... and thou alone under heaven art called the Christian Tsar in the whole world for all Christians; and therefore this very act of establishing the Patriarchate will be established according to God's will.

Vasili III's interpretation of the Third Rome included the Byzantine proprietary theory of law, which specified that the state, the land and the people were all the property of the tsar. This is documented by the testimony of Baron von Herberstein, who was twice ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Moscow during this period. Von Herberstein wrote of Vasili III: "He holds unlimited control over the lives and property of all his subjects. None of his councilors has enough authority to dare oppose him or even to differ from him ... they openly declare that the Prince's will is God's will ... all the people consider themselves to be kholops, that is slaves to their prince." (In Fitzroy McLean, Holy Russia, p. 32.)

The next Tsar was the imperial Ivan the Terrible, an instructive example of a Russian ruler who was steeped in the culture of the Russian monasteries, and who considered himself to a very large degree to be a monk. One Harrimanite writer on the subject has this to say about Ivan the Terrible: "Ivan was in his own rather strange way a deeply religious man and also a strong upholder of the doctrine of the Third Rome." (McLean, p. 38). Several years into his reign, at the end of 1564, Ivan left Moscow and transferred his residence to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St. Sergius at Zagorsk. He announced that he was abdicating as Tsar because of the intrigues of the Boyars or feudal noblemen. Ivan's move into the monastery of Zagorsk is known in Russian history as his Hegira, and bears comparison to Marshal Ogarkov's ouster from the post of Chief of the Soviet General Staff in favor of his new post as commander of the western theatre of war. Ivan said that he might be willing to resume the Tsardom, but only in exchange for life and death powers over all of his subjects. These were granted, leading to the unspeakable orgy of massacres and death by torture that followed. Ivan killed his enemies by boiling them in oil, by sewing them into bearskins and having them torn to pieces by hounds, by frying them in giant frying pans constructed for this purpose. Ivan customarily passed from the direct personal supervision and devising of torture and executions, to religious devotions and acts of penance, to sexual orgies of rape and sodomy. One piece of Ivan's handiwork was the total destruction of the city of Novgorod, in which about 60,000 people were massacred.

Most important, Ivan the Terrible founded the so-called Oprichnina, a new state within the state, apart from the existing institutions, and under the direct personal and dictatorial control of the Tsar himself. The Oprichnina had its own physical boundaries, its own form of government, and its own secret police, the Oprichniki, who went around slaughtering those whom they designated to be the enemies of the Tsar, and who in turn were often slaughtered by the Tsar. The Oprichnina on the one hand resembles the SS state of the late Nazi regime. It has proven a durable institution in Russian society, foreshadowing the KGB-militarized economy of today.

Ivan created a monastery of his own near Zagorsk, of which he himself was the "Abbot." He enjoyed composing music for the Orthodox church liturgy. He always gave lists of his victims to the monks after he had dispatched them, so that prayers might be said for their souls. In other ways Ivan recalls Diocletian. Ivan used the Oprichnina to set up a centralized state with a standing army, and with fixed classes, especially serfs, all of whom owed specific services to the imperial autocrat. Ivan used the army to wage wars in the service of Moscow the Third Rome, capturing Kazan from the Tartars, and also pressing towards the shores of the Baltic, and becoming embroiled in wars with Livonians, Swedes, Lithuanians, and Poles.

Ivan murdered his own son, the heir to his imperial throne. He obviously prefigures another monkish Oprichnik of our own century, the former seminarian of the Georgian Orthodox church, Stalin. Nevertheless, Ivan the Terrible is today a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church.

During the last years of the sixteenth century, the Russians expanded their colonization of Siberia, building forts on the River Ob in 1596 and shortly thereafter the Yenisei. By 1639, Muscovite power had reached the Pacific, and eventually advanced as far as San Francisco. This advance went on inexorably even during the Time of Troubles, the period of Polish invasion and dynastic chaos that took up the close of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth.

In February 1613 the zemskii sobor or assembly of the Russian lands elected Michael Romanov as Tsar, thus inaugurating a new imperial ruling house. The real ruler for the first decades was the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Fyodor Nikitich Romanov, the father of Michael. The leading feature of the opening years of the new dynasty was the consolidation of universal serfdom as the normal condition for peasant labor in the Russian Empire. This uniform regime of serfdom came at a time when free labor was already the rule in the West. Earlier, in 1606, there had already been a serf revolt, joined by Cossacks and others, led by the escaped slave Ivan Bolotnikov, who devastated large areas during an abortive march on Moscow. Bolotnikov was the founder of the modern Russian tradition of class war, the peasant revolt or jacquerie, but on the titanic scale suitable to the Russian steppes- -the tradition that later gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution itself.

Michael Romanov was succeeded in 1645 by his adolescent son, Alexis the Gentle, whose decree of 1649, the Ulozhenie, completed the total enserfment of the Russian peasantry, bound urban taxpayers to remain in the locality in which they were registered, and introduced the concept of political crimes to the inventory of Russian totalitarian thought. Alexis' reign was to be marked by the great schism or raskol within the Russian Orthodox Church, which introduced a new involution into the doctrine of Moscow the Third Rome. This great religious and political revolt was brought about by the Patriarch whom Alexis appointed, Nikon.

The Old Believers: schismatics for the Third Rome

Soon after his elevation to the Patriarchate in 1652, Nikon decided to embark upon a series of reforms of the liturgy of the Russian Church, which he said had become corrupt through an accretion of errors over the course of the centuries. Nikon enjoyed the position of Grand Sovereign, in effect a kind of co-tsardom with Alexis. His personal ambitions went in the direction of theocracy, with Nikon occupying the number one post. In this, he recalls Photius, who also argued that the Patriarch was supreme. From his monastery outside Moscow, which he called the New Jerusalem, Nikon promulgated a series of liturgical changes which elicited a massive, raving rebellion in church and state.

Nikon was undoubtedly well aware that his "liturgical reforms" would produce the whirlwind of revolt to which they in fact gave rise. He was undoubtedly familiar with the Bogomils, a sect of the Bulgarian Empire that gave rise in the West to the Cathars or Albigensians. He may have been instructed by controllers in Venice or at Mount Athos to carry out his reforms in order to re- invigorate, by means of the inevitable mass revolt, the monastic tradition of other-worldly irrationalism and fanaticism. Such controllers may have wished to create a current of Orthodox integrists to counterpose to the Westernizing and modernizing tendencies that the Romanov dynasty would later promote, above all in the person of Peter the Great. All of this, but above all the representation and celebration of mass insanity and the rejection of the paradigm of Western civilization, was accomplished through Nikon's provocation of the schism of the Old Believers, or Raskolniki.

The Nikonian liturgical reform was premised on the idea that Russian practice was corrupt, and that Greek Orthodox practice was older and purer. Nikon brought in new prayer books in which the spelling of the name of Jesus was changed. He ordered that the sign of the cross not be made with two fingers, according to the Russian tradition, but rather with three fingers, on the Greek model. He altered the direction of processions around the church, and the number of Hallelujahs to be chanted at certain points in the liturgy. He stipulated that the eight-pointed Russian cross be replaced with the four-pointed Greek cross. He decreed that all Russian churches built in the future had to have five domes.

Remember that the basic credo of the Third Rome was that Constantinople and the Greek church had fallen because they had betrayed the true Christian faith by their dealings with the apostate Latins. Now Nikon was proposing to change some rather sensitive parts of the Russian liturgy to make them conform to Greek models. As Archpriest Avvakum, one of the most important spokesmen for the Raskolniki was later to write, upon receipt of Nikon's circulars, "hearts froze and legs began to shake." The general conclusion was that the minions of Antichrist, or Antichrist himself, had seized control of the Russian Church, that the earthly repository of the true faith was now in danger, and that the definitive corruption of the pure Russian faith might occur, in which case the apocalypse would be at hand.

All over Russia monks, parish priests, bishops, metropolitans, serfs, Cossacks, and others rushed to join the party of the Raskolniki, those who violently rejected the Nikonian reforms. These Old Believers are called in Russian the Starovery or Staroobradtsy, and collectively the Starina. The Old Believers insisted on the pre- Nikonian liturgy, and quickly encountered the massive repression of the Tsarist regime. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, fled from the populated areas of Russia into the wilderness, with large communities of Old Believers quickly appearing on the lower Don and the lower Volga Rivers, as well as in the Ural mountains. Some penetrated even further, into the Siberian taiga. As Avvakum had said, "It behooves us to secede and flee in the season of the Antichrist." Soviet ethnologists discovered one small community a few years ago which had never heard of the Second World War, because it had lived in total isolation from the rest of the world. Other Old Believers felt that the coming of Antichrist was to be expected at any moment, and an undetermined but very large number of them committed mass suicide on the Jonestown model (certainly more than 20,000), arguing that it was better to die at once than to look on the face of the Antichrist. One Old Believer put it this way: "I would take a burning brand and set fire to the city; how joyous it would be, if it were consumed from end to end together with old and young, so that the seal of Antichrist could not be laid on any of them" (Alexander V. Soloviev, Holy Russia ;obThe Hague, 1959;cb, p.34). One of the stories the Old Believers concocted during their wanderings in the wilderness was the Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, afterwards made into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov.

The Old Believers fragmented at once into a myriad of contending sects and sectlets. After the initial martyrs had gone to their rewards, the Old Believers discovered that they had no bishops consecrated in the approved Orthodox apostolic succession who could ordain priests. In response to this state of affairs, some sects chose to be priestly (popovtsy), and accepted runaway "Nikonian" priests after these latter had undergone a type of ritual purification to put off their cloak of apostasy. The more radical priestless sects (bezpopovtsy) would have nothing to do with any Nikonian, and decided they would have to get through the short interval before the convening of the Last Judgment without the help of clergymen.

Dramatic resistance against the Nikonian reforms emerged at the Solovetskii Monastery, located on an island in the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle. In the narrative of Raskolnik leader Epifanii, upon hearing of Nikon's innovations, "in the Solovetskii Monastery the holy fathers and the brothers began to grieve and to weep bitterly and to speak in this fashion: Brothers, brothers! Alas, alas! Woe, woe! The faith of Christ has fallen in Russia, just as in other lands, through Christ's two enemies, Nikon and Arseni [hm.1] (Crummey, p. 10). By 1666 the monks were in open revolt. When Archimandrite Sergei of the Iaroslavskii Monastery arrived to enforce the Nikonian dispensations, the assembled monks replied thus: "We are attentive to the Tsar's decree and are in all matters obedient to him, but the orders concerning the confession of faith and the three-finger sign of the cross ... we do not accept and do not want to hear, and we are all unanimously ready to suffer." The leader of the Solovetskii uprising was a the former abbot of the Savvinskii Monastery, who held up his hand in the three-fingered Greek position, and exclaimed, "that instruction--that we are ordered to cross ourselves with three fingers--is Latin tradition, the seal of the Antichrist" (Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist, Madison and London, 1970, p. 19).

The monks of the Solovetskii Monastery held out until 1676. In 1673 they decided no longer to pray for the tsar. After the defeat of the serf, Cossack, and Old Believer revolt of Stepan Razin had been crushed, the Solovetskii monks sheltered many of the fugitives. The population of the White Sea regions sided to a large extent with the monks, and sent them food. At the end almost 200 monks were slaughtered when the monastery was sacked. A number escaped to tell the story of the revolt, which quickly became a legend among serfs and Raskolniki. It cannot be sufficiently stressed that from the time of the schism onward, the monasteries were hotbeds of open or latent sympathy with the Raskolnik point of view, to which the monks gravitated at once, especially later on under Peter the Great.

One recent writer sums up the Weltanschauung of the Old Believers as follows: "The liturgical reforms, one of the products of the nascent internationalism of the court circle, ran counter to the widely held attitudes usually summarized in the loosely tied bundle of historical conceptions known as the Third Rome doctrine. In their attacks on the liturgical reforms, Avvakum and the other Old Believer spokesmen from among the parish clergy and the monks repeatedly stressed that, after the apostasy of the first Rome and of Byzantium, only Moscow preserved Christian orthodoxy.... For the Old Believers, the issue was simple, at least on the surface. If Ivan IV and his subjects had possessed the true faith, then no detail of the dogma or the ritual of his time could be changed. And what worse fate could befall the Russian church than to change its practices to conform to those of the apostate Greeks?" (Crummey, p. 12).

Here, in his own words, is a statement on the theme of the Third Rome made by the Old Believer ideologue Avvakum at the Russian church council of 1667, which was called to judge the issue of Nikon and Nikon's reforms in the presence of a group of Eastern patriarchs:

The last word they said to me was, "Why are you so stubborn? All of Palestine--and the Serbs, the Albanians, the Wallachians, the Romans, and the Poles--all of them cross themselves with three fingers and only you remain obstinate and make the sign with five fingers. That is not fitting!" And I answered them for Christ as follows: "Ecumenical teachers! Rome has long since fallen and lies prostrate, and the Poles perished with them, and are the enemies of Christians to the end. Among you Orthodoxy has become mottled because of the violence of Mehmet the Turk--and one must not be amazed at you: You have become powerless. And so henceforth, come to us to study, for, by the grace of God, we have autocracy. Before Nikon the apostate, in Russia, under our pious princes and Tsars, Orthodoxy was complete, pure, undefiled, and the church without uproar. Nikon, that wolf, and the Devil ordered us to cross ourselves with three fingers: But our first pastors crossed themselves with five fingers and likewise gave their blessing with five fingers according to the tradition of the holy fathers, Meletius of Antioch, the blessed Theodorite, Bishop of Cyrene, Peter of Damascus, and Maxim the Greek. Likewise the local council of Moscow under Tsar Ivan ordered us to cross ourselves and give the blessing, putting our fingers together in that way (Crummey, p.12).

The Old Believers were an integral part of the emergence of the full-blown Russian tradition of class war and social upheaval. In the year 1667 a band of Don Cossack bandits under the leadership of Stepan (or Stenka) Razin made their way from the Don to the Volga and thence to the Caspian Sea and the Ural River, recruiting Cossacks, Old Believers, and runaway serfs as they went. They made a detour into Persia, and by 1670 were ascending the Volga towards Moscow, where panic broke out, since Razin had declared war against those he branded as the oppressors of the Russian people: landowners, merchants, and government officials. A specially assembled army under foreign officers defeated Razin, who was captured and put to death in Moscow in 1671. His army dispersed into marauding bands that were tracked down and annihilated, but only after much effort.

Among Russian peasants, the legend of Razin still persists, including in the form of a folk song. The legend says that on the lower Volga there is a hill sacred to Razin, and that if you climb that hill at midnight, you will learn Razin's secret, the secret of class war.

Many Raskolniki had suspected that Nikon was not the true Antichrist, but that this title were better bestowed on Tsar Alexis himself. From the year 1666 onwards, the expectation of a "sensuous Antichrist" became overwhelming. With the advent of Peter the Great, all Raskolniki agreed that the Tsar was indeed the Antichrist. Peter carried on a program of Westernizing reform, partly under the influence of Leibniz and of his academy movement. Naturally the Raskolniki were violently hostile to any Western importations. They were against Western science, Western geometry, and Western ways of doing things. Technological improvements were equated in their eyes with sin.

Peter traveled in the West, a thing unthinkable for any tsar up to that time, and brought back German, Italian and Dutch experts to carry on his crash program for economic development of Russia. Peter moved the capital from Moscow to his newly constructed Western window at St. Petersburg, which in the eyes of the Old Believers and the monks certified Peter's betrayal of the Third Rome prophecy. Later in his reign Peter in effect abolished the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, and replaced the Patriarch with a government organ, the Synod, under the leadership of a functionary with a German title, the Oberprokuror. The Patriarchate stayed abolished until after the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, when a new Patriarch was elected on the very eve of the October Revolution. All of these changes brought the rage of the fanatic Raskolniki to an absolute paroxysm.

Much later, in the 1780s, Catherine the Great sought to carry out a variant of the Third Rome through what she called her Greek project. The centerpiece of this plan, which Catherine developed together with her lover, Prince Potemkin, was the creation of a new Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Asia Minor as a Russian puppet state, with Constantinople to be garrisoned by Russian troops and the Bosporus and the Dardanelles to be open to Russian shipping. The designated emperor of this new Byzantium was Catherine's great- grandson, who appropriately received the name of Constantine. This Greek Project restated a number of leading motives that had been developed by the Orlov family during preceding decades, especially in regard to Russia's need for warm-water ports.

Despite her own pursuit of the Third Rome, however, for the Old Believers Catherine was just one more representative of the Antichrist of the Romanov dynasty. In the 1770s there were the first signs of revolt among the Don and Ural Cossacks, among whom Raskolniki were heavily represented. In 1773 a Don Cossack by the name of Emelian Pugachov proclaimed that he was the true Tsar Peter III, a previous husband of Catherine whom the tsarina had in reality liquidated somewhat earlier in the game. The Pretender Pugachov created a bizarre version of the Imperial court around his own person, assembled an army of Cossacks, Raskolniki and serfs, and advanced up the Volga towards Moscow in the midst of the largest serf rebellion ever seen. Pugachov's targets were officers, officials, merchants, priests, and landowners, all of whom he executed as soon as they were captured. The comparison to the Bolshevik Revolution is once again quite obvious. The October Revolution emerges in retrospect merely as the largest of the Raskolnik-Cossack-serf revolts of the Romanov dynasty, with the important difference that Lenin and the Bolsheviks succeeded in seizing power in Moscow and in the rest of Russia.

Pugachov was defeated by an imperial army under General Alexander Suvorov, who began inflicting the most savage reprisals on all those who took part in the uprising. Suvorov hunted down Pugachov and captured him, and the Cossack-Raskolnik leader was dismembered in a public square in Moscow in January 1775, at about the same time as the outbreak of the American Revolution. For years after the death of Pugachov himself, the Imperial government systematically liquidated all those who had taken part in the rebellion. Entire villages were razed to the ground, and gibbets with dangling corpses were silhouetted against the horizon as a warning to the peasantry and the dissenters. This colossal uprising, which was the greatest in Europe in the century before the French Revolution, left a heritage of bitterness and hatred which was still smoldering under the surface in 1905 and in 1917. As for the Cossacks, they were regimented as a military unit of the Imperial government, from which distilled a part of the officer caste of the Empire. Ogarkov derives from this tradition; furthermore, Gorbachov himself and Russian Republic Prime Minister Vorotnikov are alleged to be of Cossack, and therefore of Raskolnik, stock.

The Old Believer mentality asserted that the West was the enemy, as it had been from time immemorial. The specific Old Believer twist was in the notion that the Romanov dynasty and the top hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church had themselves sold out to the West, and therefore had to be overthrown to permit the restoration of the Tsardom, the people, and the Third Rome in the pristine spiritual purity in which they had existed before 1613. For this, the Old Believers argued, a revolution and class war were necessary.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of the Raskolniki who had migrated into the wilderness peripheries of the Russian Empire, returned to their holy city of Moscow. Peter III and Catherine II chose not to persecute Old Belief per se, but only political sedition. Many of the Old Believers who came back to Moscow prospered as salesmen, teachers, factory managers, light industrialists, and the like. Their position in the sweatshop-based Moscow textile industry was very strong. Reports of the Tsarist authorities in the nineteenth century stress that the number of Old Believers was in continuous expansion. The estimate may be ventured that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Old Believers amount to at least 15;pc of the total population of the Russian Empire.

Many Raskolniki became secularized, or even atheists, but they persisted in the idea that the Romanov state was illegitimate, and that the official Russian Orthodox Church was a gang of heretics. They wanted the state to wither away into a church, which would allow Holy Russia to carry out her assigned mission as the Third Rome. Secularized Old Believers made up a considerable portion of the Narodniki populists, and of the People's Will, the society that blew up the reforming Tsar Alexander II, who for the Raskolniki was but another incarnation of the Antichrist. Indeed, secularized Raskolniki were a sizable part of the recruiting base of all Russian nineteenth-century radical movements, including most emphatically the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in both its Menshevik and Bolshevik factions. Apart from the well-known penetration of the Bolsheviks by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, at the highest level (Stalin was a notorious Okhrana agent at the beginning of his career), many Bolshevik leaders, like the God-maker faction of Bogdanov and Lunacharskii, had been trained at the Benedictine center on the Italian island of Capri. The violent attacks on the church made by the Bolsheviks during the 1920s are entirely consistent with the outlook of Raskolnik irrationalists, especially of those coming from the priestless sects.

The Russian monasteries--and again, many of them shared the outlook of the Old Believers--were systematically repressed during the reign of Peter the Great. Of the 2,000 monasteries that had been in operation at the end of the seventeenth century, only 318 survived in 1764. But from this low ebb, comparable in some ways to the first two decades of the Bolshevik regime, the monastic movement was destined to stage a powerful comeback, determining the Russian culture of the nineteenth century and creating the cultural paradigm of the Bolshevik revolution.

The nineteenth century Yesterday Russian propaganda told us: I am Christianity--tomorrow it will tell us: I am Socialism.---Jules Michelet, 1851

The starting point for this new monastic revival was the Venetian-Orthodox command center of Mt. Athos. Its mystical and irrational textbook was the Philocalia of Saint Nicodemus, the Hagiorite of the Holy Mountain (1748-1809). The Philokalia was an anthology of hesychast writers from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the Jesus prayer. Other key personalities of the monastic upswing included Paissus Velikhovskii, who came to Russia from Mt. Athos in the eighteenth century to spread the line of repudiating secularism and worldliness in favor of the asceticism of the early desert fathers, the hermits and stylites of the East. Paissus founded a number of new monasteries in Moldavia and southern Russia. Following in the footsteps of St. Benedict, Paissus developed a monastic rule (regula) all his own. Paissus' rule was characterized by its extreme severity, which was based on the notion of the monk as a hermit in the wilderness. The monasteries where the austere rule of Paissus was in force usually took the title of pustyn, or desert, rather than lavra or other earlier terms. Other fanatical protagonists of the monastic revival included Tikhon of Zadonsk, and later, Seraphim of Sarov.

Seraphim of Sarov expanded the role of monasteries as controllers for secular intellectuals, who came to the monasteries for periodic spiritual retreats and visits. Each visitor was assigned to a specific starets, or elder of the monastery. The most significant example of this role of the monasteries is that of Optina Pustyn, which exerted a virtually single-handed control over Russian literary production in the nineteenth century. Optina controlled the leading Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky, who later came to the monastery to live. Other followers of the Optina elders were the novelist Count Leo Tolstoi, scion of a family that traditionally exerted a powerful influence over the Okhrana, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, the most influential of all the Slavophiles of the nineteenth century. The character of the monk Father Zossima in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov is a composite of Father Ambrose, the monastic starets whom Dostoevsky visited for guidance at Optina, and of Tikhon of Zadonsk, whose writings Dostoevsky thoroughly studied. Another spiritual visitor to Optina Pustyn was Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most sophisticated and insidious of the literary apologists for Russian mysticism.

Because of this predominant role of the Russian Orthodox monks, the Russian literature of the entire nineteenth century after the passing of Pushkin and his circle, takes on the character of a titanic revolt against Reason, with the typical apocalyptic Third Rome themes, messianism, and other-worldly mysticism occupying center stage.

The Third Rome ideology of the first half of the nineteenth century is best profiled through some observations on the Slavophiles, who together with their co-thinkers, the Westernizers, dominated Russian intellectual life in this period. The principal Slavophile writers included Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevskii, the brothers Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov, Yurii Samarin, and others, all profoundly influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church. Herzen, a so- called Westernizer, once admitted that the basic outlook of both Westernizers and Slavophiles was the same. The Slavophiles were much influenced by Hegel and Schelling. They pointed to the solution of social problems through a return to primitive Slavic institutions like the agricultural commune or mir, which later, under Stalin, reappeared as the collective farm. The Slavophiles also glorified the artel, or artisan commune, as an alternative to the modern factory. The Slavophiles condemned Reason as a Western perversion, and recommended instead that all problems be solved by a zemski sobor, or council of the Russian estates. In Western terms, they are a group of solidarists and fascists, who added a powerful impetus to the growth of fascist and solidarist ideas in the West. The roots of Dostoevsky's ideological profile are very much in this group of writers and, as we have seen, in the Optina elders who dominated the lot of them.

The first element in the Slavophile creed is an aggressive, imperialist Third Rome chauvinism, based on the messianic, "disinterested" mission that the Russian people is called upon to carry out. Konstantin Aksakov wrote: "The history of the Russian people is the only history in the world of a Christian people, Christian not only in its profession of faith, but also in its life, or at least in the aspirations of its life" (Quoted in Riazanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles, p.74). Brother Ivan Aksakov chimed in: "The Russian people is not a people; it is humanity; it is a people only because it is surrounded by peoples with exclusively national essences, and its humanity is therefore represented as nationality" (Riazanovsky, p. 121).

The issue dividing Russia from the decadent West is unerringly portrayed by the Slavophiles as the underlying theological question of the Filioque, which the Slavophiles, in best Photian tradition, take straight back to the time of Charlemagne. Here is an extraordinary summary of the case from Khomiakov, the founder of the school:

Now let us betake ourselves to the last years of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth century, and let us imagine a wanderer who had come from the East to one of the cities in Italy or in France. Pervaded by the feeling of ancient unity, and quite confident that he is in the midst of brethren, he enters a church to sanctify the last day of the week. Full of love, he concentrates on pious thoughts, follows the service, and listens to the wonderful prayers which had gladdened his heart from early childhood. Words reach him: Let us kiss one another, that we may with one mind confess the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. He is listening carefully. Now the Creed of the Christian and Catholic church is proclaimed, the Creed which every Christian must serve with his entire life, and for which, on occasion, he must sacrifice his life. He is listening carefully,--But this Creed is corrupted, it is some new, unknown creed! Is he awake, or is he in the power of an oppressive dream? He does not believe his ears, begins to doubt his senses. He wants to find out, asks explanation. An idea occurs to him: He may have walked into a gathering of dissenters cast away from the local church.... Alas, this is not the case! He heard the voice of the local church itself. An entire patriarchate, an entire vast world fell away from unity.... By its very action (that is, by the arbitrary change of the Creed) the Roman world made an implicit assertion that in its eyes the entire East was not more than a world of helots in matters of faith and doctrine. Life in the church ended for an entire half of the church" (Riazanovsky, p 65).

Here we can note in passing a typical Russian Orthodox reversal of the causal relations of the real world. The Filioque was advanced to rescue human beings from slavery, but for Khomiakov it becomes a means of shackling the entire East as helots.

The rest of the Slavophile polemic derives from the implications of this central issue of the Filioque. For the Slavophiles, the cardinal sin of the West has been its cultivation of Reason. The dichotomies they set up always oppose the West as the realm of Reason to the East as the full development of all faculties of the mind, primarily irrationalism and insanity. Here is a sample from Ivan Kireevsky: "... the Roman church in its deviation from the Eastern is characterized by precisely the same triumph of rationalism over tradition, of outer reason over inner spiritual comprehension. Thus the dogma concerning the Trinity was changed contrary to the spiritual meaning and tradition, changed as a result of an external syllogism, deduced from the concept of divine equality of the Father and the Son" (Riazanovsky, p. 96).

For Khomiakov, "... rationalism or the narrowly logical analysis became the nature of the Western church, in contrast with contemplative cognition, which was preserved in the East. Prayer, ritual, sacrament, good works acquired, in the relationship of man to God, the nature of merit and of exorcising power...." In Khomiakov's view, Western rationality was the cause of the destruction of true religion there, "for such is the nature of that logical mechanism, that 'self-propelled knife' which is called rationalism--once it is admitted into the heart of human thinking and in the highest sphere of religious ideas, it must of necessity cut down and crush everything living and unconditioned, the entire, so to speak, organic vegetation of the soul, and leave nothing but a cheerless desert behind it" (Riazanovsky, p. 92).

For Khomiakov, Reason was a hollow principle which could prevail in the short run but then had to be overturned by the specific organic genius of each people. Khomiakov held Reason in absolute contempt: "The conditional, as the creation of reason ... easily assumes the appearance of a shapely form, easily unites material forces around itself and goes straight to its always one- sided goal. An invention of one locality or of one people, it is easily accepted and adopted by others because it does not bear the signs or the stamp of any locality or of any people. It is a fruit of Reason, which is everywhere the same, not of the complete organism, which is everywhere different. Its power and its seduction are in its weakness and its lifelessness." Ivan Kireevsky shared that contempt for Reason: "But this falling apart of the mind into particular forces, this domination of reason over the other activities of the spirit, which ultimately had to destroy the entire edifice of medieval learning, at first had the opposite effect, and caused a development which was the more rapid, the more one-sided. Such is the law of the deviation of the human mind: the appearance of brilliance and the inner dimness" (Riazanovsky, pp. 99-100).

The Reason deriving from the doctrine of the Filioque was in turn the basis for the Augustinian concept of the individual. The Western individual was a target of special anathema on the part of the Slavophiles. Here is Ivan Kireevsky once again: "The entire private and public life of the West is founded on the concept of separate, individual independence which assumes individual isolation. Thence the sanctity of the external, formal relations, the sanctity of property and of conditional enactments are more important than human personality. Each individual--a private person, a knight, a prince, or a city--is, within his rights, a despotic unlimited individual, who is the law unto himself. The first step of every man in society is to surround himself with a fortress, from the depth of which he begins negotiations with other and independent powers" (Riazanovsky, p. 98).

The Slavophiles hated all the Western nations, with the sole exceptions of Venice and of Great Britain. For Germany they had the most attention, and a horrible fascination, since they were attracted by German intellectual life. It was easier for them to hate France, Spain, and Italy. Initial Slavophile interest in the United States was soon supplanted by a special form of hatred, reserved for the country that seemed to present many of the features of the decadent West in their most radical and extreme form. Here is a Slavophile profile of the United States from the pen of Ivan Kireevskii, the pupil of Optina, for whom the United States carries with it all the horror of an experiment in reason:

That experiment has already been made. What a brilliant future appeared to belong to the United States of America, built on such a reasonable foundation, after such a great beginning!--And what happened? Only the external forms of society, deprived of the inner source of life, developed, and they crushed the man under the external mechanism. The literature of the United States, according to the reports of the most impartial judges, is a clear expression of this condition. An enormous factory of talentless poems, without a shadow of poesy; trite epithets signifying nothing and yet constantly repeated; a total absence of feeling for everything artistic; an obvious contempt for all thinking, which does not lead to material gains; petty personalities without general foundations; puffed up sentences with a most trifling content, a profanation of the sacred words, humanity, fatherland, common good, nationality, to such an extent that their use has become not even hypocrisy, but simply a recognized stamp for selfish interests; a superficial respect for the external side of the laws combined with most insolent violations of them; a spirit of cooperation for private gains combined with an unblushing faithlessness of the cooperating individuals, and an obvious disrespect for all moral principles, so that it is evident that at the basis of all this mental activity lies the most petty life, cut off from everything that lifts the heart above personal profit, sunk in the world of egoism, and recognizing material comfort together with its subsidiary elements as the highest goal. No! If indeed a Russian is fated, for some impenitent sins, to exchange his great future for the one-sided life of the West, then I would rather fall into revery with the abstract German in his involved theories; I would rather fall into indolence until death under the warm sky, in the artistic atmosphere of Italy; I would rather start whirling with the Frenchman in his impulsive, momentary desires; I would rather turn into stone with an Englishman and his stubborn and unaccountable habits than I would suffocate in this prose of factory relations, in this mechanism of selfish worry" (Riazanovsky, p. 112-13).

For the Slavophiles, it is not Russia that hates the West; the Russian people is totally free of any racial, national, or ethnic prejudice. In their view it is rather the West that is responsible for existing tensions. Ivan Aksakov writes: "It is time to realize that we shall not purchase the favor of the West by any amount of willingness to please; it is time to understand that the hatred, not seldom instinctive, of the West towards the Orthodox Slavonic world stems from other, and deeply hidden causes; these causes are the antagonism of the two opposite spiritual principles of enlightenment, and the envy felt by the decrepit world towards the new one to which the future belongs.... The hatred of the West towards the East and towards Orthodoxy is a traditional, instinctive, and peculiarly spontaneous feeling and motive force in the history of the world" (Riazanovsky, p. 83).

The Slavophiles thus had no doubt about to whom the future belonged. A decisive and recurring theme of all their output is the coming apocalyptic cataclysm of the West, a kind of literary prefiguring of the Ogarkov plan of today. Khomiakov made this the theme of a celebrated poem, paraphrased as follows:

Sadness, sadness comes over me! Thick darkness is falling on the distant West, the land of holy miracles: Former suns become pale as they burn out, and the greatest stars fall from the sky.... Woe! The age has ended, and the entire West is covered with the shroud of death. There darkness will be deep.... Hear then the call of fate, spring up in a new radiance, awake, oh somnolent East! (Riazanovsky, p. 118).

We see here that the previous Old Believer view has been changed in the important respect that now it is only the West, and not the entire world, certainly not Russia, which is to be subjected to destruction. Once again, Marshal Ogarkov agrees.

Paganism has always been at the heart of the Russian Orthodox Church approach to religion. The Russian church was and is the mystery religion of the imperial state, and has gathered into itself all of the pre-existing cult forms, going back to Little Mother Russia and Mother Earth. Writers who were active at the same time as the Slavophiles leave no doubt that for them God is not a universal divine principle, but rather a tribal totem, strictly limited to the Great Russian Master Race. One writer whose ravings cast light on the subject is V. A. Zhukovsky, a leading court poet during the reign of the oppressive and reactionary Nicholas I. Zhukovsky was the tutor of the future Tsar Alexander II, who abolished serfdom. The following is taken from a letter to a friend which appeared in July 1848 in the magazine Russkii Invalid.

Meanwhile our star, Holy Russia, shines on high, shines undisturbed, and may God preserve it from an eclipse. Holy Russia--this word is coeval with Christian Russia.... Is there not marked more clearly in it our particular union with God, as a result of which we have received from our forefathers his wondrous name, the Rus God (Russkii Bog, not the Russian God, (Rossiiski Bog ... ) the way Oserov ends his "Dimitry Donskoi." The Russian God, Holy Russia--such names for God and fatherland no other European people has.... The other expression of our people, Russian God, has a profound historical meaning.... The expression Russian God conveys not just our faith in God, but also a particular popular tradition about God. He is from ancient times the champion of Russia, visible to our ancestors at all times both good and bad, glorious and miserable.... Russian God is in the same relation to our faith in God, as Holy Russia is in relation to Russia.... This conception of the Russian God ... is derived by the Russian people out of the revelation contained in its own history. It is a conception of a tangible God, of a proven God, recognized universally without any propagandizing.... It would be ridiculous to say: English, French, or German God; but at the sound Russian God the soul is transported. It is the God of our popular life in whom, so to say, there is personified for us our faith in the God of our soul. It is the image of the heavenly savior, visibly reflected in the earthly history of our people" (Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People New Haven, 1961, pp. 173-75).

Dostoevsky

With a pagan chauvinist credo of this sort, we have entered the world of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a world that is all the more significant because it was not the solipsistic creation of an isolated madman, but a very representative phenomenon, typical of the inner life of whole strata of monks, Old Believers, Orthodox faithful, Okhrana officials, and other wretched denizens of the Russian Empire. And in the Soviet Union today, Dostoevsky has been taken off the index, and is once more the required reading of all cultural elites.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is the classic irrationalist fanatic of Moscow the Third Rome in the modern era. Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821 as the son of a resident doctor in a charity hospital. He lived on the hospital grounds, and so was able to gain first-hand experience of the human wreckage generated by the strongly autocratic regime of Nicholas I. His fascination with misery and misfortune is evident in many of his writings. By the 1840s Dostoevsky was achieving some modest success as an author. Then he fell in with a group of Utopian socialists and was arrested by the Tsarist secret police. In 1849 he was subjected to a mock execution, and after that spent almost a decade in various prison camps and penal battalions in Siberia. His principal literary productions date from the years between 1859 and his death in 1881. In addition to his well-known novels (Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov), his essay magazine called The Diary of a Writer is a compendium of his political ideas. Dostoevsky's work is remarkable in that it prefigures the essential ideological apparatus of German Nazism. In other words, Dostoevsky has no trouble with either side of the Nazi-Communist coin.

In the Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky advances the classic territorial demand of Third Rome Imperialism: "Constantinople must be ours." This is explicitly placed in the framework of the messianic mission of the Third Rome, which Dostoevsky explicates as follows: "... in the name of what moral right could Russia claim Constantinople? Relying upon what sublime aims could Russia demand Constantinople from Europe? Precisely as a leader of Orthodoxy, as its protectress and guardian--a role designated to her ever since Ivan III, who placed her symbol and the Byzantine double- headed eagle above the ancient coat of arms of Russia, a role which unquestionably revealed itself only after Peter the Great when Russia perceived in herself the strength to fulfill her mission and factually become the real and sole protectress of Orthodoxy and of the people adhering to it. Such is the ground, such is the right to ancient Constantinople..." (The Diary of a Writer, "My Paradox").

In the name of this Imperial mission, Dostoevsky exalts the role of war and armed conflict. This theme is vehemently developed in pieces written for the Diary during the Eastern crisis of l877. Dostoevsky advances the case that war has a positive, therapeutic value, helping to purge the social organism of toxins accumulated during intervals of peace. Dostoevsky comments: "Believe me that in certain, if not in all cases (save in the case of civil wars) war is a process by means of which specifically international peace is achieved with a minimum loss of blood, with minimum sorrow and effort, and at least more or less normal relations between the nations are evolved. Of course, this is a pity, but what can be done if this is so? And it is better to draw the sword once than to suffer interminably. And in what manner is present peace, prevailing among the civilized nations, better than war? The contrary is true: Peace, lasting peace, rather than war tends to harden and bestialize man. Lasting peace always generates cruelty, cowardice and coarse, fat egoism, and chiefly--intellectual stagnation. It is only the exploiters of the peoples who grow fat in times of long peace. It is being repeated over and over again that peace generates wealth, but only for one tenth of the people, and this one tenth, having contracted the diseases of wealth, transmits the contagion to the other nine tenths who have no wealth. And that one tenth is contaminated by debauch and cynicism" (Diary, April 1877).

It is instructive to bear such remarks in mind in pondering present Soviet propaganda statements, in which the real content of the term "peace" is very close to that assigned by Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky is also certain that the Russian system is better suited for war than the methods of the Western powers, militaristic and bellicose though those may be. He makes the following comments in April l877:

Our principal strength is precisely in the fact that they do not understand Russia at all--they understand nothing about Russia! They do not know that nothing in the world can conquer us; that we may, perhaps, be losing battles, but that nevertheless we shall remain invincible precisely because of the unity of our popular spirit, and by reason of the people's consciousness; that we are not France, which is all in Paris; that we are not Europe, which is altogether dependent upon the stock-exchanges of her bourgeoisie and the 'tranquility' of her proletarians which is being purchased--and this only for one hour--with the last resorts of their local governments. They do not comprehend and know that, if it be our will, neither the Jews of all Europe nor the millions of their gold- -not even the millions of their armies, can conquer us; that if it be our will, it is impossible to compel us to do something we do not wish, and that there is no such power on earth which could compel us.

Here the instinctive populism of the Slavophile mingles with the rhetorical notes of the Communist and with the anti-Semitism of the Nazi. The Nazi-Communist Dostoevsky, since he is free of the cancer of Reason that has consumed the putrid West, is blissfully unaware of any contradiction, and indeed there is none.

Dostoevsky's political creed in further illuminated in his essay "My Paradox," appearing in the Diary in 1876. The paradox is that Third Rome Russian patriots, when they go to Europe, become leftists and socialists, since they find that this is the most appropriate way of working for the destruction of Europe. By contrast, a Russian conservative who goes to Europe and becomes a conservative European, is not a good Russian, but rather an enemy of Russia, since he has sold out his Motherland. This piece reads like a manual for the foreign operations of the KGB and the GRU, which to some degree it undoubtedly is.

Dostoevsky asks himself the rhetorical question, "You assert that every Russian, turning into a European Communard, thereby forthwith becomes a Russian conservative." This, he replies, is too risky a conclusion. He refines the point thus:

Russian European socialists and Communards are not Europeans, and ... in the long run, when the misunderstanding shall have been dispelled and they know Russia, they will again become full-blooded and good Russians. And secondly, ... under no circumstances can a Russian be converted into a real European if he remains the least bit Russian. And, if this be so, it means that Russia is something independent and peculiar, not resembling Europe at all, but important by itself. Besides, Europe herself is, perhaps, not in the least unjust when condemning Russians and scoffing at their revolutionary theories: It means that we are revolutionists not merely for the sake of destruction where we did not build--like the Huns and the Tartars--but for the sake of something different, something, which, in truth, we do not know ourselves (and those who know, keep silent). In a word, we are revolutionists, so to speak, because of some personal necessity--if you please, by reason of conservatism.

Dostoevsky was also, as is well known, a publicist for the violent anti-Semitic campaigns that swept across Russia during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, in the form of the pogroms organized by the oligarchical Black Hundreds, and in the form of the official policies of the Imperial Interior Ministry which counted on eliminating Jewry in Russia by forcing one third to emigrate, one third to convert to Orthodoxy, and by liquidating the remaining third. In Dostoevsky's mind hatred of Jews is mixed with his inchoate anti-capitalism and anti-Western feeling, as well as with his fascist populism. These comments are from the notorious essay "The Jewish Question" from March 1877:

Jewry is thriving precisely there where the people are still ignorant, or not free, or economically backward. It is there that Jewry has a champ libre! And instead of raising, by its influence, the level of education, instead of increasing knowledge, generating economic fitness in the native population--instead of this, the Jew, wherever he has settled, has still more humiliated and debauched the people; there humaneness was still more debased and the educational level fell still lower; there inescapable, inhuman misery, and with it despair, spread still more disgustingly. Ask the native population in our border regions: What is propelling the Jew--has been propelling him for centuries? You receive a unanimous answer: mercilessness. He has been prompted so many centuries only by pitilessness for us, only by the thirst for our sweat and blood.... The Jew is offering his interposition, he is trading in another man's labor. Capital is accumulated labor; the Jew loves to trade in somebody else's labor. But, temporarily, this changes nothing. As against this, the summit of the Jews is assuming stronger and firmer power over mankind seeking to convey to it its image and substance.

It will be found that Dostoevsky was the decisive epistemological influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, who referred to the older Russian writer as his "beloved father." Alfred Rosenberg, the author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the Nazi Party ideological handbook, carried out an in-depth study of Dostoevsky. Here he found a concept of blood and soil (pochva), which prompted the Nazi emphasis on Blut und Boden. He also discovered, in novels like The Possessed, the theory of the superman for whom everything is allowed, even the most heinous crimes. Moeller van den Brueck, who translated Dostoevsky's works into German, coined the phrase "The Third Reich" as the title for one of his books. His inspiration had come from Dostoevsky's Third Rome.

For Dostoevsky, questions of imperialist politics were essentially theological in their foundations. He wrote in the January 1877 issue of the Diary: "If it wishes to live long, every great people believes that in it and in it alone, is contained the salvation of the world; that it only lives in order to stand at the head of all the peoples, to assimilate them into itself and to lead them, in a harmonious choir, to the final goal foreordained for them all." For Dostoevsky, this applied above all to the imperial mission of Russia. His most developed statement on the nature of this messianic Russian imperialism of the Third Rome is to be found in his speech on Pushkin, which was delivered on June 8, 1880 at a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, and which was then published in the Diary.

This appreciation has very little to do with Pushkin, since the latter most emphatically did not share Dostoevsky's outlook. Dostoevsky rather uses Pushkin's genius for an ulterior political motive of his own. He comments that Pushkin's foreign characters are in each case the most authentic representatives of their national characters that can be found anywhere, even in Shakespeare. This bespeaks an unmatched universality on the part of Pushkin. Right, says Dostoevsky, and in this Pushkin is typical of the whole Russian people, who have exactly such a universal mission. And then ... hold on to your hat:

Nay, I assert emphatically that never has there been a poet with such a universal responsiveness as Pushkin.... This we find in Pushkin alone, and in this sense he is a unique and unheard-of phenomenon, and to my mind a prophetic one ... since it is exactly in this that his national, Russian strength revealed itself most-- the national character of his poetry, the national spirit in its future development and in our future, which is concealed in that which is already present--and this has been prophetically revealed by Pushkin. For what else is the strength of the Russian national spirit than the aspiration, in its ultimate goal, for universality and all-embracing humanitarianism? Having become a fully national poet, having come in contact with the people and their vigor, Pushkin at once began to foresee their future destiny. In this he was a diviner and a prophet.... Indeed, at once we began to strive impetuously for the most vital universal all-humanitarian fellowship. Not inimically, (as it would seem it should have happened), but in a friendly manner, with full love, we admitted into our soul the genius of foreign nations, without any racial discrimination, instinctively managing--almost from the first step-- to eliminate contradictions, to excuse and reconcile differences, thereby manifesting our readiness and proclivity to enter into an all-embracing, universal communion with all the nationalities of the great Aryan races. Yes, the Russian's destiny is incontestably all- European and universal. To become a genuine and all-round Russian means, perhaps (and this you should remember), to become brother of all men, a universal man, if you please. Oh, all this Slavophilism and this Westernism is a great, though historically inevitable, misunderstanding. To a genuine Russian, Europe and the destiny of the great Aryan race are as dear as Russia herself, as the fate of his native land, because our destiny is universality not by the sword but by the force of brotherhood and our brotherly longing for the fellowship of men. If you analyze our history after Peter's reform, you will find traces and indications of this idea, of this fantasy of mine, in the character of our intercourse with European nations, even in our state policies. For what else has Russia been doing in her policies, during these two centuries, than serving Europe much more than herself? I do not believe that this took place because of the mere want of aptitude on the part of our statesmen. Oh, the peoples of Europe have no idea how dear they are to us! And later--in this I believe--we, well, not we but the future Russians, to the last man, will comprehend that to become a genuine Russian means to seek finally to reconcile all European controversies, to show the solution of European anguish in our all- humanitarian and all-unifying Russian soul, to embrace in it with brotherly love all our brethren, and finally, perhaps, to utter the ultimate word of great, universal harmony, of the brotherly accord of all nations abiding by the law of Christ's gospel.

Dostoevsky was a worshipper of the Russian God, the tribal totem mentioned earlier. His ideas on this point emerge most clearly in the discussions between Shatov and Stavrogin in his novel, The Possessed, a novel based on the Bakunin terrorist underground. The starting point of the following exchange is the question of what makes the Russian people the God-bearer. The speaker is Shatov: "The purpose of every popular movement or motion, in every people and at every moment of its being, is, exclusively, the search for God; its own God, only its own.... God is the synthetic personality of the whole people taken from its beginning until its end. There never had been one common God for all or many peoples, but each people had its own particular one.... When the Gods are shared in common, then they die and the faith in them, together with the peoples themselves, also dies. The stronger the people, the more exclusive its God. There had never been a people without religion, that is, without the conception of good and evil and its own, unique, good and evil."

Stavrogin answers: "You have reduced God to a simple attribute of nationality."

Shatov: "Reduce God to an attribute of nationality? ... on the contrary, I raise the people up to God. And could it be otherwise? The people is the body of God. Every people only remains such while it has its own God and while it rejects all other Gods in the world uncompromisingly; while it believes that with its God it will conquer and drive from the world all the other gods.... A truly great people can never be reconciled to a secondary role amongst humanity, or even to a primary role, but only and exclusively to the first role.... But truth is only one, and therefore, only one of the peoples can have the true God, even though the other peoples have their own great gods. The only 'God-bearer' people is the Russian one...."

Stavrogin then asks Shatov whether he believes in God. Shatov answers: "I believe in Russia, I believe in her orthodoxy--I believe in the body of Christ.--I believe that the Second Coming will take place in Russia--I believe--Shatov babbled madly.--But in God? In God? I--I will believe in God."

Thus in the end, the idolater of the so-called Russian God reveals himself to be an atheist. This is no surprise, since a God who is the exuded essence of an ethnic group or people is no God, but a mere pagan tribal totem, however much Dostoevsky may prate in other locations about the universality of the Orthodox faith. The most characteristic aspect of Dostoevsky's mental processes is that he is not troubled by being an Orthodox atheist, a Christian pagan, a tolerant anti-Semite, a peaceful warmonger, a brotherly imperialist, or a Nazi Communist. For him this is the normal order of things.

Stalin

Today's Soviet official propaganda is increasingly preoccupied with the glorification of Stalin, who is the supernatural force presiding over today's build-up of the military economy. Like a Roman Emperor deified after his death, Stalin is the object of a state mystery cult, the Soviet Mars of the Third World War. It is misleading to speak of the rehabilitation of Stalin; Stalin was never really in disgrace, and in any case what is happening today is his elevation to the level of a god.

The principle of Stalin's actual political career was nothing but the cult of Moscow the Third Rome. The obvious comparison is with Ivan the Terrible, whom Stalin admired greatly and with whom he compared his own exercise of power. To attempt to explain any of Stalin's actions in terms of the Marxist-Leninist categories with which they were packaged for the edification of credulous gulls is the most absurd folly.

The young Stalin was shaped in a decisive way by the Georgian Orthodox Church. He first attended a church school, and then a seminary for the training of priests. As he himself later commented, the seminary experience made him familiar with Jesuit casuistry-- scholastic methods of lying. During this time Stalin began to identify himself with the character of Koba in the novel The Untameable by Alexander Kasbegi, a nineteenth-century romance about the Georgian liberation struggle. Stalin married a deeply religious woman, and at her early death he complied with her request for a funeral according to the Orthodox rite.

The young Stalin was a terrorist and agent provocateur, and there is no doubt that he was in the pay of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. Stalin was active in the illegal fund raising program of the Bolsheviks, and masterminded the 1907 robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis, during the course of which 50 people were killed and wounded. Stalin directed a protection racket to extort funds from shopkeepers and merchants in Georgia. Stalin was also a pimp, running a chain of brothels, and a letter exists showing that Lenin both knew of, and approved, this fund-raising activity.

During the 1920s, Stalin opposed those who saw the 1917 revolution as a kind of salto mortale in Russian history. Stalin himself emphasized the continuity of that history, often repeating, "We are accountable for the bad and the good in Russian history." In December 1927, Stalin was at pains to deny rumors published in the Hearst newspapers in the United States reporting a secret speech by Stalin advocating the speedy conclusion of a concordat between the Soviet regime and the Russian Orthodox Church. Stalin staunchly defended the "justified national pride of the Great Russians."

Stalin's conversations with film maker Sergei Eisenstein show his deep personal identification with Ivan the Terrible, especially with Ivan's lifelong campaign to exterminate the boyars, the Russian feudal nobles who were more or less independent of the central power in Moscow. Stalin laughingly criticized Ivan the Terrible's habit of sending lists of the names of his victims to the monasteries so that prayers could be said for their souls. Stalin said that he would have used that time to massacre even more boyars.

Stalin's equivalent to the boyars were the kulaks, the prosperous peasants who had grown up under the aegis of Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP). In 1929, Stalin adopted the policy of "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," which meant the slaughter and deportation of several million peasants and their families, representing the most successful part of Soviet agriculture. This went together with Stalin's decree for the forced collectivization of agriculture, with all peasant being deprived of their holdings and coerced into joining kolkhozes, or collective farms. This went together with the policy of forced industrialization, which provided the economic base necessary for twentieth-century warfare.

Starting in about 1935, Stalin began a policy of systematic imprisonment and liquidation for certain categories of persons deemed "objectively suspect" of collaboration with foreign powers against the Soviet regime. This recalled very explicitly the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible. Now, instead of the black-clad Oprichniki of the sixteenth century, it was the Cheka-NKVD-OGPU-GPU- MGB-KGB succession that carried on the arrests, show trials, and slaughter, under leaders like Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria. The wide- ranging, gratuitous murder of suspects, but also the slaughter of the secret police themselves (called by Ivan the Terrible "sorting folks out"), made the years of the Yezhovshchina uncannily resemble the Oprichnina. The internal butcher's bill of the Stalin regime is in the neighborhood of 30 million dead.

Stalin's attitude toward the West was also the canonical Third Rome one. He used the Communist Third International and its German party, the KPD, to assist the success of Hitler because he viewed Hitler as anti-Western, being especially impressed with the attacks on the Versailles system, Britain, and France that were the dominant note in Nazi propaganda and Hitler's personal demagogy. Stalin saw the Nazis as a force to destroy the pro-Versailles and pro-Western SPD leadership, and later as a force to turn against the Western powers. Stalin is quoted as saying in 1931: "Don't you believe ... that if the National Socialists should come to power in Germany, they would be so exclusively preoccupied with the West, that we would be free to build socialism in peace here?"

The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of August 23, 1939 was firmly grounded on Stalin's side in the imperialist tradition of the Third Rome. It resembled the Tilsit accords of 1807, negotiated on a barge by Emperor Napoleon and by Tsar Alexander I of Russia, while the hapless King of Prussia paced and waited on the bank. Both deals gave Russia a free hand east of a line of demarcation; both were directed against the British. Stalin was the only national leader of 1939 who wanted general war, and the Hitler-Stalin alliance was the crucial factor in allowing Hitler to begin what was to become a world conflict. Russia became an ally of Germany and a kind of associate member of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis.

The raw materials deliveries set up by Ribbentrop and Molotov provided the Nazi war machine with the sinews of war: oil, rubber, grain, nickel, and other vital raw materials. Stalin's medium to long-term intention was to use Hitler to batter the French, the British, and the minor continental powers into submission, but at the same time to use the German raw materials dependency on Russian deliveries (in the face of the British sea blockade) to enforce satrap status on Hitler.

Stalin exerted pressure on Romania, which had oil, while the Nazis kept a presence in Finland, which had nickel. On the occasion of Molotov's last visit to Berlin on November, l940, the Soviet government expressed interest in Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Poland, Sweden, and the Skaggerak and Kattegat-- the entrances to the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Denmark. On November 26, 1940, Stalin told the German ambassador in Moscow that he would be ready to join the Axis if he received the undisputed possession of Finland, the right to occupy Bulgaria, with a land and sea base to command the straits and overwhelm the Turks, and the area south of Batum and Baku in the direction of the Persian Gulf, including Iran. He also wanted the Japanese island of Sakhalin.

During the war, Stalin kept a channel open to the Nazi government through neutral Stockholm, and contacts were especially active during 1942 and 1943. In December 1942, on the eve of Stalingrad, the Soviet representative offered immediate separate peace on the eastern front, the terms being status quo ante--the restoration of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. (See Peter Kleist, Eine Europ;auaische Trag;auodie).

In June of 1943, Stalin was making new offers, summed up as follows:

The Soviets do not intend to fight one day, not even one minute, longer than is necessary for the interests of England and America. Hitler, in his ideological blindness, let himself be driven by the intrigues of the capitalist powers into this war, which upset the Kremlin in the decisive phase of its buildup plans. The Soviet Union can, indeed, through the employment of its last resources and with the help of deliveries from the U.S.A., offer resistance to the German armies, and can perhaps even destroy them in a murderous war. But then the Soviet Union, bleeding from its many wounds, will face, over the corpse of an annihilated Germany, the shining weapons of the Western powers, unblunted by any blows. Even now, the Anglo- Americans have made no guaranteed declaration on war aims, on territorial determinations, on the form of peace, etc. etc. (Kleist, Eine Europ;auaische Trag;auodie).

In September 1943, after the German defeat in the battle for the Kursk salient, there was a new Soviet offer: "The goal of the Kremlin's negotiations is the restoration of the Russo-German borders of 1914, a free hand in the straits question, German disinterest towards Soviet efforts in all of Asia, and the development of extensive economic relations between Germany and the Soviet Union" (Kleist). There are unconfirmed reports of a Ribbentrop-Molotov meeting during the summer of 1943, with a Soviet- Nazi separate peace as the key agenda item.

As U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes and others have noted, the Soviet catalogue of demands did not change from the Ribbentrop- Molotov period to the Teheran-Yalta-Potsdam period. The Soviets continued to demand the recognition of their sovereign hegemony over satrap states in eastern Europe, including Poland, up to the 1939 line of demarcation and well beyond it. Stalin demanded and got the division of Germany into zones of occupation--which have proven to be permanent--and also demanded his own Morgenthau Plan for the destruction and plundering of the German economy, in the form of the d;aaemontage of factories and their transfer to the Soviet, plus assigned shares of German industrial production year by year.

In the Far East, Stalin was every bit as much the unabashed Third Rome imperialist, demanding the restoration of territory and interests lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, including Sakhalin Island, imperial concessions of Russian pre-eminent interest in Manchuria (like the running of the Manchurian railroads), and possession of the port of Darien and the naval base of Port Arthur. Stalin also slyly included on his list the Kurile Islands, which had never been Russian, but which he was determined to seize anyway.

The Soviet propaganda of the late Stalin era made no secret of the Third Rome and Great Russian racist inspiration of Kremlin policies. One historian sums up the case as follows: "The grandeur of Tsarist Russia was trumpeted more stridently than it ever had been during the war. The historians exalted every feat of imperial conquest: They presented every act of violence once inflicted upon Russia's subject nations as an act of emancipation and progress, for which the oppressed nations should have been grateful. They hailed Catherine the Great and Nicholas I as the benefactors and protectors of the peoples of the Caucasus and of Central Asia; and they portrayed the leaders of those peoples, who resisted Tsardom and struggled for independence, as reactionaries and British or Turkish stooges. Schoolchildren were given a view of history as a single sequence of wicked foreign conspiracies invariably foiled by their ancestors' vigilance and valor. No one was to doubt that Russia, and Russia alone, was the salt of the earth, the cradle of civilization, the fount of all that is great and noble in the human spirit. The Russians became the pioneers, discoverers, and inventors of all those feats of modern technology which an ignorant or malicious world attributed to Britons, Germans, Frenchmen, or Americans. Day in day out, the newspapers filled their pages with stories of miraculous Popovs or Ivanovs who had been the first to design the printing press, the steam engine, the aeroplane, and the wireless (Isaac Deutscher, Stalin ;obNew York, 1970;cb, p. 603-4).

The ideological profile assembled here has been the dominant one in Russian history. The Byzantine cultural paradigm by its essence is more binding than the Western, Augustinian one. This ideological profile of Russian imperialism has been operative in this century, even during the times that its workings were somewhat subterranean, and there can be no question that it is efficient today. It has been noted by a number of writers that if we examine a Russian Orthodox believer of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, a Slavophile of the nineteenth century, or a Communist commisar of the twentieth century, we will find virtually no change in the internalized mental map of reality, in particular in regard to the relations between Russia and the West. Only the labels have changed. Out of these most superficial and ephemeral changes, the ideologues of this century have attempted to manufacture theories to obscure the historical essence of the problem.

Stalin's recreation of the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church on Sept. 4, l943, and the accompanying changes made in official Soviet propaganda and other arrangements, as the price for Orthodox support in the conduct of the Great Patriotic War serves as a very powerful illustration that some things do not change so easily. If we review the fragmentary materials available on the history of the Rossiya Society, alias the Society for the Preservation of Architectural Monuments, a group of Great Russian chauvinist military officers of the highest ranks founded by Marshal Chuikov and continued by Marshal Grechko and others, it is evident that the old traditions of the Third Rome, along with the Stalin revival, constitute the ideology of the present Soviet build-up for World War III. It may be an esoteric ideology for empiricist academics or those on the Kissinger or Harriman payrolls, but for a competent analyst it is a plain fact, and not very esoteric at all.

Stalin himself publicized his own views on the matter to a certain extent in his concluding toast at the Kremlin banquet for Red Army commanders on May 24, 1945, in which the Generalissimo stated: "I should like to drink to the health of our Soviet people ... and first of all to the health of the Russian people. I drink first of all to the health of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations of the Soviet Union.... It has won in this war universal recognition as the leading force in the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country.... The confidence of the Russian people in the Soviet government was the decisive force which ensured the historic victory over the enemy of mankind--fascism."

On July 8, 1948, the Stalin regime organized a large-scale celebration in Moscow for the 500th anniversary of the autocephaly of the Russian Orthodox Church. The following observations from the speech of Stephen, Metropolitan of Sophia and Exarch of Bulgaria, demonstrate the continuing central importance of the Third Rome prophecy:

In this way the Russian Orthodox Church freed herself from subjection to Constantinople (Tsargrad). It was not a revolt of subjects against authority; it was also not a rejection by an adult Daughter of the duty of unconditional obedience to her Mother. It was a majestic act of Orthodox zeal, a defense of one's own Orthodoxy against new criminal attacks on it. It was a courageous step by a great Church which was prepared to defend all Universal Orthodoxy, including the Greek one.... Moscow became the Third Rome, having taken the place in the confession of Christ's truth of the First Rome which had departed from the truth, and of the Second Rome which had slipped off the path of faith--Constantinople" (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, no. 8, 1948, p. 16).

Or, put more succinctly, in the words of the late Metropolitan Nikodim of the Russian Orthodox Church spoken to representatives of the Church of England in Lambeth Palace in Canterbury several years ago: "One day very soon you will have to recognize that we are the Third Rome!"

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The EIR Global Showdown Special Report succeeded in rallying western resistance to the Soviets during the last, and potentially the most dangerous, phase of the Cold War, when the leadership in the Kremlin was in effect choosing between internal collapse and a possible military adventure. Here is Tarpley's own account of the world-wide mobilization around Global Showdown as published some months later, at the end of summer, 1985, in EIR.

Habent sua fata libelli--books have their destinies.

During the second half of l985, the hottest item being perused and discussed in the chanceries and ministries, in the media across the world was EIR's monumental study, Global Showdown: The Imperial Russian War Plan for 1988, commissioned by Lyndon LaRouche. Global Showdown highlighted the central importance of the Soviet all-out economic mobilization for war, reflected especially in the building of offensive ICBMs and beam-weapon defense exertions, in the drive to assemble the capabilities necessary for a first-strike surprise attack against the United States and our European and Pacific allies. The report also documented the leading role of Marshal Nikolai Vasilyevich Ogarkov as the author of the now-operative General Staff plan being followed by Moscow.

The French and Swiss governments reached the decision that Global Showdown was controversial enough to warrant seizure by customs agents at the border--in the former case, because the document "offends the Soviet Union, a nation friendly to France," as Le Figaro of Paris quoted the functionary involved.

In the United States, the Washington press conference called at the volume's publication on July 25, which was addressed by Global Showdown authors Criton Zoakos, Rachel Douglas, and this writer, was attended by uniformed officers from the Pentagon, as well as by representatives of foreign embassies, defense industries, and the media. Many citizens who wanted their congressmen and officials of the White House and the Executive branch kept informed--and accountable--concerning the contents of the book, had endowed pre- publication copies, of which over 600 were duly distributed to the entire Senate, most of the House of Representatives, President and Mrs. Reagan, Vice-President Bush, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other federal agencies. Rumors began to circulate during August that Global Showdown was under study as early as August by several task groups within the U.S. national security community. A copy was delivered to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, with the compliments of Lyndon LaRouche. About a hundred left-liberal members of the House of Representatives were assigned to a "hopeless case" list, and received no copies. Among them was Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, who dispatched a legislative aide to complain that the Speaker had not received a copy.

At a meeting of the International Democratic Union held two days later, Margaret Thatcher, Franz-Josef Strauss, Jacques Chirac, and Konstantin Mitsotakis, among others, were seen examining copies of Global Showdown. In Western Europe, a series of press conferences for the purpose of presenting the report was undertaken by Global Showdown authors Konstantin George and Clifford Gaddy. These were held in London, Paris, Bonn, Rome, West Berlin, Copenhagen, Geneva, Lisbon, and other cities. The main theses of Global Showdown were beamed into the Soviet bloc on the Czech language service of the Munich-based Radio Free Europe and broadcast in Scandinavia on Radio Free Stockholm. The paracommunist Rome daily Paese Sera responded with a slander of the report and its authors. The leading conservative newspaper of Italy, Il Giornale, covered the publication of Global Showdown with a news article in August, and then followed up with two full pages authored by prize-winning Italian journalist Maurizio Blondet, appearing on the first two days of the Geneva summit. In response to a letter to Il Giornale expressing shock at the strategic realities thus conveyed, editor Indro Montanelli responded that "your emotional impression is justified, since the picture given by Blondet, which is based on very credible information, is extremely disturbing." The European impact of the report was further enhanced by the publication of an abstract in German and a more lengthy version in Italian.

In the United States, the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC) published a shorter abstract of Global Showdown and helped to organize a lecture tour in which this writer had the honor to participate. This tour touched 50 cities in 28 states of the United States, during which a slide presentation on Global Showdown was viewed by 25 audiences approaching 1,000 persons, many of them candidates and prospective candidates of the NDPC.

The tour provided significant access to radio and statewide and local television, with a total of almost 30 hours logged on radio talk shows and similar broadcasts. This included a media bombardment of such areas as Chicago (including a live interview on WBBM all- news radio, an hour on WIND talk radio, and two late-night hours on WGN, the classic boomer of the Middle West), Boston (an afternoon hour on WTTP in Natick, followed by an hour each on WBZ and WHDH-- with both talk show hosts freaking out), Tacoma-Seattle, St. Louis (an afternoon hour on KMOX radio, a short morning appearance on KSDK television, the NBC affiliate, and a Sunday half-hour on the ABC network's KTVI), the central valley of California, Salt Lake City, central Florida, and in the North Carolina Triad, thanks to WHPE of the Bible Broadcasting Network. Global Showdown was presented on statewide public television in Indiana and Oklahoma, on local TV in San Francisco; Hanford, Washington; Greensboro, South Carolina; Huntsville, Alabama; and Monroe, Louisiana; on the Brian Bex Report on Midwest cable television; and on the network radio syndications of Hal Lindsay and Barry Farber.

American audiences were shocked first of all by the duplicity of their own government, which routinely lies to them about the most fundamental aspects of the Soviet strategic posture. The principal difficulty in understanding the devotion of the Soviet General Staff to a war-winning strategy for general thermonuclear war is the still-pervasive conceptual mythology of Henry Kissinger's Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which absolutely rules out any thinking about the vast and "unthinkable" range of eventualities that would ensue if deterrence were to fail. The impact of Global Showdown has been to prove to key political strata of the United States--most especially the NDPC candidates' movement--that the Soviet General Staff does not regard this topic as unthinkable, but has been thinking about it and preparing for just such a war with every resource at its disposal for well over two decades.

After the London press conference, summaries of the report appeared in the Turkish press. This elicited a livid denunciation of Global Showdown by the Soviet ambassador to Turkey. Somewhat earlier, the KGB's own Literaturnaya Gazeta had assailed an article by Global Showdown author Luba George appearing in the Wiesbaden German-language weekly Neue Solidarit;auat, in which Mrs. George developed the thesis that the Russian Orthodox Church is in effect a state church of the Russian imperial regime, as betokened by the massive state-supported preparations for making the upcoming 1988 millennium of the conversion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev into a monster festival of Great Russian racist chauvinism and messianic imperialism. In the Lit Gaz article, Mrs. George's charge is denied, whereupon the KGB author proceeds to cite in some detail the evidence that compels precisely the conclusion that Mrs. George had advanced.

The impact in Washington

In Washington, the impact of Global Showdown was reflected in a spirited counterattack against the advocates of MAD, on the part of sections of the national security bureaucracy in favor of the Strategic Defense Initiative. During August, President Reagan was on vacation at Rancho del Cielo, California. Did he or top members of the National Security council spend part of that time reading Global Showdown? The answer to this question is not known, but it is certain that during August and September the pro-defense forces grouped around Defense Secretary Weinberger went into a factional offensive. The United States declined a Soviet offer to halt underground nuclear testing that clearly aimed at crippling the U.S. x-ray laser program. One such underground test was timed to coincide with a visit of the new Soviet foreign minister to the White House. The long-awaited test of the U.S. anti-satellite rocket, delayed three times since March under an ultimatum made by General Secretary Gorbachov and laser physicist Yevgenii Velikhov in London last December, was finally carried out successfully on Sept. 13.

Global Showdown stressed the unprecedented rate of production and deployment of land-based missiles by the Soviets--one a day in the case of the mobile truck-mounted SS-25. In September, a "senior White House official" finally addressed this issue with a series of off-the-record press briefings, in which he asserted that the new Soviet mobile land-based missiles were permitting the Soviets to acquire a first-strike capability, and were thus undermining deterrence. Since the Soviets had a substantial lead in "Star Wars" technology, said the official, the United States must reopen the question of further compliance with the ABM treaty.

Later, Defense Secretary Weinberger addressed the issue of the SS-25 by name. The State Department and the Pentagon co-sponsored the issuance of a white book on Soviet advances in ABM technology. Most significantly, President Reagan himself, in his first press conference after his summer vacation, radically changed the White House "party line" on defense, no longer pointing with pride to his own arms buildup, but viewing with alarm a Soviet predominance in every category of offensive weaponry. "We're playing catch up" in SDI and in other areas, the President said. This reversal of the official White House rhetorical posture generated hysterical criticisms in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and in the Soviet press. The Global Showdown view of grand strategy was clearly at work behind the scenes.

The comments of the "senior White House official" unleashed the celebrated controversy over the interpretation of the 1972 ABM treaty, which pitted the strict constructionists around Secretary of State Shultz against Robert McFarlane and Weinberger, who rightly argued that the treaty permits everything but actual deployment of SDI. SDI chief Lt.-Gen. James Abrahamson warned that the strict construction would lead to a delayed, more expensive, and inferior SDI product, but White House Chief of Staff Don Regan joined forces with Shultz to impose strict construction and oust McFarlane in the process, after the Geneva summit was concluded.

Global Showdown propounded a war-avoidance policy of launch on warning, the building of 1,000 MX missiles with assembly line methods, a $200 billion crash program for the SDI with full and sovereign participation by the European and Pacific allies, and a National Defense Emergency mobilization of the U.S. economy. This program has become more urgent than ever, and the fight for its implementation will be a central theme of the 1986 congressional elections, which represent the last chance of marshaling sufficient economic and military power to ward off the Soviet rush to thermonuclear confrontation by 1988.

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In 1956, at the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Nikita S. Khrushchev, for factional reasons of his own, delivered a secret report on the crimes of Joseph P. Stalin (Djugashvili) which initiated the historical period of the death agony of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Under Stalin's long dictatorship, he had been apotheosized, raised unto the status of a god, like the older Byzantine emperors, and the proclamation of a small part of his crimes dealt a lethal blow to the Marxist- Leninist-Stalinist official doctrine of the Russian state. A few observations on Stalin, especially regarding his relationship with Hitler, will help to focus on the impulses which characterize the Soviet leadership today--and in a very sobering way at that.

In a 20th century which has generated more than its share of mass murderers, Stalin must assume a position of pre-eminence, with a butcher's bill that is estimated in millions of victims. He is also responsible in his own way for part of the cultural pessimism that infects the world, since his cynicism and immorality helped to break the morale, not just of the generations that lived under him in Russia, but also of those hapless wretches who happened to gravitate to the Communist parties around the world.

Stalin was a Georgian, not a Great Russian, and got his education in a seminary near Tiflis run by the Georgian Orthodox Church. During his militancy in various extremist movements in the early part of the century, he was arrested many times, jailed, and sent to Siberia, but always was able to escape and return. He did this so many times that it became obvious to the less credulous that he was an agent of the Czarist secret police, the Ochrana, closely influenced by the Tolstoy family and the rest of the racist, anti- Semitic Russian oligarchy. Stalin's original pedigree is thus that of a Slavophile, of the variety adhering to the "Third Rome" doctrine which would see the creation of a new, hegemonic Russian Empire. The Okhrana agent Stalin made a rapid rise to the post of Secretary of the Bolshevik Party in 1922. Lenin, shortly before his death, warned in his last will and testament--which was suppressed--against the brutal and arrogant Stalin.

Stalin's Policies

Stalin's period of undisputed dictatorship in the Russian party and state began about 1928, by which time he had outmaneuvered or ousted all of his principal rivals and enemies. His autocratic dictatorship was associated from the first with two policies.

The first regards the foreign policy, not of the Soviet state, but of the Communist International, or Comintern, which meant in practice the German Communist Party (KPD), the one significant mass party the Comintern possessed, along with the French Communist Party (PCF) and a few other smaller groupings and numerous sects. The VI World Congress of the Comintern met in Moscow between July and September of 1928, still under the titular leadership of Bucharin, although Stalin was in the final phase of establishing his one-man rule in the Kremlin. This VI World Congress of the Comintern decided that the second phase of post-war history was over, and that a "third period" was now beginning, marked by imminent capitalist economic collapse. The practical result was that the "united front" orientation toward the Social Democratic parties of the Second International should be dropped, and henceforth the main enemy should be identified in the Social Democrats, the "left wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie." Since the main theater to which all of this referred was Germany, this meant that the SPD had to be condemned as "social fascists," and that the KPD must see in the Social Democracy, and not in the National Socialist Workers Party of Hitler (NSDAP), the prime foe.

Trotskyist casuistry will debate this issue well beyond the Greek Kalends, but the motive for Stalin's policy is clear: Stalin supported Hitler, and wished to use the KPD as a supplementary and flanking force to increase the growth rate and the striking power of the Nazis. Stalin supported the Nazis then the same way that the KGB and Pankow support ;obWest German Green fascist leader;cb Petra Kelly and the Greenies today. For Stalin, Hitler was the "icebreaker of the revolution."

Why should Stalin have supported Hitler, even before he came to power? Stalin inherited from his predecessors the shell of a Rapallo policy, which involved trade and economic cooperation between the Soviets and Germany, as well as a secret military agreement. During the 1920s Russia and Germany were the two great pariahs, the great excluded of the European political scene--Russia because of the Bolshevik repudiation of foreign debt, and Germany through the Allied Diktat of Versailles. The original Rapallo had been an attempt to turn that double isolation into an advantage. Stalin's idea of Rapallo was more in line with that of the National Bolshevik fascist Karl Radek, who had been the actual creator of the organization and leadership of the KPD: Stalin's idea was that of Germany as a junior partner to Soviet Russian imperialism, against the West, against Britain and France above all, since these were the states that Stalin saw as his chief enemies. Thus, in Hitler's demagogy, the note that Stalin wanted to exploit were the constant attacks on the Versailles diktat, the reparations, the lost territories, and so on, which guaranteed that if Hitler grew in strength, or even took state power, Germany could be used against the west.

The SPD was the chief enemy of Stalin--not because they were "social fascists," but because of the great tradition of the Erf;auullungspolitker, the advocates of appeasement, who recommended paying the Versailles reparations and a deal with the West. In 1929 the SPD showed its faith above all to its British masters by full support for the Dawes and Young Plans which were designed to turn Germany into a pastoral economy. Stalin saw the Nazis as a force that could be used to break Germany away from the West, with enhanced chances thereafter of bringing it into the Soviet orbit.

This was the basis of the Red-Brown (Communist-Nazi) alliance against the Weimar Republic.

On bloody May Day of 1929, KPD crazies fought street battles against the police of the SPD Berlin government. During 1929 and 1930 Pravda pointed to the fact that NSDAP propaganda was directed against Britain, France, and Versailles. In the elections of September 1930, the Nazis won 107 seats in the Reichstag, up from 12 seats, Pravda concentrated its attention on the "severe defeat of the Social Democracy" pointing out that millions had given their votes to the Nazis as fighters for social liberation and to cast off the yoke of Versailles. Pravda made clear that the success of the Nazis was also a positive result for Moscow, to the extent that increased Nazi influence made a rapprochement with Britain and France less likely. "The mole of history burrows most excellently. We are certain that he will take care of the business of the proletariat," wrote Izvestia after these elections.

In July 1932, the vote for the Nazis was increased to 14 million. Now the Comintern itself was calling for a Red-Brown alliance against Weimar, although KPD and NSDAP, sociologically very similar groups, continued to kill each other. The Moscow magazine Bolshevik announced that the KPD was about to take power, and KPD leaders Th;aualmann and Ulbricht pronounced fascism to be a "passing phenomenon."

In November 1932, the KPD called for a strike against the transport services in Berlin, and the NSDAP responded by joining in the support of this strike--a united front of KPD and Nazis. The KPD line soon became: "After Hitler seizes power and fails, then it will be our turn to rule." On the eve of Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933, a KPD leader went to Ernst Th;aualmann to suggest the mobilization of the party against what was obviously coming. Tha;aualmann, whose toadying to Stalin was complete, said that he was going bowling, and that the official was invited to come with him. Th;aualmann was told in Moscow that the most important thing was to avoid provocation of the authorities and armed clashes with police or troops. Stalin once referred to Hitler as "that courageous dictator." At the end of 1931 Stalin is quoted as saying: "Glauben Sie nicht auch, Neumann, dass falls in Deutschland die Nazionalsozialisten zur Macht kommen sollten, sie so ausschliesslich mit dem Western besch;auaftigt sein w;auurden, dass wir in Ruhe hier den Sozalismus aufbauen k;auonnen?" ("Don't you believe, Neumann, that if the National Socialists should come to power in Germany, they would be so exclusively preoccupied with the West, that we could be free to build socialism in peace here?") Hitler had many Godfathers in the United Kingdom, Wall Street, Germany--but Stalin was also one of those Godfathers.

It will be objected that Stalin was also the author of Soviet industrialization, which was in turn indispensable to resist the onslaught of the Nazis. He was indeed the author of an industrial buildup to produce a military establishment which he hoped to use to reduce Hitler to the status of a satrap.

In any case, it is monstrous to call Stalin's procedures around 1930 a case study in development. Let us leave this to the Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb, a likely recruiter of triple-agent Kim Philby. The premise of the forced industrialization was the forced collectivization of agriculture. Stalin used the Red Army and the secret police to liquidate 25 million private farms and coerce the farmers to join some 250,000 collective farms.

The collective farm, or kolkhoz, is essentially a cooperative, with the land owned collectively by the peasants who work it. Its model is not Marxist, but comes from the ideological babblings of the 19th century fascist slavophiles, who saw in the primitive agricultural community or Mir, the root form of pure old Russian life. The kolkhoz is modeled on the Mir. In the 50 years of its existence, it has been an unmitigated disaster.

To create the kolkhoz, Stalin slaughtered about 5 million less impoverished peasants, or kulaks, and their families. Millions were deported into central Asia. As a result of slaughtering of cattle by reluctant peasants, and because of the insanity of the new system, a fearsome famine broke out in Soviet Russia at the outset of the 1930s, which also claimed millions of victims. At a certain point Stalin feared that the famine was setting the stage for his overthrow, and he released the entire strategic food reserves of the Red Army to placate the populace. Estimates of the total losses in this exercise go as high as 12 million.

The primitive accumulation practiced on the peasants was used to create an imposing industrial establishment. But these sacrifices must be seen in the light of Stalin's subsequent policy, which was Third Rome Imperialist, and certainly in no sense anti-fascist. In 1934, the Leningrad party leader Kirov was assassinated, probably on the order of Stalin himself, as was suggested at the 1922 Party Congress.

There followed the long season of the purge trials, which were merely the beginning of a vast process of ostracism, denunciation, imprisonment, torture, and execution--one of the largest in the century. These were carried out by the NKVD, the then current transmogrification of the organization that has been variously called Cheka, GPU, OGPU, and KGB. The leaders of the NKVD during this time were Yagoda, who was replaced by (and also murdered by) his successor, Nicholas Yezhov, who was in power from September 1937 to July 1938. The phase he directed was called the Yezhovshchina. Yezhov was succeeded by Stalin's Georgian countryman, Lavrenti Beria, who held power until he was shot after an attempted coup following Stalin's death in 1953. Also of note was Andrei Vishinsky, a chief prosecutor along with Palmiro Togliatti at the great Moscow show trials.

The reality of this period was 10 million arrests, as Stalin boasted to Churchill during one of the conferences during the war. An empire of concentration camps grew up under the control of the NKVD, with as many as 6 million inmates at any given time.

World public opinion was edified by the Trial of the Sixteen, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, in 1936, followed in 1937 by the trial of Radek (Trial of the Seventeen). Then came the trial of the 21, led by Bukharin and Rykov, in 1938. Then, in 1938, the decapitation of the Red Army, with the execution of the most competent and popular Marshal, Tukhachevsky. In this purge, Stalin and the NKVD liquidated the leadership of the armed forces, killing three out of five marshals, killing 13 out of 15 army commanders, 30 out of 58 corps commanders, killing 110 out of 195 division commanders, and 205 out of 400 regimental commanders.

During these years people were jailed and executed simply because they belonged to "objectively suspect" categories, like those who had lived abroad or had contact with foreigners, those of foreign ancestry, intellectuals, Jews, and so on. In certain areas the secret police were given orders to arrest and liquidate a certain percentage of the population without regard to any criteria whatsoever. Under such circumstances, denunciation of others as spies and bribery of the secret police turned Russian society into a Hobbesian nightmare. Young Pioneers in Soviet Russia are still taught the story of young Pavlik Morozov, who in the early days of forced collectivization reported his own father to the NKVD for refusing to deliver his grain to the state, and was later killed by his grandmother and an older cousin, who were both executed. Pavlik Morozov is today an official martyr of the U.S.S.R., and the 50th anniversary of his death was widely celebrated in 1982.

Joint Rule Over Europe

The problems we are facing today in the Soviet Union come into the sharpest relief if we turn our attention for a moment to the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 until June 1941, a fundamental step in the wrecking of modern Europe. Hitler's evil seen from the West seemingly eclipsed Stalin's evil. This is a period which, of course, Soviet propaganda and Anglo-American propaganda have contributed to obscuring, in part because of the exigencies of war-time cooperation with Stalin.

The fact is that for slightly less than two years Hitler and Stalin ruled absolutely over the continent of Europe, without exception. It is clear in retrospect that while Hitler wanted to start a war with Poland, Stalin wanted to use Hitler to start a world war, and that Stalin was successful in having Hitler start a world war.

If Stalin had refused his cooperation, Hitler would have been stymied and perhaps overthrown. The strategic and logistical pre- conditions for World War II were supplied by Stalin. Of all of the national leaders of 1939, Stalin is the only one who without question wanted world war. His policy was to provoke a war among the other states, a war that would be long and destructive, especially to the West, and from which Russia would emerge as the dictator of the destiny of Europe and of much of the rest of the world. His approach to Hitler was to use him as a satrap, or war-lord, or marcher lord, to control him through raw materials dependency, and to use Nazi Germany to promote a Soviet-dictated order.

As before, Stalin's approach to the Nazi state and movement was to ask: How can I manipulate and exploit this to advance the cause of the Third Rome, of a Soviet world empire? Stalin saw Hitler as his likely satrap. A satrap is not the same thing as a principled ally. Within the framework of imperial policy, a satrap is a satellite in a relationship of uneasy subordination to an imperial center. He presides over a region of the empire, sometimes an outlying area. Satraps are inherently rebellious, and wars between the emperor and a satrap are quite common.

Stalin Dupes Hitler

The threat to use military force on the part of emperor and satrap is always there. A cunning satrap may assemble a power bloc sufficient to overthrow the emperor and take over. But generally it is the emperor, from a central position of superior power who uses manipulation, cajolery, and threats to play the satrap against other satraps and against outside enemies of the empire. Such forms of mediated subordination were what Stalin had in mind for Hitler. Stalin had progressed some distance toward his goal, when the psychotic and unpredictable Hitler decided to enact the satrap's rebellion--Operation Barbarossa--with the outcome that is well known.

This analysis does not neglect the sponsorship of Hitler by the British Cliveden set and related circles, nor the appeasement policies with which the evil Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier hoped to direct Hitler into a war with the east. Both factors must be stressed, since their result, the Munich appeasement sellout of September 1938, by which the French ally Czechoslovakia was consigned to the Nazis, destroyed any system of collective security in Europe such as the French treaty system in particular had attempted to create. After Munich both the British and Stalin attempted to determine what Hitler's next move would be, and Stalin got the upper hand, at least for two years, and in many ways, permanently. Stalin took the Cliveden set's puppet away. Stalin duped and bamboozled Hitler, and not the other way around.

By the spring of 1939, Hitler was under severe pressure to provide new industrial, agricultural, raw materials, and labor loot for the faltering German economy. In his opinion this could best be had by the conquest of Poland, which he determined to do during the military campaign season of 1939. As Hitler told his generals on Aug. 22, 1939, "For us it is easy to make this decision. We have nothing to lose; we can only gain. Our economic situation is such that we cannot hold out more than a few years. G;auoring can confirm this. We have no other choice, we must act."

This meant that the latest date for launching an attack on Poland was about Sept. 1, 1939, before the autumn rains made tank maneuvering impossible. Poland was still an ally of France, and France was allied to Britain, so Hitler's problem was how to neutralize these two Western powers in order to get a free hand in Poland. Hitler tried to convince the British to give him Poland as England had given him Czechoslovakia, but without success. He tried to convince the Japanese, formally allied with Germany in the Anti- Comintern Pact, to take a hostile attitude to the British in the Far East, to create a diversion of British power, but also without success. Hitler therefore turned to Stalin, who had been sending him proposals for a modus vivendi since Hitler first came to power.

Hitler was obsessed with his plan to invade Poland, and saw that this goal could be efficiently reached in cooperation with Stalin. Stalin had also signalled his willingness for a pact by firing Maxim Litvinov, his Jewish foreign minister, and replacing him with Molotov, whose real name was Scriabin. The elaborate charades that led up to the Hitler-Stalin Pact were carried out on the Soviet side by Stalin, Molotov, and Anastas Mikoyan; for the German side by Hitler, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, State Secretary von Weizs;auacker of the Ausw;auartiges Amt (the foreign office), and Ambassador von der Schulenberg in Moscow. The Ausw;auartiges Amt-- the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin--was closely engaged in the secret diplomatic offensive that led to the new pact.

On Aug. 23, 1939, the world was stunned by the news of a non- aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, worked out by Stalin, Molotov, and von Ribbentrop in the Kremlin. What was made public was a pledge of non-aggression and peaceful relations. What was not published, and what Moscow denies to this very day, was a secret protocol dividing Europe as a whole into two imperial spheres of influence, one for Hitler and one for Stalin, with a very clear line of demarcation between them. All sovereign, independent nations on both sides of the line were destined to be overrun and absorbed in the two empires. The procedure was reminiscent of the deal struck between Emperor Napoleon and Czar of all the Russias Alexander I at Tilsit in 1807, while the hapless King of Prussia waited outside. Stalin thus acted as a Russian Emperor, in the tradition of the Third Rome.

Poland was to be liquidated, with a line of demarcation between the two sides following the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San. This would eventually give Stalin half of Poland. Of the Baltic States, Germany was given Lithuania, while Stalin got Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. In the south, Stalin stressed his interest in the Romanian province of Bessarabia, which Hitler said he was not interested in. The earlier Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis became a dubious proposition, since the Japanese government fell over the news of the pact, but Hitler promised his diplomacy would promote good relations between Russia and Japan in the Far East. The Soviets knew very well that Hitler was about to invade Poland; a later secret military protocol between Moscow and Berlin obligated the Red Army to help in the destruction of "Polish units" that it might encounter on this side of the line of demarcation between the two spheres of interest.

The two dictators had thus plotted the fourth, and they hoped final, partition of Poland, and had done so by drawing a line on the map. Lord Carrington and his associates are thinking today of repeating this same procedure; in their dreams of a "new Yalta" they would be well advised to ponder the ultimate fate of Hitler.

Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and Britain and France declared war on him several days later. While he was conquering Poland, Hitler was most anxious to lure Stalin into a simultaneous advance, so that perhaps Britain and France might declare war on Stalin as well, thus putting the two dictators in the same boat until the treachery of one or the other changed that situation. But Stalin was too cunning. He moved into Poland only three weeks later, when the fighting was over, and neither France nor Britain declared war on him. Hitler was at war, with the west and had fought the Poles; Stalin was not at war, had done no fighting, but still got one half of Poland. At the same time Stalin rapidly seized Estonia and Latvia, bringing him far enough into Europe to launch a successful attack, or to organize an effective defense at any later time.

Hitler was opining at this time that Stalin was no longer a Communist, but a Russian national Bolshevik: he had murdered most of the Jewish members of the Bolshevik leadership, had given up world revolution, and was pursuing merely a traditional Czarist Russian foreign policy. What scant comfort this was to provide, we will see.

When the Polish campaign had been completed, von Ribbentrop once more journeyed to Moscow on 27 September, where he met with Stalin. This time the Nazis and Communists signed a German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, the only friendship treaty that any state ever signed with Hitler. Interestingly enough, Stalin already wanted to change the line of demarcation drawn up a month before, and he wanted to change it to his own advantage, (despite the fact that the Nazis had done the fighting). Stalin wanted Lithuania to be put into his sphere, and offered the regions around Warsaw and Lublin in return to the Nazis. Lithuania gave Russia a direct border with the lands of the German Reich itself as distinct from the general government of Poland, and was a position from which German advances into eastern Europe could be flanked. For Stalin, this also had the advantage of giving to Hitler the Polish- speaking areas of Poland, while he could claim to have liberated White Russians and Ukranians from Polish oppression. Hitler accepted all these changes proposed by Stalin with very little discussion. The eastern Baltic was made into a Russian lake. Another secret protocol provided for the repression of Polish agitation on both sides of the line of demarcation.

At this time, in October 1939, Hitler decided to go on a peace offensive, telling France and Britain that the Polish war was over, that there was nothing left to fight for, and that they should forthwith make peace. The main international agency which trumpeted this peace offensive through the world was none other than the Communist International.

On 28 September the Nazi and Soviet governments acting together as allies issued a joint proclamation that they had jointly dealt with the problems arising from the collapse of the Polish state, and called on Britain and France to make peace with Hitler. This was followed by a warning that, should the appeal for peace not be accepted, the British and French governments would be responsible for the continuation of the war. On 29 November, Stalin told a Pravda interviewer "Germany did not attack France and England, but France and England attacked Germany and thus took the responsibility of the present war upon themselves. The ruling classes of France and England both have in an insolent fashion rejected the German peace proposals and the efforts of the Soviet Union for a quick ending of the war. Those are the facts." The Executive Committee of the Communist International called in November for "the immediate end of this thieving, unjust imperialist war." On 9 October, Izvestia stated that "to begin a war in order to destroy Hitlerism means to permit a criminal stupidity in politics." On October 31 Molotov said in a public statement that "there is no justification for a war of this type. You can accept the ideology of Hitlerism, or you can reject it...that is a matter of your political attitude. But it is not only senseless, but also criminal to fight a war as a war for the annihilation of Hitlerism, camouflaged as a fight for democracy." Clement Gottwald, Walter Ulbricht, Georgi Dimitrov, Manuilsky, William Z. Foster - all churned out the line. Many communist parties at the outbreak of hostilities took the position of supporting the war against Hitler, as in the case of the British Communists: on September 6, their statement said, "War is here. It is a war that can and must be won. And the British people can win it. The fascists and their friends in the whole world have brought this war on us." By October 7, the line had been rectified and the central Committee of the British CP proclaimed: "The continuation of this war is not in the interest of the peoples of Britain, France and Germany. End this war! This war is a struggle among imperialist powers for profits, colonies, and world domination. Converge a peace conference of the powers at once! The war must be stopped!" Harry Pollitt, the "warmongering" party secretary, had been ousted in the meantime. Ulbircht broadcast from Moscow a condemnation on the evil western powers who were once again attacking Germany. For the US Communist Party there were special telegraphic instructions: "New tactical line. A) Imperialist war, unjust, equally reactionary on both sides. Not a war of democracy against fascism, but a war of reactionary imperialist Germany against the reactionary imperialist states Great Britain, France, and Poland. Question of who shot first means nothing. Main thing, it is a war for imperialist domination." These instructions then endorsed Mussolini's theory of a conflict between rich capitalist states (UK,US, France) and the poorer imperialisms. "The Soviet regime has through help to working people of west Ukraine and White Russia saved 11 million from the hell of capitalism and joined them with socialism." At the end: "Hold the banner of proletarian internationalism high." A clear and interesting comment with more truth than any of these came from the Executive of the Palestinian communist Party: "The Hitler, against who Chamberlain is now fighting, is no longer the same Hitler who intended to fight the Soviet Union. He has stopped being a gendarme of Ghamberlain, and now Hitler has to do what Moscow says."

The net effect of the Comintern line was a very serious undermining of the popular will to resist in the west, especially in countries like France, where there was still a mass communist party Shortly after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 1-Humanite was shut down and the PCF outlawed. But the French Communist papers kept appearing: they were printed in Nazi Germany and smuggled across the French border to increase defeatism. The PCF pursued a systematic policy of sabotage of industrial transportation and other facilities, the full story of which had never been told. Maurice Thorez, the party leader, joined his regiment in the first days of the war, when the Moscow line had still not been clearly set; he later deserted from the French army and turned up in Moscow. In Belgium, the Communists gave open support to the Rexist movement of Leon Degrelle, which was campaigning against joining the western powers.

In the meantime, Stalin continued his policy of brinkmanship towards the western allies, this time by engaging in a war with Finland. Stalin had delivered an ultimatum to the Finns demanding that they give up their defensive line, the Mannerheim Line, and cede that portion of their territory to the Soviet,. Unlike Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Finns fought in a winter war that lasted until March of 1940.

By spring of 1940, Hitler was ready to strike in the west. His ability to wage war in the face of a British sea blockade depended on deliveries carried out by and through the Soviet. This was based on a German-Soviet trade treaty that had been signed at Stalin's insistence just before the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The terms were barter deals: 180 million RM worth of German manufactured goods to be exchanged for Russian oil, grain, and strategic metals. Later this amount was raised to 500 million RM. The Nazis got one third of their oil, two thirds of their phosphates, one third of their nickel, between ten and fifteen percent of their cobalt, wolfram, molybdium, and tin, plus significant quantities of copper, platinum, chromium, cotton, and ten percent of their feed grain from the Soviet under the arrangements. The Third Reich war machine ran on Russian supplies. Based on these sinews of war, trade between Russian and Germany increased by 3,000% between August 1939 and August 1940. At the beginning these deliveries were an unalloyed advantage for Hitler; without them he could not have even opened the war against Poland. The very growth of the quantities as time went on made the system appear more and more as a liability: in terms of raw materials, he was Stalin's prisoner, in a situation of abject dependency. Stalin could and did manipulate deliveries to indicate his preferences in Hitler's conduct. For example, after the invasion of Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940, there was a sudden generous increase in deliveries, to show Soviet approval for an attack in the west, tending to make hostilities with Britain and France irreversible.

Germany was to pay with deliveries of manufactured goods. Stalin was soon demanding military equipment, even including the unfinished battleship Bismarck, or at least the plans for that ship. For a time Hitler agreed to deliver the cruiser Lutzow to Moscow. The German high quality capital goods and machine tools thus provided were an important part of Stalin's total war buildup, including the construction of new industry centers behind the Urals. Stalin used the time to prepare for total war, to be sure, while Hitler was devoting 15% of his production to war even after the fall of France.

When the British complained to Stalin about his huge deliveries of nickel to the Reich, Stalin answered that he was getting that nickel back in the form of high- quality war equipment that he needed for his re-armament program. If Stalin made Hitler's campaigns possible, there was also a deeper sense in which Hitler was a war contractor working to increase Stalin's military might, a workshop of the Soviet war machine.

Also of decisive importance was the fact that Stalin put his transportation system wholly at Hitler's disposal, organizing special fast trains from the Far East to bring in needed rubber and other goods. Russia would buy anything the Nazis needed, and sell it to them for a price. This made the otherwise British sea blockade a total stranglehold almost meaningless in military terms. Stalin even brought British products and sold them to Hitler. The more important this aid became, the more of a disadvantage it seemed to Hitler, whose initiative was quietly taken from him: in terms of raw materials, he was being turned into a satrap.

In May of 1940, after rolling over Denmark and Norway, the Nazis raced across the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and delivered the knockout blow to the French army. Hitler struck in the west with some 135 divisions. In the east he had all of four divisions, plus 6 territorial divisions, facing Stalin's army of more than 100 divisions, if not much more. Had Stalin been waiting for the moment to turn on Hitler and destroy him, this was it, but no Soviet attack came. Instead, Stalin was busy setting up puppet regimes in the Baltic. Molotov boasted that the Russians had made Hitler's success in the west possible. At the same time, the Russians grabbed the Romanaian province of Bessarabia, up to the Pruth River, and also took parts of the province of Bukovina. Taking the Bukovina was a violation of the line of demarcation agreed two by the partners. More important, the move into Romania was an ominous advance in the direction of the largest oil fields than existing west of the line of demarcation, the oil fields of Ploesti, from which the majority of Hitler's oil came. Stalin was now one or two days' march from Hitler's oil jugular. At this time the Fuhrer complained to Ribbentrop, who was still cordially pro- Russian: "I'm not going to let the Russians put me up against the wall any more!"

At the same time, there was friction over Finland. Finland was in the Russian sphere, but Hitler obtained the right from the Finnish government to send troops across their territory ostensibly to send them to Norway. The Soviets were enraged by this violation of their sphere. The issue impelling Hitler was nickel - the Finnish nickel deposits at Petsamo in the north of the country. Nickel is indispensable for arms production. Petsamo was the best source in Europe, and Hitler was determined to have it - but Stalin stressed that Finland was in his sphere, that the German troops should get out.

The other key raw material question beyond oil and nickel was iron ore. This came from Sweden, which Hitler at one point was about to invade until stopped by strong Soviet protest. An independent Sweden might still be susceptible to Moscow's wiles, especially since Stalin in any case was building up his strength in the eastern Baltic.

At this time, in summer to autumn of 1940, the superficial scoundrel von Ribbentrop was suggesting that Stalin should now join the newly stipulated Tripartite Pact of Berlin, rome and Tokyo. This he claimed would create a continental block impervious to the British and the US.

At the same time Russian pressure on Romania and Finland was increasing, with the Soviets seizing the islands in the mouth of the Danube, effectively taking over the exit to the Black Sea. Hitler had been considering an attack on Russia for some months, but now invited Molotov to Moscow for a last attempt to save the spheres of influence agreement by extending it. This was in November of 1940, and Hitler's script once again seemed a parody of Napoleon's argument at Tilsit.

Ribbentrop and Hitler argued that Rome, Berlin, Tokyo and Moscow now had to "adopt a long-range policy . . . by delimitation of their spheres of interest on a world- wide scale." The four powers had to find their Lebensraum by turning south, as the Japanese had already started to do. Germany would take central Africa, Italy, north Africa, and Russia should expand in the direction of the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. This would of course mean that the Russians would have to go to war with Great Britain.

Hitler told Molotov that the British were beaten, the war was as good as over. There was "the problem of America." But the United States could not "endanger the freedom of other nations before 1970 or 1980 . . . it had no business either in Europe, in Africa, or in Asia." This was one of the few things Hitler said that Molotov was heartily in agreement with. The points of friction were more in evidence. Like Napoleon with Alexander I at Tilsit, Hitler tried to open new vistas of imperialist expansion: "After the conquest of England, the British Empire would be apportioned as a gigantic world- wide estate in bankruptcy of forty million square kilometers. In this bankrupt estate there would be for Russia access to the ice-free and really open ocean."

Molotov was not impressed. What were the German troops doing in Finland, he wanted to know. "Moreover, there are issues to be clarified regarding Russia's Balkan and Black Sea interests with respect to Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey."

A witness to the talks wrote: "No foreign visitor had ever spoken to the Fuhrer this way in my presence." Molotov bluntly challenged the Nazi dictator, whose conquest of France had made him the master of Europe, west of the line.

Ribbentrop submitted to Molotov a copy of the Tripartite Pact, the Axis treaty, whose key provision was that Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union undertook to "respect each other's natural spheres of influence." Russian's sphere was to "center south of the national territory of the Soviet Union in the direction of the Indian Ocean."

Molotov answered that the Soviet was interested in Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Poland, Sweden, and the Skaggerak and Kattegat. Lord Carrington should ponder on the fate of those who draw lines of demarcation with the Muscovite rulers: even with Hitler at the zenith of his power, after the fall of France, Molotov was mightily transgressing into the Nazi sphere. He was looking for expansion into the Balkans, for the Black Sea and the Baltic as Russian lakes.

Nevertheless, Stalin did accept the offer to join the fascist, axis camp - for a price. On November 26, Stalin told the German ambassador to Moscow that Russia would joint the Axis if the following four points were embodied in five supplementary secret protocols in the Tripartite Pact. Stalin demanded: 1. Undisputed possession of Finland, with German troops out. 2. Bulgaria as a satellite of Moscow, with a land and sea base to command the Dardanelles and the straits. If Turkey attempted to stop this the four powers must militarily coerce Turkey. 3. The area south of Batum and Baku in the direction of the Persian Gulf is the center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union. This was Azerbaijan, which the Russians occupied later in the Arab oil war. 4. Japan must renounce her coal and oil concessions on the island of Sakhalin.

The message was clear: Hitler could indeed avoid war with the Soviet, but Moscow would take his northern flank and southern flank, and control his raw materials supplies. He would be reduced to the level of a satrap, perhaps flanked in Stalin's intentions by a Japanese satrapy in the Far East, since Stalin also concluded a Non- aggression pact with Japan in the spring of 1940. Hitler's satrap status would have been more dignified than that of the satraps of today - the Husaks, Honeckers, Zhivkovs, Karmals. But a satrap would he have been.

It is reported that after the war Stalin repeatedly remarked "With Germany we would have been invincible" or "With Japan we would have been unbeatable." These statements reflect his mentality accurately, but they must not be taken to mean "With Germany as an ally" in the usual sense. Germany was to be a satrapy, in the sense of the Byzantine Empire, of the Third Rome.

Stalin's troops were built up steadily on the German border during late 1940 and the first half of 1941. They were of course the best means of political pressure, and sometimes they went into an obviously offensive position to exert such pressure, sometimes on Finland, sometimes on Hungary, sometimes on Romania, sometimes on the Reich itself. But this did not have to mean that an attack was imminent. As it happened, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on the 22 June 1941, a very large portion of Stalin's armor was arrayed in an offensive position west of Bialystock in the former Poland. Most of these were surrounded and destroyed. Otherwise, militarily and logistically, Barbarossa was a mad adventure with little hope of success, also because the attack cut the raw materials spigot. The Nazi tactical surprise and Stalin's two weeks of catatonia have been much discussed. The Red Army had been placed on the highest alert in April for an attack that had been expected in late May. Perhaps after that Stalin had assumed that the mercurial Nazi dictator, so incapable of prolonged concentration upon any object, had thought better of it, and resigned himself to the status of western satrap of the Soviet Union. And time was on Stalins side.

There remain the questions of the twenty million Soviet dead and the second front, delayed by the British until mid 1944. From Stalin's point of view, the war was paid for even before it was begun. during the Hitler-Stalin Pact Soviet Russia absorbed 21.2 million people and 457,000 square kilometers of land. that included 12% of the population of Finland. It included some 300,000 Polish prisoners taken by the Red Army, many of whose officers were later massacred and found in the mass grave of Katyn. Poland ceased to exist. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia ceased to exist, except in the shadowy forms of Soviet republics. Romania and Finland were mutilated and were driven into the Axis. Hungary, Bulgaria also joined the Axis in this period. As for the second front, there had already been one. The Russians were not fighting. Poland had had an army of fifty divisions. In 1944 the Romanian army had 500,000 men, fourth among the allies in size. The French army lacked leadership and morale, but with more than 100 modern divisions it was still one of the most powerful in the world. To these must be added as in a grim litany denmark, Norway the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg - all overrun in 1940, plus Yugoslavia and Greece, overrun in the spring of the following year.

Stalin helped to destroy all those countries, especially by his logistical support, and by freeing Nazi divisions that would otherwise have been tied down. This is clearly what Stalin meant to happen: Hitler should destroy the west and then come under soviet domination, or be defeated in war. This is what then happened. Apart from their protestations for the edification of the gulls, the Soviet command regards the Hitler-Stalin Pact as a success, for it gave them the key to becoming the masters of half of Europe, with a sphere of interest ranging halfway into Germany, to Berlin and beyond. Although Stalin has been attacked publically in the Soviet Union for many crimes, the Hitler-Stalin Pact has not been one of them.

4-

The dominant tendency of the surface of world history since about the autumn of 1984 has been the so-called New Yalta, the attempt to subordinate the needs, aspirations, and very lives of all of mankind to an agreement among the Anglo- American empire and the Great Russian empire. The New Yalta assumes that the alliance of these forces will be capable of dominating the world for the relevant historical future, imposing its characteristic solutions on regional conflicts, overthrowing existing governments and creating new ones, redrawing lines of imperial demarcation, shifting whole nations and even continents from the sphere of paramount interest of one empire to another, haggling among communist commissars and Anglo-Saxon financiers over the destiny of whole peoples. This is the condominium, the policy of the Anglo-American Soviet Trust, which spreads its yoke across the planet in the name of Wall Street usury plus Malthusianism and Great Russian racial chauvinism and expansionism. The edification of the condominium has been latent for decades. Its consolidation in its most recent form has extended from Politburo member Gorbnachov's visit to London in December, 1984, when Mrs. Thatcher announced that Gorbachov was a man that she could work with, through the November 1985 Geneva superpower summit, the mad adventure of the Danilov affair and the Reykjavik summit, the Washington INF summit of December 1987, and Reagan's trip to Moscow in June, 1988. It is of course this concept of the Anglo-American- Soviet condominium which dominates the scheming of the Kissinger- Scowcroft- Eagleburger clique who make the foreign policy of the Bush Administration.

Thus, world public opinion has been obsessed with Gorbymania, with the new detente, with the perspectives for business deals and joint ventures with the Soviet Union, with the projects for so- called political liberalization in the Soviet satellites in eastern Europe, with the simulacrum of elections in the USSR itself. This euphoria has even been codified in the INF treaty, which removed from western Europe the NATO weapons system most feared by the Soviets. In the indications multiply that US combat troops will begin to be withdrawn from the decisive European theatre.

Thus, hysteria, euphoria, and willfull blindness dominate the spirit of the age. The United States Eastern Liberal Establishment, in particular, is obsessed by the idea: "Everything with the Russians, nothing without the Russians, and with the Russians against all the other nations." Even Soviet Russian culture becomes de rigeur in the foundations and financier circles.

In the midst of this strategic insanity, it has been the great historical merit of Lyndon H. LaRouche to have defended the strategic point of view that a durable strategic condominium with the USSR is impossible, primarily because of cultural and philosophical reasons. The Eastern Liberal Establishment may well believe that its deal with the Russians is permanent, that the Soviets will be faithful partners. LaRouche has proven conclusively, based on arguments of natural law that the New Yalta condominium is destined to explode, and that this explosion might well coincide with a third world war, perhaps even in thermonuclear form.

This condominium, like every other attempt to carve up the world from ancient times down to the present day, cannot last, will and must blow up. The blow-up can come in a number of ways. One or more of the condominium partners can break out of the condominium, as for example in one of the condominium members attacking another member - the Soviet Union might attack the United States. Or, a challenge to the condominium may emerge from a state not formally included in the condominium arrangements, as for example in the case of a regional war that violates basic premisses of the condominium - as a result of James Baker's brutal attacks on Israel, a war between Israel and Syria might take a course that would bring the United States and the Soviets into the conflict on opposite sides. Or yet, the government of one of the main or secondary members of the condominium could be overthrown by internal revolution, or even cease to exist - as may be happening in China today. So today the Trust Condominium is threatened by a broad array of crises that can be deadly for the condominium itself. Bush, Thatcher and Gorbachov will not be able to hold down the lid on the kettle ow rold history any more than Metternich was able to do so in 1848. all signs point to an explosion. I therefore ask for your patience as I attempt to accomplish three goals: first, to show the instability of today's condominium by citing the case of a previous and rather similar condominium, the Nazi-Soviet alliance of 1939-1941, the Hitler- Stalin Pact. Second, to indicate a few leading points concerning Soviet war preparations and the crisis of the Soviet empire today. Thirdly, to explore briefly the impact of the recent Chinese events on the tenability of the condominium.

One form of the explosion of the condominium would be a war breaking out between the superpowers themselves. Although Henry Kissinger is a firm believer in war as an instrument of policy for managing through a Soviet attack on the United States. Lyndon LaRouche has devoted great effort to showing that the quest for absolute world domination through armed blackmail and armed aggression if necessary is a permanent cultural and strategic feature of Soviet Russia. A remarkable new book by a Ukrainian author now allows us to restate this case in the terms of reference that are most immediately similar to the present-day condominium situation. The book, originally written in Russian, is entitled "The Icebreaker, The History of the So-Called Great Patriotic War, Short Course." Its author is a former officer of the GRU, the Red Army intelligence service, who now lives in Great Britain and who writes under the pseudonym of General Victor Suvorov. The book has been published in German, and will shortly appear in French, but no English language edition appears to be planned.

Suvorov's subject is the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939-41, and especially the events leading up to the German attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941. Drawing on material from Soviet archives visited in the past, conversations with some of the protagonists, the memoirs of Soviet officers, and other analytical material, Suvorov conclusively proves his thesis: that the USSR had engaged under Stalin in comprehensive preparations for an offensive war against Germany, and that a surprise attack, Operation Thunderstorm, was planned for sometime in early July, 1941 - the most likely date is Sunday, July 6, 1941. Suvorov shows that Stalin had irrevocably committed himself to an invasion of Germany and of the German sphere of influence beyond the Molotov- Ribbentrop line. He also shows that while the titanic war machine of the Red Army was in the very last phase of concentration into offensive positions on the western border of the USSR, the Red Army units were taken by surprise by a preventive attack on the part of the numberically inferior and less prepared units of the German Wehrmacht. The German attack came just days or at most weeks before the planned Russian sledgehammer blow. Exploiting the tremendous advantage of a surprise attack against the Red Army in its highly vulnerable offensive positions, the Wehrmacht was able to destroy the superior forces of the first and second Soviet strategic echelons, and carry the war to the gates of Moscow. Suvorov speculates that if Stalin had been able to launch his planned attack in early July, 1941, he would have quickly crushed Germany and overrun all of continental Europe long before any serious Anglo- American forces could be brought to bear. He would have conquered all of Europe. Suvorov sees the net result of Hitler's surprise attack in the fact that Stalin's attack plan was pre-empted, and he was later able to seize only half of Europe.

Stalin and Hitler represent two rival embodiments of absolute, Satanic evil. Suvorov stresses that Hitler for him is a cannibal. But, if Hitler was a cannibal, this does not mean that Stalin was necessarily a vegetarian. Of the two, Stalin was altogether more formidable. The name of the book is drawn from Stalin's reference to Hitler and the fascists in general as the "icebreaker of the revolution," who would bust up the crust of bourgeois society and weaken Europe to the point that it could be conquered by Russia.

A few overhead transparencies can give us a sample of Suvorov's argument, which is conclusive. One premiss: Soviet writers are forced to concede that Stalin had massed huge forces along the German border in June, 1941, but they assert that these deployments were purely defensive, and that the USSR was surprised by Hitler's treachery as a stab in the back. Suvorov thus pays great attention to the total difference between offensive and defensive positions for the armies of that and this time. Attacking troops are massed together in large but concealed masses directly at the border of the country they wish to invade. Defensive troops are spread out and dug in depth, using natural obstacles and the features of the terrain to their advantage. World War II defensive postions also included defense lines like the Finnish Mannerheim line, far more formidable than the Maginot line, which included virtually impregnable underground fortifications shielded by dozens of kilometers of impenetrable glacis made up of mine fields, obstacles, abbatis, booby traps, and no man's land patrolled by snipers. The point is that the equipment and positioning of defensive forces differs sharply from the equipment and positioning of offensive forces. Despite what the Soviet historians claim, the Red Army of 1941 was suited only for the offensive, and was severely limited in its defensive capabilities.

1. The first map shows the defensive line built by the Soviet Union during the 1930's, the so-called Stalin Line. This was a massive defensive cordon from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, featuring a no man's land of 120-150 km depth which could be systematically laid waste. Here were located mine fields and other obstacles. Inside the "death strip" were imposing fortresses, similar to the Maginot Line, sometimes tens of kilometers deep and up to a hundred kilometers long. Each P on the map indicates a specially trained special forces or partizan group operating out of specially concealed hideouts deep within minefields. There was also a defensive fleet on the Dneiper River. These fortifications would have blunted the most impetuous Blitzkrieg, as Stalin would have known from the bloody nose he got from the Finnish Mannerheim Line in 1939-40. Yet, around the time of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August, 1939, Stalin began to demolish and dismantle his entire defensive system. By the spring of 1941, nothing was left of the Stalin Line.

2. This map shows the Soviet troop positions of the first echelon in the late spring of 1941. I stress first echelon because there were two more echelons several hundred km to the rear. The armies shown in black are large shock armies, invasion armies, with very strong tank units. The Ninth Shock Army, between Odessa and Romania, was the strongest army in the world, with up to 3500 tanks - about as many tanks in this one Russian invasion army as in the entire German Wehrmacht. The troops are all massed on the border with Germany, the Molotov- Ribbentrop line, pressing forward especially towards Romania in the south, and filling the parrot's beak area around Bialystok, Poland on the northern European plain. All of them are forward of the obliterated Stalin Line. Notice that the southern part of the Russian Line, the left flank from Stalin's point of view, was even stronger than the position facing Germany itself. This reflected a basic strategic priority of Marshal Zhukov and the other Soviet commanders.

3. Top priority for the Soviets was to stirke a blow against Romania. The reason was the oil fields around Ploesti, which were the biggest oil fields in the German sphere, and which had to provide two thirds and more of the oil for the Nazi war machine. Cutting off this flow of oil would guarantee the utter defeat of Germany. Romania was thus to be totally enveloped, with the main attack by the strongest-in-the-world Ninth Army to be supplemented by an attack by an army of mountain troops, plus bomber raids from the Crimea and the southern USSR, an entire corps of paratroopers, naval bombardment by the Black Sea fleet, and operations by an offensive upstream Danube fleet whose goal was in the Black Forest. Stalin was committed to flattening Romania - and remember that this is only the first strategic echelon.

4. Soviet weapons production was totally offensive and aggressive in character. To slash deep into the flanks and rear of an enemy, Stalin ordered the production of tanks like this BT tank, which had light armor and a light cannon, but which could travel long distances at the incredible speed of 100 km per hour. Defensive warfare required heavily armed and armored tanks.

5. Here is a scene of Russian-German fraternization in fall 1939 along the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line. The BT-7 tank has rubber tires in addition to treads. The treads were designed for crossing Poland. Then the treads could be removed, and the tank could travel on rubber tires along the German Autobahn.

6. Other Soviet tanks are shown without any treads at all. Their rubber tires were well suited to the highly-developed road system of Germany, France, and other western European countries. But in the fields and swamps of Russia, where there were no roads, these rubber tires would sink into the mud. These tanks could hardly be used at all in the USSR.

7. Stalin's massed tank spearheads were incapable of defense. Their only possible role was an all-out attack into the heart of Europe.

8. the heart of Stalin's air force was the Ilushin-2, the most- produced aircraft of world history. This plane is a dive bomber designed to destroy the enemy air force on the ground in a surprise attack. It cannot be used for air superiority dogfights against fighter planes. The Soviet pilots were trained only in how to dive bomb airfields, not how to engage the enemy in the skies. The plane was thus wholly offensive in design.

9. In 1941 the USSR possessed 10 paratroop corps (1 million troops), 200 times the paratroops possessed at that time by all other countries of the world put togetther. Paratroops can only be used successfully for offensive operations.

10. Paratroopers, as Patton writes, have no tanks, no artillery, no heavy weapons, no heavy equipment. For defensive tasks, they are much inferior to normal infantry rifle brigades. Stalin's huge investment in paratroopers illustrates a thoroughly aggressive intention.

11. The same goes for this contraption, the incredible Soviet flying tank, the KT or Antonov A-40. This was an attempt to supply paratroopers with some armored support where the enemy would least expect it.

12. Here is a side view of the same contraption. Flying was accomplished by manipulating the turret and gun to adjust the control surfaces; on the whole something a bit more dangerous than Pan Am or Eastern, but clearly designed for a surprise attack.

13. The German General Staff started later with massing for their own attack, but they had far smaller forces and moved with great speed and efficiency, completing the buildup for Operation Barbarossa in about two months. Stalin was still days away from giving the order to attack. Soviet bombers were massed wing to wing on air bases close to the Russian-German Line of demarcation. They were caught on the ground.

14. Fuel stocks were massed in tank cars along railroad sidings in the border area. Whole tank and infantry divisions were proceeding toward the front on railroad cars. The entire Soviet transportation system had been exclusively devoted to secret mobilization over a period of months.

15. The result was that whole tank divisions were caught by surprise on June 22 and destroyed before they could be unloaded.

16. The massed parks of Soviet tanks, artillery, trucks, vehicles and supplies were largely destroyed in place.

17. Such were the killing fields of mass destruction created in the first hours of the German assault.

18. But the Soviet Generals had not been fooled, as some writers have asserted. Men like Marshal Timoshenko and Georgy Zhukov, pictured here on a reconassiance tour near the line in late summer 1940. The Soviet commanders had meticulously and correctly carried out the necessary preparations for an offensive assault of unparalleled dimensions. They were frustrated because Hitler attacked some days before thay were ready, and the consequences for the USSR were devastating.

The Suvorov thesis throws up a series of fascinating questions which cannot be answered here because of time limitations. Why was Stalin taken by surprise? Strategically because he had expected something more like a replay of World War I in the west, with extended warfare between the Anglo-French and the Germans. Stalin was midly surprised by the rapid fall of France in May-June 1940. Tactically, Stalin was surprised because he was watching the price of mutton. He figured the Germans would need 6 million sheepskins to wage war in the Russian winter, and the slaughter of these sheep would depress the price of mutton. Stalin also knew that the usual Wehrmacht oils and lubricants would not work under Russian winter conditions. Despite his surveillance, he never detected winter oil in use by the Wehrmacht. In fact, Hitler sent the Wehrmacht into Russia totally unprepared for winter conditions, since he was hoping for a summer Blitzkrieg victory. The German soldiers payed a terrible price later, but Stalin was caught by surprise.

It is important for today's reasons to recall that before Stalin could attack in the west, he had to neutralize possible enemies in his rear, in the east. In August, 1939, right before the Hitler- Stalin Pact, Marshal Zhukov had routed the Japanese Army, making the decisive contribution to the Japanese decision to strike south. A Japanese-Soviet non- aggression pact was signed on April 13, 1941. This gave Stalin a free hand to pull all his forces out of the far east for the attack in the west. The Soviet spy Richard Sorge assured Stalin that Japanese preparations were designed for a naval war against the Anglo-Americans, not a land attack into Asia. Stalin's successful diplomacy with Japan was the premise for Pearl Harbor.

In May, 1941 Stalin assumed direct personal control of the Soviet government as prime minister. He gave a secret speech to military leaders and to the graduates of the Soviet military academies in which he announced that he would indeed attack Germany, but only in 1942 -- a deliberate disinformation.

Then, on June 13, 1941, the Red Army began to draw up its units in camouflaged positions in the immediate border areas, ready for attack. It was the largest troop movement in recorded history. On that same day, Stalin authored a TASS communique which stressed that "Germany is observing the conditions of the Soviet- German non- aggression pact just as strictly as the Soviet Union," and that "these rumors of German preparations for an attack on Russia] are a shamelessly invented propaganda of those forces who are hostile to the USSR and Germany and who are interested in an increase expansion and overflowing of the war."

The TASS communique also says: Die Geruechte darueber, dass sich die USSR auf einen Krieg gegen Deutschland vorbereite, sind verlogen und provokativ...die gegenwaertig fuer die Reservisten der Roten Armee durchgefuehrten Sommerwehruebungen und die Bevorstehenden Manoever haben keinen anderen Zweck als die Ausbildung der Reservisten und die Ueberpruefung des Eisenbahnapparates, wie sie bekanntlich alljaehrlich durchgefuehrt werden. In Anbetracht dessen ist es hoechst unsinnig, diese Massnahmen als gegen Deutschland gerichtete feindselige Aktionen hinzustellen."

In the light of the events of the following week, this TASS communique makes interesting reading today.

"The Icebreaker" transforms the prevailing view of the history of the twentieth century. But even beyond the profound historical transformation is the implication for the condominium of today: that is that the Soviets will use the cover of the New Yalta for as long as it suits them to prepare strategic aggression, and they will then carry that aggression out. And this for cultural and philosophical reasons more than for geopolitics as such.

Hitler was surely a madman, but he was a madman lucid enough to see that Stalin was preparing to crush him. On that scale, the strategists and think tankers of the transatlantic Anglo-American establishment are bigger madmen than Hitler himself, since they hysterically refuse to see the handwriting on the wall. This is why they hold LaRouche in prison as a political hostage, a political hostage who is held also at the behest of the Soviet condominium partners.

Whatever the many limitations of Caspar Weinberger as Secretary Defense may have been, one thing is certain: as long as Weinberger remained at the Pentagon, until November 1987, there emerged from US military intelligence a steady stream of leaks and revelations about Soviet preparations for war, especially in the technical and scientific area. Now these leaks and revelations have ceased, and the Soviet Military Power yearbooks have become a dead letter. We must therefore construct a picture of Soviet intentions with the best means available.

Someone may object that the Soviets cannot be hell-bent on expansionism and possible war because of their unprecedented internal crisis. This is indeed the main point: to see Soviet expansionism and aggression in relation with their internal crisis, party as a product of that crisis, and with the internal crisis providing much of the dynamism for the aggression, much in the same way it did for Hitler.

First, the crisis: Andrei Sacharov has spoken of a coming economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Living standards in Moscow are now as bad as they were in 1953, at the death of Stalin. Sugar and other basics are rationed or simply not available. In Yugoslavia inflation may be approaching 400%, in Hungary perhaps only half that. Gorbachov has failed to implement his price reform and his currency reform, and his desperate measures to increase food production may fail like the rest of his measures. On the psychological plane, the Communist regime is discredited. Marxism- Leninism is dead and putrid, and the idols of the past are discredited: Stalin is a butcher, Brezhnev a drunk, even Lenin something of a war criminal. The myths of legitimacy have tumbled.

Among the captive nationalities of the Soviet Russian prison house of nations, the move is toward the exit: if you stay in the same boat with the Great Russians, say the captive nations, after another half century you will be just as miserable as you are today. The Great Russian administration is poison, they say. Better to risk death than to remain in this lethal embrace, they say. So think the Hungarians, the Poles, the Baltic nations, the Georgians, the Armenians, the Byelorussians, the Moldavians, the Azerbaijanis and the other Moslems, and the Ukrainians. The Poles and the Ukrainians, the most numerous, are the decisive ones: their revolt brings all the others to the point of insurrection. Thus, on the April day after poison gas was unleashed against the crowd in Tiflis, tanks rolled through the streets of Kiev at dawn. Some in Russia are responding to this rejection of their hegemonic role with the ethnic fascism and anti-semitism of the Pamyat movement. Others turn to the Mussolinian Boris Yeltsin, the darling of the western media. The Russian Empire has entered the antechamber of the most collossal civil war of modern history, a settling of accounts for decades of brutal ethnic oppression. If civil war comes, it may be fought with chemical weapons and perhaps with nuclear weapons; it will be fought among nuclear missle silos. If there is to be a mutiny on the battleship Potemkin, this time it will be nuclear- capable. Last September the Red Army massed on the borders of Romania for a possible move into Yugoslavia in support of the fascist demagogue Milosevic. Romania itself may be on the brink of war with Hungary. In the meantime, several Soviet Republics remain under martial law.

Gorbachov succeeds in using packed plenums of the central committee and fake elections to defeat his opponents in the nomenklatura at every turn, but those who got close to him in London recently say he has aged five years in six months. His hands tremble, and he is nervous and irritable - not like the jovial Gorby of 1984. Because all of Gorby's measures have been a failure from the point of view of the Russian population, he has come to depend on the bravura of his foreign policy triumphs - and this is precisely what he was denied in Beijing, which was supposed to be the biggest triumph of them all.

On 21 April, Lenin Day, Politburo member Medvedev delivered a remarkable speech on the policies of the Gorbachov group, best summed up as "buying time." Medvedev referred to "1918, the separate peace of Brest-Litovsk. 'Left communbists' were prepared to remain 'pure' at the risk of losing Soviet power. Lenin in his own words called it that 'obscene peace,' but necessary concessions in order to buy time. In Lenin's phrase, 'conceding space for time.' So, time was bought and the Soviet Republic survived. Now, Lenin's lessons of realism and anti-dogmatism are especially important. From this standpoint, the Party has conducted an important analysis of the situation the country was in at the beginning of the 1980's, responsibly revealing the reasons which have brought the country into its present critical situation, requiring radical renewal of all aspects of life, economic, social, and political structures."

At the same time: "Irresponsible national extremist activists can bring our country to the brink of social-political destabilization. This would be a serious blow to perestroika."

And later, near the conclusion: "History will determine which of the two systems will survive." Only one.

According to western experts, the USSR is now approaching the halfway mark in a military buildup designed to allow the country to go to war if necessary against the United States with acceptable losses by 1992. The previous plan, stretching from 83 to 88, fell short because of the death of Andropov, the Chernenko interlude of confusion, the Chernobyl conflagration, and related problems. The current makeup effort would mean readiness by 1992 at the latest.

Everyone agrees that Soviet tank production has held steady at 10 per day, some 3500 per year -- at least two new modern armored divisons. SS-24s and SS-25s are still rolling off the assembly lines. But the new developments are even more interesting.

Top priority under the Ogarkov Doctrine goes to areas like the creation of a Space Command designed to ensure Soviet supremacy in space. The Space Command will have weapons based on new physical principles -- not just smart rocks -- and the Space Command will mesh with the several theatres of war set up in the mid- 1980's. Related to the Space Command is the Red Shield, the Soviet equivalent of SDI. According to sources, the Soviets are in the process of deploying area radio frequency weapons, which may imply that that smaller radio frequency weapons may already be deployed. The new Soviet order of battle connected to these developments stresses the responsibilities of Spetsnaz special forces, airborne troops, and irregular KGB and GRU link-ups with terrorist hard cores and sympathizers. The goal is to destroy the United States if necessary, but to be in the position to seize western Europe virtually intact, below the nuclear threshhold, if that becomes imperative to solve the inner shoirtages and bottlenecks of the Soviet imperial economy. In the meantime, the KGB has never been as aggressive as under Kryuchkov.

Gorbachov's recent 'disarmament offers' for conventional forces mesh perfectly with the ongoing modernization. The Soviets, because of their tremendous depth, have gobs and masses of obsolescent T- 54/55 and T-62 tanks, MIG-21 aircraft, and towed artillery pieces they are delighted to ship back to the storage areas. They have lots of "category C" infantry units they can easily dispense with, especially if this lets them reduce the proportions of non- Great Russians among the troops. Transferring resources from these inferior troops will help thembuild up their category B units to the full readiness oif category A. Satellite armies can be adjusted to phase out more politically unreliable Polish draftees, or to increase the preponderance of Bulgarians over ethnic Turks in Bulgaria's army. Some divisions will disappear because the division structure is being replaced by a corps and brigade structure. Units that are actually pulled out of central Europe can leave their equipment and barracks there, and be flown back in a jiffy. Gorbachov's disarmament is merely strategic deception, maskirovka, a mask for his strategic modernization and war buildup. All of these moves feature Defense Minister Yazov, General Moiseyev - - the 49- year old head of the General Staff, and General Lushev of the Warsaw Pact.

In the summer of 1939, Hitler told the Nazi leadership that the conquest of Poland before the end of the year was imperative in order to stave off internal economic collapse. Hitler's decision led to World War II. What happens when a similar analysis is presented to the Politburo in the Kremlin? This may happen sooner than most people think. In Beijing, Gorbachov was seeking, among other things, a non-aggression pact with China: if the USSR become involved in a war with the United States, China will sit it out. In return, the Soviet strategic encirclement of China would relent a little. This is very much like Stalin's treaty with Japan in April, 1941. But Gorbachov did not get what he wanted.

What Gorbachov found in Beijing, apart fron a series of personal affronts, was that China will not by itself be a military threat to the Soviets. China will not be a military superpower for the time being. (The Soviets may exploit this by inciting a war between India-Afghanistan and Pakistan, since China cannot come to Pakistan's aid.) But Russian military Schadenfreude is quickly turned to gall by the political implications of events in China: Gorbachov's reforms are closely modelled on Deng's 1978 reform program, and these are now shown to lead to the brink of internal revolution. In addition, there is the wholly psychological effect of the Chinese upheaval, which can be seen among Armenian demonstrators as well as Polish students. The spectres of revolution and counter- revolution in the USSR walk abroad. For the Kremlin, military action has become easier, and has also become more urgent.

Mrs. Thatcher is reportedly raving in private that Gorbachov is a huckster, a trickster, and a liar. Britain and Moscow exchange expulsions. Shevardnadze threatens to violate the INF treaty if the Lance missle is modernized.

The European political figure who has come closest to the truth on this issue has been the French Gaullist leader Jacques Chirac, who said on French television that he has told Bush that this is not the time to disarm, since the Soviets are in a depp and enduring internal crisis, and that it is a law of history that a great power in this situation must attempt to compensate for the internal crisis with the adventure of external aggression. The French Defense Minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, has repeated this idea. Chevenement has stated that when he was recently in Moscow, the Soviets threatened him with the cancelling of all arms control agreements and other detente treaties unless the SDI is totally dumped. In the face of such threats, says Chevenement, France and NATO should not disarm.

The Chinese upheaval is thus a mortal threat to the Gorbachov group, and to the condominium....

End